Rosepoint Publishing

It should have been simple–believe me–I tried. But strangely, my simple WordPress freebie won’t accept a columnar list. I’ve been posting reviews on this blog from the time I opened it (well, almost). Let’s just say, there’s a lot of reviews out there. I wanted to list my book reviews with a link to the original review post. Was that so difficult? Apparently so because nothing I tried worked.

Not tables, not columns. Can’t do tabs. An excel file wouldn’t work. Nope. Nadda. Nyet. So I gave up and shot a note off to the “happiness engineers” at WordPress. Used to be I could catch them in a live chat. Not any more. Now it takes up to several days, depending on the day of the week and the question I guess.

The reply I got from Jerry was that it is possible, but not in the visual editor. I’d have to switch to the HTML view. However, he cautioned me, it might look okay on a desktop computer but wonky on a cell phone. Yeah, thinking I read where most posts are read on mobile devices, I elected to forget the columns.

Several more interchanges with Jerry the Happiness Engineer who still exhibited patience, but now has simplified his instructions for me. (Thank you, Jerry, I needed that.)

Next…

Getting bored with the same old theme I’ve now had several years. Changed to new theme, new look (did you notice?), same old problems.

Good ole Jerry suggested using “category,” which may be construed a page(?), and add it as a tab in my menu at the top right of my blog. hmmm….much easier to see.

Thinking I originally wanted to divide the reviews by years, and this is already May of 2017, It’s probably a little late for the old tab–but perhaps a new tab for “Reviews 2017” would work. While it is not a listing per se as it displays the complete review for each–at least they would be on a (albeit LONG) page. These are in last reviewed order; not alphabetical, as are categories. So, it took some doing for this old dog, but I think I have it displayed in my top, primary, menu and that all the links work. I’m sure you’ll tell me if they don’t!

Reviews 2017 are still listed in the categories, as well as the original Review category, but I’ve gone through them in a grand sweep and once again owe you a mia culpa as you’ve gotten some notifications that I changed a post–nope–just the category. Some changes triggered a notification and some didn’t, but unfortunately a half-dozen notifications went out and my profuse apologies for spamming you! (And obviously, I changed many more than that.)

In my free WordPress 2016 theme, I can have lots of categories (top-level or parent), as well as sub-categories (child). My categories are listed under “Ship’s Chart” keeping that whole sailing, boating feel. (Grandpa was a captain on a tall ship.) I don’t use that many categories and thinking there’s a few I could eliminate in a general WP blog clean-up. However, that is a subject for a whole nother blog post.

A category is assigned to default if I haven’t assigned one, but I see if I elect to do a reblog I’m not given the option as it immediately publishes in the “default” category–“Publisher’s Comments.” I’d prefer to be given the option to introduce and comment on the original blogger.

It’s Spring Cleaning time! Have you considered some general clean-up or struggled with some blog changes lately? I’d love to hear about those as well as a consensus of mobile devices. Do you read your blog posts on your device? ©2017 Virginia Williams