Category: Uncategorized

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Uncategorized

Adding PowerPoint presentations to WordPress posts

 

 

It has been quite a while since I’ve written here. A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned to a group who developed a PowerPoint (PP)presentation and presented it to a group live. It was masterfully done, well received and amplified the community served by that group… The credit for this post goes to Volunteer Prince George and the Handy Circle Resources Society.

Before the presentation, they presented the PP to our governance board at Volunteer PG. At the wrap up meeting after, I suggested perhaps we could place the information on our website in a post. It is a WordPress built website, way more active than mine and built for community. To that they asked me ‘How on earth do we do that?’. It’s simple, truth be told. I hope I can explain with this post I will share with them.

First, I went to my plug in directory and installed the plugin ‘Embed Any Object‘ and activated it. This put an ‘add document’ button above a draft post. It’s not limited to PowerPoint files. Enter the ‘Text’ area of the draft. It opens a set of code. Go to the location you wish the document to go. Then press ‘Add Document’. Browse to the document’s location, likely ‘upload’. Find the file and add it to the code section. Return to Visual, you’ll still see the code.

This code is visible in both Visual and text views

You can view before posting to ensure the document displays as intended. When finished writing the post, publish live. That’s the simplest way to put a PP presentation online. Alternatively, the user can upload the PP to an FTP site and embed the post with a specific line of code. As well, but with almost the same amount of technical knowhow, you could upload to YouTube and embed that with yet another plugin. Good luck!

Update: VPG’s dashboard and draft area for posts is set up differently from most WP Dashboards I work with. Likely because they use the new editor of WordPress using a newer style of WP writing blocks. It does not show the buttons on top for plugins. I’ll try to see why, as it’s a basic WordPress thing.

Top row of buttons for activated plugins
When some editing plugins are activated, this row becomes visible, on Edit or new post windows in the original WP Window
Categories
Facebook Groups Pages Uncategorized

Facebook: Build a Page or Group to attract 600 plus members.

Ask me anything to blog about!
I need a subject you want to read. Cannabis again? Something new? Help me decide!

Do you have a Facebook account? That’s step one.

Do you have questions about Facebook Pages and Groups? You likely belong to at least one if you’re on Facebook, perhaps even one I manage. This post hopefully will be completed in time to secure a ‘Social Media Worker‘ position that I applied for, could work for a service promoting website accessibility and inclusion. I have so much to learn myself. I’m a lifer in the school of life. Below in the image is step 2 of creating a Page or a Group on Facebook.

would you like a Facebook Page or a Group?
You can start a Facebook page or a group. Learn about them through my links!

Creating the Page or Group

My groups on Facebook are Private, I have one for an MS Peer Support Group I facilitate in the actual world. Speaking of that, I have a link for my MS Walk 2022, that you may want to help me find a cure. It’s linked to another page I manage for my local MS Walk. Thank you in advance. Back to FB. The Groups can be public too, but that often can’t be manged efficiently as it attracts trolls which are difficult to control. One use of Facebook is to collect donations for non-profits. I mange a business page for the Handy Circle Resources Society and the Prince George Mental Health Consumer’s Council you can view. Some funding for our programs and events comes from and through Facebook and other social media. Groups can be attached to pages to become powerful, or they can stay independent of a page. A website could also be added, perhaps for a business or supporting nonprofit. Kind of like how this website links to my social media feeds, including my page for this blog. It has no Groups attached. You likely just have one focus. That’s overall better for a business or the not so dedicated Facebook addict. Find a niche. My most popular Group involved Cannabis (naturally lol), started back when it was called Marijuana, infected with Reefer Madness and attracted a lot of attention in Canada, particularly from Facebook and the law. I started it as a local community page at first, but it quickly grew to include Canada focusing on Northern BC. The ‘Legend in my Mind‘ figured I was a frontrunner in bringing legalization to Canada.

Once it’s created, fill it with content.

It’s not enough to just post randomly and expect people to join. Yea, they’ll still join but not frequently and you can sit on it for years with just over 200 members, people joining and leaving no matter how interesting your content, never talking. Some attract trolls with certain subjects and themes as the only conversations you encourage, time to change writing styles unless you run a protest page or group, but even then Facebook has its own standards of conduct. Establish rules for your Group or Page before the first member joins. Make the environment feel welcome and secure to joiners, establish a rapport with your members as they join too, stay and perhaps in a scheduled ‘Welcome to my Group’ post perhaps once a week or more depending on frequency of new members. This will help them post and comment and stay loyal to your Page or Group.

Page and Group Management

Will you have just one person as ‘Admin’ or would you fill each roll with another person? How do you encourage conversation from your Group? Do you promote inclusion? Have you read the ‘Help’ posts on Management? All Staff should study the pages Facebook offers, study them before creating for your best chance of success. This is a good read on the normal web. After that, once members chat, their friends will join. Well, there’s a better chance of that, anyway. It is sustainable and will feed your interest greatly. No guarantees, but even without the website attached, it could attract the number you want by being interesting and well managed. Oh yea, another way to build inclusion and community participation in FB Groups is with Rooms and Video Calls inviting the entire community to a ‘private’ chat that is secure.

 

Categories
Cannafood Food food services Hemp industrial Cannabis Uncategorized

Food- Cannabis potential

Food non-Cannabis

So for the last post on Cannabis I’ll write it’ll be on its most basic use and likely the most important use. Food. We all need to eat. Not only do we need to eat, the food must be wholesome and filled with nutrients. Most food today meets that criteria but something genetically altered and suspected much of that to cause many ills in consumers. The consumers are also the domestic animals we eat, like bovine and sheep, pigs. Pesticides meant to kill pests infused within the growing plant and more chemicals to preserve the food so it’s fresh on the table are suspected of making more and more people sick. Returning to basic farming to provide local vegetables and other produce with none of the added chemicals or preservatives and livestock and fowls fed organically to local Farmers markets and to feed their families makes sense. Consumers have a choice and local is reputably better. Cannabis should be available there, imho as it is grown locally. Did you know cannabis oils both activated and raw can be infused into or onto any food and many recipes replacing butter and blended into most, if not all beverages? It is a healthy additive in pure form.

Farmers market clipart picture, great place to find food
Farmers markets are full of healthy food. Imagen is  downloaded from ‘https://favpng.com/’. Sign up for tons of graphics free.

 

Cannabis, the diet for wellness

Well, a Cannabis plant starts as a seed, which in itself is food. It can also make a beverage, a ‘Nut Milk‘. Its use into other products like fuel for your vehicles creates an editable Hemp Seed Cake for humans and animals both domestic and ferial. That seed is full of everything an animal IE the human animal could need in nutrition and minerals. But it’s not the only part to eat. The whole plant, both genders, can be eaten from the roots & stalk to leaf and Cola.

None of it will make you high unless it’s a female plant, and the Cola is prepared ahead of time by Decarbing, which removes an acid molecule that prevents the psychotropic effects of Cannabis, and CBD (Cannabidiol) Oil will not make you high even after Decarbing. For medicine, it’s only part of the complete picture. The plant defines what it means to be sustainable for our use, fast growing, versatile/diverse in its use providing employment for generations of humans from seed to consumer with thousands of end products helping communities and individuals.

The End?

Not for Cannabis for sure, the plant has no end except winter when it must go dormant, being a fair weather plant outdoors. This is November, don’t forget. It is the last planned post focused on Cannabis, but many will be written heavily influenced by it. If you want to see more posts on it, or have questions about anything I wrote on a previous post, please contact me below and I thank you in advance. Any other family safe subject you may want me to research (*with Google of course) just ask or suggest it and I’ll write about it in a future post. Refer to my Privacy Policy for your assurance of confidentiality

 

Categories
Uncategorized

Be active

Get Moving… Be active

A little diversion from my usual posts, but a slight mention of Cannabis can’t be avoided.  For many it helps to build an active life.  I’m speaking about putting one foot in front of the other.  Walking.  Left foot, right foot, repeat.  Many health professionals across the nation will recommend a walk often, well at least will not recommend sitting behind a desk for hours even writing a blog post.  The word for that is ‘a sedentary lifestyle‘ and it’s not recommended.  Well if your doctor does recommend a sedentary lifestyle, find a new doctor!  Get Active!

Benefits of an active life

The health benefits of an active life are numerous and diverse.  The community you live in benefits when it’s residents and visitors can get out and about, people are usually more productive after they walk.  It benefits with reduced health care costs for many problems.  Less wear and tear on roads often leads to reduced infrastructure costs.  Who’da thought wearing out shoe leather with an active life would save your community money?  The facts about productivity prompts your employer to encourage you to step outside and take a walk.  Your personal wellness is improved with a regular walk.  A walk in nature impacts mental health positively, more so than a walk on a city block but both are good for all your ails.

Ignore the car, walk not to far

Perhaps not to the Bar…  The distance you walk is not all that important a destination could be an incentive.  An active lifestyle leads a healthy life.  Perhaps your property manager, your job or your household makes you consume ‘smokables’ like Cannabis or Tobacco outside.  That’s a short walk, ability to live in a residence is a great incentive imho.  An apartment and business might have a smoking area away from a building.  A house often sits on a block and a ‘Participaction‘ focus I saw years ago recommended a simple ‘walk around the block’.  I call it stinking up my neighborhood no one seems to mind my smoke as long as it’s out there!  A fun activity is counting your steps.  Count my steps?  What’s that?

Healthy apps

One way to keep any fitness goal you have is to count how many steps you take per day.  You could have a wearable device, like the famous “fitbit“.  A wearable device imho is better than an app on your phone as it stays with you during all the steps of your active life, can also accurately chart your sleep.  Some can count calories as well as other healthy activities.  I use a trio of apps on my phone.  Your phone may have one preinstalled, I’ve got a Samsung and Samsung Health includes a basic Pedometer among other functions.  Google has one called “Google Fit” which yea, does the same and more.   Carrot is one I’ve used for over a decade, actually it went dormant for a while and changed some features to become better. Download and use the recently upgraded app formerly called  ‘Carrot Rewards‘ today available from the App and Play Store!  If you do that, it’s best to sync all your activity apps together with an app like ‘Health Sync‘.  Health Sync is not exactly free though, but a nominal one time fee of $3.79cdn can be paid or a recurring 0.99 charge every 6 months will let you use it forever.

 

I'm active. You could be too.
Weekly accomplishments 99.9% of humans with any ability can achieve!
Categories
Biofuel Food Hemp industrial Cannabis land needed Lumber Uncategorized Weeducation

Cannabis Potential part 3 B

This is:

Where do we grow all this Cannabis?  Part ‘B’

Uses

Fuel

We suspect that Cannabis could reduce our dependence on “Big Oil“, with just one use. Some call it a wasteful use, as there is information out there that claims a ton of dry biomass is burned to produce about 80 US Gallons of Gasoline type fuel and a pile of charcoal is produced referring to Cannabis Fuel. The charcoal for that purpose is 100% useful as fertilizing material for new plants. They could also use it in heating to replace coal use, being very similar but being wasteful and not worth thinking about. Same as for capacitor use where Carbon Graphite (from the remains of burned Cannabis fibre) rods makes the components of that device. However, that is not how hemp biofuel is made, that thinking is archaic and reminiscent of a Refer Madness infection.  Any vegetation could be our Biomass, but in this example, our Biomass is Cannabis DBA Hemp. The pluses outweigh the negatives as far as I can see, just the seeds are used with the oils squeezed out. This produces a ‘cold-pressed seed cake’. This Seed Cake is entirely editable, it’s sold as domestic animal feed but it is edible for us as well. The fuel itself is non-toxic and can be consumed, but is said to be unpleasant in taste. Alcohol is stronger and less toxic than rubbing alcohol. A spill would be good for the environment, fertilizing soils, leading to the next part where Cannabis will help.

The Forest Industry

It could replace the need to rape the forests industrially as another use. Today, industry replants pure stands of Pine and Spruce trees after clearcutting, creating firestorms that grow humongous and endanger communities. It eradicated deciduous trees and shrubs with prejudiced practices done by industry that threaten natural forests.  Feral animals are nature’s tools, the shrubs are berries and other seed-bearing plants planted by nature in the circle of life. Nature is out of balance. Any non conifer plant growing near a ‘treated pure stand’ is growing in pesticide residue, is usually deformed and is toxic to life. It struggles to exist in a pure stand. We do need big industry to step out of the forests for at least one generation of humans. But… We use forests for recreation, we use forests for employment.  We use the resources the forest produces in construction, paper products, school projects, hygiene (toothpicks) and way more, even in some very wasteful ways, like toilet paper. With Cannabis: Hempcrete, Hemp Lumber, Hemp Paper, Hemp Toilet Paper, napkins and more paper products, no toxic chemicals needed.  Everything wood can be replaced by a Hemp product. In fact, all that can be safely tossed when its useful life ends.  It returns to the soil a lot faster than wood. Most won’t have been preserved in toxic chemicals. Every product employs an army in a sustainable workforce, from seed to consumer. There is much more it can do, I could describe Plastic and Food, The problems with Batteries and a Capacitor, which is all it can be at present, but I won’t in this post. I hope it inspired you to do some research and expand your ‘Weeducation‘. It isn’t always learned in the first puff. The Industrial end of things is a whole other class in the school of Weeducation  Thank you for following so far. Hope you’ve been paying attention. Keep reading for Cannabis Potential part 3-c, it needs not cut into agricultural land, well fertile soils overall excluding ferial… Subscribe if you haven’t yet.  Next week that post will be uploaded.

Categories
Uncategorized

Education-Lessons learned…

Education.  Bleh.  Even I can learn lessons.  Yea. I’m Supposed to be ‘educating you’ with the blog.  More education. OK, Teachers themselves can make mistakes with education and we’re all teachers for sure, we are always learning too. I do not consider myself a ‘Professional’ in the field respectively just because I have a blog, that profession I respect. That does not mean I cannot teach. A fish cannot learn to climb a tree, but the simplest of creatures can teach others of the same or other species how to do new things, sharing new knowledge in a familiar medium. This includes the human collective. We all accept education in unique ways. Right now I’m focused on the Cannabis thing, but I’ll need you to ask questions in your comments to inspire new posts, or deeper into the posts I write. This is education for me, then hopefully education for you. I will limit those as I see interests sway, or perhaps put new series inspired by you on a new schedule of posts or adventures in my MS’ed-up life! Thank you for staying tuned. Just spent the day installing server-recommended plugins changing the seat (always read server emails of support and follow simple instructions) is my first lesson if I don’t have to upgrade vi emails warning me of the restrictive limits * Limits Exceeded* sorry if you got that message sometimes.  They are very touchy on a basic ‘shared’ account. I’ve got a feeling I’ll be learning a lot through this host and the info for your questions, a part of my education.

Ok for my future reference and your knowledge, here is my server-recommended list of plugins I recommend and I used them successfully while sitting on this host.  Note, some if not used, will generate intensive sales pressure for site upgrades as a ‘Shared Domain’ can affect other sites on the host when approaching server limits.

    • WP Force SSL Should have installed this one first but it’s now a recent upgrade to this website and an update to this post.  I began this site with an unsecured ‘HTTP’ domain.  HTTPS is the standard today, if you sell anything you are much more likely to have a dedicated selection of visitors not shy about buying from you.  It is way more secure.  This plugin took about 24 hrs to completely transfer all my pages, posts, pictures and files to the HTTPS domain, all I had to do was sit back and wait.
    • Akismet Anti-Spam This plugin keeps your site free of spam, hackers looking to break into my website’s inner workings and typically ruin your visit here by placing spam comments. Search for it in your WordPress Plugin directory.
    • AMP This plugin manages your small browser when you view my posts on your cellphone or mobile device.  Designed for developers down to site owners with less experience than me, it’s very simple to install and use.  It installs another theme to host an identical accessible version of your website.  Search for it in your WordPress Plugin directory.
    • Broken Link Checker This powerful plugin scans your website for links that are broken.  Sometimes site owners change their sites from ‘HTTP’ to ‘HTTPS’ which is a more secure domain setting. Sometimes site owners change site names.  Often their site goes down sometimes permanently.  You linked to those sites from somewhere in your ramblings and without this plugin Google gives you a bad report for broken links that you have to manually find in perhaps a thousand ‘Text Links‘ a very simple way to add to your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).  As soon as you notice the bad link through the report, you search for a new one if it exists and repair remove your link before Google notices.  Your website’s integrity is safe. Search for it in your WordPress Plugin directory.
    • Classic Editor.  In Late 2019 or early 2020, WordPress auto installed the Gutenberg Upgrade with version 5.5 for all the dashboards hosting a WordPress website.  Some users like myself and perhaps you are unfamiliar with ‘Block’ style writing found in this upgrade.  This plugin allows the writing field to look familiar to old time users like me. Search for it in your WordPress Plugin directory until 2022, it could be supported past then if needed and we support it.
    • Creative Email by Constant Contact is my mass mailer, automatically sending my posts to you who subscribe to the website, when it is written.  Look for it in your WordPress Plugin directory
    • Jetpack.  This is a very powerful multifunction plugin created by WordPress.com.  It is a ‘must have’ plugin for your WordPress website.  Defiantly install this first before other plugins; easily found in your Plugin’s directory.
    • Loginizer This plugin secures your site against Brute force attacks as its main goal but has other security features you should have.  It is free in your WordPress Plugin directory.
    • Smush This plugin was suggested by my server.  It takes your images and compresseses them to sizes your shared server doesn’t complain about and enables you to stay within limits imposed by your ‘affordable’ server.  It can also be found within your plugin Directory and does so much more
    • UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore This is a plugin I’ve used for many years.  It backs up my website and some others I manage using WordPress.  Very reliable with the backups and quick restores, even when transferring hosts which I’ll try on the next host in just over 2 years.  Make it your second installation of a plugin, backups are so very important to do.
    • W3 Total Cache.  Every time your website is viewed by a ‘Unique’ user, it uses resources of the server.  If the page is not stored in memory each visit is ‘new’.  With an influx of visitors it can overwhelm servers and visitors, search engine traffic can get error pages throughout all the websites on the server.  It is imperative to Cache your webpages and posts which makes your website more attractive and smoother for all visitors.  This was the other one recommended by my server who also mentioned one I already had above, I think it was Jetpack.
    • Just added Yoast SEO, a plugin I discovered on my last host and remembered as I put it on the other WordPress websites I manage.  It makes good authors better by adding SEO reminders to posts and pages as you write or edit them.  Better SEO with focused and high ranking keywords some linked, better rankings at search engines!  It is free in your WordPress Plugin directory.  Hey- I just remembered a post I wrote on SEO as one of the first ones on this server, I’ll have to link it here to remember to update it! 

That concludes the plugins I recommend so far.  I’ll take this opportunity to say ‘Thank You’ to my server for leading me to those plugins.  Which ones do you use and what do they do?  Comment on my post below, perhaps subscribe as well!  My site will change from the Cannabis theme after a short series finishes.  OK, here’s an Image for SEO…

Clouds in the sky
A nice summer late-morning shot. What can you see in the clouds? Some say a dog. Educate yourself by studying the sky. That’s education?

 

Categories
Biofuel British Columbia Canada Cannafood Food Hemp industrial Cannabis Prince George Uncategorized

Cannabis in history potential part one

Mixed feral stand of Cannabis common in history
Back in history, this could be a prehistoric scene of life before it crawled ashore.

History

Cannabis was perhaps the first plant in history on the planet. That’s just a thought in my mind, perhaps alone again. No one knows for certain when plant life grew on earth first or which plant, but it came long before and grew before any animal came ashore and crawled upon the rocky or early sandy beaches. It fed on the new, toxic to the first life on earth gas filling the atmosphere, oxygen. The animals and oxygen-breathing fish came ashore in search of air, freedom of mobility and perhaps another creature for a multitude of reasons. They might consume the other who may have been looking for seeds or another creature to consume, or to mate with a like species creature, perhaps dropping eggs or birthing on land. With an educated guess, many of them began fertilizing the rocky shores with faecal matter, exiting the slimy froth of the edges and inland of land outcroppings, creating soils for early plant life, expanding the land surface in part. What we suspect with another educated guess is that Cannabis would have preceded animal life on solid land. Its seeds contain all the nutrients animal life would need when they arrived. The nature of the plant is to terraform soil, kind of like dandelions, so probably it preceded other plants. It contains a high concentration of all the essential nutrients needed for life. It likely prepared soils for the first plants too, the first trees, the first animals and ‘land fish‘ to feed on the seeds and green fibres of the first generation plants, or the animals that consumed them. Consequentially, most life today has endocannabinoid receptors which accept cannabinoids from the plant. Eons after that, society was forming communities. They employed cannabis in many human rituals, plus making hempen materials to prosper and explore the planet. Rope, for example, sails way more on land, which includes homes and meals. We learned long ago how to separate the genders of the plant for medicinal and religious effects (all female for the stuff of ‘Reefer Madness‘ Sorry for that link, a reminder of the “RM” years that we cannot forget for fear we repeat) and the value of a mixed stand now called ‘Industrial Cannabis’, not Hemp while growing but it creates a ‘Hempen’ end product once harvested either as seed or fibre or even both.

One use for Industrial Cannabis is Fuel

Around the time 1899 turned 1900 on January 1st & during the decades to come, Henry Ford was building vehicles out of Cannabis and fueling them with the plant. The man sold his vehicles amid the early electric vehicles that were threatening to take over the auto market. He had the idea people could grow Industrial Cannabis to power his internal combustion engine (ICE). Those thoughts swayed away before 1945, likely because of advisory board decisions. We began the short run to today’s environmental problems that we see no end to, thanks to fossil fuels being damaging from extraction to consumption. We should return to that biofuel to phase out the internal combustion engine and the EV takeover. Predictions have it phased out of most nations by 2040. Certainly, by 2100, we may all be using autonomous electric vehicles, which are a combination of technologies developing individual power sources for all our power needs, individual to national will power. That dream is in another post I’ll make. We have so much more awareness now about clean renewable energy. Is it hype to think that can solve our problems? Not in my thoughts and many thinkers like a forward-thinking corporation in my community. This one function is temporary as the ICE may fade into human history in a predictable future, although perhaps as a heating oil that use will continue. The fuel is multipurpose, non-toxic, but unpleasant to consume. A spill would actually help the environment, fertilizing the soil for other plants. It’s not the only thing Cannabis can do. Stay tuned, and subscribe for more!

 

Categories
Uncategorized

Search Engine Optimisation

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

It’s also called SEO.  You build a site.  That site has pictures, it has video, it has a theme.  You build it so people see it.  Simple huh?  Not really.  If you write what people are searching for, more search engines like Google, Bing and others which crawl your website and link the keywords the visitor writes to it.  The better your SEO, the higher you rank at the search engine your potential visitor uses.  The higher the rank, the more visits you will get.  More visits equals more return from your investment of a website, perhaps sales.

 

Why do we use SEO?

As hopefully explained above, the more visits your website gets the more its value increases. You can tell folks in your local community perhaps with expensive advertising without any knowledge of SEO, you will only get visits from a local community as far as the advertising reaches and they may or may not like what you offer affecting your investment negatively.  However with awareness of SEO style writing the search engines will drive global traffic your way, but the traffic that will make your investment positive as it’s targeted

How do we use SEO?

Again, hopefully as explained above, SEO style writing for your pictures in Alt Text, your first paragraph of text on the website which is used as a “snippet” at the search engine to attract the visitor who sees your link and the first part of your text.  The first 100 characters should be written Keyword Rich, and a focus keyword is needed to increase rankings in posts.  But how do you find keywords?  Simple.  Use a Keyword Research tool, found by searching at popular search engines, or other blog posts linked.

Will you see an increase in traffic?

Chances are much better.  I cannot promise you’ll rank high on your first website.  Best I made was 8th down the list on a Google Search, on my last host.  Not much traffic did I get but on my last host I had an average number of hits (below 100 to be honest) per week, it was steady daily traffic though and lots of subscribers.  My bad, I would do an average of a post every 6 months over 5 years.  Those have to be more frequent in a Blog style website to keep up SEO integrity.  Different hosts and hosting packages can help too but the main factors are using keyword rich text and having a good reputation online and live when dealing with visitors.  Good luck, keep up your integrity and be loyal to your visitors.

The River
Added for SEO, Pictures are great tools!

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