Don’t mind me. I am soooo sick of that random calendar that shows up at the top of the template. If anyone uses that calendar – I am truly sorry but I got rid of it. I also put up a Flickr banner – and I am extremely excited about my newly discovered HTML coding skills. I was able to “hide” certain elements I don’t want to see – rather than delete them altogether. I “hid” the Recent Entries section – because I am honestly not sure how you people who read me get around my site. Do you ever check that “Recent Entries” section? Or do you just scroll down the main page? I don’t know – I never look at the “Recent Entries” thing on other people’s blogs – so I nixed it. Let me know if you are one of those people who relies on that to get around my site and I’ll put it back in. Let’s see what else. Oh, I pushed the Monthly Archives all the way down – I need to figure out a way to deal with those archives so that they are more easily searchable, and CLEANER. Like – I would like it to have only a list of the titles in each month, with a link to each post. So that when you open December 2005, you are not confronted with the entirety of each post. Same thing with the category archives. Like it would be great if, when you opened up my Daily Book Excerpt category – which is enormous – ENORMOUS – you only saw the titles, with a link to each post. It would be so much easier for folks to navigate. Any ideas? Pioneer Woman just re-did her archives and they are MUCH better. (This is what I am talking about and what I want.) I’m a writer. I want my titles to be on display – in an easy manner – so that people who get to me, for various reasons, can find what they like quicker. I also got rid of wee Sheila reading poetry and peppered the sidebar with photographs of myself as that heartless Gibson Girl character I became one wintry afternoon, all by myself in my apartment. I was going to go with the Peter Gatien’s bitter assistant photos – because they still make me laugh – and the comments section of that particular post is hysterical!! People believe I am truly that person and get all angry and uppity – it’s awesome!) but I figured I would keep it with the Gibson Girl theme. I have a birthday coming up and something about that little Sheila’s face, reading The Golden Book of Poetry, in a “casual” pose (yeah, right. Where’s the camera and my key light, please?) has been haunting me. I don’t know. Just don’t feel like looking at her right now. I prefer my Gibson Girl persona in November.
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I am in awe of this. I love the changes! LOVE Gibson Girl Sheila at the top! How how HOW do you do this? I have no control over my own blog — none. (As glaringly demonstrated lately.) But beyond that, I don’t know how to do STUFF. And I don’t wanna ask the guy that did all the stuff because, frankly, I don’t wanna pay him and he takes too long. There are things I’d like to add, delete, but I am just a tard.
Hm. See how I made the thing about you all about meee?? No, really, Sheila, this looks great and I am so impressed with you!
Tracey – I basically just went into my template – and copied the coding that was already there for all existing images – and then replaced the jpegs.
I’m just stealing code from my own blog, basically.
I might be able to take a look at your template and figure it out, if you want me to.
Thanks, though, for the nice words!!!
red, my only suggestion is to switch to WordPress. So many awesome widgets and plugins, and no rebuilding. And you can choose summarized archives or detailed.
I’m guessing that with mt, though, you go to your archives template and edit the code so it doesn’t call the whole post, only the title. ?
tracey, the wordpress support forums are great (I usually google wordpress and the issue, which gets you there a lot faster than using wp’s forum search). And if they don’t help you, I’ve been on it for over three years now, so I know my way around somewhat. I still wing a lot of it, though, but in my defense, it was so much harder when I started — all coding, no themes, no widgets.
sarah – how involved is it to switch from movable type to word press?? I am filled with fear – but I have to say, when I go to wordpress blogs, I definitely like what I see – in terms of ease of navigation and stuff like that. Like having the post assigned a category, and having it show up at the bottom of the post, stuff like that.
Okay, so anyone who knows anything about coding – here is the code for my “master archive” template. Does anything stand out to you?
Like the part where it says div class=”blogbody” …. I am imagining that is what I find so annoying and that is what I want to change?
Too scared to make the leap at the moment, though.
Crap – the code won’t show up in my comment.
sheila and sarahk — Well, it’s good to know smarties like you, I must say! Woo hoo! My sidebar just sits there, all irritated, “We have to be HER sidebar? She just ignores us!”
If you ever want to give me the keys to the castle – and tell me what you want to do – I could probably figure it out (if it’s not too hard or too stylistic.) But adding stuff and deleting stuff I certainly know how to do!
Hey, thanks! I might take you up on that!
i really like the newly displayed images, sheila, and i’m with you on that calendar and recent posts; never used the one, and always scroll instead of the other. it just makes more sense to me.
I know you people are speaking English. I mean, I KNOW it. But all I hear is Charlie Brown’s teacher’s voice. It is THAT foreign to me, this language you speak. You are soooooooooooooooo smaaaaaaaaaht!
HAHAHAHA I know, Beth, right? It is gobbledygook!!
I’m thinking of coming home next weekend. Yeah, you know, drivin’ up in my new hot rod. I miss you TERRIBLY!
amelie – glad to know you won’t miss those elements!! I was so sick of that useless calendar taking up so much space!
Hooray for the flickr banner! You have way too many great photos in there to not have an easy jump-in point for your visitors.
I do not believe I ever once used the “recent posts” thingy, btw. I’m either a scroller, or I use the RSS feed I have for you in Netvibes, which keeps the last 15 available for quick access.
I’m retarded about RSS feeds. I don’t use them at all. Is that stupid?? Do you get it emailed to you – or is it on your homepage?
Oh, you have to try it, Sheila. They’re on your homepage (or your mail client, depending on what you use.) Sites like My Yahoo! and Google let you customize the homepage with RSS, but I am using this site called Netvibes, which is totally flexible and completely rocks. I’ll send you screenshots to show you what I mean.
Yeah, I have NY Times and a couple other things on my Yahoo homepage (the RSS, I mean) – but in general, I just use my blogroll – and scroll thru on my spare time. Is that, like, totally old school??
I’ve actually seen Netvibes in my traffic reports … so I wonder if a lot of people use it? Or if that’s an indication that YOU have come to visit??
Also, how many RSS feeds do you subscribe to?
I’ll def show up on your traffic report as a netvibes person if I’m clicking through from there.
I would definitely say using the blogroll is old school. When you see the screenshot I just sent you, you’ll understand why. Every site on there likely has an rss feed, and you can really make your blog monitoring easier.
As for the number I subscribe to…dunno. It’s a lot. I probably have 20car-related RSS feeds alone, plus news, my fave bloggers, some sports ones..etc.
I just got your email – you’re wonderful!! Let me check it out and get back to you.
Wonderful = crazy talk. Hope that stuff helps. Happy RSSing.
Messing about with templates is always fun :)
if you are thinking about switching to WordPress they have a few tutorials on the easiest way to import entries: http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_from_Movable_Type_to_WordPress
But I’ve never tried so I’m not sure hoe straight forward it is.
As for RSS feeds, they are the best thing ever for keeping up to date with loads of blogs, although I do find that I comment slightly less than when I surfed my blogroll.
sarah – how involved is it to switch from movable type to word press??
WordPress is WONDERFUL; I haven’t had a single spam appear since I made the switch a year ago (today, in fact!).
BUT!
Get someone who knows what they’re doing to help you with getting all your old posts imported. A year later, and I STILL haven’t gotten it to work.
Mitch- did someone help you? Or did you do it yourself? Are you missing old posts? Is that the issue??
I am way too afraid to do ANYTHING without help … I need someone who has trod the path before me.
I just like how the categories are listed with each post, blah blah – I love the wordpress look – but gotta be honest, I went to their website and looked at instructions to switch over, and it’s written in an ancient Sanskrit dialect as far as I’m concerned.
Mitch- did someone help you? Or did you do it yourself?
My ISP did the WordPress install for me (WP comes with my hosting package).
WP has a template editor that allows you to edit the template IN WP (similar to MT); with a little noodling and poking around, I got all the key elements moved over and made it look close enough to the way I wanted it (like my site had been for the previous three years).
Are you missing old posts? Is that the issue??
The issue is that when I tried to export the 7,500 posts from my MT blog, it crashed the system; the file was too big. I need to get someone – probably hire them – to figure out and perform the export from MT. After that, the import to WP doesn’t look TOO bad…
I am way too afraid to do ANYTHING without help … I need someone who has trod the path before me.
Yep. I hear ya. It took me an afternoon of noodling around with the HTML and CSS code to make it work, although it did.
I did finally pay a guy last summer to clean a bunch of things up so I could run my new ad server (because after all these years, making some money is kinda nice!)
I just like how the categories are listed with each post, blah blah – I love the wordpress look – but gotta be honest, I went to their website and looked at instructions to switch over, and it’s written in an ancient Sanskrit dialect as far as I’m concerned.
Well, let me know – I’d be happy to help out any way I can (which involves pretty much switching the HTML and CSS; I’m not so good at installing WP).
Mitch – I don’t think I’ve looked at the configuration of your archives. Are they lists of links for each month? As opposed to having to see the entirety of each post? That’s what I’m really looking for!