blogging

A Blogpost about my Blog

Despite promising to be more regular in writing and posting here on my blog, I must yet again apologise that over four and a half months have past since my last post. However, in the last couple of days, I have discovered that, even if I had written and posted a blog post, almost nobody would have read it. Because if you had put my URL into your browser, you would have received a message saying that it was unsafe to proceed because my website had security issues.

Back in February 2024, I renewed the hosting of rickyyates.com with Namecheap.com. Part of that deal was the provision of an SSL certificate showing that my website was secure. This should have downloaded automatically, but it didn’t 🙁 There was a bug in the system.

Having been alerted to the problem, I eventually contacted Namecheap to ask them to investigate it. This was how I learned about the ‘bug in the system’. To fix it, I had to go into my cPanel, a place I’d never been before, and manually insert my SSL certificate. It took at least six minutes and three clicks on the sync button, before it finally worked, having been assured it would only take one or two minutes.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the problem. Whilst now, when anyone put my URL into their browser, there was a message acknowledging the SSL certificate, my website was still being deemed insecure because of ‘mixed content’. Apparently, not all of the content on my website had been uploaded from a ‘secure location’. Don’t ask me how that happened!

The help desk at Namecheap suggested that the issue could be fixed by ‘adding a special line to my .htaccess file which locates in the root folder of my domain name at my cPanel’. I wasn’t at all keen to go there again 🙁

But fortunately, they also noted that my blog used WordPress and they suggested two possible WordPress plugins that might also fix the problem. An /ssl-insecure-content-fixer/ . I chose the second suggestion which had many positive reviews, and set about installing it, something I also had never previously done. And I’m very pleased to report that it worked!

My grateful thanks to my good friend & former colleague, Kathy Ferguson, who first alerted me to the problem and has regularly re-tried to go to my website whilst I was working on resolving it and fed back to me the messages she was getting. Therefore a big shout-out for her new blog https://staying-put.blogspot.com/ 🙂

Please let me know, if in future, anyone has an access problem Use email, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp or even snail mail to contact me. And I do have a couple of future posts planned. One about how I became a hymn book smuggler into the EU and another about my recent trip to SW France.

Comments are most welcome & I will always try to respond to them. At the moment, there isn’t a captcha as it was previously causing difficulties to genuine commenters. But if I get inundated with offers of free Viagra or money making scams, I may have to reintroduce it. Here’s hoping I don’t.

The Expats Blog Awards 2012 – Bronze Award for the Czech Republic

blog-award-2012-czech-republic-bronze Further to my previous post, yesterday was judgement day for the ExpatsBlog.com Awards 2012 for the Czech Republic. And I came third – I got the Bronze Award.

I am very grateful to everybody who took the trouble to follow the link in my previous post and ‘left some love’ for my blog in the comment box. I shall say something about those kind comments a little further into this post. There were also, a number of people who promised to go there and leave a comment, but who never did – sigh 🙁 Whilst the number of positive comments was not meant to be the only criteria by which blogs were judged, it is noticeable that the two blogs which finished ahead of me were the two that also got more comments than me.

The winner of the Gold Award was Christopher’s Expat Adventure. Chris is an American who was relocated to Brno a few years ago by his employer IBM. He has taken full advantage of being based in Central Europe to travel widely and, in his blogposts, always gives some interesting background details about each country he visits. He frequently explains the size of a country by relating it to one of the American states – for example ‘Sweden is slightly larger than California’. I do think this is a good idea, especially as I presume a sizeable part of his readership is American, many of whom will have never set foot outside of the USA as 80% of Americans don’t hold a passport.

Chris also writes about his social life and how things differ between the Czech Republic and the USA. He is also good at explaining aspects of Czech culture and history. A recent post was very informative about why there is a Greek community here, something I had only become aware of recently during a conversation I had with a Czech young lady sat next to me on my Prague-Geneva flight in late September.

However, I couldn’t help but note that two of the positive comments were from people who admitted that ‘Chris is my boss’. It did make me wonder how many other of his underlings left comments as a result of an in-house memo 😉 But joking aside – congratulations Chris on your Gold Award.

The Silver Award went to a fellow Brit who blogs as Girl in Czechland. GIC is a young lady who met her ‘Czechman’ whilst he was living and working in the UK. When he decided to return to his native country, GIC moved to Czechland with him, about a year after I moved to Prague.

GIC or Ms Girlová, writes both articulately and humorously of her life here in the Czech Republic. Her posts about visiting the ‘Village People’, her descriptive title for Czechman’s family who live in the Bohemian countryside, are one of the hilarious highlights of her blog.

I’ve been a fan and follower of ‘Girl in Czechland’ from the blog’s very early days and have recommended it to numerous other expats and English-speaking Czechs. I honestly thought Ms Girlová would win the competition and regard it as no disgrace to finish one place behind her. And yes, I do know her true identity, (we’ve met on several occasions), but I do promise not to reveal it – honest!

As promised earlier, I want to say a few more words about the twenty-three comments/reviews my blog received. Those of you who wrote were extremely kind in what you said, describing my writing as, ‘funny, interesting, insightful, informative, warm, incisive, well-written, balanced, smart, eloquent, entertaining and detailed’. It’s left me feeling quite overwhelmed and, if I’m honest – embarrassed.

Several comments were also complimentary about my photographs which I also appreciated. And with regard to content, my frequent examples of that wonderful language I call Czenglish, are clearly enjoyed by many of my readers. I’m sure I’ll have more to share with you in 2013! Who knows? They might just help me win silver or gold, next time around 🙂

Fame at last! – The Expats Blog Awards 2012

Spires & wires — A spire with wires & lights in Prague © Ricky Yates

I’m not very good at ‘blowing my own trumpet’. I am still amazed that this blog currently gets an average of 70 hits a day and that in less than four years, I’ve written and published 205 posts. But clearly many people enjoy reading what I write and I’m grateful to everyone who kindly leaves comments on what I’ve posted here.

However, a few weeks ago, I received a most surprising email. In fact I was so surprised by what the email said, that it’s taken me some time to initiate appropriate follow-up action. For the email kindly informed me that, “’Ricky Yates – an Anglican in Prague’, has been nominated for the Expat Blog Awards 2012”. As you can see from the badge displayed at the top right-hand corner of my home page, this is now deemed to be a ‘Top Blog’.

One of the judging criteria as to whether I will receive the Gold, Silver or Bronze award, or am just deemed to be an ‘also ran’, will be the comments left on my blog listing at expatsblog.com. Therefore if you enjoy my blog and think it deserves a little recognition, please click on this link, scroll down past the details of my last five posts, the ‘Top Blog’ logo and the existing comments, and in the box below, ‘leave some love’ for my blog.

Please understand that I’m not doing anything underhand by asking you to do this. The competition judges have specifically requested that those bloggers nominated, encourage their loyal readers to leave comments – hence this post 🙂 Please don’t delay – the competition will be judged on 16th December & comments will be closed 24 hours beforehand. Therefore, you have only a little over two weeks to post a few kind words about my blog before the opportunity passes.

Rest assured that I won’t let all of this go to my head. But just occasionally, it is nice to be appreciated 🙂

All change!

Regular visitors to this blog will have noticed that, in the last 24 hours, its appearance has changed. After three and a half years, I’ve decided the time has come to alter my ‘theme’. No – I’m not changing the theme of what I write about. What has changed is the way it now visually appears on yours and my computers. I’ve adopted a new WordPress theme.

As always, when it comes to technical matters in relation to this blog, it should really be what my internet savvy wife has done. Whilst I outlined the appearance I wanted and am responsible for the photograph of the Prague skyline featured in my new header, Sybille has been totally responsible for implementing the changes you can now see. If you like what you see, her services are available to you – for a donation 🙂

Why have I made the change? Partly just to freshen up the blog appearance. But a major factor was that my previous theme was fluid. This meant that the way any post appeared on my computer was not necessarily the way it appeared on other people’s computers. It depended entirely on each person’s screen resolution. Seeing several blogposts as they appeared on other computers made me recognise the problem. Therefore, I am now using a theme with a fixed layout.

Inevitably, as you fix one problem, it is very easy to cause others. A quick journey back through the blog shows that a few photographs now run partly into the sidebar on the right. This is a problem I hope to fix in the next few days. But if any of my readers spot any other issues, please let me know either via the ‘Contact’ page or by leaving a comment.

I have also taken the opportunity to change the tag line for the blog. It used to say ‘Ricky Yates – a blog and more…..’. Now it’s ‘Ricky Yates – an Anglican in Prague’ which is a far more apt description. My thanks to ‘Girl in Czechland’, who has used this tag line for my blog in her blogroll for quite some time and which I’ve now chosen to adopt myself.

What has also changed, is the computer on which this blog is being compiled and published. Courtesy of a generous donation by one of the members of the St. Clement’s congregation, together with a contribution by Sybille and myself, I am writing this on a shiny new laptop computer which functions using Windows 7 and speaks to me in English! My previous machine had Windows XP, spoke to me in Czech, and was rapidly dying.

Once more, courtesy of my computer savvy wife, in the past forty-eight hours, the whole contents of my old computer – email, photographs, a vast variety of files – have all been safely transported onto this new machine. There are sure to be a few teething problems as, with Sybille’s encouragement, I’m now drafting this in ‘OpenOffice’ rather than ‘Microsucks Word’. But as far as I am concerned, it certainly is, ‘All change!’

If you like what you see – tell me. If you don’t – please also tell me!

Happy first birthday to my blog!

Prague Rooftops — View across Prague © Ricky Yates

This week, my blog celebrates its first birthday! I published my first blog post on 4^th February 2009. Entitled ‘Episcopal Taxi Service’, it described the events that had taken place in the previous week at the end of January 2009. So now seems a good time to look back over my first year of being a blogger.

In one respect, the blog is more than two years old as my wife Sybille kindly bought my domain rickyyates.com more than a year earlier in December 2007. She did so at the same time as purchasing a domain for my son Phillip to help him promote his skills as a caricaturist. Not only was phillyates.com available but rickyyates.com was too. So she purchased them both as very unusual but highly useful Christmas presents to us both.

When I started the blog, I had two groups of people in mind. One was my family and friends back in the UK who wanted to know how I was getting on in my new home, new job and different circumstances in the Czech Republic. Rather than write individual emails or letters I could say instead, “Just look at my blog”.

My other initial intended audience were my former parishioners in the Shelswell Group of Parishes in North Oxfordshire whom I had served as Rector from January 1993 until September 2008. The Benefice of Shelswell (to give the group of parishes their correct legal name) produces an extremely good monthly magazine entitled ‘Shelswell News’ which is delivered to around two thirds of households in the parishes who in turn, pay £7.00 a year for the privilege of receiving it. In the first few months after my arrival in Prague, I wrote a couple of newsy pieces about my new life in the Czech Republic. However, I was very aware that I could not always continue doing so.

One unwritten, but very important rule for Anglican clergy is that, once you have ceased to be Rector/Vicar of a parish or group of parishes and have moved on to a new post or have retired, you do not interfere or remain involved in any way, in the life of your former parish(es). This is order that your successor can begin their ministry without any outside interference. So in the March 2009 edition of ‘Shelswell News’ I wrote saying, “In future, if you want to know the latest news from Ricky & Sybille in Prague, visit www.rickyyates.com”.

However, I was always conscious that, sooner or later, my new parishioners at St. Clement’s Anglican Episcopal Church, Prague would also find my blog and start reading it. Therefore, after a couple of months, rather than trying to hide it, I decided to add details of it to my ‘email signature’. Now, although hardly any of the congregation ever leaves a comment, I do know that it is quite widely read by congregational members. And yes – I am extremely careful not to say anything rude about any of them!!!!

Over the past twelve months I’ve managed to write 72 posts. On average, that is one every five and a half days – quite an achievement I reckon! Initially I relied on photographs or artwork legitimately downloaded from the internet, to illustrate my posts. Or I asked Sybille to photograph something for me so I could use it on my blog. Or I scanned the relevant item. But in June 2009, I bit the bullet and bought myself a relatively simple point and shoot digital camera and since then, the blog has almost exclusively been illustrated with my own photos. The exception is when I’m in the photo when I have to rely on my wife’s expertise.

I still get frustrated at my inability to quickly turn my thoughts and ideas into blog posts. I’m a stickler both for factual accuracy and correct spelling and getting both right takes time. And, as I’ve commented previously, I also try to spell Czech words, personal names and place names correctly, using the appropriate diacritics only to discover most web browsers turn some of them into ?????. Aagh!!!

My other frustration is the number of people who read my blog but never leave a comment. I do get comments, usually far too many of them. But most are spammers trying to promote online pharmacies, or sites offering pictures of so called ‘celebrities’ in various stages of undress, or comments that bear no relation to my post, trying to build back links to their own dubious websites. When someone clearly has read my post, then even if I don’t necessarily agree with what they say, I approve their comment. But sadly, such comments are few and far between.

Therefore as my blog enters its second year, if you enjoy reading it, don’t be afraid to say so. If you disagree with me or want to amplify what I’ve written, leave a comment. It will help me as I seek to articulate more of my experiences as an expat Anglican clergyman living in Central Europe during 2010.