There are several areas I want to explore this year in the realm of computers, IT, and websites.
1. I want to tidy up my backups. I’m a bit behind, easy to do, but I need to catch up.
2. At some point, I have to figure out my carousel on the PolyWogg site. I created a pseudo-carousel, large header, and well, it doesn’t work for me. Yet.
3. I guess I also want to do something with the look and feel of the PolyWogg site as well when it comes to blog entries that are “sub-areas” — the main blog pages show perfectly, the sub-areas not so much. I’m missing something small to tweak, haven’t wrapped my head around it.
4. I want to do something with old computers. I have some I want to convert into game players, and I’m going to set up one PC to run 3D printing. It’s not urgent, but it will take a dedicated two or three days to sort it out enough to begin work. This includes re-purposing and maybe even jailbreaking an iPad. I’ve looked it for fun recently, just cuz I wanted to see how hard it is/would be, and you know what? Not that hard.
5. But if I set up the computer to 3D print, I also need to set up the 3D printer. That is a bit more complicated. The new one should be relatively easy, but the old one is a mess of pain.
6 Much more elaborate, I have plans for two apps. One is astronomy-related; the other trivia-ish. But I think they’re going to have to wait for retirement. The effort required to get into programming is just too much overall to dabble.
7. I mentioned in my book list that I want to read stuff about AI, and perhaps it should be here too, although I think it is more for my L is for Learning side of things.
8. I’m also not very proficient in a couple of pieces of software that I need to work with in the future — GIMP will be my basic editor of choice for photos, and I have a full training program to help me get better at using it. At least for the basics, astrophotography will require more work. But I also have ideas for the future that will involve video, and my wife and son got me a green screen setup for Christmas. So I’m mostly ready to go, I just need to double down on what I want to create and figure out which software packages I’m going to use. I have a bunch, but not sure which ones are best for what I’m going to be doing. That may take until late fall to figure out though.
And that’s it. Pretty linear, pretty straightforward.
www.ThePolyBlog.ca — aka this site, which has a bunch of blogging stuff that I do. There are lots of subjects, and it has generally reflected the tagline / slogan — My view from the lilypads.
www.PolyWogg.ca — aka my writing site, The Writing Life of a Tadpole, which has been primarily been about HR and a bit of other stuff.
I’ve played with the sites over the years, moved stuff around, even debated the locations of certain types of files. However, that’s not surprising…how can the PolyWogg site be about my “writing”, yet I have over a million words on the ThePolyBlog site? Isn’t that writing too?
The funny part is that I asked for advice from friends some time ago, and one who has a marketing background saw it very clearly — PolyWogg was my professional writing stuff, ThePolyBlog was my personal stuff. I didn’t quite see it that way, too far in the weeds, but it was compelling if a little bit too early to commit.
The challenge was what to do with about 200 blog posts that rode the line between the two.
My dual life confuses even me
Take, for example, some blogs I have written about life in government. It’s not exactly about my HR guide, but it’s not unrelated either. I wrote about Phoenix audits, and audits in general, and how they work in government. But then the question — is that me writing about professional topics, as I do intend to do some writing on a series of government-related topics? Or is it me blogging about a current issue that I just happen to know more about than the average bear?
Or some articles about performance measurement or libraries, both of which I will write about in the future. Those are a little more related to future PolyWogg guides, and if I already had those guides written, these blog posts would clearly be housed in the same area as the guides.
Astronomy presents a different challenge. I write about MY experiences with astronomy, clearly a personal area, and thus clearly it should be on my personal site, right? Except I also intend to write a multi-stage PolyWogg Guide that will draw on a lot of those blogs, and like with performance measurement, if the astro guides were already done, then astro blogs would clearly go with them, right? I’d be blogging in support of my astro guide. It gets more complicated when I think about astro PHOTOS. I generally publish ALL of my personal photos on Flickr with links to my website, EXCEPT if I’m doing an Astro Guide, shouldn’t my astro photos be with it? Particularly as all of the photos in the guide will come from the same galleries.
And then just to really confuse things, I do book reviews. Almost EVERY writer out there who writes their own stuff AND also does book reviews keeps the book reviews on the same site as their own writing. Except I don’t really see it that way. My book reviews are just me writing about what I thought of the book, it isn’t something I’m doing to market myself or anything else. So, since they are more like my own book diary than anything to do with writing, I feel like they should clearly be on my personal site. Along with TV, Podcast and Movie Reviews. Seems logical to me.
Except I’m also doing music reviews of decades, which I will turn into books/PolyWogg Guides. So theoretically the music blogs should be with the future Guides and thus on my writing site where the books will be…yet then all my reviews aren’t together. I feel the same way about recipes — they’re mainly personal, but perhaps, someday, I’ll publish a collection of them…is that enough to put them all on the writing site?
I know what you’re thinking
You’re likely thinking that I’m being overly anal-retentive and over-thinking it all. But it does bear some thought.
When I came back from Bouchercon, I came back with a renewed sense of “writing” purpose. I am closer to retirement, and I have very concrete plans. Some of that starts with my PolyWogg site as my primary professional writing site, as my marketing major friend suggested as a way forward.
And here’s the weird part. Over the last year, I moved almost 140 posts from PolyWogg to ThePolyBlog so that PolyWogg was very clearly focused on my HR guide and a little bit on my Astronomy Guide. I spent a lot of time cleaning up the posts, keeping it lean. Then, after attending BoucherCon2025, I realized that a lot of content that I moved away are actually better placed back on PolyWogg and that I should start arranging my menus better. I have more content already written than I thought, across a broader spectrum of topics that will mushroom after I retire.
And if I’m frank with myself, likely before I retire. Or at least sooner than my original planned retirement date, regardless of when my date actually turns out to be. It’s in a state of flux at the moment.
So, this past week, I found 185 posts that I needed to move back. It could be another 300 if I moved my book reviews, which I’m not going to do. Another 300 if I included all my TV posts and reviews over the years, but again, those will stay with my personal site. I could probably conjure up another 30 things that COULD go to the writing site, but I feel like I’m moving towards the writing site only being those things that I intend to publish in some form other than my website, or at least are linked to similar publishable content.
But the truly funny part? I moved it around not that long ago, it made perfect sense to me, and this weekend, with a new “vision”, I moved it all back plus some more.
Even I don’t understand the nature of my digital duality. But I’m starting to, I think. Heck, I even ordered new business cards that say “writer, blogger” that I quite like even if I’m not using them yet.
Yet, partly as part of my retirement plans and partly as a result of Bouchercon convincing me that I need to be more entrepreneurial and perhaps more media-savvy with my approach, I’m working on ideas for a third site focused exclusively on a more marketable niche. I’ve been toying with some separation of content to prevent overlap between the non-fiction, fiction, and media-friendly stuff, even to the point of considering alternate noms de plume and trade names to protect some of my life from the net. But I know too that some of that is a fear that one of the three will fail i.e., I know the non-fiction is solid, but maybe the fiction won’t take off as I hope, or that the media-friendly stuff will fail spectacularly. Old-style concerns in publishing used to recommend using different names for each bit so that any failure in one area wouldn’t hurt your brand in another, but well…I am my brand. I’m PolyWogg. Have tail, will hop and type. Read, ribbit, repeat. If I want to really overthink things, there are MULTIPLE rabbitholes in the three areas to avoid or embrace.
But my first two sites are (not quite) locked and loaded, and I’m working on the third. I may not know ALL the versions of me yet, but I know the core one.
Earlier this week, I got an email saying one of my social media accounts had an unusual login, but it was nearby, and sometimes that happens normally when my one tool uses a different server, etc. or a bot runs from another setup. Not necessarily “me” accessing, but things that I authorized to access showing up on a server in another city nearby. It usually doesn’t do anything else, and often it isn’t even successful. I have a few accounts that didn’t quite have my latest passwords on them, but they were decent enough.
Tuesday, I went to a coffee shop in Nepean, and my VPN on my laptop wasn’t working. However, I also played an online game on Tuesday night that has a lot of stuff going on to run it. One or the other could have compromised my access, I suppose.
I’ve spent a lot of time tonight rebooting accounts, changing passwords, logging any other access out, and generally being paranoid AF. Of 8 things I use regularly, it compromised the four easiest. The second tier wasn’t hacked, and the third tier doesn’t look like it was even viewed. I still upgraded a ton of passwords tonight using a combination of tools and double-checking 2FA. Most are fine, and are the reason I was able to recover what I did. One remains outstanding, not that critical.
Still, quite annoying and tiring. My protections around the castle engaged when the Trojan Horse was opened, and mostly worked as intended. I’d like to write in more detail, but that would be incredibly stupid.
The bigger question is the vector of attack. One of the vectors may have started before Tuesday, except I can’t think of where or how really. The wifi network would be the obvious idea, or if I had used wifi while I was in New Orleans. But the whole time I was in New Orleans, I only used my phone as a hotspot, no wifi. Hmmm…
The fun that remains is when I go to access an app on my phone or load something on another computer and it says, “NO! You shall not pass!” because I haven’t logged into it with the new passwords.
Jacob has a higher-end gaming PC. Not top of the line, but certainly higher than the mid-range. Great graphics card, decent memory and speed, and a nice curved large monitor.
He comes down to see me yesterday afternoon and says, “Umm…my monitor stopped working.” Huh? Yep, he rebooted, did all the basic stuff, nothing. No signal to the monitor.
At the time, I was working my real job, so no time for much in the way of tech support. I gave him three possibilities:
1. Full shut down, see if the PC has somehow lost its setup info;
2. Try the monitor with a different source;
3. Try a different monitor.
He comes back later to say that the existing monitor works with another laptop, no problem, and the PC itself doesn’t work on other monitors. Excellent, we’ve narrowed it down to the PC. Right???? RIGHT???? Monitor works, PC doesn’t.
Now, there were some confounding variables to add to the mix. He’d been running a new game, and the refresh rate was dead slow. He had tried playing with graphics settings, downloaded a tool from AMD, and after that, nope.
I was initially worried he had fallen for some sort of scam pop-up, but it was indeed all legit. And nothing sounded like it should have screwed up too much, but maybe he lost his graphics drivers. My brain couldn’t decide if the PC would still send a proper video signal if the drivers weren’t on it, but I was wondering if maybe the graphics card went pffft.
I popped over to Canada Computers, where we bought it, and they weren’t busy so I said, “Hey, I might have the easiest fix ever. I think he just blew off the drivers.” Which the guy told me wouldn’t matter. It would still send the basic signal, even if only BIOS info. Huh.
He reached over to his computer for checking things in, unplugged the video feed and plugged it into the PC, added power, and voila, Jacob’s login came up. So, the PC **was** working. Just not with Jacob’s monitor. Or any monitor at the house. Huh?
We chatted about a few other things, but nothing that would give me a lead anywhere. But it was working.
So brought it all back home, plugged in again, nada. No signal to his monitor. We did have a small problem with Windows not being still registered, but apparently unrelated. Huh.
Jacob went off to have a bath, I started noodling. I literally couldn’t think of anything. Then it occurred to me that while we had shut the PC down to “nothing”, we had NOT reset the monitor, and it IS a smarter-than-average monitor. It has some internal memory, auto config stuff, etc. And since it plugs directly into the powerbar, not the PC, it is always “on” at least somewhat.
What if I shut it down too to fully off? I turned off the power bar and let everything go to zero. Nothing on, nothing running, etc., and let it stay off for about 5 minutes.
Then, I turned it all back on, started the PC…and got Jacob’s login on the screen, no problem. After his bath, Jacob reenabled the proper graphics drivers, tested all his normal games, and they all work. The “problem” one still didn’t, but we’ll deal with that on the weekend. The rest is running fine.
I’d love to say I’m a god for figuring out how to reset it, but well, all I really did was turn it off completely before turning it back on. Exactly what we tried multiple times, but as I said, the monitor was staying on and remembering that it didn’t like the previous signal from the PC and thus continuing to block it.
I can’t say I was looking to solve a hardware problem last night. But all’s well that fixes itself.
For those who engage in any sort of IT world, or anything that comes with a manual, the general joke is that 90% of all problems would be eliminated if you just “read the f***ing manual” (RTFM).
A few weeks ago, I noted that I had solved a chron problem with my website. Well, to be candid, the chron problem apparently solved itself, upgraded itself beyond its own obsolescence, or it just evaporated as a problem. Whereas I had problems previously where things I told it to post at say noon wouldn’t post at noon, or even at all until someone refreshed the website thus triggering an update, the chron suddenly started working. If I scheduled something for 12:30 p.m., it would publish at 12:30 p.m. It I said, 4:30 p.m., it would go at 4:30 p.m. More importantly, if I scheduled things so one would publish at 8:30 a.m., one at 12:30 p.m., and one at 4:30 p.m., AND had it go to my Buffer app to share things to social media at 9:00, 1:00 and 5:00, then lo and behold (!), it would indeed publish on time and Buffer would post it to media as per its separate schedule.
So I went back to looking at quotes and humour, and figured out a way to post them as pictures / images, with the text in the ALT area so it would still get indexed (i.e., if a joke refers to nuns, but the joke was a picture not text, a search for the word nuns would NOT pull up the page; if instead, I also add the text to the ALT text for the image, it will indeed find the word and show me the relevant post).
So why does all that matter?
Because before Chron was working and before I had images to share, I basically had to do things manually. If I wanted to post at 9:00, I had to go online and post at 9:00. If I wanted to post at 1:00 p.m., I had to go online and post. Otherwise, the people who subscribe to my website (rather than on social media) would get all the posts at once. Soooo, if I pre-posted a month’s worth of quotes? They would all go out at once by email. Not the best plan. Instead, I generally held myself to one post per day, and let it go out by email at whatever time but would tweak the settings in Buffer so it would look right. One day ahead. If I was too tired the night before, nothing went out.
Yet I’ve always had a bit of a challenge with sharing images with my posts to social media. From a WordPress site, there are essentially three possible images to choose from:
The featured image (FI) aka usually a smallish image next to your post … because of the way I designed my layout, the FI image sits outside of the main text to the left above the date;
An image embedded somewhere in the text; or,
An image embedded in the text and tagged with OPENGRAPH settings as an image to share.
Some social media sites have a priority of 1, 3, 2 for which image it will choose; others will do 3, 1, 2; and still others will do 2, 3, 1. There has been some challenge at times sharing what I want to share. I also don’t have some big IT department to figure this out for me. Because my FI photos sometimes are the ONLY photos in a post, I want it to use that image if there aren’t any others. When I do book reviews, I also include a copy of the book cover — usually category 2 above. On occasion, I insert other images and depending on how they are embedded, sometimes they use OPENGRAPH tags and sometimes not. Sigh.
Now, things get a bit more interesting. I mentioned above that I use Buffer as an online app that takes my posts from the WordPress site and acts as an intermediary with various social media sites — Facebook/Meta; Twitter/X; BlueSky; and Threads. And then gives me a fourth place to store photos for the post, ideally for sharing with social media.
I was struggling to get the right image to show up, and I frequently would still have to go in and edit the Buffer queue so that the right image would show. I would put in the photo I wanted into the #4 slot, but it wouldn’t show in the post. I read the text that went with it multiple times, and it didn’t seem to apply to what I wanted.
Ultimately, with this plugin, I now had FOUR places to put a photo and then four possible settings for the actual sharing to social media, so 16 combinations in all. I wasn’t looking forward to trying them all, to be honest. I had tweaked something last week to make my ThePolyBlog site look like what was posting from PolyWogg.ca, but it made it worse, not better. The quotes and humour “images” were no longer showing as previews in FaceBook — it was just the featured image (FI), so if anyone wanted to see the joke or quote, they had to click through to see it. Exactly what I was trying to avoid — I wanted the image versions to be more easily shared than forcing a click-through.
I decided to do a bit of work on it on Sunday night, and I figured the best option had to be somewhere in Option 4. It’s a separate area, as I said, where you can tell WP that these are the photos you want to share. And in fact, it is designed to share multiple photos, maybe even a little mini-gallery if you want. It wasn’t limited to one photo.
There was some generic text about adding images, but it recently updated the language on the screen. It now says:
The first image only replaces the Featured Image in a status where a status’ option is not set to “Use OpenGraph Settings”. Additional images only work where a status’ option is set to “Use Featured Image, not Linked to Post”.
I read that text a couple of dozen times over recent weeks and it was not really jiving. For sentence two, it’s talking about “additional” images but I didn’t have any additional images, I was just putting in one. Sometimes it took it, sometimes not. For the first sentence, you may notice that it is kind of badly worded.
While it says the first image replaces the FI when it is NOT set to “use OG settings”, but so what? I don’t really care if it replaces the FI when it isn’t set to that, I want it set to that. Don’t I? But then it hit me that the two sentences sort of work together.
My general posts have a Featured Image. The Open Graph settings are designed to add OG codes/tags to the Featured Image. So it should use FI and OG. Great. Except you have to change the settings from using OG to something where it is NOT using OG. Wait, what? Oh yeah, that’s the second phrase. If you set it to use an FI that is NOT the main FI linked to the post, then it will use the first image saved here in this box.
So while every website advice about sharing images says to use the regular FI and add the OG settings, this one tells me to NOT use the FI, not use the OG settings, and to use a different setting that doesn’t sound right at all. It goes against everything obvious in the approach. But, ultimately, it totally overrides letting the social media sites decide between #1-3 and tells it, regardless of what else is going on, just use whatever image I tell it to use in this setting (#4).
Bam! All four of my social media posts shared perfectly the next time. A book review with a cover, a quote as an image, and a joke as an image. All three “images” shared as the main pic with their posts x 4 different sites.
Because I RTFM, apparently. It’s not just a meme. The manual makes no SENSE, but that’s beside the point. It’s fixed.
