Administrivia (I hate orange, but why it remains).

Posted on By pukeko

Themes: “I hate Orange” A couple of days ago the lad looked at the blog — he’d just finished breakfast, and said in effect that the colours are ugly and that it used to look better. In particular, he hates the Orange titles and links. I made a comment that if this theme had a blue option, I would go for it. But I change themes quite frequently. At present I have four or five themes installed, and I’m testing them, rather than inflict another change on everyone. He preferred the cyberchimps themes…. which I got rid of because they load slowly. The trouble is that I want an odd mix.

  • Fast Loading.
  • Posting excerpts on page one. A lot of my posts run to a thousand words.
  • Can handle superscripts. Which this theme does not do at all.
  • Preferably Blue.
  • Absolutely stable.
  • Not ugly: I think twenty fourteen (the default theme, used at Darkness Talks) is ugly. DT is a very low traffic site, and I don’t really mind it there. I read this multiple times a day. I don’t want my eyes bleeding.
  • Text and multimedia orientated and Link Friendly. Again, this theme is no the best here: there are links (look at the bottom of the page)
  • Not a hassle to maintain. Which is why I have not made a child theme.

So, at present I will tolerate Orange (Not for long: I changed the font the next day). I have got the photo blog using the same colour: let the complaints start…

UPDATE. Clear feedback. Orange dumped. The links are back where they ought to be, and it is a classic blog — you will have to scroll to find things. Theme is now BrightNews… and the name appeals.


Firefox has become flakey.

And it is not Firefox’s fault. The problem is Java, and Java extensions. One needs them: wordpress runs on them, and my favourite presentation software is written as a java script. Most of the time this works. But at times you need to switch this off, and at times you need raw speed. I had too many plugins in Firefox (I need a couple: Zotero being the main one) but I don’t need them for blogging.

And I dislike Chromium (Chrome). Solution? Install Opera. It is fast. and when you are creating text speed matters.

Manjaro Linux, looking good, and needs long-term trials.

Manjaro is an easy way of installing Arch, and the OpenBox system just works. It’s been up for about two weeks now, and is looking good. If it remains stable on the test machine (a dell laptop) it may become the default system: at present the servers are running a modified version of Xubuntu.

 

Comments and irritations

There have been a couple of threads where a conversation has started: some have become somewhat monomaniacal. The comments are, open — sort of. To get a comment up you have to:

  • Not be a known troll. If you really annoy me, the banhammer will swing on your email and IP address.
  • Not swear. Disqus has a very good filter that screens out every word you can think of and all the variations thereof.
  • Not be in the honeypot. That means that you are not posting from an IP address or a domain that is known to be taken over by spambots. That may knock out a lot of emails.
  • Not have an ID. Disqus will handle twitter, facebook and Disqus IDs: I’ve tested this and I can post from any of them.

If you make a good comment, it will be tweeted.

If you make a really good comment, it will be linked, oralluded to, or quoted.

On the other hand, if you are trolling, or ignorant, you may be quoted as well, because examples of errors are so useful, and fisking will happen.

Finally, the combox is not a democracy. I will redact. I will delete. I will edit.  But I would prefer not to, which is why I’ve got such strong filters and don’t really moderate.

 


 

UPDATE

Darm Brightness is number 30 on the NZ blog list for January. Thanks Open Parachute for the info.

3 thoughts on “Administrivia (I hate orange, but why it remains).”

  1. Orange is on my short list of colors I don’t like much, but I don’t pay a lot of attention to it. The other background was prettier, fwiw. Blogspot is more fun for backgrounds, but it fails most of your other tests.

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