Hello lovely people, I have something to say to ALL Bloggers today that I have been putting off ever since I started reading blogs.
I thoroughly enjoy the blogs I read and sometimes would like to leave a comment. I would average a guess that approximately 50% of the time I’m unable to do so.
If I could leave you a comment I would.
Bloggers this needs to be said:
Have you ever tried to leave a message, or comment on your own or someone else’s blog via a smartphone or IPad?
Sometimes it is impossible. Adverts cover the necessary login details and/or the comment section.
When you try to leave a comment the screen appears and then changes onto something else before you can even type a letter.
Hovering adverts move all over the place, making it impossible to leave a comment.
Suddenly an App screen will appear and contact with your website is lost.
These are just a few examples I have come across in the 10 months I have been blogging and reading blogs.
I’m sorry I have had to write a blog about it but you are the very people I can’t leave a message to!!
I completely understand that advertising brings in much needed income, however, a lot of blogs are read on the commute to work, waiting for an appointment etc and these are read mostly on phones!
Sometimes I will try up to 10 times to leave a comment, trying to dodge the Ads, I’m a pretty patient person. Surely I can’t be the only one who had encountered this?
So please if you have adverts, sharing is caring, follow me or floating social media buttons on your blog, please check that they aren’t obscuring your comments section?
Please think of those people who have spent valuable time on your site and want to leave a comment?
What you may be gaining in revenue you could be losing in followers and feedback. Surely that is the most important thing?
I love reading blogs and have found the blogosphere a very welcoming space. This post is NOT meant as an attack in any way, shape or form against bloggers, merely a gentle plead to help you, your blog and your readers.
If you don’t know you can’t fix it!
Thank you for reading this and I hope I can read many more blogs and successfully leave comments.
Have you come across this problem when trying to leave comments?
Are you aware of this problem but can’t change the advert/social media follow setup?
Hello lovely bakers, today I have 10 Steps That Will Improve Your Baking. I have had MANY baking failures over the years but experience, Food Network obsession and reading the intro’s to cook books has taught me how to avoid most disasters – in the kitchen!!!!
So here we go –
1 – Read the recipe through before starting. This may sound obvious, but, I have on more than one occasion, started a recipe, only to find, mid way through that I’m out of something! Nipping across the road to my neighbour asking to borrow wax discs, halfway through making Tomato Chutney springs to mind!!! Not baking, but the same principle applies!!
2 – Ensure you have all the ingredients and equipment before you start. Again seems obvious but, like with the wax discs, I’ve also borrowed garlic, different neighbour – we’re very friendly round here – when I was making bolognaise sauce and realised I was out of it, again halfway through cooking!!
Making sure you have all the ingredients you need, before you start!!
3 – When baking ensure ALL ingredients are at room temperature (unless specified by the recipe – which you will have read through fully!!). This small step will make a HUGE difference to the end result ; cakes will be lighter, the texture of cookies will be vastly improved. A good tip if you know you are going to be baking the next day is to remove eggs, butter, cream cheese etc from the fridge the night before.
4 – Measure/weigh your ingredients precisely. When cooking you can add bits here and there as you cook, tasting as you go along. In baking measurements are vital to success. You can’t taste your cake as it’s cooking, so you only know at the end, when the cake has cooked if it’s good.
Accurate scales and measuring cups are important.
5 – Make sure you use the right size cake/loaf tin for the recipe. If the tin is too small the end result will be a muffin topped cake/loaf. Muffin tops are only good for muffins!!!
There are a vast array of different tins in different sizes – make sure you use the correct one stated in the recipe!
I will tell you a story – one Mother’s Day I had asked that any presents, from our children, be handmade. Imagine the scene, banished from the kitchen for 2 hours, I finally came downstairs to find ALL my baking supplies depleted. “Your self raising flour doesn’t work!” said hubby (who was helping the children to bake me a Victoria Sponge Cake). “I had to go to the shops and buy some more, but that’s not working either!!”.
The house smelled of freshly baked cake. I didn’t understand. “You mean the flour I used to make cupcakes for the school bake sale, two days ago?”, I asked perplexed. Then I looked at the cakes. All four 1/2 inch deep layers of them. They had risen, were beautifully baked, just, well, rather flat!!
“Which cake tins did you use?” I asked. “These,” said a flour covered child, holding up my 9 inch springform cake tins, 2 of them!!! There wasn’t anything wrong with the flour or recipe, they’d just used the wrong sized pan!! (6 inch sandwich tins – as stated in the recipe, would’ve been better!).
So, realign the cake was actually edible, all three children proceeded to demolish one layer, spread with Nutella! Then they made me the most gorgeous cake I have ever tasted. A three layered Victoria Sponge. Delicious.
So the cake was mostly rescued and very much cherished. The moral being – use the size pan/tin stated in the recipe!!
6 – Follow the recipe. I know this sounds obvious, but, certainly the first time you bake from a new recipe, follow each step exactly as it says. You will minimise anything going wrong by adding, mixing etc EXACTLY as the recipe says.
7 – Check your oven temperature and adjust if using a fan/convection oven. Firstly it’s a good idea to buy an oven thermometer (I don’t have one, it’s on my to-get list!). This will give you an accurate reading of the oven temp. You’d be surprised how much ovens vary in their accuracy. Remember to adjust the cooking temp according to your oven’s instructions, if using a fan/convection oven, your total cooking time will generally be shorter too.
Oven thermometers are inexpensive and give you an accurate temperature reading.
8 – Do not open the oven door when baking cakes or breads. Most ovens have glass doors and lights, which helps when keeping an eye on your baking. I realise that most ovens have different hot spots. So I allow two thirds of the cooking time to pass and then I can open the door and turn the cake/loaf, so that it bakes evenly. Each time the oven door is opened the oven loses heat, so your bake may take longer.
9 – Once baked cool your baked items as recommended in the recipe. This is really important. Leave a loaf to cool in it’s tin and it will have a soggy bottom! Try to move cookies onto a cooling rack before they’ve hardened and you’ll have a crumbly mess! You get the picture.
10 – Allow your cake/cupcakes/cookies to cool completely before icing/decorating. You’ve spent time, energy and money creating your fabulous bake, the last thing you want is icing sliding off, or melting because it’s too hot! Wait for your bake to completely cool and then you can frost/decorate to your hearts content!
Cooling cakes, waiting to be transformed….
I hope this has been useful and made you smile. Remember sometimes things don’t always turn out as you want, even when you’ve followed the recipe completely. If you remember the 10 Steps That Will Improve Your Baking then hopefully baking disasters will be rare.
Do you have any tips to add to mine?
I’d love to read any funny baking mishaps that you’ve had?
Hi, if you’re reading this then you are probably panicking, sweating, anxious and worried that all your hard work has disappeared forever as all you see is the WordPress White Screen of Death, when you try to access your WordPress site. Hopefully my recent experience will Help you with WordPress Help Fixing the White Screen of Death.
My site’s crashed and I need Help NOW!!!
Let me say : if you understand coding, know a techy, have a complex site – then this blog isn’t for you, if not read on I may be able to help.
The opinions and advice given in this blog are solely to share my experience of ‘fixing’ my WordPress site http://www.feastingisfun.com
I do not accept any responsibility for individuals actions based on the content of this blog.
If in any doubt please contact WordPress or someone who specialises in working/fixing WordPress hosted sites.
Help! What do I do?????
WordPress Help Fixing The White Screen of Death :
Let me start by explaining what happened : I was trying to insert some code into the Headerphp of my site (I don’t even know what a Header php is – it’s just where I was told to insert the code!). All I had to do was copy and paste some code into a certain place in the Header php – simple you’d think – yep, a doddle! Except it didn’t work. The feed that I was trying to link my blog to didn’t recognise it. So I deleted the inserted code and tried again a couple of times. It still wasn’t recognised and then the worst thing happened – when I tried to review my blog all I saw was an error message and what I now know was TheWhite ScreenOfDeath. HELP?????
A similar error message to this came up on my WordPress site – The White Screen of Death.
Nooooo. Help?????????
This is exactly how I was feeling. Totally outta my depth.
I started Googling like mad ; Help my WordPress site has an error message, how do you fix a WordPress White Screen of Death, etc, etc???? I went onto WordPress.org (unless you understand coding I personally found this the least helpful – it’s almost impossible to contact them for support, you are just redirected to the forums – very disappointed at the lack of direct support).
What do I do? Where do I look? Someone help me pleeeeaaase?
I needed a website called ; WordPress Help Fixing The White Screen of Death
I looked at soooo many sites, all giving good advice on coding!! I set up my blog to write. I am not computer savvy AT ALL. In the end, despite potentially losing 6 months of work, I started to look at how I could reinstall/reset my site. Drastic I know, but I had tried different coding remedies and I was just making the problem worse.
Then I stumbled upon a site (I’m sorry I was in such a state I didn’t think to save the sites name). It recommended a plugin that would reset my WordPress site to its default settings. Hope and help finally.
Now this is where my computer’s/iPhone’s history was vital. I loaded an earlier (2 days previous) edit page from a post. It’s IMPORTANT to load a page that was saved prior to the coding error AND that the page is in EDIT MODE – this should allow you to access your PLUGINS-through the Dashboard. DO NOT load your site through view post, or directly through the blog title, this will just cause the updated, incorrect code to be loaded with that post and you will see is an error message on The White Screen Of Death!
Click on Plugins – add new. Type in WordPress Database Reset.
This is the plugin I found and used.
This WordPress Database Reset Plugin by Chris Berthe, is the Plugin recommended by the site I had visited. It is worth mentioning on the 6th March 2015 my site was running the most up to date WordPress version and the Plugin I used had not been verified as suitable with my version of WordPress!! I was DESPERATE!!!! Once you have found this Plugin click on Instal. You are now one step closer to recovering your site!
Once the Plugin is installed you will be given the option to ‘remove’ certain aspects of your site. These include content/media/comments etc. By clicking on the ‘remove’ button these components of your site WILL NOT be reset to default. In my haste I only ‘removed’ content (all my blogs) from being reset. Once you are happy with the parts of your site that you want reset click ‘Activate’. I held my breath and prayed.
Phew. All had not been lost. I recovered my WordPress site’s content.
I then viewed a post and it was there!! All of my writing and photos. The Set Feature image was lost and the Yoast SEO plugin that I had previously installed wasn’t working. It didn’t matter though. I had ALL of my content.
It worked. All of my posts were still intact along with photos!!!!
Sure my site was reset to the default black and white, I had lost all of my customisations. I was absolutely gutted that I had also lost all of my comments; invaluable words of support and encouragement gone, forever. Still I had my content – I initially thought I would lose everything, so by comparison I came out of it quite well.
As part of the reset all images in my Media file weren’t named or linked to the blog. I also can’t see them – there is just a box with image.jpg, but the images still showed up on each blog. I have now installed another Plugin which has systematically renamed and link each image to its blog!
What have I learned from experiencing The WordPress White Screen of Death?
* I will absolutely NEVER EVER insert code into my site’s code, EVER, EVER again! I may insert code on a blog page – for example, with BlogLovin’ you copy and Paste code onto the beginning of a new blog. BlogLovin’ then recognises this and you can claim the blog.
* Up until and including today my site http://www.feastingisfun.com has been set up and fully run using my iPhone 4S! I now intend to start using a computer to write/post my blogs.
* When using a computer I will regularly (once a week) backup my site.
* I know absolutely nothing about code and admire those who understand ; () <> %% {} numbers and figures. This allows me to sit down, press a button, log in and write.
* I realised how important my blog was to me. Not only the content, but the comments ; readers actually connecting with an article – Migraine – not all Sunshine and Roses – really hit a spot with my readers. I’ve only been blogging for just over 6 months, imagine if it had been years?
* How supportive the blogging community are towards each other. My heartfelt thanks to the guy who wrote the article about WordPress Database Reset. I’d been searching ALL day for something to help me!
* I will look around at other blogging platforms before I renew my hosting contract with WordPress.org in a few months time. They have no direct support system (that I could find). WordPress rely on their ‘forums’ to help people. I do not write/understand code. I set up a blog so that I could have a creative outlet, not so that I could become a computer whizz!!
* I hope by sharing this information with you, should you ever need it, it’ll be a lifeline and help you resolve site issues more easily.
* Which blogging platform do you use? How do you rate the support offered by your host? Has the White Screen of Death ever happened to you? If so how did you fix it?
Finally a big thank you to all of my readers, I’m sorry I’ve lost your comments. Hopefully I will publish future content that will inspire you to comment again.
I’m still not 100% finished with my blog customisation yet – but on the bright side I’ve changed the colours and tweaked a few other bits and pieces!
