Occasionally on the blog we’ll feature a fellow author type who has discovered something you all need to know about (and if you already know this one, you still might check to ensure it works). Hey, if you already know, why didn’t YOU write a guest post for the rest of us and pull us out of the dark ages??? What’s up with that, Smarty Pants? You to good to help out?

Uh…

Where was I?

 

Oh yeah.

Juliet Nubel is a friend of the blog and has commented here a lot and on other blogs. She’s a winner in our recent Word Weaver Writing Contest – and she found out something you might wanna check out.

But I’ll let her explain.

Here’s Juliet.

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Can You See Me Now?

Maybe some of you have already seen my name. I’ve done a couple of guest blog posts here already for Dan and on some other sites. Plus, I won fifth place in the July Word Weaver Writing Contest (brag, brag, brag, brag). And I also like to comment here and there on other writers’ pieces when I feel that what someone has written is worthy of being noticed and praised. So

perhaps you’ve also spotted the silly little gravatar photo of me blowing out the candle on my fiftieth birthday cake.

You have? Great.

But have you ever actually met me?

Clicked on one of those comments to get through to my blog and discover who I really am?

No, of course you haven’t.

Why not?

Because you couldn’t.

Why not?

Because my blog was unfortunately wearing an invisibility cloak.

And to make matters even worse, it has taken me almost a year to realise it!

Luckily I’ve just managed to remove the damned thing and I am now as visible as a solar eclipse in broad daylight, as long as you are wearing the necessary glasses of course. Thank heavens for that.

What the **** am I talking about?

Let me explain.

When I first started my blog omgimfiftyblog.wordpress.com last October I was absolutely incapable of undertaking even the easiest bits of setting it up on my own. All I wanted to do was write, and not worry about the technicalities and pain in the bum side of things. So my daughter put it all in place, created the name, the domain, and the rain which falls mainly on the plain in Spain (ignore that, I get carried away very easily).

I knew nothing about anything bloggish so I just nodded and smiled and said “Yes, darling, that’s great”, impatiently waiting for the moment when I could finally start posting (she showed me how to do that too).

Yahoo! I was off on a trip to Blogsville. Writing, posting, reading, commenting, writing, posting, reading, commenting. Over and over and over.

I did wonder why I never seemed to get any extra views after commenting on other people’s sites.

But hey, I’m a newbie. Maybe that’s just the way things work in this vast town.

I’m often curious to know who’s behind an interesting comment but perhaps other people aren’t.

That’s rubbish! They are.

But little did I know that when anyone tried to click on my name to visit my blog all they got was a message saying that it didn’t exist.

I can’t believe that I never actually checked this out earlier. But why would I click on my own name? I’m way too modest to do that.

Until yesterday. But I wasn’t checking to see if it was working. It was out of pure laziness. I was putting a comment on Carrie Ann Alexis’ fabulous story “Sparkles in Time” right here on Dan’s site, when I suddenly remembered something I needed to edit on one of my own posts. I’ll take a shortcut to my blog through my comment, I thought to myself. Quick click. Nothing. I must have done something wrong. Another click. “This blog doesn’t exist”, I was told again. Last try –

“Stop clicking, woman! We already told you: this blog doesn’t exist.”

What do you mean? I screamed at the screen.

Dan will confirm that I immediately sent him an email to see if he knew what was going on. Yes, I admit it, a nasty little voice was whispering in my ear “maybe this is his mistake”. Of course now I know that you had absolutely nothing to do with it, Dan, but it’s always easier to think someone else is to blame. Sorry for that.

Later in the evening I started going through comments I had put on other favourite sites. The same message was on every single one. The link to my blog was absent, missing, presumed dead.

Oopsie! This is a problem from within, I realised. My fault after all.

Drat.

Techie daughter was not home. Artsy daughter was busy (writing on her own blog: emmanubel.com – it’s in French, about contemporary artists, but have a look, you might enjoy it) so was in no mood to help her old thicko mother.

So guess what, folks. I fixed it myself!

Well, with the help of a WordPress expert named Ajay who answered my question in exactly eleven minutes.

Maybe at this point you should quickly go onto one of your own comments somewhere and see if you can click through to your site, because apparently I am not the only one to have encountered this problem. I’ll wait here.

You can’t?

Okay. Here’s what you have to do. I’ll write slowly so that you can do it as we go along. 

ARE YOU READY?

• Go onto My Site (that means your site, not mine). See the tiny round picture (your gravatar photo) at the top right-hand side of the page? The one beside the notifications bell. Click on it and it will open the My Profile page.

• On this page you will see your First and Last Name and your Public Display Name. For me this public display name had been set to omgimfiftyblog which is not a pretty name to wear. But since I thought this was set in stone I had just kept it and signed all my comments as Juliet.

• But this can be changed. Hallelujah. I am now showing directly as Juliet Nubel which, although accurate, does make me sound a bit too strict and serious. Never mind. So here you can put whatever name you’d like to be shown as, and then save it.

• But my main problem was not just my name. It was the fact that I didn’t have the correct address of my blog available on my Account Settings, which is just under My Profile on the left hand column of the same page.

• When you click on this it will bring up your Username at the top. Do NOT try to change this. Alarm bells started wailing and I’m sure I heard a police car arriving at my gate when I tried, so I avoided doing that before they rang the doorbell.

• What I needed to change in fact was simply the Web Address, which for some strange reason (no, I’m not blaming my darling daughter) was different from my blog’s actual address. If this is the case for you too, type in the correct address, make sure the two match, then save again. Nothing else on this page really has to be altered.

• Next, write a quick comment on this post at the bottom of the page and then click on your name to see if you can now get through to your own website. You can? Brilliant!

If you can’t then maybe you can contact Ajay. He’s good. Much better than me and he will not treat you as if you just started kindergarten – my apologies for that.

So now that you can actually see me and I can see you, why don’t we click through to each other’s blogs and find out a bit more about who’s behind the name?

I swear I’m not half as serious as my new Public Display Name, or my fifth-place text in the contest (double brag) make me out to be.

I’m chatty, I’m cheeky, I’m jolly and I’m bright, so maybe you should put on those special eclipse glasses again before you take a peek.

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Thanks, Juliet, for shedding light on a problem I bet a lot of people had and didn’t know!

Okay, gang: post a comment, click your name link, and tell us what happens!