The Second Coming

This is the picture (or one of them) that I tried to put in yesterday's blog. This was the view outside my kitchen door all yesterday, when it snowed about approximately 26 hours. I did not leave the house all day. I must admit I am a bit puzzled, as the template used for photo posting suggested the text would be on the right of the picture.
Okay, I guess the answer to that is to move the cursor down and then type. The next issue will be whether I can access this in Word to edit the text, or whether the Word entry will have to come underneath it. The solution, if this works, was to use the Blog This! button in Picasa; that turned out to be a bit confusing, as it looked as if I had to create a new blog, which I did not want to do (defining blog here as the site, not the page or entry), but once I got through the sign-in process the Blogger program knew about and identified my blog site. Now let's see if this worked.
As one might have suspected, the answer is both "Yes" and "
No" -- the picture is there, but Word does not see it! Hey; I am three hours late for supper and I want to watch "24" so that I won't lose track of the story, so I am leaving this for another day (or hour).
And the hour has come later, with a couple edits and a complaint, as I seem to have lost one hour and maybe two out of the story already! Moreover, as a result of spending too much time on this, I am losing out on the work I should be doing, so I'll be off to do that now and save more for another post.

The Beginning

Because two of my grown-up children have been fooling around with blogs for a while, and because my new Office 2007 software claims to let me post blogs easily right out of the Word program, I thought I would spend a snowy afternoon setting up a blog account and learning how to use it. As always, there were problems. First, it turns out I already had a Blogger account, that I apparently created some forgotten time in the past. Getting over that hurdle, I updated my profile and then attempted to register the blog with Word 2007, which kept showing me a Help page that did not answer my questions. Word 2007 insists that I have to have a picture provider and directs me to provide the posting URL and the source URL; Blogger tells me I can post pictures and mentions no URLs. Word's answer to that is to tell me to select the "My blog provider" entry … except that I cannot find any such entry to select! Apparently this is not going to be easy.

I then decided to just insert a desired picture into the posting in Word and see if it would go up. That went through another bit of confusion, but I finally got a picture in the posting file, except that it was very much oversize. Recalling what I had to do to resize a picture to include it in an E-mail, I went through that same process … and got the same oversized picture.

 

Then I simply shrunk the picture by pulling its ends in toward the center—but I know in my heart of hearts that this is not a good approach, because the actual size of the picture (that is, the number of bits) remains the same, meaning that the size will be much to large to be on the Web, slowing everything down. At this point, however, the intent was simply to see if the picture gets included, so I persevered.

The result, however, was that the text got there fine (although it took me a while to find it, not only because I did not understand that I had to search out my own title but also because I kept getting distracted looking at other people's blogs) … but there was no picture (that's the space between the second and third paragraphs). I obviously need more time at the drawing board, but I am getting hungry, so I am going upstairs to eat. Eventually there will be pictures; that's my new New Year's resolution – along with committing myself to exercising every day before breakfast, going to the gym at least three times a week, and learning French and Spanish. Ciao.