Category: wordpress

Memoir writing

WordPress Prompt – When Do You Feel Most Productive?

Published on by dgkaye95 Comments

I’m late posting this week. I’ve had quite a busy schedule this past week between dental appointment minor surgery and girl get-togethers, and of course, book-writing. So, I chose to grab a prompt off WordPress.

As writers, we all have our own time allotments for writing. And times differ for each of us. But I know my writing habits have certainly changed over the thirteen years I’ve been writing books.

I used to have a regimented standard schedule for writing when in midst of writing a book. I was disciplined. I ate breakfast, made a second cup of coffee and got to writing work every weekday morning for a few hours a day, sometimes maybe all day. But those times have changed drastically for me.

What’s changed since then? Ever since I lost my husband four years ago, I’ve struggled with discipline and concentration efforts. I’ve become easily distracted from my work. For the first year after losing my husband, I struggled to even get out a blog post, let alone book-writing. Heck, I was balancing on the edge of grief, and with a book already drafted, didn’t pay it any mind. It wasn’t until the second year of my grief I could begin edits and the publishing phase of my last book Fifteen First Times. Writing memoir is writing about real events that have happened, and sometimes those memories are painful to sit with for hours.

But all that time, I was writing because writing protected my sanity. But everything I wrote was about my husband, and consequently, I accumulated enough material for a book I very much want to write, but cannot yet stomach reading through those words. So, that is a book I will contend with in the future, when perhaps each word doesn’t strike my heart as badly as it still does now to reread what came out of me then.

When I finally made steps to get off my grief couch, about a year later, I forced myself to get out and join a women’s gym. It was the best thing that happened to me since losing my husband. I made new friends, who conveniently live close to me, got my health back in check, and my social life had picked up exponentially. Gym 3-4 days a week, taking 6-8 classes a week became what I looked forward to. Along with that came some lazy and social time, after classes, girl time with lunches and/or coffees, birthday celebrations, and social gatherings, became just what I needed to fill the void in my life. I’m a tactile person who craves live social interaction to thrive, and I got it. And it surely makes me feel better than sitting at a computer in my lonely world all day long every day.

I witnessed how quickly life can be snatched from us, and decided to join the land of the living. So yes, my book-writing slowed down, but I was okay with that because I was doing what my soul needed doing. I also began living by my mantra – One day at a time. With all my new anxieties, I learned to stop overwhelming myself with self-imposed deadlines and to just go with flow of me.

I decided to dedicate a few writing days a week for myself and took the pressure off of beating myself up for not being a disciplined daily writer. This change has been effective for me. It’s what works for me now, putting less pressure on myself. I mean seriously, thank goodness I don’t have to rely on my book sales to live, so the only pressure I have is the pressure I put on myself. Instead, I chose to put in some living and ‘me’ time in my life schedule as the priority, and I have no regrets.

I’m also happy to announce that my first draft of my newest book is almost at the finish line and hopefully will be ready for the edits by mid June, titled – About the Real Stages of Grief. The book is geared toward those who have loved and lost and all the stages of grief we all will experience at some time in our lives, which makes it a book that anyone can read. I truly hope it will help others.

What about you people? Have you noticed your writing habits changing over the years, or because of events in life that opened your perspective?

Daily WordPress writing prompt:

Daily writing prompt
When do you feel most productive?
View all responses

©DGKaye2025

money

What Would You Do If You Won The Lottery?

Published on by dgkaye102 Comments

I was supposed to begin my blogging break this week, but decided to wait until the end of January. I thought I’d dedicate January to working on my book, but there’s too many disruptions and many little things, as well as taxes I’d like to get out the way, so I’m still around. Also, I wasn’t sure if or when I was going to put a winter escape together or not, and it all came together last week. Yay, I’ll be going back to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico next month and staying with a friend in her rented condo where I used to rent, right on the beach. With that said, on to the post.

As I wasn’t prepared to blog this week, I took a look at the WordPress daily word prompt for some direction for a blog post. I thought it would be a fun post to share.

I know we all dream of winning a lottery one day, but despite the joy of becoming financially free, winning a lottery will also present being hounded by anyone and everyone such as charities and family, media spreading it publicly, and of course, newfound friends and family we never knew we had, lol.

But seriously, what would I do? Well, it doesn’t hurt to prepare for that moment. And I can assure you, I throw my intent and vision of winning a lottery out to the universe every time I buy a ticket. I even have a plan for that fortuitous occurence. So why shouldn’t we have a plan in case we win?

BERJAYA

I have a standing joke with all my friends. I told them when I win, I won’t be rushing downtown to the lottery center to claim my win. After all, a winning ticket doesn’t have to be claimed right away. Instead, I’ll be booking a luxury trip for myself, probably renting a villa in some exotic place for an undetermined amount of time where I can relax, write, and enjoy the newfound financial freedom. Only after I’m settled into my lengthy vacation would I let my close friends know about my lucky win also informing them I’m sending them all airline tickets to come visit.

During my R and R time I would be planning exactly which charities I will be donating money to (although I already know which charities), as well as cutting my niece a hefty cheque, and checking out my options for where I’d like to invest the rest of my nest egg. Naturally, a part of my holdings would be invested in real estate. I would travel extensively to decide exactly where I’d like to park myself, along with my money. Once I claim my prize, I’d change my phone number shortly after receiving it. Oh, and I’d buy a limo and hire a chauffeur because I detest driving.

What would your plans be like?

©DGKaye2025

BERJAYA

Tag, You’re It! Blogging Challenge

Published on by dgkaye55 Comments

Tag, You’re It, is the Blogging Challenge I came across while reading Debbie Doglady’s post who hopped on to this challenge from Thomas Wikman’s blog – Leonberger Life who also tagged me. I enjoyed both their posts and decided to join in the fun! I was also late in discovering that Milena from Why I Quit My Job had also tagged me, so thank you all.

How did you come up with your blog name?

I suppose this isn’t much of a surprise, lol. But DG Kaye is my writing name, so what better than to inform those venturing over to my blog that my site has my writing name, and acknowledges the fact that I’m a writer. 🙂

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If your blog was a person (fiction or real), who would it be?

My blog is real because I’m the one writing for it and everything I post is my real truth and opinions. I suppose it comes with the territory when one is a non fiction writer. 🙂

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What helps you create new content if you feel like you need some inspiration?

All I need for content is to form an opinion about something I’ve seen, read, or experienced. A lifetime of experiences leave the door wide open. A beautiful scenery, vacations, and anything about the human condition is enough to never leave me looking for words. But I also love to write reviews for books I’ve read too. Take for example this post, I enjoyed Debbie’s,Thomas’s and Lena’s posts so I thought it would be fun to join on the Tag. 🙂

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Is there anyone you would like to collaborate with?

I think collaborations are fun things to do with other writers and bloggers. I’ve done collabs with Rebecca Budd at her engaging blog of interviews- Tea Toast & Trivia, with fashion designer, Resa McConaghy on her blog of fabulous artwork, photography, and fashions – Graffitti Art Lux and More, and of course, Sally Cronin whose blog is aptly named, Smorgasbord Blog Magazine, because it’s filled daily with everything from laughter, to books and reviews, to health information, cooking recipes, and fab music – something for everyone. Sally and I do a Smorgasbord laughter and smiles post on her blog a few times a month. And I have an ongoing monthly column over at Sally’s blog for a few years now – the series subject changes annually.

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Is there anything more you wish you had or would like to learn as a blogger?

Oh sure! I would love to learn all the nooks and crannies of using WordPress, but frankly, I have my own methods of working with it, and when something isn’t working, I find a work-around. If I spent everyday learning how everything technical works, I’d never get anything else done. I keep my focus on learning things that interest me, and the backdoor of WordPress is my least favorite. I don’t have the head for all the techno stuff sometimes, so I’ll use it to best of my knowledge, ask a friend, or use my best friends Google and/or Youtube. 🙂

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Do you have a specific style of blogging?

Interesting question. I think any of us blogging long enough develops their own style of blogging. Blogging style? Hmm, I think the memoir writer in me always creeps up in my posts. I write how I speak on my blog and in my books. My writing is authentically me. I’d like to think my blog posts are always legible and hopefully engaging, with enough whitespace, and using bold headings, and always using my own authentic voice. Ironically, these days, WordPress is erasing my words when I try to use a color on the headings (as you will note in this post, no colorful headings). Ya, I’m probably not doing something right with block editor, which many of us dreaded when it first came out, and it still gives me grief. So, I’ve adapted to my own work-arounds.

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It was fun doing a blog challenge, it’s been a long time. To keep the fun going, I’m going to call on a few of my blogging friends to join the challenge if you’re up to it:

Sally Cronin, Stevie Turner, Robbie Cheadle, Pete Springer, Liesbet Collaert.

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Thanks for adding me to your ‘Tags’, Thomas, Milena, and Debbie.

Source: TAG, YOU’RE IT! 🫵 | 💻 A BLOGGING QUESTIONNAIRE 💻

https://leonbergerlife.com/2024/08/30/the-blog-tag/

https://whymilenawhy.wordpress.com/2024/09/07/the-blog-tag/comment-page-1/#respond

©DGKaye2024

Sally Cronin, Stevie Turner, Pete Springer, Robbie Cheadle, Liesbet Collaert.

ow did you come up with your blog name?If your blog was a person (fiction or rel), who would it be

Writer's Tips

Writer’s Tips, June Edition – Reader Scout, Writer Scams, Punctuation, Blurb Generator, and Book Categories tools from the #Kindlepreneur

Published on by dgkaye60 Comments

Welcome to my best picks in helpful articles for writers and bloggers for June. In this collaboration we have three helpful tools from the Kindlepreneur – Reader Scout, Book Categories, and Blurb Generator, as well as Writer Scams to beware of, How to add a Reuseable Block in WordPress, and Converting videos to MP4.

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The Kindlepreneur offers a new Free tool to track book reviews – Reader Scout

https://kindlepreneur.com/readerscout/

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The Kindlepreneur simplifies the best way to choose our book’s categories

Amazon Book Categories: My Secret Method to Choose Clear Winners

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The Kindlepreneur offers his Book Description Tool for helping to write the Blurb

Kindlepreneur Book Description Generator

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Anne R. Allen offers up good tips on current Writer Scams to beware of

10 Facts Writers Need to Know to Stay Safe from Scammers

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Hugh Roberts with another great blogging tip – Creating resuseable blocks in the WordPress editor

https://hughsviewsandnews.com/2023/05/15/what-is-a-reusable-block-on-wordpress-how-to-create-one-and-save-yourself-lots-of-time/comment-page-1/?unapproved=168326&moderation-hash=c479074c878d84fb34e0dd0e7e87b974#comment-168326

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From Janice Wald at Mostly Blogging, learn how to convert Youtube clips into MP4s

https://www.mostlyblogging.com/youtube-clip-to-mp4/

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Do you get confused if two adjectives require a comma or not? Quick lesson reminder from Anneli Purchase

Commas and Adjectives

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I hope you will enjoy some of these helpful articles and find them useful for your own blogs and books.

©DGKaye2023

Updates on health

I’m Back with my New #Blog

Published on by dgkaye109 Comments

It’s been quite an event! I’m sure many of you know, I’ve moved my blog. Some of you probably don’t know and may be wondering why my blog has been wonky for the last week or so.

I have been wanting to move away from my self-hosted blog for a long time, but dreaded the process – and I wasn’t wrong. Besides the fact that I’d get lots of messages throughout the last few years that readers were having a difficult time commenting on my blog, I’ve had so many issues myself with my old host. I paid substantial money for almost 8 of the 9 years I’ve been blogging, and when technical bad things were happening with it, the support I had was less than mediocre and I had to rely on the kindness of of some writing friends to get me out of a blog jam.

I decided at the longtime urging of my good friend and Fey sister, Colleen Chesebro, now was the time. With the advent of the new BIG WordPress update coming (something that always gave me blog woes), and the thought of me having to deal with scary blog stuff while I escape for a some winter sanity, Colleen convinced me to get it over with now. And it was far from easy.

I decided it would be easier down the road to move back to paid WordPress and let them deal with the headaches. And moving my blog from Godaddy was a nightmare! Colleen helped me a lot. First step was creating a blank WordPress.com new platform to move my content over to, except there were many hurdles. The trick I’ve learned, is to get a good WP happiness engineer – and that only took 2 or 3 until the right one showed up.

The plan was simple, export my content from old site and import into new blog – not so easy. My content wouldn’t load. Colleen was dealing with a WP tech with questions about the import problem and she said she’d get back to her. Well 5 days passed, no blog activity, stuck between two worlds on two platforms and after several days I knew nobody was answering back. And by that time, my old blog content was gone! That’s when the real chaos began.

After 2 days of calling Godaddy (now dubbed NOdaddy from me), first waiting 2 hours til a human picked up and more hours trying to explain I need my blog content and several useless support there, my blood pressure was rising. In the meantime, I was being coached by a WP tech as to how to bring over files MANUALLY. Yes, non backdoor techy me, trying to absorb technical jargon. By the second day of repeat performance, I finally got a WP angel who had spent almost 2 days coaching me of alternative methods to get this and that – to no avail. I finally got through to the WP tech that I was useless in this venture, especially with the SERIOUS LACK OF HELP FROM NODADDY. Let’s just say he went far beyond the call of duty and did things to make the magic happen that were not his job. He and I had a running chat going by email for 4 days! He got the ball rolling last Friday, and yesterday he finally finished getting almost 9 gigs of content over to my new blog, and Colleen went in to make it pretty. I didn’t lose anything, (except what was left of my sanity), my years of posts are back WITH the matching images.

I’m still learning Gutenberg editor tips, but surprisingly, I didn’t find it that complicated. And thanks to my friend Hugh Roberts, who posts excellent tutorials on the new editor, I had already got the basic hang of it.

So, I want to welcome you all over here to my new blog, where it should be easy sailing for readers now to interact. I also hope you will all hit the ‘follow’ button when you visit here. I have to say, it’s a bit discouraging seeing my followers go from over a thousand to 11 LOL – not a good look on a writer whose been blogging for 9 years. And I thank you all for putting up with the madness and coming back!

©DGKaye2021

Real talk

The Day My Website Crashed – What Happened? Beware WordPress Plugin Updates

Published on by 134 Comments

Real talk

 

Friday September 1st was a terrible day for me. It was one of those days when “Murphy” just keeps giving the gift that just keeps giving – Murphy’s Law = Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. It began with my website crashing and got progressively worse as the day went on in other aspects. But for today we’re going to stick to the website crashing and hopefully, how none of you will have to endure this.

 

After I finished writing and saving in draft my posts for next the upcoming week’s blog posts, I obeyed the WordPress plugin notification which clearly stated that ‘This plugin is compatible with your latest version of WordPress’, click to update. BUT IT WAS NOT! Just to re-iterate a bit about plugins, we have to constantly update them when we get notifications to do so for security purposes. The creators of plugins inform us about current updates to their plugins because they usually have removed security bug issues and various other things in their code to make the plugin up-to-date and more effective. Not updating could leave your site vulnerable to spam and hackers – especially when it’s the ‘CAPTCHA’ update where you have to prove you’re a human.

I hit the update and seconds later, I was looking at a white screen (known as the screen of death) with a message stating: This page is no longer available – Error Code 500. I waited a few minutes, praying it would sort itself out while intermittently attempting to re-login to my website via my admin signin and as a visitor to no avail. I then went over to Google to look up the error code and it said that this could mean a problem with your webhosting. And so the journey began.

I’m no tech expert, but I’m well aware that if a plugin isn’t compatible with your site it can create havoc. The protocol is to go into your plugins and de-activate each one, one at a time to see if it corrects the problem. The problem was, I couldn’t even get into my website to try this process of elimination, knowing full well it was that Captcha plugin update that created my WordPress hell.

I realized it was time to call my webhosting service, Godaddy to seek help. After wasting almost an hour between wait times and the unhelpful information I received, I was left in limbo. The rep explained to me that they won’t help out with plugin issues but for $80 US ($100 Canadian) they would put me on to a ‘special’ support where a web tech could resolve my issue. I gasped. I then asked what my option was, what can I do, while spewing a few expletives in my anger that I pay them to host and manage my WordPress site along with many other features annually, and offered my distaste for their lack of help from their own techs. I was given the option that they would email me directions to get into the admin of my blog through their site then through my account.

I read the email and followed the many prompts until I came to a page full of code which didn’t get me to the plugin options as promised and knew I’d better stop there before I lost my blog post history completely. Then I called back. I spoke to another tech and started from scratch with my problem and went over the instructions sent by the first rep, telling him where I left off because I felt it was dangerous for me to continue. He advised me I was right not to touch anything there and that the first rep should never have sent me those instructions if I wasn’t a webmaster! This brought me back to my question – What am I to do? I couldn’t get into my site, nor could any visitors.

The rep reiterated that offer to pay $80 US so they could farm out a support ticket to one of their webmasters. At that point 3 hours had passed and I felt cornered and very agitated knowing my website was closed, so I caved. I told the rep, “Fine! I’ll pay the damn $80, just get me back into my site.” He responded by telling me he’ll set up the ticket and someone will fix my site within 72 HOURS!!!! Needless to say, I freaked out! I told him there’s no way my site is getting closed down for possibly 3 days! I asked him for another option. He told me the only other thing I could do, through his instruction and going through their site to my account and so forth, was I could restore my blog to an earlier time and anything I worked on after that time would be lost. I figured I’d bite the bullet and lose all my previous work I’d just worked on that day and restore back to Thursday night.

After I restored back to August 31st, I lost the future posts I had in draft, and consequently, also lost all my published posts since last Sunday August 27th. I was livid, especially since Tuesday’s post was a guest post by the KIndlepreneur. At that point, I put up a quick post alerting my readers my site had crashed and spent almost 2 hours putting back together a new post of the Kindlepreneur guest post, trying to replicate it with all the links I had to go back and find to put together. I couldn’t stomach doing anymore after that and shut down the computer for the rest of the day and night in disgust at all the work I had to recreate, which I’d done ahead of time to allow me to focus on my book revisions for the rest of the week. The plugin notification was still alerting me to update as my blog was restored from an earlier date, so it was as though I never did the update. I left it flashing.

The next day I spent re-creating posts for this week and de-activated that plugin and searched for a replacement plugin under the plugin menu in my dashboard to protect my site.

 

About Plugins

All plugins will require updates every so often and we’ll get those notifications from the web creators, sent into our update notifications in our dashboards. Where the updates are offered there are also clickable links where you can read more about the plugin, see the rating by other users, read cautions about it, and read actual reviews by users to find out potential problems they had with the same plugin. This is my usual practice I do before installing a new plugin. But the Captcha plugin I used before was the original one I’ve used for years, and even with the statement that came with the update, informing that it was compatible, it wasn’t. Clicking on the info links about it weren’t helpful either and when I clicked on the ‘one star reviews’ I’d seen many complaints similar to my mine from the other users. I deleted it. I chose a new Captcha plugin and downloaded it. I read the ratings and reviews and didn’t see any complaints from users to I took a chance.

About taking a chance: The scary part about plugins is that they don’t always play nice with our site. Even after being informed that my former plugin was compatible, it was not. I had asked the Godaddy rep about the misleading information and his reply was, “It’s a gamble.” This is not very re-assuring for us bloggers so we have to do our own due diligence when installing or updating on our blogs. Unless we are webmaster savvy, we’re bound to run into a glitch every now and then.

 

Final Thoughts

There are no guarantees that a plugin will work properly on our sites. This is why if we’re having problems with something not working, we’re advised to de-activate each plugin one at a time to find the culprit so we can delete it and find an alternative.

My advice would be to check out the reviews and comments before updating plugins on your blogs, despite the approval warning that comes with the update stating it’s compatible, because it isn’t always. I know I’ll be doing this in the future.

Remember, there’s always an option to restore your blog to an earlier date to ‘Get out of WordPress Jail’, but be prepared to lose any input you’ve done after the rollback date. Although I only rolled back to the day before, it helped itself to rolling back almost a week. I’m not sure if that was yet another glitch or what it was, but it did.

In future, I’m not going to update anything on a day where I’ve created new posts. I’ll let the update sit for a day or two when I haven’t posted anything in case I have to restore again.

Make sure you are all having your blogs backed up daily! If I wasn’t doing that I may have lost everything! My blog is backed up nightly by my webhosting that’s why I was able to restore from an earlier date and that’s why I lost everything I entered prior to clicking on the update that wasn’t backed up the night before yet. But I’m still puzzled as to why when I clicked back up to August 31st, the day before the crash, I lost work from August 28th on. This makes me wonder if my hosting hadn’t backed up since August 27th. And you can be sure I will be checking that out! If you’re not sure about how to back up your blogs, please read this helpful article about it from Hugh Roberts.

 

I hope you people never have to go through this nightmare. And sadly, if you do encounter this, I at least  hope what I’ve shared will help you.

 

I’d also like to thank the so many friends and readers who saw my cry of distraught on Facebook and have come back to share my recreated posts. I honestly don’t know where I’d be without my wonderful community of writing friends. ❤