It’s been a day. That’s about all I can say about the situation that I had today. I was up late last night and as a consequence I got up very late this morning. That pushed everything back that I had wanted to get done. I only slept about 2 hours later than usual, but it seemed that everything else was pushed back much longer than two hours.

About the only thing that I seemed to either fix or work on today was the contact page on my site. When Google stopped supporting recaptcha and moved to recaptcha2 and 3, I lost the ability to filter emails for spam on my contact page. It didn’t really matter for the longest time, I didn’t get any spam for a couple of years. Then about two years ago the spam started with a trickle and then slowly became a constant flow, and lately it had become a flood. I did a couple things that I hope will fix the problem, I changed the email address, then added a newer version of recaptcha, I also did some formatting with the response and any errors too. I really don’t think that spam will be a problem for at least a few years… until Google decides to not support it anymore.

It’s official, I will be going back to the US next month. I bought my ticket to Honolulu this morning. I will be leaving here in about two weeks and although I haven’t booked a flight to the mainland, I expect to do that shorly. I’m very nervous… That’s all I’m going to say.

If you haven’t checked out my videos please do. It’s been really depressing to see that no one watches them. There are some of my videos that have been up for two months and only 20 people have watched them… so sad that I don’t have any support from anyone.

Today was a tough one and I don’t know why I’m going to write about it, but I think that it may be a good way to wind down from a long day. I don’t know what happened, but a small little job on the site ended up taking more than 12 hours to correct, and I’m still not sure whether it’s fixed or not.

It started this morning about 7 when I decided that before I jump onto the book to finish that up, I thought I’d play with my site. I’ve mentioned a few times that there have been a lot of problems with my site since the last hacking. After the third hacking I just didn’t really try anymore to get the site up to par with what I believe it should have been. Having said that though, it’s always in the back of my head that I needed to fix some things. So this morning as I mentioned I thought I’d go in and see if I could fix the menu on the blog page from covering the other links during dropdown. Seemed pretty easy, find the offending code and make changes. So easy that for about three hours I scoured the css files, the template files, every file that was even remotely associated with the menu I looked at.

It wasn’t long before I noticed some item that I had wanted to change and hadn’t gotten to it yet, so I thought I might as well do it now. That lead to other changes, and then I ended up breaking something. I tried everything to get back to where I was just so I could basically start again. I couldn’t fix it, so I thought I’d bypass the frontend and backend and go directly into the database to make the changes. Okay, I’ve done it a hundred times, it’s a little bit scary just because the chance of total failure is a real possibility, so it’s always my last resort. By now it’s like 1 in the afternoon, and I’ve downloaded and made my changes to the file. The only problem is I can’t upload it. I’m getting an error that is stopping the progress. I do my usual search to find how to fix it, no luck. I can program php/MYSQL with help from duckduckgo, but this fix was beyond my skills. So I tried fixing the db different ways, going through different methods that really didn’t help at all, except for giving me a shred of hope for about five minutes until they too failed. It was just enough hope to keep me from giving up.

So as I was sinking ever deeper into the web abyss, I finally gave in and decided that I should update wordpress. I get worried about updating software because of the problems that sometimes occur with compatibility. So I usually wait to upgrade until I have to, like today.The update took maybe 1 minute to complete. It was so fast that I thought that it stopped or something.

It’s about 4 and the website isn’t really broken at this point, I’ve managed to do some work-a-rounds to get it basically where it was when I started this morning. Anyway, wanna guess what happened after the update? If you’ve been playing along as I tell my story, you’ve probably realized that, yes, I broke the site with the upgrade. Not a major break, but wp was inserting extra code into all the blog links so they returned 404 pages. I dive straight back into the front and backend coding to figure out the source of the code that inserts the links is located. Since the update would only change includes, maybe db, and some pages, the fix should have been somewhat easy. It only took me until about 6 to get it fixed./s

Geez…

On a slightly good note though, after dinner I went back to work and fixed the problem with the dropdown menu, and made some cosmetic changes too. :)

So that’s my story and it happens to be my complete day too. I wouldn’t say that I had fun solving the problems with the site, but I feel good that I did solve them at the end of the day, literally at the end of the day. :)

As I’ve been spending more time working on the site, I keep noticing things that I didn’t realize were wrong or not correct, e.g., the footer in the blog. I seem to remember taking it out because there was a compatibility issue between Bootstrap and WordPress, but I don’t remember for sure. If there was a valid reason I guess I’ll find out when I go to change it. The biggest thing that I have to fix is the responsiveness. It’s the one thing that made me kind of give up on the site after the last hacking. The thought of creating an additional two designs for the different screen sizes that are mangled or missing is going to take a lot of time, both in coding and designing.

So I spent most of the day working on my book trying to get it to a place where I can proof it as if I was an impartial reader using an epub reader. I can do it now, but there were so many things that were wrong it just didn’t make sense to really use the epub to preview it. I’m now at the point where I have to shorten some of the movies, correct some of the sizes of the movies and make layout changes. The text has gone through 2 spellcheckers, and I edited it for grammatical errors and in some cases clarity. I kind of wanted to stay away from changing the original text too much though. There are still some spots where I will probably need edit again, but I think that the text is close to 99% done.

It’s kind of funny that I remember making a couple of posts that I can’t seem to find now. I went through the database this morning and couldn’t find the entry that I absolutely remember writing. In fact there are references to the entry in later posts. I can’t figure out what happened to it. I wonder if I deleted it because of something and had just forgotten.

I had a lot of fun recording what I did yesterday and putting it in the blog. In fact so much fun that I decided to do it again. This time I worked for more than five hours, I think it was nearly six and compressed it down to about a minute and 30 seconds. I didn’t really do the things that I did to yesterday’s video just because I’m tired, so it doesn’t look as polished as the other one… like the other was polished :)

 

So how much longer before it’s done? The quick answer is it should be done with the infrastructure and basics tomorrow. The reason I worded it that way is because I know that there will be things that need to be changed and edited even after I consider it done. It takes time to reset your brain to actually see a design like others will, so I’d give myself probably until next Monday, unless I can get some people to proof it for me. I don’t really want to ask anyone though…

This morning I got up and decided that I needed to finish the book that I’ve been working on. So after taking a shower I started on it. I also decided that it may be kind of cool to make a video out of it so I set up my screen grabber and recorded everything I did on the screen for about 5 hours. To be completely honest, it felt more like about 10 hours.

So the book is about 150 pages, and I made it to I think page 98, so it should take at least 2 more hours to finish up on the proofing and editing. That won’t mean that I’m done, but it will mean that I’m very close. There are still images that need to be modified or replaced and although as I went over consistency items today, I won’t feel comfortable with it until I go over it again and maybe again.

I really want to make a hard copy out of it when it’s done. I may do it here before I leave. It would be nice to give my Mother a copy.

Because the video doesn’t really fit my youtube channel I didn’t want to upload it there,  so hopefully it’ll work out here on my blog.

 

Like the title says, I can feel that I’m starting to get a little burned out. I’ve been trying to figure out what I’m particularly burned out on. Is it making movies? Maybe, but I still want to make them. What about working on my book? Well, I am at a place that’s kind of boring, the editing and proofreading part. So that may be contributing to my reluctance to really dive into it. I could always fix some of the problems with my web site though. The problems there aren’t easy, at least now that the little things are fixed. It could take days to fix the responsiveness problem, maybe longer. I’m betting that I’ll have to redesign the whole site to get it up to being a proper responsive design. But anyway, it could be a combination of all those projects, or neither, it could be that I have just been spending too much time in front of the computer and I’m starting to want to do other things.

I don’t know what it is, but there are a few things that I have to get done. The first is my book. I’m so close to finishing it that I could have it done in two full days. I think that would be a really great feeling to finish it. Of course, after I finish that book, the process starts again with the next one. At least though I’d have that nagging feeling gone for a little while.

I’m getting a little burned out on being in Malaysia too. There are reasons that I can’t talk about right now why I’m still here. I think I can start the process of leaving in about a week, maybe two.

Another kind of strange, maybe sad thing that I found out tonight is that I have almost zero footage from at least one summer vacation. I still think that I placed it somewhere else because the idea that I could go almost three months in Greece, Spain, Monaco, and a few other countries and I didn’t take one video is sad, or maybe pathetic is a better word. I guess which summer vacation my next book will be about. :)

I added another video to my youtube page yesterday. This video was a little bit different from the others. This was an introduction to my channel and it’s really a quick, talk in front of the camera type of video with no graphics at all. If you’re interested in seeing it I’ll put a link in this post.  It is really strange to see myself talk on camera, and if it goes like it usually does, I’ll end up cringing on it in no time, like the hiking video that I redid recently. In the meantime though it is kind of fascinating to see the way I talk. You know, my expressions and hand gestured, and by general demeanor is really different than what I have in my head when I’m talking. So strange…

I actually made this video quite a while ago and at the time it was one of my better ones. There was some problems with it though and now that I’m back into making videos/movies I thought that I’d fix them. I didn’t want to change the feel of the video so I didn’t change anything of substance, just corrected some things that I felt embarrassed(cringe y) of. Except for the music that is, I just thought adding music might make the video better.

What I changed:

1. Where I could I rotated footage to be at the correct angle

2. Added Music

3. Removed a minute or two of me talking

4. Added a new intro.

5. Changed the icon.

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