What a Relief, Asta is Staying

As most of you know, Asta was going to stop blogging. And for those who understand what happened, we can just picture her shock when she learned she'd lost 83% of the photos she's posted in the last 2 years. She posts beautiful photos, funny graphics, so her panic and discouragement was understandable.

We don't think her mom needed to apologize and she's not a dunce. She is a very caring, intelligent lady who lost hope for a moment but had the courage to return and try to help others learn from what happened to her. We all make mistakes! So this is a good opportunity for other Blogger users to learn something invaluable. You can read about what happened at Asta's blog.

On this subject, we received an email from Mom Robyn of HotMBC (House of the mostly black cats) today, reminding everyone to back up their blog. This is very good advice!!!! We tried but we couldn't install a necessary program so until we get a new computer (yeah, right -- when fat pigs fly!), we can't.

However, Asta's problem was not in losing her blog posts, but in being new to Picasa and not understanding that any photos deleted in Picasa online would be deleted in her blogs. Once the pictures are deleted, the links are gone and like Asta's mom said, she would have to go back and put in every single photo from her hard drive again. Readers can still pick up the humor, but they'll have to imagine the photos in the older posts.

Since we have never done a backup or an upload from a backup, we don't know enough about blog backups to understand whether backing up Asta's would have helped her in this situation. Our question is whether uploading a backup would have also uploaded the photos to Picasa, but if it would, it sure would be worth it. (Will fat pigs be flying any time soon? We'd sure like to backup ours.)

And Mom Robyn (of HotMBC), we apologize for responding to your email in a post but for some reason we were unable to reply to your email. The message just refuses to "leave home." But perhaps you can answer the question of whether a backup would replace your blog photos in Picasa.

For those of you that use blogger your pix are not stored with your Blogger posts, but they are stored in Picasa. You get about 1 gigabyte of free storage space. If you don't have the Picasa program on your computer, you don't need to download the program for blogger to store your photos there online.

If you haven't visited Picasa before, log onto your blog (ID and password). Blogger only! Then, either open another tab or window or use the same one, but type picasa.google.com in the bar. It should take you to picasa download, but what you want to do is to click on "and go to Picasa Web Albums to share and explore photos." It should open up your Picasa/blogger photo file for you. Anything you delete in there will be deleted from your blogger posts! So don't delete unless you intend to. But for anyone who is using blogger that didn't know that, you might want to check it out. Better to learn this now than when you receive a notice from Blogger that you are approaching your 1 gb storage and you panic.

Sorry we didn't do a 4th of July post. Jan was busy rearranging the furniture so she could use her new computer cart with the pull out for the keyboard (but no room for the mouse. Hehehe) See Friday's post. And then she took off and left us alone; didn't even bring us any leftovers from dinner.

This is Jan's new workspace. Sorry about the blue lines at the bottom of the screen but Jan said we can't post her scribbles. She scribbles a lot! And loses them a lot! So she tapes notes to her monitor.

So since Jan kept us offline most of yesterday, it serves her right that she worked up such a sweat today (really, she was dripping all over the electrical cords) trying to untangle all the cords behind the computer so she could move the monitor onto the cart. Guess that was our day's entertainment. We should have taped it.

And she says we're messy? She put the little dog there to guard the cords. (Really to keep us kitties away from the cords, but ....)

Hope you all had a fun 4th!

(s) Crystal, Cotton, Merci, Cyndi, Percy, Cameron, Buddy, Rusty & Sam