Moments in Time

Using Evernote to keep a journal and feeding stuff from Facebook and Twitter etc. into it automatically using IFTTT has proved to be a winning combination. This combination has been made far far better and more powerful with the added ability to create weblog postings directly to a Postach.io weblog using Evernote. Approaching a journal in this way makes publishing simple and yet keeps all your material under your own control within the searchable Evernote system.

I've been surprised how often it is useful and enjoyable to be able to refer back to things and it's also interesting how stuff posted on Twitter and Facebook, though transient, does give a little insight into things as they were at a particular time.

Does it all matter in the grand scheme of things? Probably not, but for me at least a journal makes some sense of the passing time and stops memories and events just becoming an impenetrable fog. There is no doubt, based on my experience, that the value of a written and searchable record rises as time passes. Initially it can feel like a chore but after a while I've come to value these records more and more.

Ask yourself the question, what did you do on the 23rd October 2014? If you have no idea, which I wouldn't have without my journal, maybe a brief written record would have made that day just a little more valued, we only have so many of them!

Following some experimentation earlier today I identified that even though Flickr slideshows can be embedded in a Postach.io weblog there are limitations, a particular one being that because Flickr slideshows are flash based they will not play on an iPad which is a significant problem for me because that is what I use for many of the tasks I perform. Having done some investigating I think I may have worked out a solution, the only thing to do is to try it and see.

This problem may have been solved by others far brighter than me and if there are better solutions to the Flash Player/iPad/Postach.io issue I’d be delighted to hear them!

Here goes!

Uploaded this last night, not often you get to see FOUR bulls all together in a field!

Day 2 and Another 0.2lbs down on yesterday so down by 1.6lbs since day zero, hardly setting the world on fire but heading in the right direction. I normally drop several pounds in week one when I start this kind of process so I remain optimistic and so far my willpower is holding up!

Sent this to Postach.io: "I've no problem embedding Flickr slideshows in my blog which works fine. My problem is that because they are flash based the slideshows cannot be viewed on an iPad, which is probably what a lot of views would be on. Is there any way I can get around this, other than telling people to use a "proper" computer. Is there another way to post slides? Is SlideShare the answer?" Received a reply which indicates that this is an issue they were not aware of or hadn’t considered, it will be interesting to see if there are any ways around this.

Lady complaining loudly about not being able to take a dog into Hulne Park, saying something about only a small percentage of people being able to use the park if it can only be used by people without dogs! I think it's just nice to be able to walk somewhere without being exposed to piles of dog excrement which has not been picked up, or has been put in plastic bags and dumped, it's one of the reasons I like going there!

Enjoyed my walk today and shot some more video clips as a reminder of just what a fantastic day it has been, I was walking around in just a T-Shirt which is almost unheard of at this time of year up in the North East of the UK. When I say "just a T-Shirt", I was of course wearing the usual trousers etc. :-)

Quick bite to eat and then off out to make a couple of audio recordings for The Alnwick Clarinet Trio which Lorena plays in with a couple of her friends. Enjoyable little session, then had some fun and games with GarageBand pulling the stuff together. Problem is I don’t use that package very often so I just forget most of the commands so these things take me far longer than they really should.

Been a good day on the food front I think, pretty sure I’ve stayed within the sort of calorie intake I should be hitting, certainly not binged on stuff that’s for sure! The scales never lie anyway, we shall see what truths they reveal in the morning.

Facebook Updated: October 02, 2014 at 08:17AM Ordered some WarmCards. Looking forward to experimenting with them :-)

As you may have noted in my previous posting I have been trying to add Disqus commenting to this weblog without any success. I created a Disqus account and linked it to my Postach.io weblog and it was showing up as "connected" exactly as it should do according to this video.

With great anticipation I reloaded the weblog and was mightily disappointed to see that nowhere amongst all the posts could I see anything that was going to allow a reader, if indeed there were any readers, to leave a comment. I’d failed, or so I thought.

Entirely by accident, when testing a link for some other reason, I saw that a comments box had miraculously appeared beneath the post I was reading, just as it should have done. What I hadn’t realised, and what I still don’t understand is that you only get the chance to comment if you have opened a single post from a link to that post alone rather than seeing a comments box beneath each post on a list of posts, as is the case on Blogger for example.

I’ve no idea why it works like this and I don’t know whether this can be changed but at least part of the mystery has been solved.

Stop Press! As of 02 October 2014 a "Comments" link has appeared as if by magic above the "Permalink" link on each weblog posting, clicking that opens up the Disqus comments dialogue box which is great. I guess this just took some time to filter through after the initial setup process so that's worth bearing in mind.

As of 7 October 2014 I have observed that the opportunity to comment, ie. the appearance of a comments link, seems to be time related in that the link appears some time after the original posting was made. I can only imagine that this is caused by some sort of delayed batch processing but that is pure speculation. This behaviour is only an issue if someone wishes to comment shortly after a post has been made and even then it can be overcome by opening the post permalink, though this will not be apparent to most visitors.

Off to a good start on the weight management front with a drop from yesterday's weight of 1.4lbs which is good. Always going to be plenty of day to day variation and it's the long term trend I'm interested in but hey, the scales are there so I may as well hop on them and capture the information!

On the subject of weighing there are two camps really, those who say weigh weekly or fortnightly and those who say weigh every day. There is actually quite good evidence that daily weighing helps with long term weight management so that's why I do it. The problem, as we all know, is that when we start to gain weight the first thing we do is to stop weighing ourselves!

Out for a nice walk this morning with Lorena, not such a nice day as yesterday but still not cold and still dry. Walked up to Brizlee Tower today for the first time for a good while which was nice, had hoped to find some toadstools but there were surprisingly few about, maybe because of the surprisingly dry weather.

After lunch decided to copy a programme I'd saved to a DVD, it was an interesting CH4 documentary called "The World's Best Diet". Having finalised the disc I discovered that there was no sound, damn it. Traced the problem I think to a loose cable on the back of the player, no idea how that happened but at least I think it is the problem, will find out when I try to re-record it. The annoying thing is that when I checked a previous recording that was also without sound and the original has now been deleted so that is lost. Real shame that as it was "Cycling's Greatest Fraud" about Lance Armstrong, hopefully it will be on again at some point and I can capture it again.

Now that I have everything sorted out I'm quite enjoying the process of converting my daily diary notes into a Postach.io weblog posting, miles easier than having a different blogging platform, makes things so much simpler. I have it in the back of my mind to go back into some of the material I have saved in Evernote in the past and see what I can find that's worth posting to the weblog, I'm sure that there will be material in there that people would be interested in.

Spent a bit of time this evening trying to add Disqus commenting to my Postach.io weblog. I’m sure I’ve done everything correctly but for some reason nothing has appeared on the weblog where folks could leave any comments. Don’t really understand what is going on and am hoping that there is perhaps some sort of a delay so planning to just leave it and see what happens rather than waste any time with it. Always possible I guess that something got broken with the latest Postach.io upgrade, time will tell.

Sent the following message to the folks at Postach.io, hopefully I will get a reply that I can share with others: "Hi, followed all the instructions in your video to add Disqus commenting to my Postach.io weblog but no joy. All seems to be properly set up and Postach.io is showing as connected to Disqus but nothing showing on the weblog to allow people to comment, any suggestions? Something broken?"

Twitter Updated: October 01, 2014 at 06:57AM #Nike advertising in the sky over Alnwick? :-) http://t.co/KMtWVKchpS

Twitter Updated: October 01, 2014 at 07:33AM @MissB6_2 trying to message you re Postachio and Evernote but the website contact form seems to be down. I have some queries, can you help?

Twitter Updated: October 01, 2014 at 07:50AM @MissB6_2 Ah, sorry, just assumed it was Postach.io on the basis that you were singing it's praises! Thanks for getting back!

Twitter Updated: October 01, 2014 at 07:53AM @MissB6_2 Sorry about the resends, the site gives a constant "busy" icon but never actually says that something has been sent! :-)

Twitter Updated: October 01, 2014 at 10:20AM @MissB6_2 Same position I was in. I decided to just jump and get all my previous posts into the system and see where that took me!

Twitter Updated: October 01, 2014 at 10:21AM @MissB6_2 The lack of search and navigation as @Postachio currently stands is a big problem for anyone wanting to use the system seriously.

Twitter Updated: October 01, 2014 at 08:37PM Adding Disqus commenting to my @postachio blog. Think I've done everything correctly but no commenting options appearing so far :-(

Twitter Updated: October 01, 2014 at 08:41PM @RealChrisPowell The patient's knees are giving way too. Shame the image, unlike MRI, doesn't show intra-abdominal and epicardial fat.

Pleased to wake up this morning with the Postach.io weblog scheme behind me so that I can get back to a more active life. That project really consumed me for a little while and I'm glad it's over and done with but I don't regret the time I've spent on it because I am pleased with the end result.

Made a much better start to the day today and got myself out for a good walk, out for 2-3 hours and felt better for it. Today was the most amazing Autumn day, beautifully warm and sunny with hardly a breath of wind, definitely not a day for sitting in front of the computer!

We enjoyed our usual pleasant leisurely lunch and spent a relaxing afternoon doing nothing much in particular. Lorena for various reasons missed out on this morning's walk so we decided to go out for another hour before our evening meal. Walked about another four miles through the fields locally which was lovely, stil very warm, just like a midsummer's evening.

Have decided to take myself in hand and make a much more determined effort to shed a few pounds and I will share my progress here. I'm not planning to post my absolute weight for all the world to laugh at so will be posting my relative weight and today is zero pounds, I will post my results either positively or negatively relative to today.

My weight loss plan is simple, I am going to set myself a target of two hours of exercise a day which will be either walking or cycling. If this were all walking the calorie consumption for that level of exercise would be something in the order of 800 calories. Using that as a foundation I will manage my calorie intake to aim for a calorie deficit of about 500-600 calories per day, this should result in my losing about a pound a week.

If this all goes to plan my objective is to have lost about ten pounds by Christmas which is about 12 weeks away so that should be possible, even allowing for a few inevitable slip-ups.

Successful day on the eating, drinking and exercise fronts today so hopefully this is the beginning of a steady movement in the right direction. No, it IS the beginning of a steady movement in the right direction!

Twitter Updated: September 30, 2014 at 12:31AM @tyabblemons Yes, everything going back to 2008 is now migrated and also safely in Evernote, it all started off on Blogger.

Twitter Updated: September 30, 2014 at 03:44PM @postachio I hope my comments were useful, my hope was that they would inform others considering this platform and help them avoid problems.

Twitter Updated: September 30, 2014 at 03:45PM @postachio I think the bottom line is that if these issues in particular cannot be resolved the true potential will never be realised.

Twitter Updated: September 30, 2014 at 03:47PM @postachio Something else which niggles at the back of my mind is the possibility of the service becoming subscription only.

Have finally reached the section of this Postach.io weblog work where all my material is already in Evernote so it should make it easier to get things posted, that's the theory at any rate. As it happened this section of the work took me a very long time because of the volume of embedded media in the notes all of which I had to transfer into the correct format so that things worked properly. Never mind, well worth it in the end.

Lorena off out for a walk with Alison Slassor so I'm sitting here at the moment working my way through my May 2014 diary entries, just hoping that uploading them will be a smooth process and that I won't hit any major synchronisation issues again with Postach.io. For some reason this part of the work did go more smoothly in terms of synchronisation which I was grateful for, certainly saved me a great deal of hassle which there would have been had there been lots of delays as there have been previously.

Been a pretty slow day and I will be very glad when this work is done, which it now almost is, it will be nice to get back to a more normal existence and to spend a whole lot more time outside. Lorena was out at the band this evening and she seems to have had a nice time so that is good. I did write up a bit of a summary of my experiences with the transfer from one blogging platform to another which can be accessed here if anyone is interested.

This will be my first "live" posting as pretty much everything else has been backloaded from my previous platform, hopefully everything should work a whole lot more smoothly from here on, fingers crossed!

The job is done!

Twitter Updated: September 29, 2014 at 01:43PM Disappointing that the @postachio system does not offer a search feature and Google search can't be added as no access to Source Editor :-(

Twitter Updated: September 29, 2014 at 11:26PM @postachio @tyabblemons My thoughts and experiences of things so far, might be of interest to potential users? http://t.co/6gq4aqlWy3

Well, I have finally made it. After a great deal of hassle I have managed to move the 1831 posts from my previous blogging platform, Blogger, onto a new platform, Postach.io. The beauty of this arrangement is that each and every one of those previous weblog postings now sits in my Evernote account where they are fully indexed and searchable so that I can actually easily access and make use of all the information that I have collected over the years.

I do not know, nobody can know, whether this new platform will stand the test of time but I found the idea of having everything under the one roof very attractive and it is for that reason that I have expended the time and energy to get to this point, I hope it will prove to be a wise decision.

If nothing else this move does at least mean that all this material is now under my own control and if changes are made to the blogging platform or if one day it is no more then I still have all the information safe and sound and easily accessed. If need be any or all of my notes can be used elsewhere and I am no longer subject to future decisions that the folks at Google might make about their blogging platform.

It has been difficult and tedious to move all the material from one platform to another. However, now being able to easily embed video, slideshows, still photos, downloadable PDFs, sound files etc. etc. using Evernote and to publish this material simply by applying the tag "published" to the Evernote note will be a huge benefit and the work and frustration that has been involved will soon be forgotten.

In terms of the process I started with a Blogger weblog which I had to export as a single file and then import that into a temporary Wordpress blog. A Python script I got hold of would accept a Wordpress export file as an input. The script would not accept a Blogger export which was why this intermediate step was necessary. Having generated a Wordpress export file this was processed by the Python script and a number of .enex (Evernote Export) files were generated by the script. These files could then be imported into Evernote generating individual notes, each one representing an individual post on the previous weblog.

The story did not end there, many of my original posts had embedded images, videos etc. and all these had to be regenerated. This doesn’t sound too bad but I was dealing with over 1800 individual posts so it has been quite a task.

From there it has been a matter of checking things and tidying them up, this whole process has thrown up a number of deficiencies with the Postach.io service which I am hoping over time will be addressed. Bear in mind that I have no knowledge or skill in writing HTML and I cannot therefore make changes to a style sheet to change my Postach.io template without running the risk of wrecking it, there will be many many people in the same position. Here is a checklist of just a few of the issues that I hope will be resolved quickly, as these issues are remedied I will tick them off and this post will be updated, as if by magic :-)

This system has great promise, which is why I have chosen to move over to it but as it stands I think it runs the risk of being looked at by people and it being rejected because of the fact that some basic tools are missing. ANY weblog must be capable of being searched and navigated easily "out of the box" without specialist knowledge of how to hack a page of HTML, that’s my view at any rate.

The problems with syncing files to Postach.io continue. It was taking ages to get things published first thing, it improved a bit later in the day but then deteriorated again and as I type this evening I have one post which has been sitting there unposted for about three hours which is just hopeless.

Been in touch with a guy from Australia who has similar problems so it's not just me which is at least a little bit reassuring. The whole thing is extremely frustrating because I like the system and it has great potential but these practical synchronisation problems cast a dark cloud over things.

Popped out to Lidl for a few bits of shopping, interested that they have now changed things and have started accepting credit cards rather than just debit cards so they must be doing well!

Big treat this evening, we decided to have fish and chips from Carlos in Alnwick and it was lovely. For the record the chip shop is open until 21:00 on a Sunday which surprised me. So it was fish a chips, followed by some Coronation Street and an episode of the new series of Downton Abbey, perfect :-)

This afternoon I did watch some of the men's World Road Race for the rainbow jersey which was won by Michal Kwiatkowski of Poland who broke away late in the race and crossed the line just a second or so from the chasers.

Facebook Updated: September 28, 2014 at 10:11AM Placed an order for some Wiggle Hydration Tabs. Miles cheaper than the SIS and High5 versions and just how complicated can a zero calorie electrolyte tablet be? Got to be worth a punt, anyone tried the Wiggle gels?

Flickr Updated: 2014 @ The Cycle Hub - Brought to us from the people behind Saddle Skedaddle Cycling Holidays and The Cycle Centre, Byker - The Cycle Hub is a social enterprise that promotes and facilitates cycling, complete with bike hire facilities, cafe, bike shop and repair workshop. Some photos taken recently down at The Cycle Hub recently, excellent place to while away a little time.

Facebook Updated: 2014 BikeServe Service - I wasn't familiar with this one until recently, I particularly like the collect and drop option. I'm attracted to the collect and drop option!

Video uploaded to YouTube: Nissan X-Trail

Video uploaded to YouTube: The Cycle Hub

Video uploaded to YouTube: Freeman Hospital

Video uploaded to YouTube: Sainsbury's Cafe - Alnwick

Video uploaded to YouTube: Woodhorn Gardening Trip

Twitter Updated: September 28, 2014 at 08:40PM @postachio @tyabblemons Spoke too soon, same old sync problems back again, any idea how long users will have to tolerate this?