I don’t often blog about blogging on this blog, that’s a bit meta for me (I do it on my Do It Anyway blog instead) but I thought it would be good to mention the best reward I’ve had for writing words and inserting pictures around them recently.
Travel back in time to July 2014, getting on for approaching two years ago now, and I had some serious trouble with my Kindle. It wouldn’t connect to the WiFi, which meant that everything I had on it was all I could have on it. That wasn’t really suitable because whilst I love A Song of Ice and Fire, there are only so many times you can read it. Fortunately doing a factory reset sorted the issue out… for a week. I then encountered a second and more complicated problem, the factory reset option stopped working. On a Kindle there isn’t a hole you poke a pin into for a factory reset, it’s simply a software menu option. I could select it but it didn’t work.
After many hours searching for a resolution to the problem, I found it buried deep within a forum discussion on some tangential Kindle issue. It worked and I was so chuffed I decided to write a blog post about it in case anyone else had the same problem and lacked the OCD like obsession to keep on searching.
That post was called Reset to Factory Defaults won’t work on my Kindle and since I posted it, I’ve had almost 50,000 page views on it, averaging nearly 80 views a day. I’ve had over 100 comments on it but recently I had one that really made my day:
Oh my god you have just saved my dad £90… I have searched everywhere to try and find out why his kindle wouldn’t connect to the wifi any more, wouldn’t do a factory reset etc etc. and I am no techy newbee but I was tearing my hair out.
2 minutes on your site and Bingo it’s all up and running again. So simple My dad is 83 and loves his kindle but £90 is a lot of money by anyone’s standards.
Thank you so much you are a star
The idea that I helped some octogenarian read the books he wants to without having to fork out another £90 made my day. Call me overly whimsical but at it’s best blogging is about making a difference. It doesn’t have to be about sinking wells in Africa, sorting out homelessness or world peace, it can be saving ordinary people a few quid. I’ve probably cost Amazon over £10,000 in Kindle sales to date, but you can’t have it all!