Salish Sea

Here is a bit of bloggery that I will forget if I don’t record what happened.

I wrote that bit yesterday about a wonderful wet romp up to the new new snow on Mt. Gardner. And created a new category called Backcountry. Backcountry is a word my spelling checker does not know; but all wilderness wanderers use it. And us environmentalists make a distinction between frontcountry and backcountry activities.

When I clicked my new category to try it out, it opened a page that reported:

Error 404 - Not Found
Sorry, but what you’re looking for isn’t here. Perhaps you typed a URL incorrectly or clicked on a broken hyperlink.

Then I found that clicking ANY of my categories led to that page. What had I done? I tried reposting that new article, and a few other silly actions, and finally went to the WordPress Site for a solution. I posted my problem in WordPress Support » How-To and Troubleshooting. Moshu, the Moderator wrote right back to say:

The right forum for you is at http://wordpress.com/forums
(we are the wp.ORG guys here)

Howesound wrote:

Thanks moshu. I suppose I should understand the distinction between org and com at wordpress. Anyhow off I go to the world of com-merce.

At the WordPress.com/forum a sticky message recognized the problem with categories, and promised a fix. So, there was no point in my posting anything. And I see that today it is fixed.

At another sticky, Andy the Key Master provides a full description of the difference between WordPress the ORG and WordPress the COM, here: http://wordpress.com/forums/topic.php?id=3700. It was good to find out about this, and to discover this helpful forum.

So, didn’t I say I’d no longer be writing to this blog? Well, I just wanted to talk about this somewhere.

My daughter (C) asked if I’d walk up the mountain on Bowen Island, Mt Gardner, with her today. It is a treat for me when anyone wants to go into the backcountry with me. We would go whatever the weather. We left home a little after 10 AM. Hardly an alpine start.

The sun had been shining earlier, but as we headed up there were a few drops blown by a gusty breeze. It is a short hike - about 2000 vertical feet from the trailhead to the summit. In good weather, when I am fit (I’m not fit now), I can make the top in under an hour. So I decided that I’d wear my hoody fleece, toque and gloves, but not bother to carry a pack with food, water, and extra clothes.

By the time we were at Viewpoint 1 (about 1/3 of the way up - and no view) it was raining. But we were warm from walking. We were taking the route up from Bowen Bay, which is relentlessly steep. By the 1/2 point the rain was mixed with snow. At Viewpoint 2 (about 2/3 of the way up - and no view) it was snowing. The ‘Valley of the Trolls’ (a gully leading to the shoulder of the mountain) was stunning with its glowing fronds and dark shadows. At the summit (actually a sub-summit, but the usual hikers’ destination because there are views - no view today) there was 1-1/2 inches of snow on the ground, and huge flakes falling in spite of the wind whipping past.

We were soaked, and didn’t stay to risk becoming cold. The trip down was speedy. We had to be careful because everything was slick and slippy. We saw no other people the whole day. As a result of the recent wicked weather there are many new blow-downs on the trail.

Why do people love only the bluebird days in the mountains? This was awesome, and we were both glad to experience it.

On Saturday, October 21, 2006 there was a gathering at the Xa:ytem Longhouse Interpretive Centre in Mission, British Columbia. For 15 years the Sto:Lo have worked to save Hatzic Rock and this archeological site. In June, this land, now with its traditional pit houses and First Nations Interpretive Centre, was formally transferred to the Sto:Lo. There has been continuous habitation here on the banks of the river for nine thousand years.

… See my Tabblo>

This summer my friends on the Sunshine Coast invited me to go sailing on the Salish Sea. From Bowen Island, I crossed Howe Sound to Horseshoe Bay, and took a second ferry to Langdale. The sailboat was in the marina at Gibsons. We sailed around Keats Island. So for some of the time we were out in the Georgia Strait.

See my Tabblo>

To use the RSS feeds, you need an aggregator. The free ones are good; and because they are free, they are simple. You may never want a full featured aggregator unless you run a news room or you like to play with software. Here is where to go to read about ‘em and download the programs. We use (and like) NetNewsWire Lite, and we found the Windows programs with an Internet search. You may want to do a search yourself and read some online reviews.

For Macintosh:

NetNewsWire Lite

For Windows:

Awasu

RSS Bandit

BlogExpress

As you browse the web you’ve probably seen buttons like this one:

That’s my button. Others might look like this:

or and to keep you confused, there are other similar buttons.

Those buttons will all take you to a boring page of text that is to be read by a program called an aggregator. So, to use these buttons, you will need an aggregator. You can download free aggregators - I’ll suggest some in a future post.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Sites like this blog, all online newspaper sections, and most Internet pages that are updated with some regularity automatically update the information on that boring page of text every time something new appears at the site.

If you have an aggregator, click on my button (above) and copy that URL. Click the subscribe button on your aggregator (or whatever command is expected) and the program will do the rest. It will figure out the name of my blog, Salish Sea, and display it in your list of feeds. If you click on that name, in another pane you will see list of the titles of my recent posts. If you click on any of those you will see a synopsis of that post. Click on that and it will open your browser to that page in my blog.

Your aggregator regularly and swiftly checks all of the sites of interest to you and shows you at a glance what is new. Is this good? For me, I seldom listen to or watch broadcast news — I usually know about breaking stories hours or days before the public. Although I glance at the popular news on my aggregator, I am always up-to-date with the subjects of particular interest to me. That includes blogs such as this one too. Currently I am monitoring 46 RSS feeds… and I see that at the moment those feeds have a total of 522 stories. Just the news, no ads. You will have to try it to see how simple and easy this is. And fun.

It is possible that with a free WordPress account, I will not be able to upload and store any images at this site. So, for this attempt, I have stashed that tiny RSS-valid GIF at one of my sites.

The concept is to have it appear here as a clickable link to the RSS feed for this site.

I’m going back to PageSpinner to write the code.

The code is entered below… and if this works, there should be a clickable link to the RSS feed page.

Bingo! It works. In my browser there is a faint line under the image than fades on an off to indicate that the image is a link. I was also able to do that neat effect where, in modern browsers, if you hold your cursor over the image a little popup appears to say: RSS Feed for Salish Sea Blog.

I am using MarsEdit to upload (and now edit) this entry and created the code in PageSpinner.

If you are reading this and wondering why the fuss to find such a boring page: the reason is that a news aggregator can use the URL of that page to monitor this whole site. More about that in a future post.

At the site of Adam Kalsey there is a button maker, and the default button is for making an RSS feed button. http://kalsey.com/tools/buttonmaker/

I made one. And saved it to my computer.

It was surprisingly difficult to find the URL of the feed to my site trying to read through all of the geeky instructions at the WordPress site. This was a bit helpful: http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds

It turns out that with our 2 blogs (I guess because they use permalinks) it is easy. Take the home URL and add /feed/.

Here is what I have for the RSS aggregator for this site: http://howesound.wordpress.com/feed It even works without that last slash.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to make that image a link. I don’t see how in MarsEdit, but I can make an image a link in PageSpinner.

And here is the code…

{nope… a mess}

And now, and hour later, the little gif of the RSS feed button has vanished… only the text box and placeholder remains. I need a better way. Stay tuned.

I’ve opened the New Post window.

And over in Flickr I have an image of a boat approaching Mt. Gardner Dock. I’ll choose the little version that is only 240 x 205 pixels.

Hmm, using the HTML button isn’t working. It wants me to upload an image to this site. I just want to show an image from another site.

Let me try this…

Well, you can see the picture! MarsEdit didn’t do it. Under that size of image in Flickr is the code in a box with the heading: 1. Copy and paste this HTML into your webpage:.

It worked.

____

But I had it only in the Uncategorized category, and it should be in Blog Site Development.

So, this is an edit to add this bit, and to add the category.

The previous entry, including the picture of the sailboat with the green hull, was composed, not here, but in Flickr. A few points about doing that:

1. Since the entry is associated with a specific picture at my flickr account, such an entry can have only one image. I suppose I could make several postings from Flickr - with one image for each - and then take the code that shows the imagery for each, and back here in WordPress, combine the code in a single entry that has several pictures. Since the posts are live to the Internet when I push the button over at Flickr, there would be a period when those individual posts would appear here and before I had the opportunity for editing the posts into a single entry here, I suppose that a reader could make a comment, or Google could catalogue the site. Is this an issue? I think so. I have posted pictures at my Flickr site, and one of my friends, whom I know uses an RSS feed, had commented within seconds — actually before I saw the newly uploaded pics on Flickr myself. (They were uploaded with non-Flickr software, so I was not at Flickr at the moment they were uploaded.)
2. The code for the picture, as it appears here in WordPress, makes the picture into link back to Flickr. This is good because over there the reader can choose to see/download larger images than the one that appears in the blog.
3. Flickr’s posting at this site also includes a link with my name over on Flickr… which is HoweSound. If this is a distraction, I could simply remove it while editing here.
4. The entry about the green-hulled boat has not been edited here. So, you can see exactly what a Flickr-blog post looks like.