1. eBay and Ross
2. Hearthstone: The Witchwood expansion pack
3. Killing Eve
4. Business Wars podcasts
5. Yoga Warrior 365

Preoccupied…

Amazon Store

Heh, I had forgetten that I have a store on Amazon where I highlight items mentioned here. I had strayed away from this Amazon store for awhile, trying different things, but the store’s still there so why not clean it up?

I removed some older products and added in more items including a section dedicated to the Olympus OM-D EM10 Mk II. I added a few more sections and moved products around to better fit the new sections. This store is also a good place for me to bookmark often used consumables that I need to restock on periodically.

Menus

I didn’t like the feel and flow of my previous menus, so I changed things up a little. I’m still not certain if the current menus will stay though. I need to include more categories to really capture the content on my site. Building these content pages are harder than I would have thought unless I’m doing it wrong.

Email Subscription

Although I had never sent out an email newsletter for Pulpconnection before, I did set up a TinyLetter account where you can sign up to get email notifications. And yes, I actually did send out my first email newsletter this weekend (more so to learn about TinyLetter). Will I keep this up? Not sure, but again, it is a resource that I can tap into.

Fruity Background

With a 20% discount at iStock, I figured it was time to get a high quality image to serve as the background image of Pulpconnection. Going with a pulpy theme, I like the dark wood backdrop with the bright citrus fruit accents.

So take a look around and rediscover Pulpconnection like I have. Sign up for email updates and check out (and maybe even buy) stuff from my Amazon store.

I found very useful troubleshooting tips in this article, namely deactivating themes and plugins. For me, it seemed the theme was the culprit. Still trying to sort it all out.

The K380 feels pretty good. The key layout seems just a tad cramped, but that could be my imagination. I’m still more accurate typing on the K380 than tapping on-screen.

No wires since it’s Bluetooth connected, and this keyboard can pair with three devices. Need to try out my AppleTV to see what the experience is like. I probably won’t use this keyboard with my MacBook Air since what’s the purpose. But the keyboard is small-ish and light, so it’s easily transportable to make mobile blogging a better experience.

Hmm, I just noticed that the virtual keyboard no longer shows up in WordPress while I’m using the external K380.

This ain’t too shabby a wat of traveling. Catching the Amtrak for a few hours. A little bumpy but climate controlled, big seats, and free Wifi.

So my bottled Starbucks iced coffee costs $3.25, but I’m enjoying it and the ride while blogging on the railroad.

Um, yeah, I dunno. But Kimi (let’s call her that) wants to share her experience eating a $14 peach or something like that. Intrigued? Actually yes, I am. Don’t let the pulpy readers down, Kimi!

I was only aware of this since the UpdraftPlus backup plugin wouldn’t run its automated backups. UpdraftPlus itself would complain about incomplete actions. On a hunch, I disabled Evergreen Post Tweeter since it times the posting of old posts on Twitter. Sure enough, after disabling Evergreen Post Tweeter, WordPress started behaving normally. Scheduled posts published on cue, and I have yet to see incomplete actions reported by UpdraftPlus.

But…

I did it wrong or at least didn’t really have a good understanding of what I was getting into. While secured communications is a good thing, I didn’t realize how much unsecure communications was actually going on. Pictures are not loading and some widgets are busted, assumedly trying to use http versus https.

That and my site’s certificate has an unfortunate mismatch due to the www prefix. Yeah, times have changed, and the URL convention of starting with www is no longer the norm. So the certificate I got from Let’s Encrypt is for pulpconnection.net, not www.pulpconnection.net. Yes, it matters.

I may be able to reconfigure my site to remove the leading www, but I’m not sure what havoc that may cause. So for now, I’ll leave things as is, but if you go to https://www.pulpconnection.net, your browser should warn you of a mismatch. This is (mistakenly) intentional until I can figure out how to fix it

All I can say is mahalo to ParkRat and his fan base!

• portague jokes
• howie haiwaiian mainlander

While I don’t define portague jokes, the post, 21 Slang Words You Should Know Before Visiting Hawaii, discusses haole aka howie haiwaiian mainlander.

Years back when I got in to blogging, I used MarsEdit as my blog authoring tool of choice. As Internet connectivity became faster, more ubiquitous, and more stable, an offline app for writing wasn’t as critical. That started my transition of using the web-based WordPress interface for blog posts. Over the years and versions, the WordPress interface changed and improved, most recently adopting a distraction-free look in Version 4.1.

So there I was, surrounded by connectivity and familiar with authoring posts in WP. I knew how to tag and categorize posts. I knew how to set featured images and place and resize images. All of this basic stuff I didn’t know how to accomplish in Desk. Even titling a post was strange for me using Desk, so why change? 

It’s about the writing. As I learned more about using Desk, I started seeing how this app allowed me to focus on writing by truly removing any distractions and barriers. Typically when I log into WordPress, I immediately see the blog stats that I spend time analyzing, looking at popular hits and searches. Did I also mention that I secured my WordPress authentication which poses another (necessary) hurdle to get to writing? Even with my intent to write a blog post, there are enough distractions getting me to that point. Not so with Desk. Fire it up, get a blank page, and write. 

However, I can’t say that I’ll stick with Desk forever. There are times I need to get into WordPress and muck around. That and there’s still that learning curve with Desk to understand what it can and cannot do. But in the meantime, I’ve been writing more and more using Desk.