Comments Too Simplified

Much to my distress, Blogger does not support any kind of features in comments, especially links.  

The comments are, of course, in the cloud and not where I can preserve them.

I wonder if I can use Discus comments instead.  It will involve hacking the template.  But maybe that is the reliable way to support and curate them.

Staging Progress

I have moved control of theme customization and trials to here,  in line with the Accounting for Themes direction.

Orcmid’s Lair design is moved here.  I made adjustments to the customization that are consistent while distinguishing Muddleware Lab appearance.  Those cosmetic features will also be customized when I respawn other blogs in the current re-establishment effort.

A few design modifications have been back-ported to Orcmid’s Lair after being confirmed with changes here. 

I’ve determined how to avoid Open Live Writer mangling its edit pages.  I am not updating from the blog’s theme material on blogspot.  I pray that there are no untoward effects.

I also discovered why the Movable Type incarnation of the Muddleware lab now serves up ugly.  The forced change of the access URLs causes page-internal absolute URLs to be blocked because they are still http:// ones.  So styles and scripts are not fetched. Ick.  This deserves a post of its own on the law of unintended (?) consequences,  fixing things that are not broken, and widespread cluelessness.

Stage Setting

I am mostly satisfied with the current templating of the Orcmid’s Lair blog.

Before I begin respawning my dormant blogs as part of organizing voices, I am capturing everything I know about the Orcmid’s Lair template so that I can be systematic about it.

I might give up having different-colored page-top banners because of the problem when Open Live Writer imports the blog’s formatting in a manner that is unhelpful.  Perhaps, just perhaps, I could find a template customization that overcomes the problem I am witnessing at the moment.

Accounting for Themes

It might seem odd that some posts earlier than this one provide screen captures present no difference in theme compared to the post the image is included in.
Those appear that way because when the theme is changed or modified, the image will continue to show what I was looking at the time, event though the page itself will appear as the newer theme.  These happen retro-actively because of the way themes are inserted in the access to these blogspot.com pages.
I am now itching to respawn other blogs, as part of having clear voices. 
Notes to Self:

• Tie this blog and archives to the predecessors at https://orcmid.com/BlunderDome/wingnut/
• Mimic the current layout of Orcmid’s Lair, but have a distinguished banner coloring.

• Find a way to have Open LiveWriter not over-employ the site theme in Edit model

• Get better highlighting on visited links as well as unvisited links.
• Figure out how to get the edit pencil on all of my bylines.  [Got that, and dates above posts also]

nfoCentrale: Longing for Clear Voices

[2020-02-12T19:10Z Cross-posted from Orcmid’s Lair]

I have had several blogs.  Some of their dormant states are linked on the sidebar here.  My inattention to maintenance of consistent voices on particular themes has led to fracture and confusion (for myself at least) with respect to my Internet presences.

A feature I miss is having separate blogs focused on roughly-consistent themes.  There has been 10 years of neglect since I was flummoxed by breaking-for-me changes in how Blogger worked. Now there is fragmentation of voice to reconcile. 

• Numbering Peano for the Miser Project, with theoretical and implementation facing matters now also addressed on the GitHub project, GitHub-hosted documentation, and perhaps a Miser Project Wiki.  Project issues are also used as a form of dialog on topics.  Discounting the Facebook presence, my pent-up need to provide a blog narration started with Orcmid’s Live Hideout (on Wordpress) and migration of posts under a label here.  That’s not satisfying, and I might migrate one more time with revival of Numbering Peano.  What a scatter-brain that orcmid is.
    
• Professor von Clueless, where I prefer to consolidate geeky developer materials and also tie ins related to nfoWorks, nfoWare , and the GitHub nfoTools (and a few others), all oriented to beginner/enthusiast/developer matters.  The separate nfoWorks diary is also languishing, with its focus on interoperability and electronic documents.
    
• nfoCentrale, the web-site anchor and its now decrepit status blog and the Spanner Wingnut experimental blog (and its predecessors) for confirming blog setups and templates prior to attempting changes to another “production” blog.
    
• Orcmid’s Lair, this respawning of a previous incarnation that is also the sequel to Orcmid’s Live Hideout, itself an imperfect image-losing migration from a blog originally hosted on Windows Live when there was such a thing.  There is a great of material on the Live Hideout blog, going back to 2007.  It was meant to be just an experiment, not Orcmid’s Lair accumulated offerings du jour.

What a mish-mash!

Some of this has to deal with me being so easily distracted and pursuing of new shiny things. “Squirrel!”.  At the same time, there is also confirmation that life-cycle of vendor (i.e., MIcrosoft) products and the continuing-use dependency of end-users are wildly different. 

So many blogs are dormant since 2010 because I failed to come up with appealing replacements.  Self-hosting of Movable Type on nfoCentrale.com and node.js development of hexo-based blogs didn’t pan out and they managed to have little deployment apart from experimentation on Spanner WIngnut. 

Here I am, having traveled full-circle, using Blogger and free blogspot,com hosting.  This restoration of Orcmid’s Lair (and continuation of Orcmid’s Live Hideout) is just one step. 

I remain wary and cautious, faced with tending this octopus’s garden of mine and achievement of some manageable consistency.

2019-11-19T08:22 Seeking Reflow

I have managed to have a better default width, by specifying

This however, does not provide for reflow when the browser width is expanded or contracted.  It is fixed but somewhat more appealing although the text is rather wide.

I can touch up other things, but this basic provision is unavailable with the "Simple" theme.  The XHTML of the theme is over 4,000 lines and I hesitate to dig into it, even if the change is easy to accomplish.

I might want to look at other themes just to see what is possible by comparing the XHTML provisions.

2019-11-18T15:50 Not Quite the Same

On comparison, I realized that while I have now switched to the first "Simple" theme, Orcmid's Lair began with the flavor having the bookshelf background.  I removed that because the busy background interfered with the blog-editing window in Open Live Writer.

My change of layout with left sidebar was preserved from my use on the default Wingnut theme I just replaced.

Now I must see if I can make the necessary margin and textflow adjustments that I desire.