Letters From Home

I’ve added a new option.  If you’d like to receive my posts via email, now you can.  Just click on the “Subscribe by email” link in the banner (above) and fill in your preferences.

I do not now and never will use your email address for anything but sending these blog posts.  Death to spammers and scammers!

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I think maybe I’m ready to peddle myself as a WordPress guru.  Well, a guru in training, at any rate.  The weird problems I have plowed through in the past couple years of WP blogging have been…  educational.

A few days ago, I was getting “500 internal server” errors on this blog and my tattoo blog.  The tattoo blog proved to be a relatively easy fix (the .htaccess file was messed up).  But this one…  wouldn’t fix no matter what I tried.  So I called my web host’s tech support.

The helpful tech I talked with agreed that the problem was likely the .htaccess file here, too, and said he’d fix it.  I thanked him, he fixed it, everything worked fine.  Phew.  Thought that was the end of it.

Today, trying to add this blog to TwitterFeed, I discovered that (a) in copying over the sig from my tattoo blog I had stupidly not changed the feed link and (b) the RSS link in the banner didn’t work.  Fixing the sig was no problem, after I quit whapping myself on the head, but I was out of my league on the RSS link issue.

So this time my first line of approach was to post a message in the WordPress support forums, which are without a doubt THE best source for WordPress answers.  Especially for off-the-wall problems like this.  It seems like no matter what the problem might be, someone there has the answer that works.

Which was the case this time–within a very short time span I got help.  And it turned out to be a host problem once again, not anything within WP.  And thus nothing I could fix.  So I called the host again.

They said they’d run some diagnostics on the site and email me the results.  I have not yet gotten the email, but everything appears to be working just fine now.  My blogs back themselves up automatically once a day, but I think I’d better go run another backup now.
photo credit: The Flooz

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I’m experimenting with yet more changes for the format of my blogs. This is as good a place to try stuff out as any.

If you have a gravatar, it will now show up beside your posts. Mine is the logo I created for myself 40+ years ago to sign my artwork. It serves as the favicon for this site, too.

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There were a couple of things about this theme that I didn’t pay attention to when I installed it. However, I was smart enough to ask my eagle-eyed (and very web-savvy) daughter to take a look at it, and she spotted something that I had missed. Links came out way too close to the regular text color to be readily visible.

Fortunately, the theme’s creator has a very helpful web site, and after some experimentation with various colors I got the links to stand out better. And I changed some of the other colors to be more harmonious as well.

And then I noticed that I could use my own custom header graphic instead of the one the creator supplied, and that opened up a lot of possibilities. The current graphic is the result of much experimentation and color-fiddling, plus my daughter’s advice on the look of the background.

I kinda like it, but then again, after all that work with Photoshop Elements, one would hope so.

I may change the typewriter graphic to something else, eventually, but for now I think it fits.

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I spent a long time browsing through the WordPress theme viewer and previewing everything that looked likely.  I downloaded several and then spent some more time installing and uninstalling and looking and considering and asking family members to look and consider too.

It boiled down to a choice among five themes.  I tried each in turn, adjusting the various items on the page to coordinate.  One three-column theme turned out to be just too busy when all was said and done.  One theme that I really liked turned out to have missing pieces and wouldn’t install.  One had a sidebar that was way too wide.  One looked really good, but there was no “edit” function for the posts and the borders around my images disappeared, so the text butted right up against them.  And then there was this theme, which excited no one, but in which every component actually worked.

So I have installed it, for now, and will continue to look around for something I like better.

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…or the blog by its theme.

I love this [ie. the original] theme, called “Travels with Evelyn,” but it hasn’t been updated for the newest version of WordPress, and some things I try to post mess it up something terrible. Sigh. So I suppose that the best thing for me to do is look around for a new theme, at least in the short run, and hope the designer fixes this one.

I thought about making my own unique theme, but my programming skills are WAY short of what I’d need to do that. So I’m going to start going through the theme browser, and see if I can find a new one that I like well enough. I did the same for my Multi.Colored tattoo blog so I’m sure something good will come along.

Anyone have any suggestions?

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Well, I did try out an Amazon banner in a previous message, but my WordPress theme doesn’t seem to like it much.  So the banner’s gone and so is the message.

Serves me right for trying to put ads in commentary. 

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I also upgraded this journal to the latest edition of WordPress, updated all my plugins and removed some of the ones I’m not using.  That, at least, went well.  But if you spot any glitches, please let me know.  I’m definitely getting better at this with practice. 

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Don’t mind me.  I’m always on the lookout for good WordPress plugins and I’m experimenting with some new ones today.  We now return you to your regularly scheduled eccentricities.

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Just experimenting with plugins. This is a good book if you’re interested in the “backstory” of the Teutul family from Orange County Choppers (aka “American Chopper” on TLC). Click on the image to go straight to Amazon!

This book goes into much more detail about the family than the previous “At Full Throttle” book did. Maybe too much. But it does give one a better idea of why the family dynamic is the way it is.

Definitely worth a look if you’re an OCC fan.

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