Diary of a Zombie

Mr Conehead, below, helpfully let me video part of his exciting day today.

I used the free Lego movie app on the iPad to create the film, but then had problems uploading it to the blog. I couldn't use the Blogger app to add it as there is no video upload option, so I switched to the web version of Blogger (still on the iPad)... but you can only upload video from Google+ or You Tube (not from the camera roll, where it was saved) - there is no file structure on the iPad so you can't navigate to where things are saved as you can on a computer.

So, Plan B: I signed up for Google+, downloaded the Google+ app to the iPad and should then have been able to add the video by using the clapperboard option on the blog toolbar. However, because the video was saved as a photo in Google+ it couldn't find it as a video (I couldn't see a way of changing it), and if I loaded it as a photo it didn't appear in the blog. Grrr.

Now we're on to Plan C; I added the video to Dropbox and am now writing this on the old and clunky laptop that objects to, well, doing most things. I think I have managed to upload the video though (using the clapperboard on the blog toolbar then navigating to find the video in Dropbox), so thank you computer. And thank you Mr Conehead for sharing your day with us:

Subscribers

Well, I've investigated a couple of things about subscribing to a Blogger blog:

I don't yet know how to see if anyone has subscribed to my blog, although I think there's a way in Wordpress so there probably is in Blogger but I haven't found it yet.

I used the cunning ploy of subscribing to my own blog (using the Subscribe by Email box to the right of the page) with a different email address to see how often notifications of new posts come through, and what they look like.

It looks like notifications come through once a day and include all the posts published on that day. I like the fact that the whole text of the post is included in the body of the email; I was expecting only the first couple of lines and then to have to follow a link to the blog to read the whole thing. Thumbs up to Blogger for that! The screenshot below shows how the email looks...

(In an aside, I have just been shown by a 7 year old how to get ... on the iPad in one keystroke instead of having to press the full stop 3 whole times in a row: you change it to the number view, press and hold the full stop then slide your finger up when the ... shows to select it. No idea how he knows that but I'm impressed!)

Dropbox

I've been trying to think of a way to easily add photos to this blog that I've taken on my Android phone. My initial workaround was to upload photos to the phone Facebook app, then open web Facebook on the iPad, save them to the iPad camera roll, then use the Blogger app to get them onto the blog. It works, but it's a bit of a clunky way to do things and I want to improve it now rather than wait for whichever of the 23 Things will show me a better way, so I thought of using Dropbox.

Good points about Dropbox: it was easy to install on both my phone and the iPad. Also the layout and functionality on the iPad is intuitive, but...

Bad points: the layout and functionality on an Android device is not easy to work out! As soon as I installed Dropbox on my phone it started adding all of my photos to itself which was very frustrating because I only wanted a small number of them in a Dropbox folder. I finally (by the standard approach of pressing every available option) discovered that on several, but not all, of the screens I can press the menu button on the phone to pull up a menu including 'settings' then I could 'turn off camera upload'.

I then had to get the photos I wanted (which it had uploaded by that time) into a folder...hang on, this is where it gets complicated. In order to create the folder I used the iPad web browser to log in to my Dropbox account. The folder then showed on my phone, I touched the folder name then used the phone menu button to access the upload option, then ticked the photos I wanted.

From that point on it was easy - the photos automatically appeared in the Dropbox folder of the same name on the iPad, and from there I saved the ones I wanted to the camera roll, then used the Blogger app to write this and add the photos below...

(Oh, but because the Blogger app only has basic functionality I then had to log in to my blog using the iPad web browser and edit this post so I could add the link to Dropbox in the first paragraph. Maybe I should resort to using a proper computer!)

Reflective Learning

Hopefully somewhere on this post there is a picture of a zombie who has been reflecting on his learning. However, getting the picture on the blog was not as straightforward as I anticipated because I was determined to do it without using a computer.

Stage 1: create a photo, add a caption and speech bubble.
Rating: easy.
I downloaded a free app onto my Android phone called ComicStripIt. Using this app I took a photo of my slightly puzzled looking zombie, added a caption at the bottom, added a speech bubble and moved it around until I was happy with it then saved it and shared it on Facebook.

Stage 2: upload my captioned zombie picture onto this blog.
Rating: not so easy!
I switched from using my phone to the iPad and opened up Facebook so I could retrieve my picture. I don't use the Facebook app on the iPad (I prefer the web version) so I logged on using the Safari browser, found my photo (complete with a couple of comments from my friends) and saved it to the iPad photo gallery. So far so good.

I then opened up Blogger, created a new post and tried to add a photo. However, there was no option to add a photo from the gallery. Never mind, thought I, as I returned to using my phone, I'll do it this way and sure enough from the web version of Blogger I had the option to added a photo from the phone gallery. However, there was no option to save the picture from the ComicStripIt app to the phone photo gallery. Hmm. So I used What's App to send the picture from the comic app to a friend, then tried to save it from within What's App to the photo gallery. No joy.

So I am now back on the iPad having downloaded the free (and very basic) Blogger app and I think it has added the picture from the iPad gallery but I can't see where on the page it ill be. So I will now publish this post then switch back to the web version to see how it looks!