Oops, Needed A Title

You can always tell when I'm disgusted with politics as usual, I play with the blog design.  I went back to the Neo configuration, with a few mods on my part.  The mods took me most of yesterday and part of this morning, so I gave up on adding the header picture for the moment.  It just wasn't coming out right.  It's amazing how much you forget about playing with coding and RGBs when computing isn't your profession.

The best part about Neo, the template not the hero, is that the whole blog doesn't have to reload (only the top post, much faster for those in a hurry) if you click on one of the post links on the left hand side, which is currently set for the last 20 posts.   I realized that I had accidentally destroyed the posting function and hopefully it will nowwork for somebody besides me.  Let me know if it does or doesn't.

I also went back to the dark template because it's easier on my eyes.  I'm getting older and less functional as the days go by.

Monday Morning Musings

The cheapest day to buy certain items has some good information and logical reasoning. The gas, grocery and eating out tips were quite helpful even though I know better than to buy gas on the weekends.

Our military is overstretched and overtaxed because they are busy protecting us from terrorists over there, meanwhile back in the USA one fourth of the jobs in Homeland Security remain unfilled, which might be a good thing in the long run since political appointees haven't demonstrated that they have the nation's best interests at heart, just our pockets. As in emptying, but I digress. Isn't anyone else sick of the constant yammering about national security and then finding out once again that our knickers are down around our ankles?

Time's 50 best websites is out, I hope it's better than last year's person of the year. The Polling Report looks interesting and StumbleUpon made the list as did NetVibes which makes a great homepage.

It's that flipping work thing again, so off I go. I have to do some template work when I get back, it seems that someone is changing their domain and it isn't me.

Why Programmers Drive People Nuts

A few days ago while trying to link to one of my own posts, I noticed that when I clicked on the title from the Dashboard or from Archives, that it would only show the most recent post. While the page was loading, you would see the post you asked for and then it would disappear and be replaced by the most current post.

Now, I bought this template for a whopping ten dollars because I like the idea of not having to reload the whole page every time one wanted to see a post. I was extremely pleased with it ...and then he updated it.

When I tried to load a post, it sucked up so much memory that the computer literally couldn't complete its task. And I don't even have Microsoft! No matter what I did, any posts older than a month were inaccessible except for a very time consuming method of clicking backward on an "older" link. This is my exchange with the designer.

From March 6 when I first noticed it.

I don't know if it is a blogger problem or not, but the post feed is constantly updating and my comments aren't showing up. I don't get a whole lot of them, but I had just responded and then both disappeared. It happened yesterday also.

Is there a glitch somewhere? It worked great before the upgrade but it seems a little slower now. It could be my connection, but it's very strange.

Thanks

Then on March 12th, I started in earnest.

This has happened to me several times and today was extremely inconvenient. Whenever I try and only when I load one of my archives, Firefox hangs. It ties up 100% of my CPU. Firefox freezes in that I can't switch tabs. The title changes, but not the screen. The only way out is to quit and start again. I just lost a really long post that I was very proud of and am having difficulty recalling it.

Is there a glitch?

His reply.

I don't see why firefox would hang. But even if does, how can you lose a post by just viewing the archives?

My response and explanation.

Because if you can't change tabs, move the page up or down, if you are stuck on the page, you have to force quit, thereby losing all unsaved work. I was checking my archives for a post that I had written and couldn't get back to save my work. This has happened to me three times. and it only happens when I ask it to load a month. I asked it to load last November which had 45 posts and as I scrolled down the page, it froze. the mouse moved but had no effect on firefox, as I said before, the title of the tab will change but not the focus. Also, I'm trying right now to load a post through the edit posts page. I click on view, it loads the page, I see the post I'm looking for, for about two seconds and then it shows the current post. I cannot access individual posts.

I tried going in through the archives again, it was still loading from feeds.feedburner.com and www2.blogger.com, for over two minutes. The title I was looking for was near the top of the page, I clicked on the title, it loaded the post, for two seconds and flipped to the current post, again.

Do you think there is something wrong with the feeds? Also, would it be possible to just load the titles from the archives with the peekaboo option instead of the whole post? I was able to access old posts by going through the older link in the feeds post. It is the only way I've found so far. I don't really want to click back two years but that way does work.

No response so I sent this.

My readership has dropped tremendously in the last few days with only one page view. I opened it in Safari and have the same problems, plus sitemeter didn't record more than one page view, no matter how many I looked at. If people are unable to search my site, what good is it for me to maintain an archive? After all the hard work I've put into it, I would hate to take it down but I'm going to have no choice if this continues. This is very frustrating.

His response.

This is expected because page is not reloaded for every post with Neo, as I have told repeatedly in my blog. But, it doesn't mean that your readership has gone down. People may be reading several of your posts but without reloading the page. If you are highly concerned about the statistics and not the speed of your blog, you can revert back to your previous template. I will refund $10. let me know.

Now, I'm steamed. I was getting a lot of referrals for the Walter Reed stuff but nobody could access the posts because it was flipping to the most recent post. So I sent this.

It has to do with the fact that my archives could not be accessed. Period. As I said repeatedly. There was no way to access older posts except to go through your new "older" link. Most people aren't that savvy. I have wasted my whole day trying to repair the damage. I have taken the Neo template down. I had made some changes and am trying to convert my old template and having extreme difficulty.

And I knew the pages weren't reloaded for every post, that wasn't the issue. Whatever change you made on March 6, affected archive access.

This morning I received this.

I don't think you told me about this archives issue. there's no way neo could affect archives. did you add archives widget to Neo (it doesn't come with one by default)? anyways, if you don't like neo, you can go back to previous template.

This is my reply to that brilliant piece of customer service.

I don't appreciate being treated like an idiot. Of course I had Archives, I had labels, I had widgets, I had formatting, Ii had no problems until your update.

I've gone back to an older template, and I am not happy with the hours of work involved. I had better things to do than to try and fix something that wasn't broken until the update. If you had checked before I took it down, and gone through the steps below, you would have known what the problem was.

Thanks for the irritation.

The amount of work that I had to put in to recover the old template and fix the additions to bring it up to speed was tremendously time consuming. It isn't about the ten dollars, it's about someone avoiding responsibility and then being patronizing and insulting when the customer needs help.

I'm up and running again, albeit rather slowly in comparison to the Neo template. The lesson here being to do everything myself if I'm going to spend that kind of time tracking down errors. Now the question is, should I link to someone who treated me this way? I linked to him and have recommended him to several people already. I hope they are happier with the service than I am.

3bs

Template Crisis

I am going back to my old template since I discovered that my archives were inaccessible and I'm really frustrated by the situation. Today will be a work in progress, please bear with me. I'll get it looking neat in a few hours.

Thanks.

Update: I'm still at it, I can't tell you how irritated I am, so I have to take a break. Will continue later. Sorry.

Site Maintenance

Again. This should be the last time for a while, or until I get bored again. I'm still trying to get a spiderweb graphic up, but it has not been successful. So far.

Many thanks to Ramani at Hackosphere, this is a collaboration between his new Neo template, the old Lefty Stretch by Dennis Bowman and yours truly. I'm responsible for the colors and the add ons.

The blog loads one post at a time when you first enter. If you click on a category (still working on the cloud), only posts related to that label appear in the second sidebar ....and nothing else changes on the page. No more waiting for the whole page to reload, it's all there. The same thing happens if you click on a post title. Post appears, everything else stays the same. Comments show up too. If I ever get 10 comments, they will roll over to a new page, leaving the newest on the top.

No more waiting for Sitemeter or Statcounter or Blogflux (what a nightmare they have become), I put them at the bottom of the page and they load last, you won't see them unless you are looking for them. Profile information also.

Hopefully this will speed up the blog since most of the javascript is gone. Play with it and please let me know what you think. Since I did this on a Mac using Firefox I have not a clue how it looks to IE users.

Lookiing forward to hearing from you, be gentle.

Mumbles and Musings

The internets are absolutely fascinating to me. I've been trucking around in it for almost eleven years and have enjoyed almost every moment of it. I started with AOL, back when they charged by the minute and those first two months were expensive. Four months later I switched to Earthlink and now I use that convenient but rip off service called Verizon. As one techie observed, you are allowed to download Windows Service Pack Two but you can't listen to streaming radio because you might use too much bandwidth and it's only supposed to be for business use. What planet does Verizon exist on?

All my life I had my nose in either a book, news magazine, comic book, science article or whatever I could get my eyeballs on. My ex used to say that if I didn't get my daily supply of words that I was unlivable. It was one of several things about myself that obviously bothered him. In my defense I can say that the only time I ever read romance novels was when I was married. I prefer science fiction, it has a better chance of coming true.

Since discovering the internets, my days of buying my purse to fit whatever size of the dead tree edition that I was currently reading are over. I hardly ever read a fiction book anymore, non-fiction is so much easier to find on the internets. I've been trying to finish Eldest for a year. Grisham, Robinson, Nance, Baldacci, Jordan (series should have been finished at book five, he's on eleven plus a prequel and I quit on eight, I'm sorry he's sick), Cussler and Clancy (wrote his most popular character into a corner) have not graced my eyes in a while. I only have eyes for the internets.

Oops, I have drunk the Google Kool-Aid. Once Blogger (no longer in Beta, yeah!) started using Gmail as a sign in, I began to use more of the services. The personalized homepage was first, with all of the little widgets from many ingenious people. I have no idea how it happened, but I lost all my Sage live bookmarks and had to start over, so I did. With Google Reader. Love it. Now I can really keep up with news, bloggers and several other items that interest me.

Recently there has been much whining, crying and useless flapping of hands in the blogosphere over having to switch to the new Blogger. When I first switched, I wasn't very happy but some of the ideas appealed to me and I went back and slowly played with the template (Minima, it's easier to add than to take away) and now have it hacked to the teeth. I realize other bloggers just want to type and print and aren't particularly interested in the intricacies of widgets and how much easier it is to play with unless they suffer from a form of geekdom.

Some are asking, what's the difference in page elements, can't I just use one? Not really. If you don't have a friend to help you, aren't comfortable with asking another blogger for help and don't mind reading through some people's arrogance, I recommend the Blogger Help Group. In addition, at the top of my page you can mouseover the HackZone, these are bloggers who explain how to do something and explain it very well.

Remember to make a copy of the code in the template section to a text editor (plain not rich text) on your computer before you start. This will contain all the code that you may be using for Haloscan, Sitemeter, et al. Then you can copy and paste the appropriate portions of code into the correct page elements instead of having to regenerate.

Blogger requires that some sites get permission to access and this is accomplished through a Google screen that pops up if they are interested in working with Blogger. I just copy the YouTube embed code in order to post to my blog since it won't work any other way. So it isn't a one click deal, but eleven years ago it couldn't be done at all.

Blogging, Games and Names

I wondered why everyone was complaining about Blogger this week. It seems that Blogger was having problems that didn't affect Beta. I'm so happy I switched.

I'm also happy with Firefox 2. I had been running the release candidates for a while and now have most of my extensions enabled. I tracked down new versions of Colorful Tabs (I'm running the Cloudgnome theme and my close buttons work) and Blogger Web Comments. Now, if I could just get History Submenus enabled, the Fox would be a really smooth ride.

Jolly Roger over at Reconstitution has a couple of great posts up, I still can't comment there, the spam checker hates me and my computer. I give up after four tries now, I won't do the twenty tries like I used to. Maybe I've been banned but I seriously doubt it. Anyway, he has my new favorite name for the Decider. Domestic Enemy #1.

Oops, JR was leaving a comment here while I was typing this.

The Chimperor can't find his own ass with GPS directions.

but what if he uses the internets to reach The Google?

What does waterboarding feel like? This isn't dunking their head in a bucket of water to see how long they can hold their breath, it's like being pulled in by a riptide, tumbling over and over again, occaisionally seeing the shore or the sky, but not long enough to get a good breath without a mouthful of water. Domestic Enemy #2 should try it before he waxes poetic and thinks it is a no-brainer. I hear he wants to go hunting again. I hope it's for four legged animals this time.

My dad and I used to play Scrabble and I'm pretty good at it, but I play to see if I can make words, not points. So, when I saw that someone had scored 830 points in one game, I thought boy was he lucky, everything must have fallen into place for him and that's what happened.

This is the last time we set our clocks back in October. Unless you live in a state or territory that doesn't participate in Daylight Savings Time. We spring forward on March 11, 2007.

If there is a hell, I hope that the person who started the Palm Springs fire enjoys the roast.

The cakewalk that isn't, just keeps on taking. Since we don't like to remember history, we forget that during the American Revolution we kept fighting against all odds to remove the invaders from our shores. Does our hubris prevent us from understanding that other people feel the same way about their country?

F'shizzle. Dude, it's an airport, they are paranoid there.

Nothing In Particular

Last night I had two of the best tomatoes I have ever had. My tomato plant finally produced more than one red tomato at a time. I love heirloom tomatoes but it was late in the season when I started growing them and all OSH had left were Early Girls. Flavorful doesn't begin to describe the experience. I have about fifteen more left on the vine, hopefully it will stay warm for few days and they can ripen naturally. Next year I'm going to do several different varieties, this is so exciting.

I only got one meal out of the swiss chard but it was killer. Picked and cooked within a half hour. Magnificent. Next year I will have a better idea of what I'm doing. I love fresh food, don't you? I hated peas until I had some that were fresh picked and cooked, now I love the things.

In other unimportant news, Heroes rocks! I am fascinated by the storyline. I thought the show would be cheesy but it isn't. The characters are interesting and I'm beginning to see where it's going. I could be wrong since Tim Kring is a good friend of Damon Lindelof (Lost) and friends usually have some things in common. Devious storytelling is probably one of them. My favorite line from this week: Nicky's not here right now.

Everybody links to Keith Olbermann so I don't need to, but I hope that his being relatively famous will provide him some protection in the coming pogrom.

The invisibility cloak is coming closer to being a reality. The government should be swooping in at any moment and appropriating it for military use or for the new nobody but us gets to rule space program. Or the spooks will want it. That could be a pretty interesting fight, oh to be a fly on the wall during those conversations in the nut, I mean White House. But then that's why they won't let civilians have it. Too much potential for finding out the truth.

I have few new blogger beta hacks but I can't remember what they were, internal stuff I believe. You can now label all your old posts with the new label management system but it isn't perfect yet. I have quite a few posts tagged with the Bush label but it only shows seven, unless you click on the label and then you find quite a few more. This is a Blogger problem I'm not going to spazz on. What I would like is the ability to delete some of my labels and make subcategories to neaten it all up. Somebody will find a simple solution soon.

Update: Ask and you shall receive. You can now remove your labels on the manage post page. Yippee! But you can't correct spelling errors or change the capitalization, yet. Can subcategories be next?

I've been running the Firefox 2.0 RC3 for a few days and haven't had any major problems. I really like the spell checker, now if would only do grammar . Most of my extensions don't work and I'm surviving (I guess some of them aren't really necessary) but there are a couple I hope become functional soon. I want my unified Stop/Reload and Clear Cache buttons back, History menu so I don't have to open my sidebar (why do people like sidebars, they drive me crazy), Colorful tabs and Blogger Web Comment and I'll be pretty happy camper.

Advice on how to be a successful space tourist. Hmm, how would I be able to do what I want? How much privacy will there be?

Hacking Blogger Beta II

When I first switched to the Beta version I was irritated because I lost my template and wanted some of hacks that made it easier to blog. Blog This! still isn't working but I have learned to live with that inconvenience.

The first thing I did was find a three column hack (courtesy of Ramani at the Hackosphere) and then I adapted it to fit the Minima Stretch template. It took a little doing but I finally figured out what numbers had to be changed. Why would anyone want a three column template and have unused space on both sides? Not me. Preview is a wonderful feature when it works.

I was still at Ramani's site so I used a couple more of his hacks since he gives great directions and is open to feedback. This resulted in the Peekaboo posts (expand and collapse a post) plus just showing the title of post on the Label and Archive pages (I call them categories, some people call them tags) with a plus/minus sign so that the reader has some control over the page.

That worked so well that I installed the hack for the recent posts in the sidebar. Well, reading the comments helped me find other hacks. One of which is the Label cloud which is courtesy of Phydeax3.

Courtesy of Hoctro, I installed the horizontal tabs of my most used Labels, which will change as I get all of my posts tagged. I also got the hack for the Label breadcrumb trail, so visitors have another way to find their way to my homepage.

There are a few others but I don't remember them all. Blogger Beta is much easier to deal with, easier for you to make your blog look different from everyone elses.

Hacking Blogger Beta

Yesterday was blog maintenance day. I installed a few hacks into Blogger Beta, some of which make my life easier and a few to enhance the browing experience. I can't code, but I can research and follow directions.

PeekABoo. Now you see the posts (+), now you don't (-). This hack and several others are courtesy of Ramani at The Hackosphere, he gives great instructions that are easy to follow.

I'm having foot surgery in a week and will be off my feet for six weeks. I'm going to Categorize all my posts and then I might install the Labels as Tabs hack. I'll need something to do since I won't be allowed to walk.

Then I headed over to Hoctor's Place to add a Breadcrumb trail to the item, search and tag pages so people can find their way Home. I like it.

I also added a quickie. That's a quick edit pencil for the top of the post , it makes it easy to edit. Yes, I know there is one on the bottom, but what's wrong with having two, each conveniently placed?

Once the comment feed is working I'm sure someone will come up with a hack to show the comments in Peekaboo style like the Dark Wraith, so meanwhile if you guys ever leave a comment the last five are supposed to show up in the sidebar, courtesy of some German site and a handly little Dapplication.

I'm sure I will find many more uses for their web scraping tool. The future is fascinating.

Have you ever tried Cooliris Previews? It takes mouseover to a whole new level. I only have to click on a link if it has the information I want and that is just the beginning. This is a Firefox extension but then you aren't using Exploder are you?

Just Have To Live With It

I'm not real fond of Blogger Beta. The selection of templates suck and I have had to give up Haloscan comments for a little while. I will remove the annoying verification system, unless I get major spam, in which case it will make a reappearance.

For those people without a curious bone in their body, Blogger Beta is a wonderful thing. If you were learning to play (and enjoying it) with CSS and didn't mind playing around with your template, Blogger Beta is a royal pain in the tush.

I'm still working on the patio, it is getting quite involved. Next thing I know it will have heating and plumbing, or that is what it feels like.

I Screwed Up

I updated to Blogger Beta and am having some difficulties until I update my template. I will lose some of my favorite stuff and I'm hoping that Blogger will make raw html editing available by the end of the week. What is this fascination with iframes? Unfortunately I don't have time to futz with it today as I am still building the patio and depending on the amount of beer ingested this afternoon, I might still be working on it tomorrow.

Two weeks ago I knew nothing about construction and now I'm familiar with the lumber and hardware sections of Home Depot, Lowe's and OSH. I've been told I make a pretty good assistant (I fetch the beer, nails and other small items) and heights aren't bothering me as much. This is kind of fun and mom is enjoying the increased privacy. Shai just sleeps.

Meanwhile, did you know that over 40,000 people have deserted the United States military since 2000? Me neither.

One year later and we are still clueless. We could ask the Dutch for help, but that would eliminate all the opportunities for graft and corruption that all those corporations and their no-bid contracts have been enjoying.

Look who's back in the news. The cynic in me wonders why now. It isn't as if anybody in the administration has cared for the last few years and to casually mention that Bush had dropped the ball (as John Kerry had pointed out) at this late date....

Thanks to The Sideshow for the link to my Sort of Science rant.