I've decided to abandon my WordPress blog on BlueHost that I started up earlier in the year. I simply don't enjoy using it and that's reason enough to abandon it. I only made use of the blogging platform and never started building a website by transferring content from my Google Sites. All of my blog posts that I made using WordPress were mirrored on Blogger so my disengagement with the former platform is immediate and complete. There will be no transition period. It's done. However, the experience has been interesting and I no longer have to wonder about something that I never tested out.
I'll return to making blog posts on my respective Blogger accounts and using Google Sites as my personal website. It may not be cool but then again I have no reason to look more professional. I'm blogging for my own amusement and have no audience to pander to. I do what I like and I realised that I don't like BlueHost and WordPress. The dislike was causing me to reduce the frequency of my posts.
When choosing a theme for your website, one that will carry over to your WordPress blog, don't choose a dark theme. This has become more and more apparent as I kept posting to my blog. Initially the problem was with the numbering of graphics. Under each graphic, there is the opportunity to insert a caption. The problem with using a dark theme is that the caption uses black text and is therefore invisible. It must be manually changed to white text.
That wasn't too much of an inconvenience, although it was annoying. The problem extended however, to the pasting of text. Copying for example from a sequence of numbers in the OEIS, the pasted text was invisible again because of the black on black problem. Other problems occurred when dealing with mathematical content to the extent that I changed to a white background theme.
I've been unimpressed with BlueHost due its slowness and the problems in accessing it all on occasions. I find the whole experience clunky and frustrating, as if I'm back in the 1990's. It has an irritating retro-feel about it. It's hard to believe that this is the most popular blogging platform. I guess I'll persist with it while my subscription is active but I'll definitely be backing up all my posts to Blogger. The guy in the graphic above doesn't really give any good reasons why people hate bluehost but the picture helps capture my mood.
Copied from my blog on voodooguru.net using the same title.
I’ve really only used Blogger as my blogging platform since I began blogging in 2006. I did have a brief flirtation with WordPress when creating a Staying Healthy on wordpress.com but I was never comfortable with it and ended up continuing it on Blogger. As I wrote at the time:
I’ve had enough of this platform and its frustrations. I’m moving to Blogger where all my other blogs are anyway. The new address is https://voodooguru1949.blogspot.com/ with the same title for the blog, namely Staying Healthy. I’ll eventually link back to the previous posts on wordpress from my new blog or maybe I can export them. We’ll see.
WordPress was unfamiliar to me at the time and I had gotten so used to Blogger that I couldn’t be bothered coming to terms with the new interface. At that time (August 28th 2020), it hadn’t occurred to me that I could have exported the WordPress blog to Blogger. I’m now realising how relatively easy it is to export and import entire blogs from one platform to another, and to back up entire blogs, using the xml file format.
On this site, there is a simple and straightforward guide on how to move an entire blog from Blogger to WordPress. I’m not sure that I really want to do that but it’s good to know that it’s possible. I’m really still coming to terms with this new WordPress blog and what I want to do with it. I’m happy that I’ve created categories in this blog that correspond to my blogs on Blogger. These categories are:
Mathematical Meanderings
Mystical Meanderings
Astrological Meanderings
Pedagogical Posturing
Alternative Media
Staying Healthy
At this point, I’m inclining to simply continuing my former blogs on the single WordPress blog, differentiating them by the use of the above categories. As I described in my previous blog post, I can export individual WordPress posts to my various blogs on Blogger (should I choose to do so). It’s good to know that I can mothball all these blogs by backing them up in xml file format and saving them on Google Drive and a local computer.
The quality of my posts on Blogger have been variable over the years. Most have been mediocre, a few downright dumb and few of high quality (in my opinion). It would be interesting to revisit my earlier blogs and evaluate them in terms of the current world situation. My blogs have never been about garnering readership. I enjoy writing and expressing my thoughts “on paper”. My electronic blogging may have started in 2006 but I was committing my thoughts to paper long before this. Perhaps this history could be the material for a future post.
The export of my posts from WordPress to Blogger using the plugin described in my previous post was successful. A little tinkering was needed such as resizing a graphic and changing LaTeX delimiters but apart from that it all went well. However, the plugin only allows export by category and not by individual post as far as I can determine. I should be able to work around this problem by creating a category called Export and apply it the post that I want to export. After doing that, I’ll remove the post from the Export category in readiness for my next export. This should work. I’ll try it now and report back.
Copied from my WordPress blog on voodooguru.net under the same title.
I have my various blogs on Blogger, some of which date back to 2006, but I only seriously started blogging when I retired in the middle of 2015. I am in a dilemma whether to keep blogging on that platform or shift to WordPress. Anything I post my voodooguru.net website will only survive as long as I keep paying the annual fee for domain name and web hosting.
There is perhaps a solution in the form of a WordPress plugin called “Export to Blogger” that boasts:
With this WordPress plugin, you can easily export WordPress data to Blogger(Blogspot).No need to use software and convert by yourself anymore! This plugin exports dedicated xml files directly, so what you need is just import it to Blogger. Source.
The instructions are straightforward enough:
Upload directory export-to-blogger to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
Go to Settings -> Export to Blogger to export xml.
There is a website that can be referred to if I have any problems. I plan to do this and then test it out. If it works, then what I may do is to post to this blog but then export to the relevant blog on Blogger. That way I still have the posts on Blogger should I decide to stop using bluehost in the future.
There is definitely something weird about the Raspberry Pi and Blogger. Using Chromium, I tried to access my Pedagogical Posturing blog on Blogger but all attempts failed. I checked if Blogger was down and it wasn't. I checked on my Staying Healthy blog on Wordpress (that I haven't used since August 2020) and it opened instantly. So did the BBC website. I opened Firefox and things were exactly the same.
It's not the browser then, it's to do with the interaction between the Raspberry Pi OS and Blogger. I recently created a post titled From Blogger to WordPress? in which I discussed the possibility of switching from the former to the latter. This current experience has only strengthened my resolve. I don't think Google is properly supporting its blogging platform and that may be the reason for my difficulties.
Figure 1
Anyway, I switched to my 2013 MacBook Pro running Linux Mint and tried to access my Pedagogical Posturing blog using Chrome. It opened instantly. This means that for the moment I'll be doing my blogging on the laptop and not the Raspberry Pi. To be honest, the monitor to which the Pi is attached is ready to be replaced. It's very hard on the eye and there are no speakers for the HDMI connection to take advantage of. There are some good monitors out there for about A$200 so that is a likely purchase in the not to distant future. Figure 1 shows a Raspberry Pi 400 running dual monitors.
As for getting Netflix to run on the Raspberry Pi, it's not easy. There's a lot of help out there but all of my efforts failed using the Chromium browser. I then switched to Firefox and encountered the same problems. In the end I gave up. I can run Netflix on my iPhone, my laptop and TV so it's not a big deal. However, it was frustrating to not be able to get it running.
When searching through Google's list of products, it's interesting that Blogger is never displayed. I use Blogger frequently and have several blogs that I maintain on that platform. I never get any comments for any of my posts and that's alright as I use these blogs as a way of organising my thoughts on various topics. I am most active on my mathematics blog. It never occurred to me that very few people were actually using Blogger anymore. I started using it back in 2006 or 2007 and, except for one blog in WordPress that I abandoned, it's the only service I've ever used.
This article appeared in TechCrunch back in May of 2018 and it really opened my eyes:
Blogger, the blogging platform Google acquired back in 2003, is somehow still alive and kicking, even though few people remember it still exists. But alive it is — and it’s even getting some updates to its Google+ integration that will see all those 20 people still on Google+ rejoice.
After a year of inactivity, Blogger’s own news blog sprung to live this morning with a brief update that lays out the changes. Google calls this a “spring cleaning,” and we all know what that means: shutting down features.
You probably don’t care, but gone from Blogger are support for third-party gadgets, the Next Blog feature and the polling widget. Soon, OpenID support will be gone, as well, and Textcube.com is also shutting down. What is Textcube.com, you ask? It’s a Korean blogging service Google acquired back in 2008.
But there are also new features, which I’m guessing the sole two engineers still working on this project slaved over for the last year.
Blogger’s Google+ widget integration (yes, try not to laugh) will be transformed into HTML widgets to “give you more flexibility in how you share and see your followers.” Fifteen years after acquiring the service, Blogger now also supports logging in with multiple accounts. Google also today noted that the Blogger infrastructure has moved to Cloud Spanner, Google’s newest database service.
In the near future, you can expect a new video management feature, too. Exciting stuff.
It’s surprising that Blogger is still around. I can’t remember the last time I saw a Blogger site in my searches, and it sure doesn’t have a lot of mindshare. Google also has let the platform linger and hasn’t integrated it with any of its newer services. The same thing could be said for Google+, too, of course. Google cuts some services because they have no users and no traction. That could surely be said for Blogger and Google+, but here they are, still getting periodic updates. I think the writing is on the wall, though, and I wouldn’t expect them to survive the next major Google spring cleaning.
This could account in part for the complete lack of comments on any of my blogs. It also prompts me to consider perhaps migrating to other blogging platforms. What if Google decides to shut down Blogger as the article above suggests it might? I don't mind Blogger as a platform probably because I'm so familiar with it but I particularly dislike Google Sites. I find it clunky and awkward.
WordPress.org is touted as the best web/blog hosting service with the following advantages (according to this review):
WordPress.org gives you control over every aspect of your website.
You can grow your blog and add extra features like forums, online store, paid memberships, and sell online courses. This makes WordPress the best blogging platform to make money.
There are thousands of free themes available for WordPress. This allows you to create a beautiful website that stands apart from the crowd. Most popular WordPress themes come with built-in customization options that gives you full design control.
You also get access to more than 59,000 free WordPress plugins. These plugins are like apps for your WordPress blog that allow you to add features like contact forms, galleries, etc. See our list of must have WordPress plugins for all websites.
WordPress is search engine friendly. You can easily create SEO friendly URLs, categories, and tags for your posts. Plus, there’re a good number of great SEO plugins for additional optimization.
You can easily enable Google Analytics powered website analytics in WordPress, so you can see the stats that matter. This helps you grow your new blog traffic and subscribers.
Last but not least, WordPress’ drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to create any type of content on your blog site. It also has options to embed dynamic content like videos, social media feeds, Google Adsense, graphs, charts, and more without any technical know how.
The same review also clarifies the distinction between WordPress.org and WordPress.com:
WordPress.org is the world’s most popular blogging software. Started in 2003, WordPress now powers more than 43% of all websites on the internet.
Note: It’s easy to confuse WordPress.org with WordPress.com, which is a blog hosting service mentioned later in this list. See our guide on the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com.
WordPress.org is an open source free blogging platform that allows you to build your website or blog within minutes.
It is a self-hosted solution which means that you will need to sign up with a WordPress hosting provider. WordPress is a great option if you want to have full control over your blog’s future.
The review also suggests BlueHost as the best starting point which involves choosing a domain name which costs money annually to maintain but its relatively inexpensive and the domain name voodooguru.net is available. This article explains how to migrate a blog on Blogger to WordPress.org.
The idea is appealing but I should consider whether I even want to keep blogging, let alone have a dedicated hosting site. It's something to sleep on. At the moment, I'm preoccupied with Raspberry Pi and Linux Mint so any decisions will have to wait. Meanwhile, this video provides a good introduction to bluehost for anyone, like myself, who is considering using it. The guy speaks very fast so I found that lowering the speed to 0.75 makes it easy to listen to what he's saying. A non-native speaker might well find him incomprehensible.
Having just now stumbled upon Terence Tao's WordPress blog, aptly named https://terrytao.wordpress.com/, I noticed that he has a panel titled software in which he lists the following:
I thought it might be a good idea to check out some of these links. I'm already familiar with the Online LaTeX Equation Editor and Sage but the latter links to William Stein's Blogger blog site. Stein is the guy who started Sage in the first place. He only made one entry in 2019, on May 1st. It's a rather long post so I'll just quote the first and last paragraphs.
Nearly 3 years ago, I gave a talk at a Harvard mathematics conference announcing that “I am leaving academia to build a company”. What I really did is go on unpaid leave for three years from my tenured Full Professor position. No further extensions of that leave is possible, so I finally have to decide whether or not to go back to academia or resign ...
I have decided to resign. I’m worried about issues of intellectual property; it would be extremely unfair to my employees, investors and customers if I took a 50% UW position, and then later got sued by UW as a result. Having a 50% paid appointment at UW subjects one to a lot of legal jeopardy, which is precisely why I have been on 100% unpaid leave for the last three years. But more importantly, I feel very good about continuing to focus 100% on the development of CoCalc, which is going to have an incredible year going forward. I genuinely love building this (non-VC funded) company, and feel very good about it.
I'd actually read this earlier in the year and I was saddened once again to read of his struggles. Why can't philanthropists give a million dollars to a guy like this rather than to useless NGOs as they are wont to do?
I've used the Online LaTeX Equation Editor before and it does a good job for one line expressions. Figure 1 shows a screenshot. The site also generates the HTML code that can then be inserted into a web page.
Figure 1
I used Detexify the day before I wrote this after following a link I saw somewhere. It's better suited to devices that support touch input or, better still, a digital pen. It will show you the command (let's say for the integral symbol) and what package to download. An example is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2
The LaTeX to Wordpress link leads to a blog post with a link to another post that contains a link for downloading this free software. As the author writes:
LaTeX2WP is written in Python, so you’ll need a Python interpreter.
If you are using Linux/Unix or OS X, then you already have it. If you are running Windows, go here and get the Windows installer for 2.6.1.
Uncompress the files of the LaTeX2WP distribution in the directory in which you are going to write your posts in LaTeX.
On OS X, double click on the file latex2wp.0.6.2.zip after saving it; on Linux unzip latex2wp.0.6.2.zip. If your Windows machine says it doesn’t know what to do with a .zip file, get 7zip.
Write your LaTeX post, say you call it spam.tex. When you are done writing your post, type from the command line: python latex2wp.py spam.tex
This will produce a file spam.html. Open it with a text editor, copy and paste it into the WordPress editor, and here is your post.
This is simple enough and something that I might test out in the future. I've gotten used to using Blogger for my mathematical posts but I much prefer the look and feel of WordPress as opposed to Blogger, so I may be tempted.
GmailTeX is a Chrome Extension that enables the creation and sending of emails containing mathematical notation created using LaTeX. The creator says that "the other person does not have to have TeX for Gmail installed or to use Gmail. Math is viewable in most mail readers and browsers, including mobile ones." Figure 3 shows the result when I tried it.
Figure 3
This could be quite useful, so I'm happy to have discovered it.
The Inverse Symbolic Calculator link doesn't appear to working or is loading very slowly. It's purpose is to change a floating point decimal into a symbolic expression. The jfig link is also a dead-end. It is a java applet designed to draw xfig-like figures. The site can be found but the latest Java versions seem to present problems with its implementation. The link Subverting the system describes a collaborative software for mathematicians so it's not applicable for me in my current situation.
Overall, the GMailTex chrome extension was the main takeaway from all of this. Of course, there's lots of other interesting stuff on Terence Tao's site. For example, he writes in a post on September 4th 2019:
In the fall quarter (starting Sep 27) I will be teaching a graduate course on analytic prime number theory. This will be similar to a graduate course I taught in 2015, and in particular will reuse several of the lecture notes from that course, though it will also incorporate some new material (and omit some material covered in the previous course, to compensate). I anticipate covering the following topics:
Elementary multiplicative number theory
Complex-analytic multiplicative number theory
The entropy decrement argument
Bounds for exponential sums
Zero density theorems
Halasz’s theorem and the Matomaki-Radziwill theorem
The circle method
(If time permits) Chowla’s conjecture and the Erdos discrepancy problem
Lecture notes for topics 3, 6, and 8 will be forthcoming.
The notes he has provided so far for the course are quite comprehensive. He has links to lots of other interesting stuff so it's a good site to just poke in and see what you find.
Looking at my first post on this blog (Sunday, March 15th 2009), I noticed that I had a link to my Edublog's site that was still operational. My very first entry there was in September of 2007 and my last on December 24th 2008, almost exactly 9 years ago. I ceased using the Edublog site for blogging because it only offered 20Mb of storage. I'm not sure what it offers now. The blog is powered by WORDPRESS so it looks good.
I did have the Edublogs' app on my phone for a time but I've since deleted as it's really only useful if one has a class of students. Nonetheless, it's interesting to look back at past posts and read about my battles getting Ubuntu to work properly on my laptop. I'm reminded that I do have a WORDPRESS site at seanreeves.wordpress.com. It's titled Staying Healthy but I haven't made much use of it. My first entry was:
On the subject of students, I still have my free Moodle Cloud site active at http://seanreeves.moodlecloud.com but have made no use of it recently. I also have MAMP installed on my laptop but again haven't used it in quite a while. Having thought of MAMP however, I've taken the opportunity to download the latest version of the software: MAMP 4.2.1 (a 331Mb download from here although it's still not operational at the time of writing). May as well keep it up to date. I find it hard to let go of these relics of the past. There is of course Google Classroom as well, which I've only dabbled with briefly.
