iPhone

Share Your World — Not My Lucky Day

Fandango13 Comments

Monday means it’s once again time for Melanie’s Share Your World questions.

What is the best pick me up that you know of to shake you out of the blues?

The good news is that I don’t get blue that often, but when I do, there’s nothing like ice cream to get me back on track. After the news of the release of the Mueller Report and Attorney General Barr’s summary, which essentially gives Trump and his corrupt family a free ride, I’m going to have to sit down and consume a couple of gallons of ice cream later today.19F0E55A-02D2-4A25-A54C-25E27674C421

What would be the title of your memoir?

  “A Life Most Ordinary”

Where do you like to go when you eat out?

Mostly to restaurants.

Do you believe in luck?

No. Not in fate, predestination, or anything like that, either.

Aside from necessities, what is one thing you couldn’t go a day without?

My iPhone.

WTF WordPress?

Fandango11 Comments

8A371390-1E1E-46F7-8DB1-A7E9272C573DHere we go again. Back last October, I wrote this post in which I complained about a four hour time gap in the posts that showed up in my Reader overnight on my iOS app on my iPhone. When I contacted WordPress about the problem, its Happiness Engineers informed me that they were aware of the problem and were working to fix it. And, after a while, they did seem to fix it.

But the fix was short-lived. A month and a half ago, I wrote this post complaining, once again, about how, when I go to my Reader on my iPhone, that huge gap, now typically five hours, has returned.

Once again, the gap issue seemed to have been addressed. When I went to my Reader I’d see a message that said “Loading More Posts,” and then, lo and behold, the missing gap posts would be there.

But now, as of yesterday, it’s back yet again, as can be seen from the screenshot above. Only now the gap has grown to six hours!

I don’t know if each time WordPress makes an update to its iOS app, the problem magically resurfaces, but, as I said to WordPress the last time I complained about this, you need to “get your shit together, dammit.”

JusJoJan — How On Earth?

Fandango16 Comments

8847d76d-b40b-4e3c-aca2-15736fb16d78

For today’s Just Jot It January prompt, Linda G. Hill got her suggestion from Pamela over at Butterfly Sand. Pamela gave us the word “curiosity.

Speaking of curiosity, in a post the day before yesterday I wrote, “I blog exclusively from my iPhone.” That statement apparently piqued the curiosity of a few people who read it.

One blogger asked,

“How on earth do you manage to do all your blogging on an iPhone? I think I’d throw it out of the window after about 20 minutes!”

Another blogger wanted to know,

“How on earth do you blog on an iPhone, you must be young and type with your thumbs. I’m somewhat set in my ways and cannot conceive of trying to do it that way, I need a full size keyboard and a decent screen so my two finger typing can progress.”

So how on earth do I blog from my iPhone? Well, I’ll tell you. Before I retired at the end of 2016, I was somewhat of a road warrior. I traveled much of the time. Back in 1997, 22 years ago, my boss at the time handed me a BlackBerry device.

He said, “Fandango, you need to never be out of touch when you’re on the road. This BlackBerry will enable you to receive, respond to, and send emails immediately from wherever you’re traveling.”

And so began being connected to my job 24×7. I became quite adept at thumb typing on the tiny physical keyboard on my BlackBerry device. I could type out an email on it almost as fast as I could on my laptop.

In 2010 I migrated from the BlackBerry to an iPhone. I admit, it took me a while to adjust from the BlackBerry’s tiny physical keyboard to the iPhone’s tiny virtual keypad. But after a while I became pretty good at that, too. So using my iPhone to blog is not a big leap.

It also makes me more nimble. I don’t have to be sitting at a desk in order to read and write posts. I also don’t have to be lugging around a three-pound device that is way too big to fit into my pocket in order to blog. I wrote a post on the bus yesterday while on my way to the dentist. I’m writing this while sitting on the toilet. Actually that’s a lie. Or is it? You’ll never know.

I average, according to my iPhone’s screen time log, about 10 hours a day on my iPhone, about two-thirds of which is on WordPress. I probably spend fewer than 10 hours a month on my laptop.

I admit that touch typing on a full size keyboard on my laptop is probably faster and with fewer typos than using my iPhone’s virtual keypad. But the flexibility of using my always with me, wherever I am iPhone outweighs that. So, it’s just a matter of getting used to thumb typing. And I love being untethered.

Now if WordPress could just stop being so wonky and if Trump would be impeached, everything would be good with the world. My world, anyway.

Does This Only Happen to Me?

Fandango26 Comments

I’ve written lately about some wonky things happening on the WordPress iOS app. Here, for example. And here, too.

As some of you know, I blog exclusively from my iPhone and I’ve noticed something a bit weird. On the WordPress app for the iPhone, when I’m looking through my Reader, I will see a post notification with a small, cropped image at the top, followed by the post’s title, and then the first few lines of the post. As in the illustration below:18264bf5-be5d-42bc-85d0-39ff3f48287bThere are two ways to view a post in my Reader. One is to tap the post’s title, which displays the post in Reader mode. The other is to tap the “Visit” icon at the bottom left, which will bring up the mobile-enabled view of the post. This shows the Reader view when I tap the post’s title:4e10783f-9a7b-432e-9157-154380e34f37Note the full image at the top of the post. But if, instead, I tap the “Visit” icon, here’s what I see:6a241377-88f2-4f5a-bb13-22a72eb0644dNo image at all! Nowhere in the post! Where did the image go?

Maybe it’s the fact that I’m using an iPhone instead of a laptop. But why, I wonder, does the image show up in the Reader version and not in the mobile version of the post?

I’m sorry if I’m coming across like a bit of a whiner, but I’m curious if the images you see in your Reader don’t always show when you go visit the actual post. Or does this only happen to me?