Redesigned Again

Despite my fears of the dreaded lost password problem, I upgraded to WordPress 1.2. I did, indeed, experience the Dread Problem, but deleting my wordpress cookies solved it for me. Others have not been so lucky. (I backed up the database before making any sudden moves, of course.)

The new version spontaneously reordered my categories, but this advice fixed the problem. I’m hoping to use the subcategory feature to organize my categories better, although it’s kind of flaky.

Note the new blog design. If it looks dull and grey, give it a minute. In a real browser, color will slowly trickle in. I’m using the colorpress script under a semi-transparent greyscale PNG background image to get the colors. Since Win/IE is a piece of aging junk that can’t handle transparency, the most you’ll see with it is some pretty text colors. I’m also seeing some wackiness with the tabs and post content in Mac/IE - the workaround is, as always, to use a real browser. Tell me, though, if Win/IE munges the entries as well. Thanks.

[Update:] With Seema’s help, the Win/IE flashing problem has been fixed and the floating comment box is more or less anchored in the right place. To fix the latter I reduced the number of columns in the textarea from 70 to 40. (I had to edit wp-comments.php by hand to do that. While I was in there I upped it from 4 rows to 6.) The stylesheet then resizes it to the correct size in real browsers. Mac/IE’s float bug is beyond my power to fix, but if you make the window narrow enough (just over the width of the tab bar), the blog will become legible.

4 Responses to “Redesigned Again”

  1. Seema Says:

    Actually, in IE, your blog is going all weird and blinking and it’s hard to determine where to click to leave a comment.

  2. Jemima Says:

    Thanks, Seema. I turned off the flashing (the background color rotation) in IE, since in theory you can’t see the background through the PNG anyway. Firefox will still flash once on loading.

    I’m not sure what’s up with the comment box, but this page validates and works in real browsers so it’s not my fault. I’ll try to track it down later.

  3. Lori Says:

    Very nice. I like the snowflake pattern, especially in gray. Safari thinks this is just fine - not that you didn’t know already….

  4. Jemima Says:

    Thanks. I need one of those old tacky “best if viewed with some browser you probably don’t have” buttons, though any real browser will do.

    I should have mentioned that the background image is from my Persian Rug tile collection. I made it semi-transparent using GraphicConverter.