Google's Blogger picture uploading mess

Google have recently changed the way pictures are uploaded to Blogger. I wonder if this has to do with the policy changes to Google storage, making phone backups part of the free 15Gb. They clearly want people to buy storage. 

Now this is what happens: 

So, then I select the picture by clicking browse, or by dragging and dropping.  The picture appears to upload, but it is never added to the blog.  It is not available in the 'Compose' or 'html' views.

I have tried this on Linux Mint and Ubuntu, using Librewolf, Firefox and Brave.  They are all the same.

Now the smart ones among you will say, "but you HAVE uploaded a picture".  True, to upload pictures now I have to be in a private tab.

So, to use Blogger, I must now:

• Start a Private (or Incognito) tab in my browser. 
• Visit Google.com and sign in.  Because the link to sign in on blogger doesn't always work
• Visit Blogger, where I can create or edit my blog.

It really seems like Google don't want blogger anymore, which I hope is not the case because moving 20 years of blogs is a major effort. 

Interesting Blogs ..

Take a look at the column on the right. Some way down there is a section called "Interesting Blogs ..." - Its my Blog List or Blog Roll. A little while ago I added "The Church Mouse" and the dates of the updates were wrong. So were one or two of the others. The Church Mouse kindly sent me a new link - which works on the "Blogs I am following" inside blogger, and if added from there, works on the blog front as well. I have done this also for the others that didn't work. 3 of them are now OK, 1 to go!

It's Broken, but not Vista

Apart from my Arm, my shower and my printer are both broken. Now it appears my blog is broken as well!
For lent, I have been following some new blogs and twitter. As part of that I discovered Church Mouse, which is now in the interesting Blogs list. Today it says '5 weeks ago'. This is rubbish, Mr Mouse does daily updates, or there abouts. Some of the other blogs have never updated, now I have one that's predictable, I have reported the problem to Blogger, or at least to a discussion page. We'll see.
Working in reverse order, I have borrowed an old HP deskjet 5550 from my daughter. It has been in out loft for 2 years, carefully wrapped in its original plastic bag, and sellotaped in the box. Getting it down and set up with 1.3 functioning arms was interesting, but that's not the point. Once set up it worked straight away. I downloaded the drivers for the old XP machine, and carefully following the instructions, ended up with two printer definitions sharing the same queue (I think). Anyway, when I tried to delete the original printer definition, the newly created one stopped working. The printer though had already printed a test page, in colour only. So I'll need a new cartridge, what does it take? HP56 and HP57 - exactly the ones that I had already bought a stock of for the hpsc2110 that has now broken. God is Good!
Then I thought I'd check the status in Vista - it's drivers are included in the base distribution, just plug it in. I DID AND IT WORKED! Vista 1, XP 0 Stunning, amazing, unbelievable, but true. I can now print and read my sermon in the usual way.

What should I call this post?

Blogger Arrrrrrrrgh! was my first thought. Perhaps I should stick with "Sunday, April 15th @ 10:00am at Christ Church". The story is of technology and buses.

We arrived at church early, because I was helping with the technology, and Jo was doing Tea/Coffee and Singing. The Tea/Coffee went well, so did the Singing, but the technology was awful. The DVD player I was given doesn't do timed indexing, and it creeps on pause. That's probably a way of stopping me frying the track. Our projector is next to useless, and the clip was of a man in a cave - all very dark. However the talk was interesting, if only that it highlighted what tradition does to our beliefs. A very good point. Thomas, far from lacking faith, was merely refusing to trust his friends when they told him something that sounded entirely unreasonable. Look at his reaction when he met the risen Jesus.

Anyway back to the story. As the prayers were led a sunflower seed was given out. It caught the imagination, and hopefully should be a good was of reminding us to pray. A few jokes about Sunflower cam, and the blogging idea came out. Take a look at http://sunflowerprayers.blogspot.com. In a conversation over coffee I said, "Oh yes, I'll just add to the Tanzania Blog". Simple! Login, ceate a blog - 2 minutes - doddle! Couldn't be easier.


RUBBISH

Hadn't reckoned with Blogger. (yoda voice required for the next bit) Moved it to the new blog they have. Very unhelpful it is. ( OK, back to normal) So I have to sign up with a new gmail address, which seems to be the only way to make it work. All that's done - but what a waste of time. Haven't they heard of "migration script".


Any way if you've got this far - Well done! Here I hope is the good bit. I have been trying to get Christ Church people into blogging. We should add the blog addresses to the A-Z. I'd like to run multiple Christ church Blogs, one for each of the organizations we have. Let people create their own content. Thats what the web should be about. Lets hope that has started.

Buses
So there I was, finally getting on with my meeting minutes. I've had a busy week, of four official working days the shortest was 11.9 hours. So, I've not been doing all I should. The phone rings. I answer it "Hello."
"Dad, What are you doing?"
"Talking to you on the phone, Mike"
"Yes cut the sarcasm. Are you busy?"
"Of course. What do you want?"
"If I give you some money will you pick us up from Lakeside. The bus hasn't come"
"When's the next one?"
"Tomorrow"
So I do the return trip to Lakeside (about 15 miles each way). The last bus should never be cancelled - cancel the one before if you have to, but never the last one.



I haven't had any money yet.

URLs in e-mails are not preserved

I've started sending the blogs in via e-mail. It looked good, but the links are not preserved, I've updated the affected blogs.