As described below, I have written the javascript coding out of the site’s design that would set the size of the site depending upon the site of your browser. While this code was good for that, very few people view this site at a lower screen resolution than 1024 X 768 and it caused many more problems than that. There were more people trying to see this site using Opera or Saafari than those with lower screen resolutions, and the javascript code wouldn’t show anything up on those two browsers.

Thanks again to Jim for pointing me in the right direction and listening to me bitch and complain that coders design programs that will flip upside down in different directions even if the exact same code is inserted.

I also changed the way hyperlinks are shown within posts to get rid of what I thought was an annoying dotted line that would blur words on the next line. In order to do this but still show it was a hyperlink, I did two things. The first is to color visited hyperlinks in red and unvisited links in blue.

When you hover over a link, there will be two things that pop up. A Snap page preview of the link will pop up as well as a solid line of the same color (see above in rules of visited versus unvisited). This will hopefully also provide better sourcing for the posts within this blog in case people want to take a quick look but don’t want to click over.

The third thing I changed was that I added a poll to the left-hand sidebar. I’m not sure if anyone will use the poll, but I encourage all to do so. Further, if you have a poll question you would like asked, just email me and I’ll try to accomodate.

The final addition or change is the addition of gravatars. I announced this one week ago but have since found out the Gravatars.com site is undergoing maintainence and will be for a few weeks. Since I implemented gravatars after the site decided to reform, my gravatars caching program was unable to capture your gravatars that you may have signed up for elsewhere. I don’t know when this will resolve itself.

I am about to embark on a semi-major renovation of this site to delete the javascript code that was written when the current design was implemented and has never worked right. The site will remain up, though you may experience a rather odd design depending on when you click through.

Please bear with us.

UPDATE: I’ve made steady progress and it’s basically done. I just need to figure out how to call in the header graphic to display above. After tweaking it around myself for quite a long time, I’m calling in the big guns to help me out.

After that’s done, I’ve got some new features I want to implement.

UPDATE: No more re-sizes of this site, finally!  You can now search through your Firefox browser and not have the entire page reload.  I’ll see later what this does to a javascript program enabling readers to see more of a post without clicking on a single post entry.  Thank you, Jim, for all of your help.

Also later I will work on adding those features I talked about, but the Stars play tonight so it’ll be a close call between adding them and getting some shut-eye.

Yeah, so somehow I seriously screwed up this site’s individual archives by trying to implement some new code to enhance certain features. Right now you can’t view just one post.

I hope to have it fixed soon, or maybe after I take a breather since I have already undone everything I changed and it’s not working. Patience, it is a virtue and not one that I typically have.

UPDATE: I’m still wroking on the problem, but I have to admit I’m running into a wall. I switched ‘themes’ in order to determine if it was something I did, but the problem persisted. Thus it must be something related to my database which will be a load of fun to find.

Or am I on the wrong track entirely? Any help is appreciated. My email still works.

Meanwhile I have put the entire posts within my RSS feed, available to view in a browser here.

UPDATE: Fixed, temporarily, thanks to the help of Zoute snor.  I also found what the problem is and why that happened.  I tried to create a WP page and that screwed up my .htaccess file.  I am now trying to figure out how to manually write the code to fix the error.

However you can access full, individual posts now.

Many of you subscribe to this site’s RSS feed, but still many of you do not. I signed up with Feedblitz which will email you this site’s daily headlines and roughly the first paragraph. I encourage all to sign up.

I have also added gravatars to comments. You can sign up for a free gravatar when you leave a comment.

This post will remain at the top for a few days, more or less. To read new entries, just scroll below.

This site will go relatively dark sometime this afternoon through to next Tuesday because of Christmas.  If I had not procrastinated until the week prior to, I might have more time to dig around the ‘Internets.’  But you all know me, I’m a procrastinator on things I really don’t want to do (i.e. shop).

Sometime in the future, they’ll invent ways you can just think of an item and get it shipped your way.  I figure that would be easy on those of us who absolutely loathe standing in long lines after you spend the time locating the item you were making the trip to go get.  I enjoy giving gifts, but not the actual purchase thereof.  There must be a short cut.

If you happen to catch yourself watching the Insight Bowl on the 29, though I’ll be back before then to remind readers to tune in, just root for the team in the black glitter helmets.  The glitter, Coach Leach says, makes the team look fast.

Merry Christmas.

This site is getting bombarded with spam, making it load extremely slow and making posting nearly impossible. To give you an idea, on a normal day, this site receives around 100 spam comments/trackbacks that my filters stop. Yesterday this site received well over 1,000 spam comments and today it’s well over 2,000.

Unfortunately there is no way to just prevent the comments from being sent, or at least that I know of, thus it’s slowing the site load down. Please bear with us.

We’ll be on a bit of a hiatus, posting from time to time through the end of the week.  It’s Thanksgiving here in the States, and that tradition most American families hold true is an influx of family from far and wide.  My family is no exception and perhaps takes that tradition to another meaning.

For our international readers, Thanksgiving celebrates a time in North American history predating the founding of the United States where two different groups of people having radically different religious backgrounds, different races, different cultures, different levels of technology and vastly different world views all came together and feasted, recognizing that even though the two groups of people were different in almost every way, they still shared the same common bond of survival and the personal prosperity of their families.

Or at least that’s the Cliff’s Notes version of the events.

Anyways, Happy Thanksgiving and may all of our readers who are making a voyage remain safe.  This site won’t go dead, but I don’t believe I will be posting a whole lot over the next couple of days.  There’s food, family and of course, football.

Fellow contributor Debbie celebrates here one year blogiversary, a word I can’t stand by the way. Hey, who knew it had been one year?

Sorry for no posts today.  I’ve been helping my brother move a few things until he smashed my left index finger with a big screen television set, it’s throbbing now and pretty swollen, and I’m going to the Mavericks game this evening.  Sweet tix; 16th row behind the bench.  I won’t be able to clap, but I don’t really like basketball anyways.

I’ll be back tomorrow, but I didn’t expect to be gone all day today.

I have added links to register and login on the left-hand sidebar. You don’t have to register to comment and I can’t forsee ever requiring registration to discuss any event since I have spam filters that are working reasonably well, but it will help with ensuring you aren’t blocked by that same spam protection that keeps those incessant spammed comments/trackbacks from showing up.

After you register, and many have done so already, please fill in your name, set your password to something other than the one automatically emailed to you (unless you like that one I suppose) and the rest of your information. That information is only to automatically log you in, provided you are logged in, when you leave a comment so you don’t have to fill out your name, email address and URL if applicable in each comment.

If for whatever reason you were not emailed a password, contact me and I’ll reset it to something generic and email you back with the new password for you to change.

The key to all of this though is to make sure you’re logged into the site after you’ve registered and accept the Wordpress generated cookie to keep you logged in. My spam filters boost up logged in commenters with a score over other potential triggers. I am hoping this is the only issue, but please contact me if there is something else going on.

Onto another issue, assuming of course I have the know-how to fix it.  Just over 80 percent of this site’s users have a screen resolution of 1024 X 768 or bigger, meaning barely below 20 percent use 800 X 600.  I am thinking of doing away with the smaller screen version which creates issues of reloading the page with any re-sizing of your screen (ctrl+F5 on Firefox reloads the whole page), but I want to make sure those who are viewing this site on a smaller screen resolution won’t have an issue with this.  I can create a smaller resolution if needed, again assuming I know how or can learn how to do so.

Please let me know if you’re a 800 X 600 user and would object to viewing this site under a 1024 X 768 resolution.