Category Archives: About

About the blog

January 2, 2013 · 12:23 am

One Year…

Today (oops! missed 1st jan by 20 minutes – it should have been posted on 1st Jan, not 2nd jan) marks One Year since trippingdifferently.com came into existence and i started blogging here. (You can read about this blog’s previous life here.)

oneyear_20130101

WordPress has done a great job of summarising the year for me:

  • There have been 167 posts in 2012.
  • There have been about 6,600 visitors from 65 countries!

And i would like to give a special thanks to my top 3 commentors for showing me and my blog such love:

Thanks so much ladies for showing my blog and my writing such attention and love. i am very grateful and it has been wonderfully encouraging to read comments from everyone.

i know i have a number of followers as well and i thank you also. (i apologise if i have not gotten back to visiting your blog yet… i will… it will just take me some time…) It is amazing to realise that my words are being read and that people appreciate them enough to click “Follow”. Thank you very much.

i started trippingdifferently.com, hoping to bring more to my blog, more about Switzeland where we live, more about parenting, more about writing, more about photography…

BUT…

it turned out different – isn’t that what life is all about? – i did get to bring more to my blog but it has brought so much more to me; more than i could ever imagine…

i have met wonderful people in blogosphere and have gained so much from their writing. i have learnt and grown and matured as a writer through this whole year.

God has also allowed me to be of good use in His Kingdom plans; He has allowed me to become an advocate and prayer warrior for those without a voice of their own; for special needs orphans. If you have followed from the start, you would realised that from about the third month of its existence, more than 60% of this blog is devoted to special needs orphans. It will continue to be so. (Click here to read more posts about the orphans and how you can help too. Click here to read about some families who are in the adoption process and how you can help.)

However, in 2013, i also hope to be able to bring more of my writing life (perhaps more in the form of shared articles about writing as i am so “young” in my writing life) and more of my photography onto this blog. Of course, our happenings in Switzerland and our travels will also be featured at times.

So here’s to 2013 and wishing you all a fulfilling year!

Thank you once again for reading and loving on my blog. Hope you will continue tripping differently with me.

syc

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June 20, 2012 · 9:27 pm

No, Not Again…

Summer is really not a good time for our computers – sigh! This morning i turned on the computer and was met with a grey screen – that’s right – grey, not blue (which i think is worse). So what does grey mean?

Grey means that it was able to run on limited capacity but can not actually start the proper Windows platform – sigh!

It ran the Auto Repair program a few times – nothing. It found that 2 “boot critical” files were corrupted. So i clicked on Advance Options, hoping for another solution. Because i simply can not believe that my laptop which was functioning perfectly, showed no signs of any problems just 8 hours before is now unable to start!

Anyhow, i didn’t give up (at that time). i tried to do a System Restore to an earlier date, thinking maybe an update is causing the problems. It said System Restore successful but upon restarting, we were back at grey again! This happened both times i tried restoring to different dates.

i’m composing this on my little Dell netbook, which has no picture editor, which i use mainly to write so i have very limited programs on it (to avoid distractions). So this post will have no picture.

This also once again means i have lost files! AHGRGRRR… (see here for other losses.) i did the last backup 2 months ago – so at least it’s only 2 months worth of files. But i was in the process of painstakingly downloading from our LJ picture gallery (see the above link for details about that story) over 500 photos. Now i will have to restart the process – sigh! What time will be wasted re-downloading those 100 over photos i had already done. SIGH!

Oh well, the laptop was getting old (i think almost 4 or 5 years old).  Maybe, just maybe (fingers, toes and eyes all crossed) we could get it to work again? At least long enough to retrieve those files. sigh… :(

syc

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April 15, 2012 · 11:22 pm

Disappointed in WordPress!!!

Yes i am and disappointed is putting it mildly.

If you look at my posts dated from January 2006 to December 2011, you will notice that all the images are missing! i just discovered this a few days ago when i redirected someone to a previous entry from November 2011.

From 2006 and 2011, our family blog was on Livejournal. i felt i wanted to do more with the blog and searched for another platform. Finally having researched carefully, i decided on WordPress. They seemed to have a wonderfully import process – or so i thought at that time.

So in December 2011, i did the import and all was fine – the images were all there and it all looked great! i didn’t even think to check the links for the images because it was not mentioned in the import instructions from WordPress. So i was happy until a few days ago.

Here are the import instructions given by WordPress:

Importing Content from Another Platform or WordPress Blog

We make it easy for you to import your blog content from a variety of other blogging platforms, including Blogger, Tumblr, Israblog, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Typepad, Posterous, Splinder, and Yahoo! 360. Simply log into your WordPress.com blog dashboard, then go to Tools -> Import, choose your previous platform and follow the instructions.

You can also easily import content here from another WordPress.com or WordPress.org blog or web site (choose the WordPress option).

Don’t See a Specific Importer for Your Blog’s Service?

If we do not have an importing tool for your particular platform, you will need to try and convert it into one of the accepted formats so that you can use the proper importer. This means you first convert your blog to one of the services mentioned above (such as Blogger), and then import your blog from Blogger to WordPress.com.

Importing Media (Photos, Videos)

If you are importing content from another WordPress-powered blog, your media files will be downloaded from your old host and uploaded to WordPress.com automatically.

See? There were no specific instructions that if your images are linked to another blog or in the gallery of another blogging platform, that you should re-link or even highlight that images might be lost should your other platform expire, that you should re-upload your images.

That’s what happened to me – i had thought that all was well after a couple of months of using WordPress. So we let our Livejournal expire and now this happens! Almost 250 previous posts without photos now!! And most of those posts only make sense with photos!!!

What is even more tragic is that our harddisk had crushed middle of last year and we had lost a few years of photos. So the photos on our family blog were the only copies of those years. Now it’s all lost.

The only saving grace is that the volunteers who man the Support Forums and the staff (ironically called Happiness Engineers) did  respond very quickly. But they could not help. You can follow my exchange with them here.

Sob. Sob. Sob.

My last resort is to see if we can resort our expired LJ account. SIGH!

syc

PS: there is no image with this post because i’m crying over the lost of my images from almost 250 posts…

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