Hypercompendia

Gosh, these are getting better and better in their attempts to slide past the spam filters (they don’t make it). Can you imagine, the following comment was left on a Tinderbox post from a dog food place (which I’m visiting and warning that he’s gotta quit spamming people or I’ll give him some real bad press about it):

I hate to sound like a nitpick, but your grammar is just…deplorable.  I want to be interested in this, I really do.  But it seems you spent so much time on the design (which, I will say, is amazing) that you forgot that people actually have to read your blog.  Clean this up…PLEASE.  It could be so much bigger if you just did some work.

Well, I’ve stripped down to the minimum here and on Spinning, and Lunar still claims I’m exceeding resources and there’s nothing else I can do. The php script they’re saying thats using too high an average is what loads the opening page. Here, I’ve eliminated the K2 theme and gone to default, cut back to 10 posts displayed, and eliminated (or am about to) the “Click to Enlarge” for the maps.

Don’t know what else I can do, but I won’t be posting any more on the 100 Days Project and may be off the air anyway.

Because Lunar has threatened to kick me off for over-utilizing resources I’m doing everything I can to adhere to their instructions, though I can’t understand how these two weblogs are hogging resources (I suspect rather that the server is under-resourced).

Since the problem according to them seems to be in my main index.php script, all I can do is whatever they suggest which has been updating WordPress, Askimet, knocking out plug-ins while adding two at their suggestion for cache and commenting captcha to keep out the bots.

It’s this latest that I sincerely apologize for instituting but I’ve picked a 5-starred simple one.  You have to add two numbers together and type in the answer.  Sort of strange because even a 50 year-old adding machine can do this, but hey, hopefully, so can you.I just hate that it kills the spontaneity of commenting, and while I have only two dedicated commenters here that I appreciate tremendously, it will indeed discourage anyone else who thought they might one day give it a go.

The only other thing I can do is eliminate the “click here to enlarge map” which is a great feature for this 100 Day Project, but which may have to go as well.

Again, I apologize and while I’ve just renewed with Lunar this month, I may be demanding my annual fee back and go shopping for a more qualified, heartier server.

. . . the cliche’d much-dreaded-by-camels-straw: being pushed by WordPress to update to 2.8 and all the precautions that must be taken prior to that to ensure all is not lost or jumbled around on the site so badly that the 100-Day Project postings and hypertext files and all but the simplest of sayings is not worth carrying on.

Finally did so on the old Hypercompendia site at Typepad since I’m getting spammed over there and also find that the search engines likely still bring folks there (where for some strange reason, even while I deleted all files the posts are still available on the server I guess) rather than here.  So if you’ve not rebookmarked (how quaint) or updated your feed, for all intents and purposes I’m lost to you.

Haven’t quite had the guts to cut the cord to Spinning at Typepad yet, but getting itchy on that one as well. Typepad was a wonderful service and home to me for over five years but I needed the capabilities that WordPress gives me to expand. The only thing Typepad didn’t allow me to do was an automatic redirect so the sooner I establish the new weblogs on their own, the better.

Seeking, trying, learning, doing; a long and tedious process for but the simplest thing; simple, that is, if you know what you’re doing.

Got it though; in changing the basic links to the arrow, it bothered me more and more to see those links all in red when this story–and likely this is one of few hypertexts that will be so utterly dependent on link-color to help tell a story–remained red.

So I explored a bit and found that a few simple tags could be entered within the html templates (individually for now) to change the text to what I wanted. For the links (from the main narrative line to the ‘asides’) I placed font code within the link code:

<p>She half-awoke angrily, as if someone had <a href=”https://susangibb.net/blog2/wp-content/uploads/NewBoB/Shoved.html”><font color=”#00ff00″>shoved</font></a> her.</p>

Then, for the ‘aside’ lexia itself, which is coded green from the above link “shoved”, I placed the following code at the beginning of the BODY heading, closing the tag with the final </font></p> in the lexia:

<BODY>

<p><font color=”#0000ff”>
<p>Not a good night for hunting, the moon full tricky with shadows and the jackal appeared double his size. His yellow grey fur was matted with burrs and dried blood.  He stunk of three days of mating with females stringy and old.  But he also was long past his prime.  His tail hung in tatters, one rear leg was shriveled and slow, many of his teeth had rotted in pain and his right ear hung folded in half.</p>

<p>Out here, life was hard for the healthy.  For the old, it was keep moving or die.</font></p>

To come up with this:

And though these changes aren’t being made on-site, but rather on-desktop for now, they’ll be uploaded as soon as I figure out borders. Ain’t life grand?

Thanks to Chris I’m changing the basic links to ▶ from the idea of linking from the final word in each writing space. It picks up the color from the css sheet and works perfectly. But then we enter the shadowy world of browser perception.

Luckily I have pc’s around the house (and only one Mac–so far) to pick up on such things. While the symbol comes out looking like an empty box, that’s fine. But what I’ve learned is that in future work the site must also be browser-readable by those using other than Firefox, and while I don’t have the link ready here, there are places, including the site where I got the symbol, that can validate this.

One bad thing I’ve noticed about this move from Typepad to WordPress is the amount of spam that’s found both sites (even as regular readers and Googlers have not).

Going to have to check the Askimet widget or upgrade to a better filter methinks.

Thanks to the WordPress Forum, I discovered that to make the widget work so that only “Home” or “Spinning” showed up yet acted as a link, I had to leave the title of the Text Widget blank and put the reference in the body only, i.e., <a href=”https://susangibb.net/blog2″>HOME</a>

One more problem solved!

Since my text widgets don’t serve as links (gotta figure that one out) I’ve changed the banner to upload just background without text and am using the “show text” feature of the Dashboard’s easy-do upload of custom banner. Also had to take out any “description” on the Settings page so that that didn’t come through. You have to actually click on the name to use the link, but it’s better than nothing for now.

Now, on to do the same with Spinning.