I think I’m there, now.

With a few more tips -and a LOT of help from Alan, I think I’m able to post on my own this time.
In the interest of helping others who may have been having the same difficulties as me, I am including some of our email exchanges below.

Before I do that, here is another of my recent flower paintings. It’s one of my favorites. at only 8″ x 10″, it’s also one of the smallest I’ve done this year. It’s called Awake at Midnight because that’s pretty much when I painted it. Also, it’s because of the glow of the blossom against the black background.
Most of the paintings in the series have that dark or black background, and they are all mixed blacks, meaning I made the black from combinations of things I already had on my palette. I find black paint straight from the tube to be cold and characterless when used in any volume. Starting with the greens and oranges etc that I already have on my palette, and adding indigo or red or violet as needed, and no actual black paint at all, I can achieve some lovely rich black tones.
In person, the differences are apparent when seen together as a group.
That aesthetic simply does not translate to the photos I can post.
I also notice that here on Bindle, my images appear much softer than they do elsewhere. ::shrug::

Speaking of posting, here is a most of my email conversation with Alan on making that happen:

Alan: Okay, Rose, I decided to give you a little push by publishing this article for you. The reason that you couldn’t publish it before was that you hadn’t inserted the excerpt. The excerpt is used to create the blurb that appears under your featured image when you are articles are posted on the website.  I would like at least two or three lines of copy, but that is up to you. For very short posts, the whole post could be inserted into the excerpt.

Here’s how you do it:  Make sure that you are not in full-screen mode. If you see the black bar on the left side of the screen and you can see the sidebar on the right side, then you are not in full-screen mode.

Scroll down to the bottom of the data entry section, Immediately below that, you should see a box labeled “Excerpt.”  You have to insert something, anything (but nothing obscene, profane or Trumpian) and then the system will let you publish your article.

Hope you don’t mind that I stepped in. Hate to see people getting frustrated.

Rose, not minding a bit: I think I was marginally more successful with your help…I wrote a new post and I think I followed all the directions, but still don’t see it in the feed.
Can you tell what I’m doing wrong, if anything?
(and) Is there a specific category I should use that will allow my posts to appear with everyone else’s?

Alan, who is very patient: Okay, you’re getting it. This time, the only thing you didn’t get just right was the category. This wasn’t really your mistake but rather something I have to figure out a fix for.

When you post an article but you do not select a category yourself, the system automatically chooses the “uncategorized” category. The “uncategorized” category is not included in the categories that appear on the home page so you won’t see it there and since we don’t have an “uncategorized” page, it won’t appear anywhere else either.

I set it up that way so that you have to select a valid category to publish but as I said, that’s more my problem to fix. All you have to do to make sure this doesn’t happen to you is to simply CHOOSE YOUR CATEGORY before you do anything else. In fact, when you try to save a draft it is supposed to demand that you choose a category.

This is great. You are helping me to find the things that will trip other people up.

Rose: Actually, there WAS an “Uncategorized” choice on my screen for the last one I did, and I clicked it, not seeing any category I thought my piece would fit. 

Alan, citing some other information seeing posts: All of the posts appear in chronological order most recent first on the home page. There is a special page for former Open Salon members, but no one seemed to want to use it. If you did, you would be alone there right now. The logic shift that Bindle encourages is to arrange it so that everyone sees everything in the feed. I just checked the feed and, right now, is dated 11/23/2020, which is 23 days’ worth of posts, so if you scroll down the home page every other day you would certainly see everything going back almost a month.

If more people sign on, that might decrease to 48 hours. There are 36-38 posts on the left side of the home page. When the scroll reaches a speed of 36 posts over 48 hours, there would be a new post every 45 minutes.