Today’s post is going to be a rant.
The day started out great. I was just going to check into my blogs, to see if anyone had dropped by to view them. I love looking at the stats. Then I was going to get to work getting the house clean so that when I leave to visit my parents and family in another state for Thanksgiving, the house would look good for the family I’m leaving behind on this trip.
Then I got sucked into my blogs, first by a couple of interesting comments and then I saw that my sister had posted to our private family blog. All I needed to do was approve her comments. Her first posts were about the problems she was having changing her profile image from an auto-generated one to her own personal one.
That’s when things turned ugly.
A couple of days ago I had a great idea to set up a private family blog, where we could all get together and contribute to the conversation and keep up with what we’re all doing. Being a design nut, I had been looking at this one particular theme Word Press offers for group blogs and thought it might be fun to set one up for our extended family and friends.
So I named it, set it up and saw that it had a provision for a custom header. Going to my web image file – the one I spent a day going through all my free dreamstime image downloads to resize for web usage – and selected one I thought would look good as a header. I chose a lovely image of an apple tree in bloom. Uploaded it. Cropped it. And it looked beautiful.
It so reminded me of the apple tree in my grandmother’s back yard. The one my grandfather had planted for her years before I was even born. The one she loved so dearly. I thought the rest of the family would probably be thinking the same thing, and that it would be the perfect image for our family blog.
As it turned out, one of my sister’s comments was about the lovely apple blossom image I had used in the header.
See, I knew it was a good one.
After doing my thing by approving her message, I went to view the blog.
No lovely apple blossom image.
No problem, I’ll just go upload it again. That’s not hard. I’ve done it a million times on my other blogs. For me, an image does speak a thousand words and getting just the right image for the header is important. It makes a statement. It reflects something about the person who writes the blog and their perspective.
So I went to my trusty dashboard, clicked on design, waited for that page to load, clicked “Custom Image Header” and waited for that page to load.
On that page is an input box where you can browse your computer for the image you want to upload. You find its location, click on its file and it loads the file location in the little box. Then you just press “upload image”. Easy enough.
No image appeared. Only a button to crop the no image.
I don’t even know how many times I tried uploading the image. Every time – no image. I did see that the image was being uploaded because, I could see a tiny little green image icon in the upper left corner and – as quick as a wink – it vanished and only the crop button would appear.
I tried resetting to the original image, then trying to upload again. I tried logging out and logging back in – going through the process. No image. I decided to check the section where you can view all the media uploads you have for that blog. There were about 10 uploads of the same image. Each one re-numbered each time it was uploaded. Maybe the file had somehow been corrupted. So I went to my original file and duplicated it. It now has a new file name. Uploaded it.
Still no image.
I then decided to delete all the apple blossom images and try again. Guess what – no image.
I went to the forums and found that maybe it was the image size. While the size I had before worked fine – and wasn’t any larger than others I’ve uploaded that still work fine, I decided to resize it anyway. I had cropped a lot from the top and bottom of the original, so I decided to trim that part of the photo. Saved it for the web. Tried to upload.
No image.
Went back to the Word Press forums, new search for topic: custom header disappeared. Found other bloggers have had this same problem. One suggestion was to change and then reload the theme. So, I did that. Tried to upload.
No image.
I’m getting exhausted just re-living this nightmare!
And there’s more to this story.
But, It’s now 6:54 pm, and I’ve been at this stuff since about 8:30 this morning. I’m going to call it quits for now and will – maybe – finish it up tommorrow.
