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When I visited my parents recently, I sat down with my mother to show her photos on my iPhone.  There were photos from Thanksgiving, from Hanukkah and from my father’s eightieth birthday celebration, along with pictures from back in the summer — some really good shots I took of our family Fathers’ Day brunch in Los Angeles and my nephew’s college graduation dinner.

Although my mother enjoyed the photos, the problem, she says, is that they’re not real.  You can’t touch them, put them in an album, let them gather dust in a closet until you pull them out for special occasions.

I assured her that the photos can be printed and that we would make this happen.

After we got home, I emailed the photos to my wife, who uploaded them to walmart.com.  For about three dollars, Wal-Mart printed them and mailed them out to my parents.

They called…

I thought you were sleeping. It seems silly now, but you must understand, when one sees a person slumped over inside a parked car, the most reasonable conclusion is rarely that the person slumped over is dead. It was the lights from the dashboard that caught my eye. If it weren’t for the lights, I would have missed you completely, and – who knows? – you may still be lying out there, unknowing of the legions of addicts drawn to the verifiable Mecca of caffeine. You’d remain oblivious to the following day’s massive local windstorm and the city’s collective anxiety, followed by elation, when our beloved Seahawks won the big game. You might still be slumped awkwardly over your console, and I suppose your car would be run dry of gas by then, but folks would not be any more observant.

I say it was the lights on your dashboard…

Last year, we looked at the art and science of getting good WordPress support.

Now, let’s jump into some of the more advanced troubleshooting techniques you can use to tackle the trickier problems you might come up against.

Have you heard the old joke:

Patient:Doctor, it hurts when I do this.
Doctor:Then don’t do that!

With advanced troubleshooting it’s exactly the opposite! You want to be able to reliably reproduce your symptoms. Knowing exactly how to recreate the problem will be a huge help in figuring out how to fix it.

Your visual editor isn’t loading! You can’t drag-and-drop widgets! Your sticky posts aren’t sticking!

Finding the cause of a WordPress.com problem is like detective work. You look for clues. You find likely suspects. You narrow down the perpetrators.

The first question to usually ask yourself is: What did I change most recently? Undoing your last action very…

Today is an exciting day! A new version of WordPress for iOS was just pushed live, and it’s been dubbed the “biggest update ever”. It features a completely re-imagined interface for both iPhone and iPad that takes mobile blogging to the next level. It’s most noticeable on the iPad: a sliding panels interface enables you to quickly get to any part of the app and rediscover your content.

New Interface

As soon as you download the app you’re greeted by a new welcome screen that guides you while adding your blog(s) to the app. Once authenticated you’re taken right to the Reader, where you can catch up on the blogs you follow, find topics you like, and now use a friend finder to discover your friends’ blogs on WordPress.com.

On the iPhone you’ll see a list icon in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Tap or swipe to…