Current Mood: Meh

For Christmas this year, I got money, candy, and books. These were great gifts.

What I didn’t get, was a round toit.
So, the standard site design is still up.

I had downloaded a Christmas design, and I suppose I could put it up now anyway, but it seems like a waste of effort to change it for just a week or so… So, I guess I’ll look for a more generic winter design instead.

Which I may or may not get around to implementing…

Christmas was fine this year, but I’ve got a real case of the mehs now anyway. I seriously do not want to do sh*t! Except I think I could force myself to drive 1200 miles, southbound, on I-75.

It’s probably the horrid weather. Sooo gray, RIDICULOUSLY FREAKING COLD, and dreary! And it gets dark too soon, and gets light too late.

I’m a bit jealous of bears. At least they can just hibernate through this crap!

Now things are looking good.

Verdana, and a slightly bigger size. I had originally recoded for a lot bigger text size, but then I was reminded (by the resulting presence of huge type) that Verdana’s base size is already bigger than the Ariel/Tahoma that was in the original CSS.

The Verdanatization has also helped the admin end. I can actually see what I’m typing now! It’s still not as big as I’d like, but at least it’s not microscopic. Do devs think it’s more macho if they use font-size 1? Well, it’s NOT! It’s just a pain in the eyes!

Also, the headlines aren’t crowded in on themselves anymore. The CSS had actually specified, -1px spacing. So I deleted that. I don’t like text that looks like it’s jammed into some invisible sardine can!

With the tag cloud, I was having the exact opposite problem: It was overwhelmingly huge. So I shrank it a bit. I figure it’ll shrink even more, once more tagged posts get into the system. Once it has enough to determine that some are “unpopular,” those will shrink to about 50% of the base size. It should be pretty cool, once it’s gotten a decent-sized data sample.

All in all, I think I’ve got everything set now, from a software perspective.

Current Mood: Playful

It may drive programmers nuts, but it works a lot of the time.

Occam’s Razor basically says something to the effect of “go for the simplest explanation.” While the Razor’s often used in theistic/atheistic arguments, that’s not how I used it in this case!

The error said there was a call to an undefined function in Line 27 of index.php. Now, I could have spent hours and hours trying to find out what that function should do, where the definitions are, was there a typo, etc…

Or I could try the simple solution. Find file. Highlight offending code. Hit the backspace key. Hit Save.

So, I went with simple.

And lo and behold! Not only did the error disappear and the footer appear, I got my left-side column appearing, now, too! Before, it wasn’t appearing, even though this theme said it should have 2 sidebars. It should be a simple matter now to adjust the columns so that they aren’t showing redundant info.

Current Mood: Happy

Here’s the new theme! Hope everyone likes it. Everyone but the spammers, that is!

What does that have to do with the theme? Well, the new look also has the latest WordPress backend on it. Complete with Akismet.

Akismet is an automatic blogspam-killing plugin included in new WordPress packages, which makes short work out of spam elimination! In fact, if I just let it clear the spam quarantine on its own, it makes NO work out of it!

So, I’ll be turning comments on for most posts after this one. This may or may not affect old posts, but new ones should be commentable. I won’t allow comments for the Sponsored posts, regardless. I know I sure wouldn’t want to sponsor a post and then have the ad wrecked by people deciding to mention the competition, LOL…

I’ll still moderate comments, so don’t be worried if you make one and it doesn’t insta-appear.

On other matters, there are still some tweaks to be made to the new look. The text is a bit too small, I don’t like the font…little things like that. And I just noticed there’s some stupid PHP error in the footer that I’ll have to fix.

On the good side, I get a few capabilities I’ve always wanted. You’ll see that this post has a “mood” icon. I’ve always thought those were cool, since with an icon, I can make a note of it, even though I rarely want to make an entire post dedicated to my mood. And, I have the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, too, so somewhere a tag cloud should appear. It seems to take about 20 posts or so before a tag cloud really shows its strength of being able to point out what subjects are the most common/popular, so have patience…Also, I’m not sure how the coloration’s going to come out since I set it for the most popular being maroon-linked, and the least ones in gray (I’m hoping for a gray-red middle level, but who knows?).

Now to hit Publish and see what comes of this!