Category Archives: blog

Playing with CSS

Warning: geekery ahead. But maybe useful geekery.

If you’re observant, and if your screen shows it, you might notice the text in my posts has gone from not quite black to black. That’s because I’ve been playing with the CSS for this WordPress “theme”. Which I’ve done mainly because I hate watery type and think black should be black.

When I started, I assumed I’d be able to copy the text of the existing stylesheet into Notepad and edit it as a text document, or at least search in it for the things I needed to change. It turned out though that this didn’t work: oh yes, it copied into Notepad, but without line breaks, creating a huge block of gibberish.

Well, today I discovered how to copy it legibly into a text document, and I thought I’d tell you, in case the same problem has been driving you insane.

This procedure worked for me:

  • Open the CSS editor (My dashboard > Appearance > Edit CSS)
  • Click View original stylesheet.
  • Press ctrl-a to select all the text in the original stylesheet, then ctrl-c to copy it, and close the popup window.
  • Paste it into the CSS editing box.
  • Select all the text that you’ve just pasted, and copy that into Notepad.

This time it copies into Notepad, but, lo and behold, the line breaks now appear properly, and the result is readable.

And there’s loads more I want to change about the page layout, but making black text black will do for a start.

Off home now to nurse my cold.

Small change

I moved here partly to make it easier for people to leave comments – there were problems on the other site.

So I’ve now amended the comment settings here, so you can leave comments without having to fill in your email address. I don’t like giving my email address to random websites.

I’m unsure, though, whether WordPress will recognize you on future visits if you don’t fill it in – I might have to approve every comment instead of just the first.

Up to date!

Well just about. Computer time in the library comes in one-hour chunks, and I’ve used a few of those this week to copy blog posts from my original blog to here.

What I haven’t transferred is all the comments and discussion which took place there. I’m undecided what to do about that. Link to it? Copy selected comments and add them here?

Any thoughts?

It feels good having transferred the posts, though.

Some of them are quite long. Unlike the other site, this one lets me decide post-by-post whether to display the full post or just the introduction. So for longer or more specialised posts, I could display just the introductions. What do you think?

See the poll on the right. I’m waiting with interest to see whether the poll displays in Opera Mini on my phone…

The Original Blog With No Name

As you can see, I’ve not created any real posts here yet. But you can visit my original Blog With No Name at my.opera.com. [Edit: I’ve now copied quite a few posts here from the original site. I’ve kept their original dates, so see below.]

I’ve been posting there for a while, but many visitors have had problems posting comments, making it frustrating—I enjoy the discussions with readers but can’t have them.

There you’ll find posts about violin playing, science, religion, books, art, and general reflections.

Some recent posts there:

I’m undecided whether to copy old posts from there to here, or just post new ones. It might get confusing having discussions on the same post in two places. Any thoughts?

Trying out WordPress

Well, here I am. Discovering that there are lots of useful settings I can set, which do all sorts of useful things, and that I don’t know where most of them are…

It looks pretty flexible, and I like that.

Hey, it saved my draft too, without me having to do anything. I approve of that, too.

Oo, password-protected posts! That’s a good idea too. Show people stuff without showing it everyone.

I don’t like the watery grey type. Doesn’t anyone use black ink any more? Let’s see…  Hmmm. Looks as though I can’t actually change the colour without creating a CSS. Why on earth use GREY as a default colour for text people might be going to READ?

Let’s try using the Font tag on it. Yes, that does seem to give me black text. Messy solution, but better.

Here’s a bit more outside the tag, just to check that the black bit really is a different colour from this and it’s not just my eyes going funny.