I noticed a small article in the local paper when reading it yesterday. Here in Polk County the News comes out once a week and the only reason we started getting it was that Anne as a teller at the local bank wanted to ensure she was up with local events. As it turns out she was laid off from that job (last in first out when they downsized to change operations in the COVID-19 environment), but we had paid for a whole year so I continue to scan the 8 pages weekly for anything of interest.

Cleveland State Community College have decided to make a dozen or so of their online courses free until the end of this month. They are 3 month self paced courses on a range of topics and the one that caught my eye was ‘Creating WordPress Websites’ and while it is blatantly obvious I am using a wordpress website already, it’s design/layout/functionality is far from where I would really like it to be. That being said – the free add-ons, the excellent help, and the relatively straight forward set up – and much assistance from the Internet in general make it possible for someone at my level to set up a basically working site. Unfortunately I have found that some more advanced things can easily burn up half a day to get something to function and after that time I mostly give up on the ‘dressing up’ I know should follow. A lot of the work is also slightly beyond my level of knowledge of systems and connections. The posting of blog posts to my Kiwiweave Facebook site is a good example. I followed tutorials – it didn’t work; I found ‘fixes’ to make it work – it still didn’t work. This continued for some time and then suddenly it started working! To this day I don’t know what I(/someone/something ) did to make that happen.

So over the next 3 months I will be plodding through the basics and more, then hopefully the skills can be applied to tidy up (and know how/why it works) this web site. Look for improvements as I go – I’ll try really hard to not cause all to go dark!

On the Kiwiweave work front – I now have a 1945-ish Sears Roebuck Fireside Folding Loom to fix and use. More on that in a later post.

One of the goals of refreshing this web site was to incorporate a shop so that I could offer my products for sale to a wider audience.  I have been working on this on and off for a couple of weeks and finally managed to get the tax set up (after the other challenge of ‘shipping’).  We did a test run on the weekend and that was where I discovered that neither of these were correctly set up! All to do with accepting defaults that I have to admit I didn’t realise how inter-related they all were.

Anyway it all seems to work now so will try another test and plan to launch early next week.  We are at a memorial service over the weekend and better to wait until after that to focus on the launch.  I don’t have a lot of product but enough items to start off and I’m now getting the hang of getting new product up quickly.

The above are the first six products that will appear in the store.  I have several bags of other bits and pieces that I can sort through for more, and then it will be any new products as they come.

I still have catch up work on the gallery but will need help with the layout on that.

After a couple of days in bed feeling rather poorly I woke up today back to near 100%…  An ideal time to tackle the ongoing Facebook feed problem.  Several days back I followed the ‘recommended’ procedure to fix the final connection issue only to get a reply back from the support staff on my hosting site saying they didn’t believe my site and WordPress were set up correctly so I should contact the WordPress support – not particularly full of detail or helpful!  Also in my long years in Government I recognise the ‘off-loading’ of a problem with the assumption that they will be unlikely to hear from me again.

Anyway in the process of fully identifying all the individual parts of the process I have been following, I was writing info down so that I could pass on all the appropriate detail in this attempt.  I turned off one feature and rechecked another, did one final trial and lo and behold: it worked!!

At a minimum, my blog entries will now be posted to the kiwiweave (@kiwiweavellc) page on Facebook.  When (shortly) I get the kiwiweave shop open for business on my web pages, new product and product updates should also be cross posted.  At that stage I’ll probably abandon too much further ‘tweaking’ of the site and stick to ensuring everything is kept up to date.

In the meantime I’ll offer proof that I wasn’t wasting any time before falling briefly ill. With a wood fired hot tub you can never have enough cut/dry wood. This lot was cut and stacked before three days of rain arrived…

Those with keen eyes will spot that this is pine.  As it turns out my heat exchanger doesn’t have anything to ‘gum up’ and so burns pine perfectly – along with any other wood type we find in our forest.

In the last few days I have been trying to become more regular with blog postings and also catch up on a few project postings that had slipped through the cracks.  That is still the goal but in the meantime I have also undertaken to resurrect my kiwiweave.com web presence, then join the two and add an ability to sell my products on-line.  How hard could that be?

The blog part is proving relatively easy (I have a lot of photo’s and info on projects that never made it to my sheep2shawl blogsite).  After some basic tidying up of the web site it too is back up to date and now just needs fleshing out with more gallery pictures etc.  The shop side of it is mostly built now – just testing to go – and will be populated with some more product with a goal of going live with it this week.

Now comes the myriad of detail that normal occurs behind the scenes and is taken care of by the web design team, project managers, and tech team.  Currently I wear all those hats and keep getting bogged down in the detail that is never seen, but makes for smooth customer browsing and better visibility.  The goal today was to link these posts to my newly created ‘Kiwiweavellc’ Facebook page.  Seemed simple, but I gave up after a couple of hours of getting ‘one more’ detail finished only to find that wasn’t the last thing needed.  I was trying to set up Google Analytics as well – perhaps next try will just be one or the other.

The bottom line: as a tech support person I make a great baker!!  (The lastest loaf baked fresh this morning – sourdough rye – good to have one success)