I've Just Passed The Half-way Mark ...

... in my project of converting all of my 155 "picture-blogs" into Albums. My Wireclub Pictures page now contains about 2000 separate images. I've run into many problems along the way (see my previous ranting blog), but I'm slogging through it. I've got the fairly complex procedure down to a routine now. At first it required working from a long, detailed check list ...


~ Open #101; compose “Preview Wall Message; close #101
~ Open #0.04; enter the date; scan the document for errors, etc.; Save the document; copy the “Original Blog Title; close #0.04
~ Open Wireclub to Home page
~ Open Wireclub Pictures page on separate tab
~ Open Windows Explorer to selected Album
~ In Pictures page, click “New Album”
~ Note the three-digit number of the top listed Album; enter the next highest number in “Album Name” field; add a space
~ Paste the "Original Blog Title" in “Album Name field; click “Create Album”
~ Open (and stack) all text documents in this order: #103/#101/#0.06/#0.05/#0.04/#0.02
~ Copy the text of #0.02
~ Upload #0.01 “Begin Here” slide
~ Paste text of #0.02 into comment area and post; close #0.02
~ Copy text of #0.04
~ Upload #0.03
~ Paste text of #0.04 into comment area and post; close #0.04
~ Go to Wireclub Home page; refresh the page
~ Copy text of #0.05
~ Paste text of #0.05 into “Reply” area of the notification on Home page and post; close #0.05
~ Scan #0.06 to make sure that all “XX” texts have been replaced properly
~ Go to Wireclub Pictures page; upload all photos, while copy/pasting in Picture numbers/Captions from #0.06 (following the standard procedure); close #0.06
~ Copy text from #101
~ Upload #100
~ Go to Wireclub Home page; delete notification
~ Go to Wireclub Pictures page; Upload #102
~ Go to Home page; refresh the page;
~ Paste text from #101 into the “Reply” area of the new notification and post
~ Close #101
~ Copy text from #103
~ Go to Wireclub Pictures page
~ Open picture #100
~ Paste text from #103 into comment area


... but now I can rip right through all of that without giving it much thought.

The one thing I can't do is chat, answer messages, etc. while I'm in the midst of that, so occasionally I might appear to be ignoring someone rudely. I'm not ignoring you. I see that little green number up there next to the "envelop" icon on the top of my page.

I've also been meticulously going over those pictures, and tweaking them here and there with Photoshop Elements software. That's a very tedious and time consuming process, but rewarding, because the appearance of my pictures is being improved significantly.

At any rate, I'm about half finished. Once I'm done, I will, of course, continue to create new Albums, but they'll be coming at the rate of perhaps once per week, rather than several per day.

Seventy eight Albums completed, seventy seven to go.

Once Again, I've Been Wire-Screwed

Here's the facts:

With "Old Wireclub," I used to post LOTS of photographs. And in Old Wireclub, there was a limit of 200 pictures in the Picture Gallery. I could typically fill that thing up in about two months. And rather than just discard photos to make room for new ones, I would typically create special blogs for those older pictures. As the Gallery would run out of space, I'd re-post pictures into blogs, and then delete them from the Gallery to make room for new pictures there. It was a continuous process, with many pictures moving through the Gallery and eventually into a blog.

When I did that, I preserved the comments that people had left with the pictures, and placed those comments in the text part of the blog. I figured that if someone bothered to actually look at the pictures, and bothered to write a comment, I owed it to them to preserve the comments.

Along with that, I created special blogs that held both pictures that were only posted in that blog, such as a blog that featured pictures of a pretty vineyard, or a cool-looking auto, etc. The pictures for those blogs were never posted in the Gallery as the others were. Those special picture-blogs also received various comments, and I felt that if someone bothered to look at the blog and comment on it, I owed it to them to preserve those comments.

The upshot of all of that is that my profile contains literally thousands of pictures, and it also contains a lot of text generated by all of the comments people left. Most of those pictures and text now reside in those blogs that I described above.

The Old Wireclub picture-blog wasn't a perfect way to display pictures, but it worked pretty well. But with New Wireclub, the workings of blogs, and how pictures work in blogs, is just a TERRIBLE way to display pictures. It's nearly impossible to view the pictures in blogs in any meaningful way now.

But in New Wireclub, we now have these things called "Albums." They don't work all that great either, but they work infinitely better than picture blogs.

And so, I spent endless hours trying to figure out just how to go about setting up Albums to work within the way New Wireclub works. And I thought that I'd finally figured out a reasonable way to do this. It still had LOTS and LOTS of things that didn't really work for my purposes, but I thought I had figured out the best way to work within these terrible design aspects of New Wireclub.

I spent endless hours of testing, experimenting, apologizing for subjecting you to the ways that all of my tests and experiments resulted in what can only be described as GARBAGE on your Wireclub "walls."

My endless hours of testing and experimenting resulted in communications with Administration, and many suggestions submitted by me for improvements. It also resulted in a great deal of bitterness on my part for what I will still argue were INCREDIBLY STUPID decisions on how New Wireclub would work.

At least one of my suggestions was actually implemented. I was thankful for that. But most of my complaints about, and suggested remedies for the INCREDIBLY STUPID aspects of the New Wireclub Pictures page remain ignored.

That's just how it is.

And I can understand that Wireclub doesn't exist to serve me, so I can understand that while some of what I consider to be INCREDIBLY STUPID aspects of the workings of the Picture page simply aren't important to others.

So I came to terms with the way that things are, and decided to work within the limitations. After all of that, I finally arrived at what appeared to be the best way to make these new Albums.

So I began the process of converting those old picture blogs into Albums. There were a few minor bumps, a few small revisions in how I went about doing this, but things appeared to be going along pretty well. Out of the 154 picture blogs I want to convert, I'd gotten up to #043.

And that's when I suddenly hit a wall.

Suddenly, I now am having trouble attaching text to those pictures. I had been doing that by using the "Comment" area below individual pictures to number the pictures, to add captions, and to replace the comments that had been left there when they were originally posted in the Gallery.

Suddenly, for all intents and purposes, I can’t do that. When I try, I receive a message that says:

~~ There was a problem submitting your request - we will try and fix this as soon as possible.

I’ve spent the better part of two days trying various experiments, trying to figure out why this is happening. Tink actually posted some pictures just as test subjects, a laboratory of sorts, that we could experiment with. And a few very interesting things were revealed …

~~ The amount of text wasn’t an issue. Tink posted a big piece of text on one of her pictures. I copied it, and used Word to make a character/space count. It was nearly three times as big as the text I’d been having problems with.

~~ I copied Tink’s text, and pasted it as a comment to her picture. No problem. So it would appear that it’s not an issue of ME posting large texts either.

~~ Tink went to the blog of mine that I was converting into an Album, and copied the string of comments that was included in the problem text. She then pasted it as a comment on her picture. It failed. That seems to suggest that the difficulty lies in posting THAT text.

So all of that, and some further experimentation on my part, seems to suggest that this might be a matter of anti-spam protocols here in Wireclub that recognize that the text I (and Tink) was attempting to paste as a comment exists elsewhere in Wireclub, and defeated the attempt to paste as a result.

I even re-typed the entire text – no copying WHATSOEVER – just looking at the text with my eyes, and typing the same thing. That failed as well.

And I tried to send that text in a message to a friend ... that failed as well.

The bottom line is that I can no longer make Albums as I want to.

So I’ll stop.