Writer and Author

Tag: France

Back Home and Back to Work

After a much needed break (even with all the hassle with this blog) I’m back at my desk and back at work.  I have just over a week before Sharon Collins and Essam Eid are back in front of the courts for sentencing and the courts aren’t back until next week either so there are a few days to get back into the swing of things.

It’s time for one final push but for today with the suitcases still only partially unpacked I can’t take things too seriously.  I still have French music on Media Player and I’m not quite ready to get back to the hustle and bustle of normal life and normal posting just yet.  Once I settle down I’ll blog more seriously but since I’m still essentially talking to myself (Google indexing being the arcane beast that it is) I thought I’d share a little music.

I always get cds when we go to France and my latest find is a Parisian singer called Camille.  I’d heard about her before we went through my friend Rowan’s blog (always a good source of inspiration music wise!) and already got her latest mainly English album, Music Hole which includes tracks like Cats and Dogs – you’ve got to love a song which has the whole band making random animal noises at the end…

While over there I found a copy of her first album, Les Sac des Filles.  Sung mainly in French it includes songs like Paris.

The lyrics (for those of you that don’t speak French) are talking about leaving Paris because it’s dirty and miserable and smelly but in the end coming back because it’s home.  Which seemed rather appropriate coming back to grey and miserable Dublin.  It really is just peachy coming home to the news that the economy is teetering on the brink of collapse…

Yes I’ve just decided, the holiday can last one more day, I’m going to listen to more Camille!

Yet More Technical Problems!

I’m seriously beginning to wonder why on earth I decided to start this blog on my own domain.  After days of grappling with the vagaries of WordPress, Google and FTP clients I feel like banging my head against the wall and going back to the nursery with a hosted blog.  I know that I had reasons for registering a domain and getting started on all of this but it’s been a long time since I’ve felt so relentlessly dumb as I have trying to set up a website.

Up until I registered the site a couple of weeks ago I had thought I was computer literate but now I realise that I’m just like any other journo, an expert in the surface matters but just as in need of tech support as any Joe Soap.  As I write this I know, with all the general sinking, annoying frustration of it all, that no one is going to read this post because the Google bots haven’t found me yet.

I feel like someone far down the cast list in a 1950s science fiction film waiting for rescue.  I’m new to the idea of bots and in my mind they’re still large, shiny and man shaped.  In reality they’re anonymous and unfathomable (for the moment anyway).  What I do know for certain though is that they don’t like me.  My site does not have sufficient crumbs of shiny robot food for them to come and take a look.  I can look on Google’s Webmaster applications page (another new discovery) and see that they did in fact visit my site today but left without so much as a hello or a goodbye.

It’s ironic that I’ve spent much of my summer up to my elbows in web searches and Internet sites, while I was writing Devil in the Red Dress.  I can confidently say that I can find most things I look for on line.  The last couple of months have taught me a few more tricks of the trade and I’m just as quick to google as any of my colleagues rather than hit the books these days.  But now that I’m supposed to be adding to the whole World Wide Web phenomenon I’m stumped.  I’ve spent the whole summer searching for sites that weren’t there and finding them and now I’ve got a site that’s not there (at least not as far as Google is concerned).

This is a bit of a pointless rant really.  It’s not really on topic as far as the blog is concerned and by the time anyone can find it my troubles will be over and it will be redundant.  I suppose I’m just writing it down for posterity, so that one day , when I’ve worked out how the hell everything works I can look back on this and laugh.  Also it helps to vent a bit.

With any luck Google’s robots will have come back to made friends in a day or so and this post will actually see the light of day.  Then I can begin the blog in earnest. I hope anyway…

Trying to Do Things Properly!

It seemed like such a good idea, book due out soon so setting up a blog to get in on this whole author blog thing.  It’s been something I’ve been wanting to do for ages to be honest but you feel a bit daft setting yourself up as a fount of knowledge when you’ve got nothing published to your name.  It’s hard to be a credible source of writing wisdom when the only thing you’ve ever written is stuffed in a box under the bed.  Not that I’m planning on becoming an oracle of course but I did think that a moderately attractive website containing the inner workings of my fevered little brain would be a good idea, besides, everyone’s doing it and since the books due out before the end of the year…

Well for the past week I’ve been trying to set up this famous blog.  Emphasis on the word “trying”.  I’m currently recovering from the whole writing frenzy in the South of France so I was planning on stopping trying while I was here but here I am, sitting inside while the sun splits the stones outside, the husband getting increasingly annoyed that I’m not getting ready for a romantic candlelight dinner – you get the picture.  Instead I’m sitting here, writing this, in the full knowledge that I’m not even writing to anyone at this stage because the bloody blog’s still up on the blocks so to say.

I’m beginning to think I missed a trick, spending all those years studying journalism then working in newsrooms until I’d learnt my craft and all that jazz.  What I actually should have been doing is studying web design, then I would know what the hell I am doing here.

I’m used to writing a WordPress.com blog.  Hosted and mindbogglingly simple to set up.  I thought it would be a better idea, with my plan for self promotion, to register my own domain and install the WordPress application from wordpress.org.  That was my undoing.

I’ve spent the last week and a half batting emails back a forth with a tech support person with my domain provider who is managing to answer every sodding question but the one I’ve actually asked her.  My poor blog still sits unread because up until today the domain provider have been insisting to the world there’s nothing there.

I’m fed up with tech support and I’m fed up with technical problems.  I don’t even particularly want to be writing this blog.  I want to be out enjoying the September sun with the husband and forget for a couple of hours that there’s a book coming out all too soon.

Ah well…maybe tomorrow…

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