Spooky photo of a reflection of me, Jim, taking a picture of my spooky reflection in a window or patio door, or something like that, in 2008.
Okay- We’ve been busy in a lot of areas lately and when we checked this page/ these pages for the first time in months, we found that: 1.) There were 1,942 spam comments waiting to be deleted. & 2.) ‘upgrading’ to a much hyped newer theme can be a pain in the, um, bum.
Jassper, bless his heart, has been fantastic at sitting there, going through the mind-numbing task of making sure none of those spammed comments had anything to say worth allowing them to be approved for, and posted live. I think he said that two out of the first 400 he’s gone through might have been legitimate comments and/or worth checking out.
The new theme, “evolve”, has a couple great features and, as far as our needs and tastes are concerned, a lot of superfluous nonsense- The developers went way out of their way to make the theme user friendly, probably aimed at the 15 to 35 year old crowd – which means my step son could have whizzed through it at the age of 5. 🙂 But it has some annoying features that I haven’t been able to figure out. The suggested height of a header was “125 pixels”. This like almost everything else about this theme, is customizable. So I changed it to 200 pixels and that worked, for about ten seconds. Then the stupid thing snapped back to showing only 125 of the two hundred pixels of the old header image I had to re-upload. There probably is a setting in here somewhere that I can change, manually, by diving into the code in the code editor, reading through thousands of lines, finding the right line, overwriting the setting with the new numbers, re-saving or ‘updating’ and then sitting back while the wheels spin and hope that when I look at what I think I have just fixed, it just might be what we thought we had all along.
Sigh.
They have some color settings here that are marked “Important!” in the code, as seen through the editor. And I can’t figure out how to get rid of the plain vanilla overly white background all around the guts of the page and put in my own color, or ‘colour’ since we are in Canada. 🙂
And- I wasn’t thrilled with the very green colour block around the ‘sticky’ messages that are supposed to stay at the top of the list of ‘posts’ to be displayed whenever any of you out there in reader/surfer land come pay us a visit. But that may be one of the things in the code that is marked “Important!” And right now, I’m too tired to argue with them or mess with the code to see if changing the color setting launches an ICBM attack on our closest allies or anything.
It also took me between ten and twenty minutes of clicking through all the user friendly options to find the button to push to turn off the ‘featured image’ function, which grabbed the first image in the post and displayed it larger than the image was supposed to be displayed, and displayed it on top of the rest of the article, as a link, so articles with images had a huge honking featured image above itself and then the same image in its normal size down inside the article where it had been told to hang out- and articles with no images included had a huge light gray box with a spooky semi translucent image of a ghost camera above the article, so fraekin huge that the images were often twice the size of the article itself. But I did find that box and clicked it off, grumbling, “We don’t need no stinkin’ featured images.
And Jassper has promised to sit down and delete another couple hundred pieces of garbage ‘comments’ tomorrow and we’re pretty sure we turned off the ability of anybody to post a comment here if they’re not on our staff. So if you really have something to say that we might think is valid and worth posting, you can send it to “jassper@aerendel.org” and if you really want to become another unpaid volunteer here, say so, and we’ll send you a user password set to ‘contributer’ and screen everything you try to post until we’re damned sure we can trust you. Sorry, we only needed to get burned once before we turned hard on potential volunteers.
Don’t tell anybody, I just yawned.
— Thank you — And we hope you find something here that makes your day more enjoyable or at least more informed. And since these pages here are more or less aimed at relatives and close friends, we would probably be surprised if you did find something that really tweaked your interest here. But then, again, you may have found something in/or one of the other pages that fired your enthusiasm, and you can write to jassper and tell him you’d like to contribute to that page, include a user name and either a password that we hope you can change later or we’ll pick one for you. & don’t forget we need your real email address to send you this information.
& I’ve clicked every category we currently have listed as pertaining to this message, and that’s what we’re all about, so far. New categories might explode into our consciousness any time, day or night-
— Have a wonderful day, have a wonderful life time, and a wonderful happily ever after –
————— Jim
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