Unusual for me, but I’m going to have a moan. Just to balance up my complaints with a positive, I’ll give you a rose photo at the beginning and the end of my post 🙂
My first moan. At the weekend, WordPress decided to develop an error that prevented me from posting comments on other people’s blogs. This was just after I’d completed one of its surveys and sung its praises as a blogging platform. So if any of my followers are feeling neglected by me, blame it on WP.
When it decided to dump every comment I made on some of your blogs, I contacted Akismet.com asking them to check if they were dumping my stuff into people’s spam folders. They sent me a link to fill in form so they could run a test. Not heard from them since. Nothing has changed. Please could you lovely bloggers check your spam folders and let me know if you find anything of mine there.
Today, it’s possible to comment but only after going all around the houses to do so. This involves linking to your blogs via Reader on my site. Entering the comment in the box on your sites, highlighting the comment and doing Control+C, as I know it will be dumped on the first attempt. Then I’m asked to sign in to WP again to make my comment, so I sign in and send the comment and am rewarded by the words “Sorry, this comment could not be posted”, and “WordPress>Error” on my tab button above. So I close your site, go back to Reader, follow the link to the same blog and, Voila! I can post the comment. You are all worth the effort, but it is such a labour of love and means I only have time to visit half the blogs I usually do. If anyone else has encountered this problem and resolved it, please let me know.
It’s nigh on impossible if WP doesn’t have an email address to contact their technicians direct. Instead, you’re told to post something in a forum and wait for an answer there. That’s just fine, if someone responds, but no good at all if your question remains unanswered. But enough of WP for now.
My second moan. It’s July and I have flu. Yesterday my temperature was 102 degrees F and I felt absolutely terrible, aching all over, nauseous, a foul cough, and unable to get up from bed without almost passing out. Lay on my back all day, being nursed by my dog, while reading and having a short snooze between chapters. To read for so many hours was a good distraction from my ills, and prevented me from shooting malicious thought-arrows at the foreign language student who sneezed all over me in the bus last Tuesday, on my return journey from meeting up with a fellow-writer for the evening.
The novel was The Boleyn Inheritance by Philippa Gregory, all about Henry VIIIth and wife number four, Anne of Cleves, and wife number five, Katherine Howard. Previously, I read The Other Boleyn Girl, which was about the story of wife number two, Anne Boleyn, told from the viewpoint of her sister, Mary, who was the King’s mistress before he married Anne. The novels are totally riveting and I’d thoroughly recommend them to anyone who’s interested in history.
When I woke up this morning, my first thought was, apart from still feeling ill/slightly better, that I have a big problem with Henry VIIIth being the founder of the Church of England, considering he was foul, lecherous, and prone to sending people to the Tower and the block or scaffold at a whim.
On an uplifting note, I did find a superb quote about haiku in my inbox this morning, emailed to me by fellow blogger, David Kanigan at Lead.Learn.Live.
– Reginald H. Blyth
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Sarah Potter Writes 
Oh how grim having to comment in such a long winded way especially as you are feeling ill. I hope you are feeling better soon, at least you have some good books, I shall re look at your list as I am looking for something to read. I just finished the stories of Eva Luna – by Isabel Allende.. take care.. c
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Thank you, Cecilia, for your good wishes 🙂 There are quite a few Tudor novels by Philippa Gregory. I think I missed reading the first in the series, so make sure you read them in the right order. And I’ll take a look at Isabel Allende, as I haven’t read anything by her before.
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I hope you feel better soon , Sarah! good luck with wp.
groetjes, Francina 😉
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Thank you, Francina 🙂
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oh what a beautiful “explanation” of haiku – it left me feeling surrounded by grace, like resting in a field of buttercups, watching clouds go by.
WP must have had gremlins at work. I must have had 100 unfiltered spam comments to deal with on the weekend. Some were for my posts and some for posts of other bloggers so have no idea how they showed up in my list! All is calm now.
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That must have been very irritating, all those spam comments getting through. It just shows how effective Akismet usually is, catching the spam.
Yes, I loved that explanation of haiku 🙂
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Nope you are not in my spam folder. I do always check just in case. Your internet issues could be resolve by emptying you temp internet folder – you could have bits of old page which the computer is using instead of the latest online version (what browser do you use).
As for the flu – I don’t know so much about that but I think it is probably going out with wet hair or not eating enough carrots.
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No, I’m always emptying my temp internet folder. I’ve also done F5 to reload the page. Just trying a different browser today, to see if that works. Someone suggested I try that.
Re the flu, I never go out with wet hair as it goes incredibly frizzy if I don’t use a hair drier. And I eat loads of carrots. One of my favourite vegetables.
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I blame WordPress. I had to have 5 attempts to load that comment onto the picture of your bench/cwtchy corner.
I don’t have hair. It detracts from my beautiful face!
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Here we are. The explanation re my WordPress technical problem — quote:
WP.com apparently rents server space from companies that also rent server space to torrent sites and pirate sites, and these have been banned by a court order in the UK. What internet service providers have done, it seems, is block all the IPs of all the servers from all those companies, and as a side effect, WordPress.com gets blocked too.
It’s only blocked sometimes because every time you reconnect to WP.com you get a different IP and not all WP.com IPs are blocked. Just some. And just in the UK.
So all you can do is wait while staff work on a fix.
Staff will also be providing updates on this issue in this forum post:
http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/recent-problems-accessing-wordpresscom-sites
Thanks for your patience while we work on this!
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Dear Sarah,
SO sorry you are feeling ill. I hope you get well soon! Glad you have a good book to read. I read The Other Boleyn Girl and enjoyed it. I agree that Henry VIII is one of history’s grotesques–it must have been truly scary to have such a self-righteous unscrupulous madman in such a position of power. (In this country we had to put up with the Bush dynasty)
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Oh, yes, Naomi, the Bush dynasty scared the whole world and was generally despised D:
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(((((Hugs))))) Get well soon honey and lets hope next week is definitely a better one 🙂
Xx
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Hope you feel lots better now Sarah!!
I found all your comments in my spam folder and moved them to where they belonged.
As for the Haiku quote – absolute truth!
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