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Posts
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May be related to “Including >1 link erases the post” thread. I don’t think it’s the quantity, and maybe it’s not related to links. But there’s something in my content that causes my post/comment to disappear.
I’m trying to build a trip report using the Test forum category. Nothing but frustration. Perhaps it is just one particular piece of my content that is causing trouble, or perhaps there are multiple bugs. Since I can no longer edit a post (grrrrr), I’m now doing my drafts in comments, which I seem to be able to edit. In any case, as I try to add more and more content sooner or later I’m no longer able to see the comment – it just disappears. I can’t include the problematic content in this post, since it will cause the post to disappear. Feel free to PM me with an email address and I’ll send the data in a text file.
p.s. I’ve been using BPL for years to host our trip reports, but the past two hours has been so frustrating that I’ve solidified my plan to build a website for ourselves that we fully control. We’ll still post announcements of new trip reports here on BPL, but the actual report will be on a site we control.
p.p.s. I worked in SW development for years, and I know it must be frustrating for you to get ambiguous reports like this. I also know how long it would take me to properly isolate and describe this bug. I’ve made a decision to invest that time in learning WordPress instead so I can follow that path. Hopefully if I send you my offending content you can glean something useful from it.
Hi Amy,
Too bad these problems still happen. I was so frustrated when I tried to post our Father-Daughter Iceland trip report My post disappeared repeatedly – all of a sudden there were only replies to my post that had disappeared and so I recreated it a couple posts down in the thread. Very frustrating. More and more people have taken the route you are taking. I’m not sure it is a good trend for this community, but with so many months gone by it is only understandable.
Looking forward to your newest trip report.
Manfred
I’ve been using BPL for years to host our trip reports, but the past two hours has been so frustrating that I’ve solidified my plan to build a website for ourselves that we fully control. We’ll still post announcements of new trip reports here on BPL, but the actual report will be on a site we control.
I started doing this a few years ago. I can do a trip report in much less time, especially if it is picture-heavy.
Another thing is the photos are stored on my server and there are no file size limitation — however large image files are not a good idea for a website. However, and something I don’t do, in WordPress you can reduce the original picture from something like 5000 x 5000 pixels and insert it into a blog post at 800 x 880. If the user clicks on the picture it will open in a new tab at the original size. I can reduce the file size right inside WordPress if I choose to do so.
I think this is important because BPL is storing a lot of picture files, which take up huge amounts of server storage space. Many bulletin board software packages require that pictures be linked to another internet location such as a picture posting site like flickr. If that service changes policy or goes out of business then all the pictures disappear from the bulletin board post. This happened to me years ago when Webshots changed into some sort of social media site.
I take pictures in RAW format (usually around 20MB in size) and edit in LightRoom. Once edited, I export them as a JPG file with the longest dimension (length or width) at 800 pixels.
Just pointing this out because, as an old guy, it took me a while to learn all the ends and outs of WordPress HTML even though I had years of other kinds of computer programing experience.
I worked in SW development for years, and I know it must be frustrating for you to get ambiguous reports like this. I also know how long it would take me to properly isolate and describe this bug. I’ve made a decision to invest that time in learning WordPress instead so I can follow that path. Hopefully if I send you my offending content you can glean something useful from it.
Yes! Especially since BPL is using a WordPress theme that probably has all kinds of plugins that can cause a plethora of conflicts.
what? You have your own email server Nick??? I can’t think of anyone that has their own email server… : )
Jerry,
My website is hosted on a commercial server. I pay for this. I can maintain an unlimited number of websites, email systems, and unlimited data. The files are backed up by the hosting company and stored on their servers. I periodically create my own backups and store them locally at home.
I thought about buying my own server but maintenance and keeping it physically secure wasn’t worth the effort, especially after I checked out something a friend runs in his home. I don’t fool with my own email system, Gmail is more convenient.
it might sound like I’m knowledgable about all this stuff. I’m not.
My first post in this thread is how I avoided the difficulties of posting trip reports on the old BPL software. It would probably be easier for me to use the new BPL software because my pictures are almost automatically prepared for website use while I edit them. Plus on my blog I can insert as many pictures as I want at one time as long as I click them in the order I want them in the blog post. But the BPL software has too many glitches. A user can spend an hours putting a trip report together, doing everything right, and then the software acts up when the submit button is clicked.
Bottom line is many people are creating their own websites and blogs, then simply posting a hyperlink in a forum post because forums are just too clunky and haven’t been creative or innovative in improving the user experience. It’s like using a 1980’s era Radio Shack cell phone.
I sympathize with Amy BIG TIME. Last month I spent 30 minutes trying to insert a hyperlink into a post and never could get it to work, even in subsequent posts. Definitely not user error on my part.
the lauterbach trip reports are some of the best on the internet. we will all be reading, whether here or elsewhere. :)
Hi Amy, I had the same problems and gave up. It really is true that this new site is creaky old software. It does not handle multiple resizing of images well, which is a basic requirement in the era of multiple devices, and the images it does allow are just too small. I recommend Squarespace; it is slightly more controlling within a theme than many wordpress themes, but it just works, it is super-easy to use, and you can make those images LARGE. It is commercial and has a large user-base, which is very important as they have an investment in fixing their software every time a new browser and platform tries to break it.
I am going to start posting brief trip reports with only a few images, attached with a link. I learned to make text in a text editor that strips it of all formatting, and of course that means that you have a copy you don’t lose.
for what it’s worth, i made a trip report yesterday for the first time in a year.
i copied and pasted the text from a gmail draft.
i inserted a bunch of images that the software actually managed to automatically resize to fit the width of the forum (500px maybe?). that has never worked before.
it all seemed to work fine.
though no one has commented on it, so maybe it exists in some ghostly, liminal space only i can perceive!
I sent my offending text to Ryan. He reproduced the problem and said he can fix it pretty quickly. Hurray.
I am, none-the-less, investing my time now in building my own web-site for our trip reports, so that I’m in control of everything. I’ll post notices at BPL when we have a new trip report, but the content will be elsewhere.
And THANKS to Nick and Ben for expressing appreciation for our reports. It takes a lot of time to organize our thoughts into what we hope are useful collections of information. Sometimes we wonder if it’s worth the effort, and then every once in a blue moon we got word from somebody who used our info to plan a trip, and that makes it all worthwhile.
Amy,
Your trips have been an incredible inspiration – not just to undertake similar trips (and benefit from your planning), but also to reciprocate and write trip reports myself. Beyond your fantastic trip reports you have contributed to many other areas of this community. So many members benefit from all your research about map apps on the iPhone that you put on BPL. Others (like Michelle & me) benefit from your detailed instructions for a double quilt. Your contributions to this community are countless and are appreciate by many. Mostly everyone I talk to in the BPL community “knows Amy”. May be not in person from a GGG, but from your generous sharing and contribution of content to this community.
Thanks for all you do,
Manfred
Amy your trip reports are world class and much appreciated. The interesting and fun stories and accompanying photos really give one a sense of place and the rich detail helps others planning similar trips. My wife’s favorite content on BPL are the trip reports and yours are among our favorites. We’ve also made a few gear choices based on descriptions of how your gear performed under specified trip conditions.
I think you’ll enjoy configuring and maintaining your own site. I just built a very sharp site on Squarespace, and I’d agree with Cameron it works very well and is highly responsive for mobile. As mentioned it can be rigid within the theme. There are also a good number of Squarespace folks to help you on Fiverr at relatively low cost.
However, as you likely know already, WordPress is much more robust for SEO and eCommerce and has a large developer ecosystem and user community with many plug-ins. You can also use WP Genesis Framework themes to save many hours of development time so long as you don’t customize the theme too much, and using Genesis will also keep your site stable with WP updates. Note that if you build a Squarespace site you could host the blog portion on WordPress for the SEO.
Locally the SF Bay Area WP Meetup hosted at Automattic in SF is a fantastic resource and there’s the Santa Cruz WP Meetup and I believe there’s a Peninsula group.
It was a bad post and the forum AI took corrective action.
I mean, maybe that’s the case. I thought you’d appreciate a response instead of silence.
It appears that this problem is similar, if not the same problem:
https://backpackinglight.com/forums/topic/some-content-causes-posts-andor-comments-to-disappear/
If so, it may still be a problem.
Ryan got back to me to let me know that my problem was that I tried to post the same thing twice, and the software prevents duplicate posts using some algorithm. In my case, I was trying the same post a second (and subsequent times) in order to reproduce some other problem so I could give a good bug report. I worked in Software Development for years, and I will say that it is impossible to track down a problem if you can’t try to reproduce it over and over again varying one thing at a time.
I gave up trying to narrow in on specific bug reports, and instead I’m busy working on a web site of our own. I’m making good progress, but it will take a while. We’ve got our domain, our hosting company, our navigation system, our look-and-feel, and exactly one trip report done. We’re tuning it and tweaking it in order to get the layout and formatting right before we replicate the infrastructure for the other 30 or 40 reports that we’ll include. I don’t think we’ll come forward with our URL until we’ve got the dust settled, so we’ll probably be quiet for a couple months.
I’m having fun :)
Excellent news on your front. I look forward to seeing the results.
I’m sure you’re well into doing things your way, but here’s a long list of popular sites that might interest you while fine tuning your own.
http://tinyurl.com/gsmw5nt
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Hilight –
Thanks for pointing to Skurka’s list. I read many of those already, but some are new. We definitely have our own plan and target audience.
- We will NOT be writing a “and then I ate oatmeal and then I stubbed my toe” type of thing. Walking with Wired is a great example of what we will not do. We don’t want to flood people with an endless stream of details. We have a little personal blog for friends and family in which we write a sentence or two each evening when we’re on the trail. But we don’t share that widely.
- Our plan is to include about 30-40 trip reports, half were previously published on BPL forums (from a hundred or more in our inventory), mostly about hikes that are not popular. Not another JMT report. Our focus will be on why we took the trip, essential resources, a link to a CalTopo map, our assessment of it. We’ll include how-to info only to the extent that the route has some unusual characteristics.
- We’ll have Route Guides to a handful of routes that we’ve put together that we think are well worth repeating. We won’t write extensively about routes that are already documented. Big SEKI Loop, San Francisco Stairway Walk, Diablo Loop Hike, etc. I think this might be where we can add the most value, particularly in the Bay Area.
- We’ll have a little section of Gear We Love. Not a complete gear list, no reviews of categories of gear, no how-to-do-it guides (except maybe Gaia GPS and CalTopo, since I’ve got a pretty long history of working with those apps). With the exception of iPhone apps and Gaia GPS, there are many many dozens of people who are more gear-geeky than we are. That information is very readily available already and we have not much to add.
- We’re going to include affiliate links, with clear disclosure, and donate any revenue to land conservation groups. Seems silly to leave that money on the table when there are oh so many groups trying to buy more land. We’re not trying to earn a living, and we will not be trying to “drive traffic” to our site.
So that’s our plan. I’m sneaking it into this odd and unexpected thread for the die-hards who read these obscure things :)
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