The worst problem: All posts and comments posted to “Alas” after December 30th have been utterly lost, and there’s nothing that can be done about it. Many apologies to everyone who wrote a post or a comment during that period.
The good news: It’s still rough around the edges, but “Alas” is back online and working. That’s good, isn’t it?
Once I learn the system, having switched to WordPress should give me a lot more spam-blocking options. Also, the “it takes two minutes to post a comment” problem appears to have been fixed by the change.
The continuing frustrations: Have I mentioned how much I loathe working with CSS? I know it can do wonderful things, but html was so much easier to work with.
Anyhow, I’m going to continue poking at the CSS and index file, and playing with WordPress, and maybe someday the blog will look right again. I’ll restore the blogroll sometime in the next several days.
In the meanwhile, my experience is that “Alas” readers (collectively) usually know a lot more than me. (Not that it’s difficult to know more than me.) I’ll be very grateful if you have any suggestions regarding:
- Why does the sidebar look okay in Opera and Mozilla but horrible in IE?
- How can I get the brick-red color at the top to extend all the way to the top and left side?
- Why is the blog always slightly wider than the window, regardless of how wide the window is?
- Why does the sidebar overlap the top banner in Mozilla and IE, no matter what I set the “#menu” “top” setting to? (Opera seems to be the only browser that pays any attention to that setting at all; I have it set to 260px currently).
- Is there any advantage to me in using WordPress’s built-in “sidebar links” function, rather than just putting raw html in the index file?
- Is there any way I as admin can edit who authored a post in WordPress? Although WordPress successfully imported all old MT blog entries – which is more than MT can say – it didn’t correctly guess the author on all of them.
- Got any tweaking suggestions?
Any advice would be appreciated. If you like, you can view a .txt document of the css file here, and of the index file here.
Scotty, I need more power!
Congratulations on being back up.
3. I’m using Safari on a Mac, and the blog is the same width as the window.
Congratulations on getting your site back up, and welcome to the WordPress army. My blog also runs on WordPress, but I’m probably no more competent with CSS than you are. I assume you’ve found the basic WordPress help page, which I’ve usually found can eventually yield answers to all my questions — I just need to figure out how to properly phrase the question.
I can answer one question: I like using “sidebar links” just because I don’t then have to mess with the HTML file, but I suppose it’s a matter of preference.
You can get the posts from the Google cache: http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:8ifvffH8nW0J:www.amptoons.com/blog/+amptoons&hl=en
(I have a copy of this page if you need it.)
Thanks, Dylan!
In your css file:
#banner {
background:#993300;
padding:15px;
width:100%;
}
drop your “padding” down to zero. That might fix your problem with the red not going all the way to the edges.
And a tweaking suggestion while I’m at it… you could make the image at the top linked and on the comments pages too so we could get back to the main page after we’re done commenting. Just an ease-of-access thought.
I love reading your blog, but the new RSS feed isn’t working with FeedDemon. I am not very technical, so I can’t give you much more info than that. It just has a big fat x next to your blog! I hope you work out all of your techncial difficulties soon!
Also, take out the width: 100% of your #banner; that’s what’s making the horizontal scroll. (100% plus padding and margins = more than 100%. Darn how that throws me all the time.) DIVs are 100% by default anyway, so it’s not necessary to state it explicitly.
Your move seems to be going great.
OT: is Lucia still around? Or is she off on a sabatical or something?
I kinda miss her posts :^).
Thanks for all the tips, folks! Now if only I had more time to impliment them…
I miss Lucia, too. She’s been working on her knitting blog lately – which has blogads and makes her some money! – and hasn’t had time for “alas.”
We moved our blog over to WP from Blogger and never looked back. Blogger was driving us crazy. I highly recommend the Kitten Spam Words plug-in, its excellent.
A couple of CSS suggestions:
(a) Try using float: right, possibly in conjunction with vertical-align: top for the #menu element instead of position: absolute, top, right, etc. This will unfortunately mean that your HTML code will have to be re-ordered.
(b) Remember that the ‘padding’ and ‘margin’ attributes do similar things in a crucially different way. ‘padding’ adds space within the current layout box, while ‘margin’ adds space outside that box. Understanding this is vital in order to lay out borders and fill colors properly.
(c) Finally, don’t be afraid to continue using
See http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/css for a great handy reference on all CSS properties and how they work.