I just updated the WordPress Theme we use around here (Portfolio Press, if you’re interested) and thought no more about it.
Then I saw a couple of comments about things looking different, so I logged on the same way you guys do to take a look (normally I don’t need to do that). Looks like the update has changed the default fonts, so it’s not you guys’ equipment, and you’re not going crazy.
It is quite startling, having got used the old “look”, and I don’t think it’s an improvement particularly. It’s possible there’s something I can do about it when I have time to look under the hood.
It does seem legible enough, at least to me on this big screen. No idea what it’s like on a laptop or a handheld thingy though, so let me know if it’s so bad as to be a frustration.
I dunno, maybe we’ll get used to it. I do like the old setup better, but I’m not sure if that’s just because I was accustomed to it. I would probably not be put off by this font set if it had been the default when I chose the theme.
When I get chance I’ll look into what options are available without having to go down to code level, meanwhile your honest feedback will be helpful….
Maybe my computer is just getting too old, Gunny, and can’t cope with software that is running too far ahead of it’s creaky old knees. But as things stand now I can no longer access the ‘block quote’ & ‘italic’ or whatever other facilities there were. I think I can still link, tho.
And the box for the captcha code is about 4 inches long, when it used to be about the right size. It sort of looks as if it’s maybe too big and covering up the tool bar or something?
Oh shit, yeah, I see that now too.
Let me see what’s what.
Pain in the ass.
gunny here, trying a few things out.
From here it looks like the captcha thingy is normal now I reloaded it, but let me know.
Not sure what to do about the quicktabs yet. May have to email the author of the theme.
We shall see.
My computer is fairly new with snazzy OS and I can’t access the block quote, italics, etc. either.
By the way, does anyone else get “suggestions” based on browsing history when they go to Google? This just started today after I updated Firefox. It’s very annoying. I don’t know if it’s Google or Firefox.
Hi MM
I have the same problem – the word “comment” obscures most of the quicktab bar.
“blockquote” will still work if you click on the part that is visible, and the “link” tab still works too, but the italic and bold are inaccessible presently.
I’ll work on it tonight if I have time.
-g
One thing that’s kind of cool with this new look is that the tab up there on my Firefox thingy has Gunny’s chicken instead of that boring WordPress thingy.
Can’t fix the quicktag thing, so I disabled it.
I’ll need to email the theme guy somewhere down the road.
Meanwhile if you need to put links in the comments, just paste the URL on a line by itself. It should become a hyperlink automatically.
All the other HTML you’ll have to do the old fashioned way for a while I’m afraid. Or just use “”.
dammit.
I think the quicktag menu is fixed now.
Here’s bold
Here’s italic
Here’s bold and italic together
And here’s a link.
Looks like italic and blockquotes are about the same thing now, and the big ” has disappeared.
I’m tired, that’s the best I can do for now.
Gunny,
Yes the tool bar is back!
Thanks for taking time to do that. And for keeping this whole site up and running for the rest of us to fly in, eat all the snacks, jump all over the furniture, then fly out again. Hope you get some proper rain.
Bluthner;
Fixing it was simple, once Devin pointed me to the change in the stylesheet that was needed. First time I ever messed with that, and I don’t know the first thing about PHP, or LSD or whatever the hell it is. It looks like Greek, with bad punctuation.
Did your captcha display settle down OK too?
Yeah, some rain would be good, but there’s nothing on the horizon so far.
Man, it’s just terribly dry around here. Over on the North Fork to the west they’re saying that folks with the less senior irrigation water shares are going to be out of water by early July at the latest, which is just about unprecedented.
A lot of farmers are going to be hurting. Not sure exactly what the hay supplies for winter will be, but they ain’t gonna be good.
One of these days there’s going to be the mother of all fires out here, and the alkaline runoff into the Colorado River will be appalling, with implications all the way out into Lake Powell and beyond. The amount of deadwood accumulated from generations of fire suppression and the die-off from the Pine Bark Beetle has to be seen to be believed.
Gunny, I haven’t been out your way since before the pine-bark beetle struck in earnest. it must be completely transforming/already have transformed the landscape.
I have read that when the first Europeans arrived, much of the eastern seaboard temperate forest was sweet chestnut. (which was favored by the N. Americans as a food source). What will replace all those dead pines?
Bluthner, yes, the landscape has transformed dramatically beginning slowly about 15 years ago, and accelerating rapidly over the last 5.
The Forest Service predicts at the present rate that in about 5 years more than 80% of the pine in Colorado will be dead. They were saying that Aspen would take over much of that habitat, but then arose this S.A.D. thing (Sudden Aspen Die-off) and they have been croaking too. I’m not up on the latest research into what the cause of that might be. Aspens, as you perhaps know, live in colonies interconnected below ground, and when one gets sick they whole “family” gets sick too.
The mountainsides along the Interstate 70 corridor are literally brown now, with patches of green here and there signalling a small clutch of survivors. Same is true on North/South routes on the East side of the divide. It’s very bad indeed.
Around here in the West things are not yet that serious, in fact the Aspen die-off is visually more apparent than the pines. But it’s slowly worsening.
Ain’t templates just a little funny? Most of the stuff seems to work, and I have to admit I prefer the new font size (and the favicon is pretty cool too). Only major difference seems like the boxes for entering user/email/website/captcha seem to be set to resize to a proportion of screenwidth (like this comment box), rather than being of fixed width. I also can’t see the labels for the boxes, but that might just be a Chrome thing…
The settings to adjust should be somewhere in the stylesheet under a class with “comment-form” in the title, unless there’s a global setting for it somewhere else, of course. [i.e. your captcha image is set within a box of predefined width of 175 under the class class="captchaSizeDivLarge", but none of the other boxes have predefined widths...]
Hope you get some rain – want to borrow some of ours!?
Gunny – Some years ago when Vermont had a terrible spring/summer drought, farmers from other areas sent truckloads of hay to Vermont farmers for the winter. I bet it’ll be the same for Colorado farmers/ranchers if they’re in trouble. Might even be hay from Vermont, as we’re having tons of rain that might more than make up for the weirdly snowless winter. Of course, too much rain ain’t good for the hay either but we’re not at that point yet. Couple summers ago most people had only one cutting because of heavy rainfall. Precarious occupation, farming.
What’s wrong with me? I haven’t noticed any changes
Just about to watch The first match in the European Football Championships…
I’d been baking bread, a chicken, a strawberry cream sponge cake, and scones, and for once timed it just right! But oh God, the washing up
Gunny -
dunno about your particular theme, but is there in your wp admin sidebar an “appearance” link, where you can select fonts and colors and stuff like that? If so, you may be able to tweak from there.
I got an email the other day that WP was updating, and i don’t notice any difference on my own site. (I use the Suffusion theme, which is almost fully customizable from scrap. Granted it would be total overkill to use it for a site like this one).
If that doesn’t work, there is a plugin called Google Fonts too, that you can i believe use with any theme to customize your fonts. The fonts look great on my site and browser, but i haven’t looked at it on any non-Macs.
Gunny,
The other difference (maybe just IE?) is that “recent posts”, “recent comments” and the blogroll aren’t visible until I open the comments on some post. Then everything appears as it always has. (There also seems to be an undeletable invisible character in the upper left corner of the reply box — just before the G in Gunny in this case; but maybe that’s just a new feature, to help push “Gunny” to the right.)
Probably no big deal for most of you but at my age, every keystroke is precious. I’ll try to get in some extra lifting of my small sack of pingpong balls — to delay the atrophy, you know — but sometimes even the most strenuous exercise is just prolonging the inevitable.
Sib;
Good eye!
Yes, autosizing is one of the new changes, not that I could figure that out like you were able to—I found that info on the theme author’s site.
I’ve been poking around in the stylesheet and in the templates, and I’m able to get a sense of what’s going on but not enough to feel comfortable screwing around with it.
I’m getting to where I can live with the font, though if it were me I’d change the color to make it a little darker. Not much though. I think this is the pertinent section of code;
body {
font: 14px/21px ‘Open Sans’, sans-serif;
background:#fff;
color: #555;
}
I’m looking now to educate myself about 3-digit php color codes. By the time I get it all figured out, what with the fire preparation eating up my days, I will probably be so accustomed to the new look that I won’t even want to bother changing it. Still, learning new things is good, they say.
Pornamy;
Yes, there is an “appearance” option, but in this theme it does not include fonts/colors. I might try a plugin just for grins on down the road, but right now my big problem is that the backup utility provided by the webhost won’t work with the ping times associated with a satellite IP.
Consequently I’m flying without a net, so am being very cautious. If I mash things up and can’t reverse what I just did, I can’t just restore a recent backup because I don’t have one, and until I work something out with the host I can’t d/l one.
Spooky.
Nat;
I’m not seeing the absence of the blogroll etc. like you report, though I do understand what you’re saying. You could try a different browser maybe, to see if that’s the source?
Anyone else having that (or other) problems?
The invisible character is part of the autosizing, I think, to prevent the start of a comment from running into the avatar, maybe. That’s a guess.
I honestly haven’t noticed anything different apart from every so often having to log on again even though I haven’t cleaned my cookies…
If it helps, I’m on Google Chrome and because of my eyes have the screen enlarged to 125%.
body {
font: 14px/21px ‘Open Sans’, sans-serif;
background:#fff;
color: #555;
}
Gunny – That’s css, not php. This is good news. Open Sans is the font style. If for some reason a browser can’t read Open Sans, then it defaults to another sans-serif font. You can change that to any font you want, but you probably want a browser-safe one. Here’s a list to pick from. (The 14px / 21/px is the font size.)
http://www.ampsoft.net/webdesign-l/WindowsMacFonts.html
Background #fff – #fff is white, that’s the background color. the #555 is the font color, that’s a gray i think.
To make life easier – here’s a simple chart of web-safe colors and the hexidecimal codes -
http://html-color-codes.com/
For the best tutorials – W3 is probably the best -
http://www.w3schools.com/
On both Safari and Firefox on Mac, i can see the whole sidebar all the time. The field for typing here, and the captcha field does indent and jump around like Natty said though. Not too sure how to fix that.
Also Gunny, just to make things more interesting -
If you see some code in the vicinity of your “body” code that looks like a:#whatever, or a:link#etc, a:hover etc – that is the font code for the links. so you have a blue color for the links, and the hover decoration is underline – so when you hover over a link, it’s underlined. You can change the link color, and the hover color, decoration, etc.
And to backup – in your sidebar there should be a “tools” link, and under that an “Export” link. That’s how to do it, but granted i haven’t tried that yet. No doubt pretty stupid of me. The WP help section at the top right of the page can give you more detailed instructions.
Pornamy;
yeah, css, not php.
And yeah, #555 is a kind of bluish grey etc.
I do kinda get what’s going on, in terms of what the templates and stylesheet are doing and the overall programming architecture. I just don’t have familiarity with the css nomenclature. What you’re telling me is helpful though, for sure.
The color/font definitions are scattered about in “body”, “comment-form” and the like, and obviously those are the lines that control how things look. With this theme there is also a bunch of stuff concerning the “portfolio” aspect of things, which is what I will one day activate to display my work elsewhere on the site.
Devin, the author, has plans to introduce a lot of options in the near future, so I’m thinking I’ll just bump along reading up on this whole thing, and studying the stylesheet and template, until I get a clearer sense of just where everything is. That’s kinda how my mind works—I tend to study the bigger picture first, to get the lay of the land so to speak, then move down into detail. That way I can usually find my way home if I get “lost”.
That way, with a bit of luck and the time to do it, I’ll be able to tweak what I want in future updates as they come along. Sure not going to spend my whole summer staring at the screen to figure it all out though.
The problem with the “export” thing for backup (and with the backup “zip” files from the host, which I can’t d/l anyway) is the size. I’ve ranted before about how slow satellite internet is, and how there is an “FAP Cap” on how much data you can transfer in a 24 hour period (250 MB, with a rollover of unused allowance to a max of 500, in my case).
So, d/loading a complete backup would take hours, and would knock me back to dialup speeds as punishment for exceeding the FAP cap. All that magnificent capability for a bargain price of almost $70 a month. Even low-res videos stall out routinely for me, except at about 3 in the morning, and 25 minutes of video will put me in the penalty box for 24 hours.
There really is no solution to this until/unless we get 21st (hell, even 20th) century technology in this valley. To get the kind of bandwidth and speeds that city folks get for 30 bucks would cost me $250 a month, minimum. No other options here besides dialup, which is impossible of course.
Actually, now I think about it, given how Rube Goldberg this all is it’s amazing any of it works at all.
To make it sort of simpler – if you wanted a darker font color, simply change the 555 to 333.
As to the Rube goldberg thing – the fellow who designed the Suffusion theme that i use is a total genius. He says if you like the theme buy him a cup of coffee – as soon as i get teh site to start paying off, i hope to send him enough for many, many more than just one cup of coffee.
A note for obsessive debuggers (morning, Amy): I flew home yesterday and this morning open up this here site (on an identical copy of IE 9). Right away I noticed that the right side (comments list, etc) was back in place, so I thought I’d tell y’all about it. But in my absence Norton had eaten my log-in cookie, so I had to sign in first. Once I did, the articles were once again spread across the whole page and the usual right side was gone. Now that I’m back in comment land, things are fine again, so I’d guess this would only be a (minor) problem for new readers logging in for the first time on IE 9.
For the conspriracy minded, this takes me back to the 90s when the MS Beast was targetting Netscape, which was then the top selling browser. MS would tweak IE so it didn’t do XML quite the same as Netscape, Netscape would rush out a new version that looked like IE, MS would re-tweak, the Government sued, the case was dropped, and Netscape finally went away for good. Of course MS is over all that now, so this is just nostalgia.
Natty -
The browser wars are why i’ve given up on coding my own sites from scratch and succumbed to WP. There are so many changing adjustments to make in the code to adapt for different versions of IE, Safari, FF, Opera, Linux, etc it’s just not fucking worth it. So i leave the heavy lifting to the saints who design the templates for WP now.
But why are you still using IE? I’m sure you have your good reasons, but once you go Firefox, you wont go back. Safari is actually a piece of shit now too.
For the conspriracy minded
You actually want to avoid both Safari and Google Chrome.
Amy,
I surrendered so long ago that I’ve almost forgotten why. Now it’s just intertia and the fact that I have to use it at work. But what the hell: if you say try it, I will. If you don’t hear from me again, you’ll know it didn’t work out. (I wonder if Google will let me query Firefox…)
Am^=
W+ll! Th&t Seem% t# h^ve w~rk_d p$rf$ctly! And h*re I w`s afr+d Bill Gates w%^ld h=ve s?meh@w f$und a w<y t` s-bot!ge it!
And now you can hook up adblocker – not sure uncle Bill let you do that…
Nat
If we’re going to obsess, which can be fun, let’s get to it. I won’t know how to fix it, but I can, and would like to, pass it along to the theme author:
The right hand column, with the recent comments and the quotes from all over etc etc, are widgets, and I can turn them on or off at will by page. Right now they are turned on for the blog main page and the welcome page, and off everywhere else (“who”, “contact” etc).
Is this what you’re saying …
1. If you connect with IE 9 when not logged it (missing cookie, whatever) the widgets are showing as described above.
2. If you then log in, then they do not show (on the blog main page? on the welcome page? Both?).
3. Regardless of all the above, logged in or not, when you connect to a comment thread on a single article, the widgets are always showing.
… ??
Hmm interesting – I’ve been ignoring IE for a long time, as so many have switched to Firefox. I was wrong above, IE has had adblocking for awhile now. But old Bill hasn’t yet given up orneryness -
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/06/07/microsoft-wont-back-down-on-offering-do-not-track-by-default-in-internet-explorer/
Just for fun – here are some browser usage stats. No wonder Bill is spitting.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Gunny,
Correct. Your point 2 is option 1, “on the blog main page.” They showed for an instant when I first accessed the site while logged in, then disappeared when the posts appeared a second later.
But that’s all behind me now that I’ve put childish things aside and IE is just an ugly memory of my amply misspent youth.
But that’s all behind me now that I’ve put childish things aside and IE is just an ugly memory of my amply misspent youth.
And good for you. Lessee, who owns IE? Safari? Chrome? Now Mozilla…
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/
way o/t – i believe this fellow writes for the Graun -
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/05/25/arianna-huffington-new-uk-political-director-brings-pro-iran-baggage-large/
Now Huffpo, especially the uk version, is a joke. But the relevant part -
Yeah, remind me again of how that works out?