By the way, if you are using Firefox, the new image gallery format may not be showing. I don’t know why, as it’s working properly in every other browser I tested. I tried clearing my cache, re-started Firefox, and even rebooted my machine, but it didn’t refresh properly for me. What finally worked–duh–was to close out all my tabs, then clear the cache.
Category: Meta
Adventures in Coding
I’ve been tearing my hair out, trying to figure out why all the captions for the final image in every post were flush up against the following paragraph. No matter how many paragraph or hard breaks I stuck in the damned things, there was still no space between the two lines. O gross! That’s the sort of thing that would make the baby Shelly cry.
It occurred to me, after fiddling with it for nearly an hour, to try sticking a couple of hard breaks inside the end center tag. I don’t know why it worked, but it did. Weird!
Sod’s Law
And, of course, once I find a tolerable theme that has already been ported to Coppermine, and after I finish massaging it into something I can more or less live with, I think to check it in IE, where it is all kinds of b0rked. Damn! The lovely sidebar, which ought to be along the side (duh!), is down at the bottom. Gaaah! I hate IE!
Teh Ugly
I apologize for the real-time fiddling, but I just didn’t feel like creating a whole new back end directory to play in. Anyway, I’m surely not finished yet. There are some things I really like about a few of the themes I’ve been playing with, but every damned one of them has a deal breaker of one sort or another. For example, this one. I’m not super keen on the blogroll being uncategorized, or the fact that all the sidebar junk is at the bottom, but I have to say, I do really like the rest of it. Only, it does not go with my image gallery. And y’all know how I feel about sans serif fonts. Yes, I could alter that, but unless I’m totally in love with the theme otherwise, I’m not going to bother.
I thought I’d found a WordPress theme I liked that had–miracle of miracles!–been ported to Coppermine. Obviously, that would have been too easy. There was some sort of error in the Coppermine files that was beyond my ability to figure out. Crap.
Another theme I really liked was missing a blog roll. I added one, and it worked but the formatting was wonky. Same with a calendar (which I’ve decided is indispensable, as it prompts me to be less lazy). Another had something seriously wrong with the archives, and I wasn’t able to fix the problem.
I’m not going to find something I like straight out of the box, obviously, but I’d like it to at least not have structural problems with the code. I can slap a coat of paint on it, but I cannot rebuild the foundation, if that makes sense.
So, I’m still hunting, and the periodic moments of ugly or even flat-out not working are likely to continue. So, if you get a blank screen or a bunch of code, you know that I broke something. I’ll fix it or switch it back to another ugly-but-functional theme ASAP.
Technical Note
My web hosts are supposedly in the process of upgrading their MySQL servers (if you haven’t noticed, access has been painfully slow lately). This should improve server response time. They’ll be doing the upgrade to the server where my domain is hosted on Monday morning. They say there will be about a 15 minute window when my site will be inaccessible. I think they are probably being overly optimistic, but who knows? Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised.
So, if you have trouble getting here on Monday, that’s why.
Okaythen! As you were, comrades!
Light Housekeeping
I spent most of the afternoon playing around with CSS and reorganizing my genealogy website. It’s tedious work, so when the mood strikes, it’s best to go with it. I found a gorgeous CC licensed image to use as a banner, which is what set me off. It was taken in County Galway, not Mayo, but they are both in the west country, so I decided to use it anyway.
And, of course, the reorganization means that the family tree page I posted last night has been moved.
Goin to Minnesota, BRB
Well, not right this minute. We’re leaving Saturday morning. I have a metric buttload of stuff to get done between now and then, though, so blogging may be light to non-existent until I get back.
I’m not dead, yet!
I was just playing around some more with Google Earth. StatCounter uses WhoIs to give geographic locations for each visitor, based on the location of their ISP. It then taps into Google Earth, allowing you to see a map of who is posting from where. Or that’s the basic theory. It’s not quite that straightforward, though, so don’t panic, thinking that I or anyone else can hunt you down! For example, I’m located in southern Indiana, but my IP address maps to Louisville, Kentucky. I assume that’s where my ISP’s main office is located. Except, I just looked at the Google Earth satellite map, and I appear to be posting from a cemetery.
I’m not dead, yet!
Flickr
My Flickr Pro account expired today, so everything has reverted to freebie account status. I’m seriously tempted to ditch Flickr completely, because they are tied to the heinous Yahoo-SBC-AT&T megacorporateclusterfuck. Every interaction I’ve had with AT&T has been worse than the last, so I’m really not interested in giving another penny to them or to any company they have assimilated.
On the other hand, Flickr is a great networking opportunity. On the other-other hand, I’m not using it to its advantage, so why bother? And, it’s not like I need the web space, because my host provides a metric butt load of it.
(Guess what? It’s 9:59 pm and it sounds like Mr. Upstairs is finally getting out of bed. This means he should be hitting the treadmill by about 2am. The treadmill is, I may or may not have previously mentioned, directly above my bed. I have to get up at 4am. That’s not gonna happen if he wakes me up again. I know that, because every day this week I’ve slept through my alarm and been about 30 minutes late for work. I expect I’ll be late tomorrow, too. I ought to send him a bill for missed work hours.)
Speaking of Stats and Whatnot
Have y’all heard of Track Me Not? I hadn’t, until today. It’s a browser extension for Firefox.
I use Teh Google, but it sort of creeps me out to do so. They have access to a huge amount of information on their users, and they have turned into quite a behemoth. Even if their policy is to “Don’t be evil” (yeah, right), I don’t see why they should automagically be trusted to not be evil. Anyway, the less info a large company like Google has about their individual users, the better, I think.
red paper boat 