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.

2019-11-14T09:01 Lair Dujour

It looks like the Orcmid Lair theme, as it is at the moment, is a better continuation point for Wingnut and other provisions.  This is what it looks like and what I will replicate and tweak here.  I am particularly fond of the top row with the search gadget and handy links for authoring.

A Margin Too Far?

There are some very odd goings-on now that I have been fiddling with the default theme. 

I have learned how to obtain reflow by extending the right margin.  This makes for some very long lines, and they defeat sight reading.  I will adjust that. 

I also observe that images are expanded as the browser view is widened, and it can expand too much, starting pixilation.  So, a new problem.  It is nice that this theme will keep images within the margins and shrinking them as needed.  It makes use of the “original size” image option very appealing.

Finally, there seems to be no way, with this default, to defeat the “Read More” business.  I suspect I will have to change the theme to conquer that.  The default theme just doesn’t seem to have enough control, and I am not prepared to edit the theme’s XHTML just yet.

Oh, and the sidebar has disappeared as well.  And the first body paragraph flows up next to the title block.  My goodness.

Change is the Constant

The initial post and this one at Wingnut’s Muddleware Lab (Blogger reboot) use the default theming that came with initiation of the blog.

Since the idea is to explore changes of themes and other features, these blogs will alter and you won’t know what is being talked about once changes are percolated to all of the posts.

So here’s an image after the first post was made.  It is a matter of interest that if the browser window is shrunk any farther, material starts to be lost.  I am grumpy about how that works in either direction.

My goal, beside other cosmetic improvements, is

• Keeping the sidebar on the left and having it neither resized or the left margin increased as the width of the page is increased in the browser view.
    
• Having the body text reflow to exploit whatever the width of the browser view is.  This will also deal with pages having images that extend past the current right margin, a problem the attached wide image demonstrates.

Those two things are my road to happiness.

Wingnut Da Capo

Spanner Wingnut’s Muddleware Lab is a sort-of-companion to Professor von Clueless in the Blunder Dome.

von Clueless is about geeky things and especially approaches to development, tutorials, and other topics mainly around software development and information technologies.

The Muddleware Lab serves as a laboratory for monkeying around with blog setups, experimental themes, even new hostings, before disrupting what I think of as the production blogs in Orcmid’s Orbit.  It is narrowly applied whereas von Clueless is more generalized.

This reboot of the Muddleware Lab is for the continuation of that arrangement for blogs, new or rebooted, now on blogspot.com.

A little History

“Professor von Clueless in the Blunder Dome” was inspired by “Baron von Tollbooth and the Chromium Nun.”  Really.  “Spanner Wingnut” was inspired by “Bunsen Honeydew,” also confused with “Omar Hampstercheeks.”  I couldn’t help myself.

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Wingnut began as a companion of my original Blogger blogs.  I used it to work out theme changes before propagation to other blogs.  There is a consistency of layout with a variation in the color schemes.

Restoring nfoCentrale Blog Hosting

I decided to migrate from Blogger blogs when I could no longer host and archive their web pages on my own web site.  I began with a Movable Type flavor of Wingnut, practicing before any migration to all the other blogs.  There was a new companion blog,  nfoCentrale Status, dealing with over-all activity on what I think of as the nfoCentrale suite. 

Self-hosting of Movable Type and migration of other blogs stalled.  The site-server model that I favored for authoring was complicated by blog posts showing up on the web sites first, and then having to be backed up on private repositories.  The Web Development Pillars were daunting and depend on some obsolete technology such as Microsoft FrontPage, Visual SourceSafe, and locally running Internet Information Server.

Firtations

While fatigued by my web development model, I also operated Orcmid’s Live HideOut, originally on Microsoft’s Windows Live blog service and migrated to a free Wordpress account when Microsoft’s attention span took what is by now an all-too-predictable course.  I began using Live HideOut to account for conception and effort for my career capstone Miser Project.  That felt awkward.

Meanwhile, I was intrigued by Hexo as a way of authoring and maintaining a blog on my own computers, publishing from there to my various blogs hosted inside the nfoCentrale.com server.  This would provide backup at the source.  Comments were to be handled by Discus. My effort to accomplish that on Wingnut first stalled on an interoperability problem.  We have parted friends.  I am done with that and the inscrutable dependencies and the challenges of maintaining forks of GitHub chunks.

Going Forward

For now, Wingnut is back on Blogger, hosted on Blogspot.  There may be yet-another migration of a blog or two, and we’ll see how Wingnut figures into that, or not.