Tinkering

I have been tinkering with Ghost Town Orange's template; you may notice a few new bells and whistles, and some old ones repaired. In particular, I restored the Weather and Upcoming News Sources pages--find the links to the right.

Ghost Town Orange is over a year old. I need to clean up the archives--remove dead links, restore pictures that are no longer hosted, and eliminate some obsolete information about prior versions of Ghost Town Orange. Developing...

Father, let me dedicate All this year to you
In whatever earthly state You will have me be
Not from sorrow, pain, or care Freedom dare I claim;
This alone shall be my prayer: Glorify Your name.
--from New Year's Hymn by Lawrence Tuttiett, 1864 (alt.)

Yet more testing of the template

Style sheet tinkering.

This is Headline 1

This is Headline 2

This is Headline 3

This is Headline 4

This is Headline 6

Father, let me dedicate All this year to you
In whatever earthly state You will have me be
Not from sorrow, pain, or care Freedom dare I claim;
This alone shall be my prayer: Glorify Your name.
--from New Year's Hymn by Lawrence Tuttiett, 1864 (alt.)

Template Tinkering

Following the advice found here, Ghost Town Orange is being spiffed up a little. Excuse the mess.

UPDATE 10:53 am

Ghost Town Orange has been successfully tinkered with! The improvements:

• Revised permanent link code and implemented post pages
• Updated page title code
• Inserted 'Recent posts at Ghost Town Orange" code at the foot of the main page
• Fixed Javascript for Random Quotes.
• Removed the odd link-to-nowhere that followed post titles

UPDATE 2--June 20, 2004 6:25 pm

I have tried viewing Ghost Town Orange with another browser (Mozilla) and it's a mess. I realize that I need to make my blog a little more standards-compliant. (Internet Explorer is too forgiving of bad code.) So major changes are coming to Ghost Town Orange.

Father, let me dedicate All this year to you
In whatever earthly state You will have me be
Not from sorrow, pain, or care Freedom dare I claim;
This alone shall be my prayer: Glorify Your name.
--from New Year's Hymn by Lawrence Tuttiett, 1864 (alt.)

New image host for Ghost Town Orange

Finally, Blogger has enabled image hosting for cheapo blogs like Ghost Town Orange. We are so sick of arbitrary band-width restrictions by these free hosts that shut down images whenever they actually get used.

So here's a plug for Picasa's Hello Software with Bloggerbot. This, plus Blogger's recent revamp with new templates, comments, RSS feed, etc. means I have some template tinkering to do... :-}


To do's:
1. Find one of Blogger's new template for Ghost Town Orange's Archive.
2. Check links in old posts.
3. Move image files to new host and update in posts.
4. Clarify RSS feed. It seems that I promised to write about newsfeeds and never have...
5. Maybe I'll provide an alternative non-Javascript-heavy version of Ghost Town Orange.

Father, let me dedicate All this year to you
In whatever earthly state You will have me be
Not from sorrow, pain, or care Freedom dare I claim;
This alone shall be my prayer: Glorify Your name.
--from New Year's Hymn by Lawrence Tuttiett, 1864 (alt.)

Apology

Ghost Town Orange has noticed that it has apparently exceeded the daily download limit from its free image host. So they say:

Downloads from your account has been temporarily locked.
Our system has detected that your usage over the last 24 hours has exceeded your daily download limit. Download links to your files are temporarily unavailable.As soon as your 24 hour total usage drops below your daily transfer limit, public access to your files will be restored.

But "In the last 24 hours, you have used 3.56MB(71%) of your daily transfer allowance." So Ghost Town Orange does not understand how it exceeded the daily transfer allowance. . .But Sitemeter says we have had 21 visitors today, which must be a new high for our very humble site.

Father, let me dedicate All this year to you
In whatever earthly state You will have me be
Not from sorrow, pain, or care Freedom dare I claim;
This alone shall be my prayer: Glorify Your name.
--from New Year's Hymn by Lawrence Tuttiett, 1864 (alt.)

More template tinkering etc.

I enjoy the sliding layers of the template I'm using, but sometimes it doesn't load properly. So I am going to simplify it in the near future: just links to simple pages with the reference material.
I need to do another batch of link-testing to fix the images that villagephotos so courteously de-linked, etc.

Father, let me dedicate All this year to you
In whatever earthly state You will have me be
Not from sorrow, pain, or care Freedom dare I claim;
This alone shall be my prayer: Glorify Your name.
--from New Year's Hymn by Lawrence Tuttiett, 1864 (alt.)

Image host troubles

Village photos no longer allows external links to image files.

I'm bumping up against Ripway's daily usage limits.

It's just a matter of time until I pay for better service, or stop putting pictures in Ghost Town Orange. . .

Father, let me dedicate All this year to you
In whatever earthly state You will have me be
Not from sorrow, pain, or care Freedom dare I claim;
This alone shall be my prayer: Glorify Your name.--from New Year's Hymn by Lawrence Tuttiett, 1864 (alt.)

Christmas Program at School

Here are some pictures from our visit to school for the Christmas program. I forgot to post them earlier; and then the camera went AWOL until today.
Here Joe is showing me the different sounds the keyboard can make. We visited the music room, where about 30 children played a phrase from 'Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee.'

Tim and I in his classroom after the program. (I'm the one with the goofy smile.)
A sudden unexplained surge in visits to Ghost Town Orange today has over-used one of my image hosts, so some pictures will not be viewable until tomorrow. Patience!

New template for Ghost Town Orange

Testing, testing
I'm trying to pack in as much as I can!

Have patience while weather banners load; if you click too soon, you may get an error message. Refresh the page if this happens.

Buttons on the left side lead you to other parts of the page:

Home: returns you to the main blog page.

Christian: takes you to a page of Christian links,

Reference: takes you to a page of reference links.

News and Weather: takes you to a page with the weather banners, links to favorite columnists and blogs, and background links for Iraq and Afghanistan.

Miscellany: takes you to a page filled with stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else--the German aphorism of the day (which is not changing daily!) and stamp-collecting links.

Archives Credits: takes you to the link to the archives and gives credit to the various web services that make this blog possible.

Ideally, web pages shouldn't have links that point to themselves, but the template I modified came that way and I don't know how to fix that.

Praise the LORD. Praise the LORD, O my soul.
I will praise the LORD all my life; I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.
Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men, who cannot save.
When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing. --Psalm 146:1-4 NIV

Happy Thanksgiving

Tim hasn't been feeling well, so we didn't go to Joyce's sister's house for Thanksgiving.
I have spent much of the day tinkering with a new template for Ghost Town Orange. It's not quite ready for prime time, but you can get a sneak preview here. I just don't like the "instability" of the current template: pictures in the main column bump the sidebar down to the bottom; wide sidebar items don't fit or have to wrap in an ugly way. So I will switch to the new template soon.
One thing about the new template: I will not be able to use the checkbox to "open links in new windows;" the browser thinks the slide layer function is opening a link, tries to open a new window and can't find what to put there.

Don't be hateful to people, just because they are hateful to you. Rather, be good to each other and to everyone else. Always be joyful and never stop praying. Whatever happens, keep thanking God because of Jesus Christ. This is what God wants you to do. --1st Thessalonians 5:15-18 CEV

A little template tinkering

If only I could resist the temptation to put wide pictures in posts, I could have a side-bar at the side.
I think I'll redesign the title bar to include the "check box for links to open in new windows." At least that should be up top.
My "bottom-bar" has a news feed from allheadlinenews.com. Scroll down to find it, or maybe I'll post it here for now:


I discovered how useful RSS feeds are yesterday. More to come. I have found instructions on how to "syndicate" my blog; but they involve a can of beer and more time than I have now; I need to polish a rough draft for my final comp II essay.

UPDATE

The checkbox is up top; smaller pictures have returned part of the side-bar to the side.

Don't be hateful to people, just because they are hateful to you. Rather, be good to each other and to everyone else. Always be joyful and never stop praying. Whatever happens, keep thanking God because of Jesus Christ. This is what God wants you to do. --1st Thessalonians 5:15-18 CEV

Template tinkering

Ghost Town Orange should be more ORANGE .

Tinkering

I've been goofing with the template. See the left side of the page for the new additions:
You will be greeted with the salutation appropriate to the hour of the day.
You can check a box to have links open in new windows. (Code borrowed from Atrios, who credits randomwalks.com. I notice that they are featuring the bull-doze Iraqi fruit-trees story too.
What an outrage that we are responsible for this. Like imperial Rome dumping salt in Carthage's fields--we will reap what we sow.

Back to the blog

Here's some more about blogging:

a survey

about people who blog and

a quiz

for people who blog.

Here are my results for the quiz:

12.5 %

My weblog owns 12.5 % of me.


I'm not very typical: most bloggers are very young and female. About one fourth of all blogs are created and never updated (why bother to create one in the first place?) Many are abandoned after only a few months. The quiz results seem to indicate that I'll be likely to abandon my blog. But they don't know my commitment* to keeping this "news diary."
Only 50,000 blogs are updated daily. (I have missed a day or two since I've started.) I am still goofing with html tags html tagshtml tags!!! What happens if I do that?

I notice that some of the links have migrated to the bottom of the page. The Columbus stamp picture must be too wide? Perhaps they will correct themselves when Columbus scrolls down? I don't want to mess with the template today.

*My commitment is strong if I can continue to do this for free!

Staying up way too late

I found an image host that will store 25 images for free. I have tinkered with the template a little bit to see how I can put a picture there. And now I'll try it by adding a picture to this post:

Let's see how it looks.

UPDATE

Now I will need to design a Ghost Town Orange Banner!

What's up?

I'm cleaning up my template. The JavaScript for the cost of the war in Iraq counter was fouling up navigation to the bottom of the page somehow, so I replaced it with a link.
I intend to get comments working again soon. Haloscan's logo is back!

UPDATE

The template is fixed! Comments working! Back up everything! Change nothing! (well, I'll keep changing stuff ... carefully.)

Speaking of cleaning up, here are some stain removing tips (link from Grandpa John.)

Last night we attended our stamp club meeting. We discussed our upcoming stamp auctions. Bob showed us some collectibles from "Chicken in the Rough" restaurants (an old fried chicken franchise.)

Template bollixed again

Older posts are not available? And comments have disappeared.

UPDATE

I restored to an earlier version of the template plus a few more links, but lost the comments function. I will re-install tomorrow and clean up the links. Haloscan must be down tonight.

What's Up?

While adding links, I inadvertantly lost a big chunk of my template and had to rebuild it. Back up more frequently!

UPDATE

Monday, I'm still fine-tuning the links and getting a little compulsive about backing up before making any changes to the template.