Recently, I switched the appearance of my blog to better accommodate people who visit to read using their phones. Much to my surprise, I lost most of the photographs in posts because of this change-over; suddenly, ALL my posts are solid blocs of plain text.

For a technophobe like me, this is a major headache. I’ve fooled around with things for the last few weeks, trying to find out what went wrong. In one case, I was able to restore the photos in THIS post simply by removing some code that mysteriously added itself during the change. This turns out to not be a universal fix, however; photos in another post with similar extra code did not reappear when I removed what I thought to be the errant coding. Frustrating.

One other thing I’ve tried is reloading the photos. It’s a very slow process, and the prospect of doing that for each of my posts with photos is daunting, but worth a try. I will gradually work my way through my catalog of posts trying this fix too; if it works, I’ll continue, but this may take some time.

Another issue that cropped up: my crawl of the books I’ve contributed to is now gone, as this new blog theme doesn’t support that feature. I’ve created a work-around by re-adding pages with those books and the associated links to a tab on the top navigation bar titled “Bibliography”. So far, I’ve only added a few of those books here, but my goal is to recreate one or two a week until I’m caught up. This, too, may take some time…

Having a blog is fun, but it’s also work. If, like me, you use your blog as a combination of soapbox and self-promotional tool, it can be a joy one week, and drudgery the next, but it keeps me writing, even in weeks when I can’t find the inspiration to work on fiction. That’s important because it helps maintain my writing “muscles'” sharpness, and also helps keep me in touch with the outside world.