Today I solved a problem that has been bugging me for over a year. That’s a big deal. I can guarantee than you won’t think it’s a big deal but this is MY diary. There is a lot of testing and tweaking that goes into finding a payment button that converts like crazy. The colour of the text. Should it be underlined? What should the “call to action” text be? Click here? Click to buy? Add to cart? It isn’t always the option that seems obvious that works the best. How big should the button be? Should it have a border? Does putting an image of the product actually ON the button help conversions?

Finding the answers to this shit is like gold dust. One of the big factors proved to be the size of the payment button. The optimum size for my site proved to be 500 pixels. Excellent! Job done. Well, not quite. I use an excellent responsive Wordpress theme for my sites. If you have a large image on the site that would be too big to view on a mobile phone it will automatically resize it. However it wasn’t resizing the Paypal button. When you create a Paypal button on their site you fill out all the details of your product and there is the option to use a custom image. When you have filled out all the options you are given some HTML code that you insert into your website.

I figured I just needed to make a change in the code. I know a fair amount about HTML and CSS code but as I teach myself what I need to know at the time I need to know it I wasn’t able to work this one out. I posted a question on Paypal’s support forum months ago but never had a reply. After a few weeks of trying to find a solution I gave up and left it with the huge button on the desktop site that was far too big when displayed on a mobile. Google don’t like things like that and from time to time I had emails from them saying my site was not mobile friendly. Just because of the size of the Paypal button. That affects your google ranking as the primary device these days that your site has to work on is the smartphone. Eventually even Google gave up and the ranking improved but it still bugged me.

So today I decided to try again. Maybe I had received a reply to my support question. I went onto the forum and searched for the issue. Just 1 topic matched my situation. AHHH this guy has the same problem as me! “This guy” turned out to be me. it was the thread that I had started all those months before. No one had replied.

I looked for other solutions. Maybe there was a “container block” that would make adjustments to whatever you put inside it. Nope. Then I tried googling for ways to hide items on your page depending on what device was being used. I found a couple of methods but couldn’t get them to work. I tried searching for a Wordpress plugin that would let me choose what devices a content block displayed on. Found one! Conditional Blocks. It lets you choose what devices a block is displayed on. So now I have a 500 pixel button that only shows on a desktop or laptop and a 300 pixel button for mobiles and tablets. I was a little irritated that I didn’t find this solution months ago but you need the correct terms before a search will give you what you want.

I told you that you wouldn’t think it was a big deal. If you are still reading you really are desperate for things to read!

I didn’t have a lot planned for the day. I looked at the tennis matches available and saw a couple that looked interesting. The Pliskova sisters were in an exhibition with Strycova and Vondrousova. The first match was Karolina Pliskova against Strycova. Pliskova hadn’t played since February so there was a chance she would be a little rusty. She lost her opening service game and Strycova held hers for a 2-0 lead. Perfect. I backed Pliskova. She wasn’t that convincing but did break back for 3-3. Strycova was broken when serving at 5-6. I hedged. Pliskova took a 5-0 lead in the second set and won 7-5, 6-1.

We’re not going round to the neighbour’s garden for a BBQ on Sunday. We will have it in our own gardens like the last one. They will probably also have the music blaring away like last time but at least I can bugger off and watch some football.

I took the dogs out around 11 pm. I bumped into someone from our street. She was with her daughter who I think is around 12 and they had their dog with them. Charlie hates their dog. When they first got this dog he had been days away from being put down for being aggressive. They didn’t get the dog neutered. Some neutered males will react aggressively to an intact male, especially when there are females around. Charlie was never bothered by intact males until we got Molly. Since then he acts like he wants to kill the other male. Apparently “doggy daycare” places don’t allow intact males as they cause fights.

I think the smell is enough to trigger the neutered male but this woman has not got a clue about dogs. She walks it with the dog out in front of her. This makes the dog think that he is the boss. This dog is very dominant and her lack of knowledge had made it worse. As they came round the corner their dog’s ears went up and he squared up to Charlie. His tail was wagging rapidly which in this situation is not a friendly gesture. If you ever see dogs fighting their tails will be wagging like crazy. He was challenging Charlie. Charlie just can’t ignore a challenge. Molly is a very calm dog. She will never start trouble but if Charlie ever kicks off, 1 second later she is backing him up.

The woman was pissed out of her skull. That left her daughter to hang on to their dog. I moved my two out into the middle of the road so we could go past. Other than Charlie’s barking and growling I was able to get past pretty calmly. I lifted Charlie’s front legs off the floor which reduces the traction he can get. As we moved round the corner and a little further up the road I saw that there were people in the pub’s outdoor seating area. This woman HAD been to the pub. I have suspected for a while that the pub was serving regulars. They have a large outdoor covered seating area and the lights have been on every night since the pubs were shut. I thought that perhaps it was just the landlord and his family but more recently I have heard more people there. The woman with the dog is best mates with our neighbour who wanted us to go round for the BBQ. You can never know how strictly people have stuck to the rules of social distancing.

Stay safe.

 

Over the last couple of days we have had a bit of a problem with ants. We have been in this house something like 15 years or more and have never had ants. Two mornings in a row they have been all over the kitchen floor. None on the worktops and there were more of them in the corner by the fridge and the kitchen table. Sue hangs her work bag and also her handbag on the chairs in that corner. The first morning there weren’t as many so I hoovered them up. The next morning there were a LOT more. I made sure the dogs were shut in the living room and poured boiling water on them. The ants, not the dogs.

When Sue came downstairs I told her about there being more ants. She wasn’t paying too much attention. I asked her if she could check her work bag for bits of food or crumbs. I’m pretty sure she heard me though I didn’t see her check them. Last night before she went to bed she took her drink bottle that she takes to work from her work bag and put it on the work top next to the sink. I went into the kitchen a couple of minutes later and there were ants all over the work top and all over the drinks bottle. How could she not have seen that? The bottle was sticky.

I cleaned everything checking for ants and got rid of them all. I expected to see a load more this morning but I found just 1. It was clearly the drinks bottle that was attracting them. After the first morning of finding them I ordered some ant baits and ant spray from Amazon. They have arrived this afternoon. I don’t need them now but at least I will be ready for them the next time Sue leaves a sticky drinks bottle in her work bag.

I had another attempt at ordering some gravel for the front garden. It really shouldn’t be this hard. I can get some if I want to pay the best part of 200 quid. I don’t and even some of those companies require me to have a forklift to unload their truck. Do I have a forklift truck? You know what? I don’t think I do.

The companies who can deliver with a crane are out of stock. It’s been 2 and a half months! Surely everyone who wanted to do their gardens have done them by now! If I get just one more sarcastic comment from Sue about half a job I might just pay the 200.

We had a discussion about the BBQ. I’m a little surprised that she wants to go round there. She said that she hadn’t agreed to it. She kept with that story even when I pointed out that I had heard her agree to it at the weekend. She also let slip that the neighbour was wanting me to do the cooking. Yeah, nothing has been agreed.

I made an earlier than normal trip to Tesco. It was about 1 pm and the queue wasn’t bad at all. In fact when I had finished the shopping half an hour later there were 3 people in the queue to get in. I hope they keep this system a lot longer.

Sue has been stressed about an incident at work. One of the nurses can be a bit of a bully at times and had treated a patient badly and yelled at Sue and her workmate. She was also heard later telling another nurse that Sue and her colleague were not working well that day. Sue doesn’t handle criticism well at the best of times but I have to say when it comes to her work she is even more conscientious than me.

When she told me about it I advised her to report it. She would normally come up with a million and one reasons why there was no point reporting it but I got through to her this time. Then she spent another day fretting about whether or not she did the right thing. She fell asleep in the garden last night so I legged it for a bit of peace.

Stay safe.