Monthly Archives: April 2014

Kijiji Adventures – Mysterious Buyers Lose Interest Quickly

Last year I purchased a new (to me) hard-bottom dingy and dingy tow system. I’m getting ready for spring commissioning and will install my new dingy towing system prior to launch. As a result I decided to try to sell my “old” dingy and davit system.

 

I posted ads on Kijiji and was initially inundated with replies–most wanting me to ship one item or the other to another location far away from me and accept payment by PayPal. Interestingly enough, none of these people wanted to give me a phone number so I could talk directly with them or an address that I could contact them at. Many people who contacted me by email asked questions that were very poorly worded and showed little or no experience with boating.

Kijiji posts warnings about scammers trolling the ads looking for victims. I was quickly getting fed up with bogus inquiries from dishonest people who were looking for a sucker to take advantage of so I changed my ads to say that I would only deal in cash and close sales transactions in person.

Funny how that changed things. Most of those so-called interested people immediately disappeared and the ones who kept communicating with me were legitimately interested. Result – I met a great guy who bought the dingy and have a serious buyer looking (in person) at the davits.

If you are using Kijiji or another on-line service to buy or sell something please take some extra steps to protect yourself from fraud.

Cheers & have a great sailing season!

Wally

 

 

 

Importing Google Blogger Posts to WordPress Site

I have kept a blog since 2010 using Google Blogger. It is very easy to set up and use and I also really like the email posting app that I can use with my iPhone and iPad.

I also set up a web site for SV-Ananda in 2011. Having a web site enabled me to share experiences and information in a different way than the blog platform. Unfortunately, it was cumbersome trying to maintain two distinct sites. I found that through WordPress I could merge the two together and have the best of both worlds.

I am very much a novice at all of this and spend a lot of my time on a steep learning curve. but I have found that there are many people out there sharing their knowledge and experience through a variety of forums and this has been extremely helpful. I hope that by sharing my particular experience on importing my blog will help others.

My blog/website is based on the Weaver II design. After conducting some research I learned that WordPress had a tool specifically for importing postings from Blogger sites. I used this tool to import my blog site into SV-Ananda’s site. It worked very well, importing over 150 blog entries—many of them containing multiple photographs strategically placed within the text. I am very pleased with the results. I have reviewed many of the imported blog pages and found all of them to be virtually exactly as they were originally posted.

My only comment is that the importing tool includes a progress bar that shows how many pages and how many photographs have been imported. The page count showed correctly but the photo count did not and this caused me concern for a while. However, as I stated earlier, so far I have not found any imported pages that are missing photos.

 

Cheers! Wally

 

 

Ananda’s Blog Comes To The Website

I have been keeping a blog and a website since 2010. I was very active in posting to the blog during my cruise through the Great Lakes, down the St. Lawrence River, and through the Maritimes to the Bay of Fundy.

Since that time my blog entries have tapered off – working for a living kept getting in the way, but I occasionally found time to make a few posts.

Now that the website and the blog are merged together I hope that it will be easier to share information and adventures with family and friends.

Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions. I’d love to hear from you.

Wally