Asides

Well Opera started acting funny yesterday, so I went back on Epiphany, despite its suckiness (it doesn’t show italics! what the hell?) but I got tired of its suckiness so I started messing around with Galeon. Then Galeon did that unexpected closing thing it does, just like Firefox. So I opened Firefox and started fooling around. I opened a couple of tabs– only to have the program close right up. So I think the problem is with tabs and anything that uses the Mozilla Gecko Geico Lizard whatever rendering engine will have that same problem.

So anyway, I’m back on Opera, which at least uses its own software, though it has weird problems of its own. I need to tweak its settings to see if I can get it to work right. Also I’m going to look for another theme for the site because having all my sidebar info squashed down in the footer is depressing me. I like a sidebar.

That was my exciting post for the day. I’m doing laundry in the cold, cold basement. Later, d00dz.

$^&^*^&(*$%^#!

Okay, now I’m using Opera, and because Opera didn’t like the special text-rendering thing that the last theme used, I’ve changed it to this one. Well you don’t care, as long as I have content, right? Whatever content is.

Anyway, what happened is Foxfire has decided to go blotto on my Ubuntu-run laptop, so I started using another web browser for Linux called Epiphany. It works okay, but has some little annoyances, so I looked around and found one for Gnome (my window environment) called Galeon. That rendered pages better — both use the Mozilla Gecko engine thingie. But then Galeon started shutting down all of a sudden just like Firefox had been doing. So now I have the choice of Epiphany, which works but sort of sucks and also uses the Firefox rendering engine, apparently, so it’s probably only a matter of time before it goes down too, or Opera, which has its own eccentricities but was at least a dream to set up (download click click its done). Opera had a tendency to freeze solid on my Windows computer, so let’s see how it works on this one.

I sure hope it’s not some sort of problem with the computer itself. I really need to get one of those USB thumb drives so I can make a backup. They have them at Walmart in 2 GB sizes for ten bucks, and I can get 4 for about fifteen.

I’ve decided to start the year off with a nice clean basic theme. Hope it looks okay on your computers.

Well — not quite yet. This is just the previous theme I had before I switched over to the Christmas theme. I’m going to be working on a new theme for the site, I just haven’t decided how I want it to look yet.

I’ve changed the theme for the Christmas holiday, because I’m feeling Christmassy, sort of. I had to play around with this theme, which is pretty crappy, so I may change it out for something else, or just go back to my previous theme. Who knows! That’s how I keep life exciting around here. It’s craaaazy!

In an update to the finding of some of my old posts (from my 2002 blog that vanished in a database crash) on the Internet Wayback Machine, I have now found that they seem to have stored my individual posts, including the comments. That’s much better. Of course, what isn’t better is I’m having to save a year’s (or however much they have — I hope it’s the whole year’s) blog posts one by one. I will also need to get them back up on my server somehow — I don’t want to keep them on the laptop, it’s not safe to just have them in one place. Well, the Internet Wayback Machine is two places, but who knows when they’ll decide to clear out their databases of seven-year-old junk?

I was searching around the Internet Wayback Machine and found some of my old posts from my 2002 blog, Spleenville World Domination Headquarters, which I had lost in a database crash. They’re nothing special, but they’re mine, so I’m going to be putting them up one of these days as soon as I clean up the urls and code as best I can. (Note: the comments to the posts were not saved — basically these are old cached copies of the main blog site.)

As a treat, here’s an old friend:

Choppin' Dude

I’ll post an announcement when the site is updated.

Good Lord, another free blogging service. Are they trying to kill me? You know how I love to try out new stuff… I wonder if this means Vox is going defunct. I have a Vox site but their service is crap, I don’t know why Sixapart bought it and gave up Livejournal — which has its lame side but is at least successful and has a niche — to the Russkis.

Hi there from the sidebar! This is a new section called “Asides.” This is basically going to be a side blog of inconsequential stuff with which I don’t want to clutter up the main blog. Mostly it will be stuff about the site design, some new plugin I added (like the one that gives me the ability to set this up — some blogging software does have side-blogs built in, but Wordpress isn’t one of them), and so on. Since most people don’t find that interesting, I’m not going to put it on the front page anymore.

I‘m just shifting some things slightly and playing with the theme. Expect some color changes and so on.

Update: okay! I had a bit of a conflict with the comment editing plugin canceling out some formatting options for people who were not logged in, which is everyone but me since I’m not making people register to comment. So I deactivated the rich text formatting plug in and found one that just puts plain HTML formatting buttons above the comment box. All the tags have to be closed — if you don’t know what that means just click the “close tags” button and all of them will be closed for you. But once you click on a button it will change to show you a backslash, to indicate that after you finish inserting the text you want to format, you need to click the button a second time to close the tag. A properly closed tag looks like this:

<strong>Bold</strong>

And it results in this:

Bold

Obey!

Now, there are no formatting buttons in the editing box, so make sure you pay attention to the ones that come up in the regular commenting box, because they will display the syntax that is allowed on the system. (For example, the commonly used <i></i> and <b></b> are not accepted for italics and bold, you have to use <em></em> and <strong></strong>. And the <strike> tag does not work for strikeouts; the correct syntax is <del></del>. I’ve decided to dispense with underlining; it just looks like a link anyway and is confusing.

Also, I’ve turned on the reply function, but only two comments deep, because any more than one reply is all squished and looks terrible. So you’re limited to one reply per comment.