The Happy Pilgrim

In the first draft of this post I put a call out for IT experts to help me get my blog to work. The blog was looking quite nice, but a few weeks ago it was very much "under development".

I would think about stuff and use the "phone a friend" option!. While I was waiting on responses, I decided the safest bet would be to try and work things out myself! I would YouTube or Google or speak to someone. The longer I waited for someone to provide me with an answer the more likely I was to find the solution to my own questions! Before I knew it my IT problems grew smaller.

Moral of this tale:
If you think about things and keep trying - you can almost invariably work stuff out yourself.
There was no need to hold my breath or throw the towel in. I drew on recent advice from a wise woman I know she tells me she lives by this same advice. Sometimes, you just need to "put your big girls pants on" and get on with it. It's sort of like the Nike "Just Do It" motto or the Michelle Bridges "JFDI", same-same but different and it has definitely works for me!




Over the last few weekends (and Easter) I booked myself into One-to-One lessons at the Apple Store. I learnt about how a Blogger App would assist me with navigating through my posts on my iPad. I am pleased I invested the time in the lessons. Now I can do "posts" on my iPad and will be able to transfer photos from my camera on to my iPad and upload them as my make my way across North-West Spain in a few weeks time.

The list of "what didn't work" began to turn into the list of "what I worked out". It just goes to show that life is good when you persist. Happy Blogger - Happy Pilgrim!

What I fixed

1. The Gallery wasn't working but now it does thanks to a YouTube tutorial and my persistence I have learnt how to insert a Picasa Web album. My gallery contains a small collection of Salvador Dali pieces that I found on a Google search. I am extremely excited about this because I am going to the Salvador Dali Museum just outside of Barcelona. I am looking forward to viewing these amazing pieces first hand. I am going to try out a slide show of my own from the iPad to see if I can organise my photos in a more interesting manner. (But enough late nights, that's definitely a job for the next weekend).
2. About Post Author - (is working now!)  I know, I am truly amazed, I actually edited HTML without hyperventilating. I would like to acknowledge my friend on the SoraTemplate helpdesk in India (who has been very intolerant of me in the past). He really doesn't write nearly enough text in his email responses but I am showing resilience  and tolerance when it comes to helpdesks overseas.
3. And yes  scrolling pictures at the top of the home page are now photos of my choice and not those in the template! Some people would have given up by now but I persisted and yes, even did some more tinkering in the html section!  
4. The menu bar now works as expected. I was able to rename the menu tabs and link the urls in the html codes section. This allowed me to link the tabs to all the right pages. This made me a Very Happy Pilgrim!

Last challenge
The only thing I am a bit stuck on now is formatting on the Itinerary page. There is a big gap between the table and the top of the page. When I insert the map (and believe me the map has been inserted and removed about 10 times now) the gap is still there. I have even started from scratch with a new page but still no luck. I have converted the table to html and copied it back into the template and it may just have to do. I like the fact I used the purple table template in Word and when I converted it to html the text was purple too!

I am pretty happy with my blog and my progress. It's time consuming but very rewarding teaching yourself something completely new. The things that don't work so well are small and I have managed to achieve what I set out to do. Needless to say I am going on holidays and I will be a Happy Pilgrim anyway!