Tech Stuff: Top Ten Blog Posts 2021

journal
Image by Dariusz Sankowski from Pixabay

In 2021 I published 32 posts on the blog, this was less than in 2020 when I wrote 43 blog posts. Compared to 2019 when I wrote just 18. 

In 2019 none of the top ten posts were written in 2019. This time six of the posts were published in 2020, three were published in 2021 and one was from 2015.

Number ten was from June 2020 when I wrote about our gas metre: How are we using gas overnight with our new smart meter? Having had a smart metre installed, I started to notice that we seemed to be using a fair amount of gas and electricity overnight! This made no sense, as we didn’t have the heating on, no hot water was running and the only electrical device running was the fridge!

In Ninth place was a post from May 2020 about the death of my Pogo printer titled, No more Pogo. I had bought the Pogo back in 2009 and it lasted over ten years. I got a replacement Zip printer last Christmas.

polaroid zip printer

The eighth most popular blog post on the blog was from April 2021 and was a series of images (virtual backgrounds) I wanted to use for online meetings over the summer: Ten Amazing Summer Zoom and Teams Backgrounds.

Sunflowers
Image by Bruno /Germany from Pixabay

At number seven was a post from December 2020 about Using iPad as separate whiteboard in Zoom, which was a follow on post from one I had written about using an iPad in Teams

The sixth most popular blog post was from December 2020, Ten Great Christmas Zoom and Teams Backgrounds. Using the excellent image sites, Unsplash and Pixabay, I put together ten festive images that could be used as backgrounds for Zoom and Teams meetings.

Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash

In July 2021, there I was opening a PowerPoint file from my OneDrive folder when I got this error message: Sorry, PowerPoint can’t read ^0. I couldn’t open any of my files on OneDrive. Having looked around for a solution and to be honest it wasn’t too much help. I did try and reset OneDrive but this didn’t work. I was convinced that this was a permissions issue rather than file corruption or data loss. The file sizes looked fine for example. In the end though I did come up with a solution which I wrote up as a blog post to help others: Solving the Sorry PowerPoint can’t read ^0 error and this was the fifth most popular blog post this year.

Having used the BBC backgrounds for a while and having some photographs when I visited The Harry Potter Studio Tour I decided to share some of the more suitable photos as backgrounds for Zoom and Teams and this was the fourth most popular post on the blog in 2020 and 2021: Harry Potter Teams and Zoom Backgrounds

In third place for the second year running was a post from May 2020, on how the amazing BBC Archive had posted a series of images of empty BBC Television sets across the years to be used as Zoom and Teams Backgrounds.

I used these quite frequently in my Zoom meetings.

Despite new posts and more traffic, the second most popular post on the blog was my post about QR codes on chocolate bars, Cadbury QR Coding and Twirling which has been my number one post for a few years now, so had dropped one place. It was published in 2015 and was one of many posts I published on the use of QR codes back then. Of course the pandemic has seen more usage of QR codes across all aspects of life, from Track and Trace, to ordering food in restaurants.

So the most popular blog post in 2021 was Using iPad as separate whiteboard in Teams. This was a post in response to a tweet on the Twitter.

This inspired me to give it a go and see if I could get it to work and as a result documented the process.

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