Tag: Website

As I slowly make the change from rambling on Facebook to using this website more, I am faced with a decision. When I first started this blogging thing (way back in 2003), the site was done by hand in html and tables. It was ugly but it worked. Then I learned basic CSS and upgraded the website. Moving to WordPress greatly improved the look and feel of the place!

I created the main site (They’re Just Words) then re-created the blog as a directory. I did a LOT of copy/paste! I still have some of the original html pages.

And now I am considering moving the blog (where you are now) to its own sub-domain. So the URL would be blog.paulaoffutt.com. I’ve created it but it is empty because moving a WordPress site can either be easy peasy or it can be PITA wita. Since I am not switching hosts (I love DreamHost and have been with them since 2002).

What would be ideal is to copy the database over, leave this one with a single page that says “We’ve Moved!” and give the address. But that’s the PITA wita.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Thought Patterns (this blog) has a “privacy policy” now. Yay?

You can view that page here: Privacy Policy page. It has links explaining why on Earth I have a privacy policy. Not going to repeat it all here.

But I did some more research. See Linkages below.

I logged out of the admin panel then went into my browser’s privacy settings, found cookies, and deleted all of them from paulaoffutt.com. There were a lot because of the two sites within the same domain. Anyway, I removed them all, cleared the browser’s cache, and went to the website (paulaoffutt.com/blog). I then right clicked a blank spot and selected “Inspect Element” (this was Firefox but each browser should have the same “inspect” option). After that, click the “Storage” tab at top and “Cookies” from the lift on the left.

Doing so showed me two things:

First, visiting the site and accepting the privacy policy gives you two cookies. These are ironically from the new plugin I have to assist with keeping track of this GDPR thing. Go figure.

Second, if you leave a comment, and only if you leave a comment, you will get two (if you don’t enter a website) or three (if you do). See screenshot below. Click it for larger version.

Since I do not allow anyone to register and I don’t make anyone sign in via Facebook or Google and I don’t have any ads, that’s it as far as cookies go.

Linkages:
WordPress Cookies by commenters
Wikipedia article about Cookies
GDPR WP – the WordPress plugin I am using

So while I think about the beginning of this book I’m trying to write, I’m still working on my websites. I now have only two of them to keep track of. I dumped the contents of all the others, even got rid of the databases for them. I am such a digital hoarder. I admit that.

Anyway, the theme I have been using is one I kinda did myself based off one of the original ones from many years ago. I like my CSS stylesheet to be neat and tidy, not the mess they have it now. And it was working just fine, but more and more plugins were getting hard to get to work if I needed them to run on a page vs run in the background.

“They’re Just Words” (my official site) has had a “real” theme for a while now but it is all pages and very static. “Thought Patterns” however, has a lot going on. Or it once did. Anyway, I’ve looked at a bunch of themes, tried them out. I didn’t want one with flashing crap or rotating images or rolling news feeds. I wanted:

• light colors
• two columns
• right sidebar
• single image across entire top
• OR right sidebar that goes all the way to the top
• custom colors
• custom anything else I could do

Oh what fun it has been finding any to fit all that. Then to trial them and see if I could figure them out. Some were so funkily CSS coded, I couldn’t find anything! One looked good but was very, very widget dependent. If it wasn’t a widget, I don’t think it could go into the sidebar. I tried putting a line of text inside some code to see where it would appear in the sidebar and it…well, it was a mess. Another was beautiful but you could only have 3 custom menus for the entire design. Just three??

But I think I like the one I am using now, called Catch Evolution. A little to bright white for me so I may gray it up a bit. And the upper right menu bar, the title of it is in black inside the brown and can’t be read. I need to dig through the CSS and find it.

Let me know what you think.

Oh, and the plugin found close to 1600 broken links. Not surprising for a blog that’s been around for almost 11 years. I got almost all of them on the main site and will slowly work through them on this one. So anything that is faded and has a line through it is a broken link.

I think. I hope.

They’re Just Words (main part, professional part)
Looks ‘xactly the same and should have no issues. You will notice two differences immediately. One may be annoying and please let me know. All external links will have the “external link” icon next to it. If you find that distracting, tell me! Personally, I’m not fond of it but it’s something I am trying. The other difference will be some links with lines through them. That means they are broken and I need to fix them. Of course there may be a few other things here and there that are new. Like a new “captcha” for comments I’m trying.

As far as things being broken still, there’s a few pages with specific purpose, such as the sitemap, that are not working since they are plugin or code dependent. Those still need to be fixed. Most of the major changes were behind the scenes. WordPress is an awesome software and luckily this site has a “real” theme with very few changes to it.

Thought Patterns (the good, the bad, the fugly)
The problem with good old Thought Patterns is it’s been around a loooong time. Which means a huge database with lots of stuff that I wasn’t sure was still needed or not so I was just leaving tables still there. So the blog was getting slower, taking up a lot of room, and just asking for trouble. Which was surprising it was not the one hacked. Or maybe the hackers just didn’t want to deal with all the clutter and went for nice and neat TJW instead. We’ll never know.

Once I figured out what I was doing and got the other half working, I got to work on this one. Which wasn’t easy. The theme I use is based off one of the original themes from way, way back and is so customized, I’m surprised it still works with each update. The CSS file, bless its heart, is what holds this site together. It’s a strong beastie.

So. Plugins. Outdated. Wow were they. Replacing some many most of them was impossible. Luckily I’d found replacements for the important ones when doing the other so all I had to do was either find something for the others or decide if I really and truly needed whatever it was that plugin did. I opted for the latter.

Which means some things no longer exist. If you were subscribed to be notified of new posts, that no longer exists. I can’t find one that does what I want without also notifying you of everything else under the sun (like if I update a page or log on). And there’s going to be some older posts with some missing stuff in it. Broken code, missing images, etcetera. Get over it.

Anyway, I could go on and on about what is working and what is not. But I’d rather go sit out in the sun with my dog and my honey. So have fun with the “new” sites and let me know what you think. And let me know if anything is not working.

3:08pm – Wow. 12hrs. I did get some sleep, though! Updated a LOT of the stuff in the sidebar. Did a bunch of links, changed/updated pages, um, bunches of stuff along those lines. Changed the color of the sidebar background. But…I think it is all a little too….pastel-y. I ain’t a pastel-y gal. I like soft colors, soft textures, yeah. But….I don’t know. Wood tone colors aren’t that fun to look at sometimes. Gonna look for images of trees now. When I’m done, I’ll link to all the images I am trying out or, rather, the ones I at least liked enough to leave up for more than a few seconds.

3:42am – couldn’t sleep. About the time I was ready to, the sound I’d been hearing finally made it’s way to my brain. I thought a fish filter had gone kuput but it was a helicopter. It had been flying around for at least 45 minutes at that point. It finally changed it’s grid or something and I could no longer hear it at about 2:30, about 2hrs after I first heard it. No clue what it was looking for. We locked the doors and turned on the porch light juuuust in case.

Anyway, looked for a photo of my own and put up two photos. One in the header (our garden shed) and one in the sidebar (purple iris bud). But they no longer match the color scheme I had before so….

I’m going to bed. More later.