BOOYAH!

It’s time to not only celebrate my blog relaunch, but my two year blogging anniversary!!    And dude, the video totally captures the moment here.  I’m talking a blog wrecked to death, only to come back stronger, sleeker, and totally badass with some badass music cranking in the background and leather jackets and cool black vintage cars cruising the highway and let us go have a throwdown and kick some serious scum of the earth hellbags because baby,  I am back!

Yeah, I’m a little excited here. 

But really, what I just pulled off was a miracle that only God could have given me, and I now have the latest version of WordPress along with a new Who-is-your-DADDY theme that is all kinds of awesomeness. 

I still need to work out a few kinks and decide on a new photo gallery to use, but for all intents and purposes the site is now live, with a sleeker, faster look and a few new bells and whistles I think you’ll all enjoy.   For an idea of what’s new, see the little oval thingie jiggy to the right of each post title?  Go give that a click.

Cool, huh? 

In addition, you’ll now be able to edit comments as well.  I also dropped a few plugins, added a cache system and went with a 2 sidebar look again to reduce clutter.  Yes the ads are still there, but they are no longer as obtrusive as they used to be.  To be honest I got tired of having a larded up ad block embedded inside my posts, partly because I couldn’t quote or post any media content on the fly.  The ad would jam it up and I’d have to manually remove it in order for the post to show cleanly.  Not cool.  But I still need the ads though, since the 50 cents I’m making a day is paying for my newspaper, and I just don’t know how I could live without those two quarters a day, ya know?

As for the dark theme, I’m working on creating a white backdrop just for the posts and comments for easier reading (while still maintaining a dark look), so stay tuned there.  I might have gotten it done sooner but the theme kept overriding my color settings.  Regardless, let me know what you think.

It wasn’t easy though, but I got through it, and now I can finally enjoy the fruits of my labor…. except of course, Google just had to rain on my parade by dropping my pagerank from a 4 to a 3 while I was busy upgrading.    Really Google, why don’t you just suck my ass times a thousand?  Dweebs.

But meh, whatever.  I finally made a leapfrog in upgrading without having to spend a fortune to have a designer do it, my sleek black car will get a nice facelift and wax job by the end of the summer, and in a few more months I’ll be out of debt,  cruising the road and enjoying my new lease on life.  All I’ll need then is a weathered black leather jacket, and my life will truly be complete. 

I’m serious, the government needs to declare all of Microsoft a terrorist group, because quite frankly they are more of a threat to mankind than Al Qaeda is right now.

I was polishing up up my blog when I happened to noticed the colors I changed for a particular table wouldn’t take for some reason in Microsoft’s newest bundle of pure joy, IE7. No matter, since it didn’t affect the layout or anything… but then I glanced down and also happened to notice this HUGE horizontal bar on the bottom scrolling out for maybe half a mile before it ended. Oh no. No no no no…..

It wasn’t showing up in Firefox or IE6, so I knew this was an issue relating to IE7. Just beautiful. Worse yet, as I surfed around my blog using IE7, I noticed a few other things were breaking as well. Why, oh why, did I harbor the hope that maybe, just ONCE, IE7 would somehow prove not to be yet another disastrous release that would cause web designers everywhere to curse and spit at any and all things relating to Microsoft? I had thought IE7 would be just enough of an improvement over IE6 (which itself gave me endless hours of grief) that I wouldn’t have to pay it any mind when coding my blog.

Nope nope nope. IE7 promptly decided to treat my blog like a public restroom, hosing everything down in its path, but in just clever enough a manner that I wouldn’t notice it right away. And now because of those nice folks in Seattle who curiously enough also liked to worship Satan in their spare time, I had to deal with this mile long horizontal bar that was apparently stretched out to cover some 4th dimensional object residing on my blog, seemingly invisible to the naked eye.

So, with the clock striking midnight, I resolved to work this through until I figured out what was causing the problem. What would follow would be a series of deleting/adding code, uploading the modified file, refreshing my page, checking the results, then rinse, wash and repeat. I continued on this neverending cycle until 4AM, when I finally tossed in the towel and crashed on my bed, muttering curses at Microsoft, then sleeping and dreaming that I was muttering curses at Microsoft. I finally woke up around 11AM, somewhat refreshed and ready to pick up where I left off.

After another hour or so of googling for answers, uploading code and swearing yet another blue streak at Microsoft, I finally found an answer. The reason my horizontal bar spanned on to infinity was because the numbers I used to list comments in numerical order were in…. italics.

That’s it. No other reason. Because my comment numbers were in italics, IE7 in its unending wisdom decided it needed to create a horizontal bar that could be wrapped around the earth three times because somehow, that just makes it all better.

I hate those Microsoft coders. I hate them. I hate their mothers, I hate their wives, I hate their children, I hate their pets, I HATE THEM. There are not enough fleas in this universe to infest the armpits of those hacking terrorists to my liking. I long await the day when the earth will open up and swallow the entire Microsoft campus whole, while angels in heaven sing and rejoice over the destruction of the greatest evil the world has ever known, at least ever since the invention of disco.

But in the meantime, I must continue to fight off these demons from infesting my blog, and lend my hand in some small way to assist those who have also been afflicted by this plague of mankind. So here it is: I noticed this problem also occured in those running Wordpress blogs using the Tiga theme. If this describes you, check an individual page where at least one comment has been made (in IE7 of course) to see if you get the horizontal bar as well. To fix, simply change the font style in the class “comment-num” to something other than italic, OR add the line “overflow: hidden” to the class comment header in your Tiga stylesheet. That should resolve the problem.

Fortunately, the other IE7 related issues were easily solvable, and I managed to clean them up just in time to see the sun set in the sky, yet another day stolen from me because of those evil snotbags in Seattle. *Sigh*

I think it’s obvious web design is definitely not for me. I had to do all this with only a rudimentary understanding of CSS, PHP and XHTML, and things have gotten a wee bit more complicated since I built my first webpage back in ‘97. Ahhhh the good old days, where you could throw some text up, wrap them in a font tag and low and behold, you had a webpage comparable to Yahoo. Now it can suck up all my time just to figure out what relative and absolute positioning means, and why it’s making my blog look like a pile of moose droppings. I can either spend all my time building and maintaining a blog, or I can spend it blogging for real, but I surely can’t do both. I think the time will eventually come when the technology will be so far over my head that I’ll have no choice but to use a service like Typepad just to avoid the chores and anguish of building and maintaining my own blog. It’s kind of sad, but what can I do. I don’t intend to go down without a fight though, so while I can still dance, I say, bring on the NOISE.