Garrulus Grommeler

While looking for information on HTML coding, and also XML coding, — my interest has been renewed due to the CSS and XML coding in the new blog templates I'm using — I happened across w3schools.com . I've some knowledge of HTML and CSS coding, but my knowledge of CSS extremely limited. However, w3schools.com has tons of tutorials, covering (in addition to the previously mentioned items) XHTML , TCP / IP , JavaScript, PHP and ASP , SQL and Database, and more. Their tutorials are free. I'm unemployed. I've got lots of time, and I could spare a little time each day to learn some of these things — perhaps an hour each day. Also, w3schools.com has an online Certification Program . These are free, too. They say their "tutorials are recommended reading in over 100 Universities and High schools all over the world," and they provide a brief list of some of the schools along with links to pages showing the recommendation. For example, this page at the Univers...

It would appear that my blog template frustration has been abated. I have found a template that is . . . obedient to my every command, appears to have no problems (miracle of miracles), and is a template with which I can live (although there is one minor item I'd like to fix; I've got to figure out where the problem lies first, however). Amazing, isn't it? [EDIT: That one minor item? It's been fixed. Life is good. :P ]

I've found several templates that I like for my Townshende blog , and yet every single damned one of them has problems. Some of them have highly technical problems. One, in fact, — a template that I like a lot . . . this one, called Black Splat — had several problems. The code was designed to work around several problems with Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser (very typical of Microsoft, actually), but it didn't have the code necessary for other browsers to display that template correctly. It took me about 10 minutes of experimentation, along with some very specific searches to figure out the problem. Most people aren't interested in this crap, but indulge me. Here's the original code: body {    position: relative; /* Fixes browser resizing bug in IE6 */     margin: 10px auto;    width: 980px;    font-family: 'trebuchet ms', arial, sans-serif;    text-align: center; /* IE Centering ...

I've tried the "gadget" for Recent Posts found in Blogger's gallery of gadgets, but I didn't care for how it looked. For the list that it automatically generated, that gadget completely overrode the typography specifications embedded in this new template. I like my blogs to have a consistent appearance to them. This meant some customization if I was to have that list. It also means manual updates to keep that feature current. I'm willing to give it a shot, to see how well it works. I added this feature because I want to limit the number of posts displayed on this front page to either one or three. My inclination at the moment, given the length of my posts, is to keep it to one; I definitely would be interested in my readers' opinions on this, however. Having a list of the recent posts available, which I'm thinking of limiting to five or ten — your opinion would be welcome on that point, too — allows you to see if you've missed anything and gives y...

Added links to more destinations in my ever-growing list of links deep down below at the bottom of this blog page. Added links to . . . Belgium (not been there . . . yet) Denmark (not been there . . . yet) England (lived there for about 3½ years, when I was a teenager; lived in the village of Shenington, and later in Bloxham; this was during my high school years) Guam (been there; was a stop-over when I moved to Okinawa and again when I moved to Thailand) Japan (lived there for about 3½ years, when I was very young; lived on the island of Okinawa; went to kindergarten there, in fact) Philippines (been there; was a stop-over on the return trip from Thailand) Poland (not been there; have had several friends over the years from there; currently have one friend who lives there, in Bialystok ; good reason to go visit, if you ask me) Scotland (been there; visited when I lived in England) Sweden (not been there; for some reaso...

A test of the various headers, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, and h6. Here you go (isn't this as boring as hell? :P) — H1 — Header 1 Lorem ipsum la la-la la-la. H2 — Header 2 Lorem ipsum toodle doodle doo. H3 — Header 3 Lorem ipsum tweedle deedle dee. H4 — Header 4 Lorem ipsum twiddle iddle poo. H5 — Header 5 Lorem ipsum cock-a-poodle who? H6 — Header 6 Lorem ipsum any silly man will do. :P Well, well, well. Isn't that nifty?

In the code for this template, the three columns of links at the bottom part of this blog are called the "dashboard." The left column is "dashboard1," the middle column is "dashboard2," and the right column is "dashboard3." One problem I've had with this template from the start is that the title for each set of links butted up against the last link in the set above it. So, I've been pouring over the code trying to figure out how to fix this. I noticed that this problem did not exist in the sidebar to the right, that there was plenty of space between the small block of text with my photo and brief description and the "Writer-Speak . . ." quote. With that as my guide, I tried to find the code that spaced them apart. I found some code that read: .sidebar .widget{margin-bottom:1.5em;} I know a little about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), so I know that a dot preceding a name defines a "class." "Classes" are used in...

I've renamed most of the various lists of links found at the bottom of this blog page. Garrulus' Travels — A half-assed attempt at a play on Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels . For those who know of my penchant for grammatical correctness (or at least my attempts to be grammatically correct), I use Garrulus' instead of Garrulus's because: 1) Garrulus is Latin, and 2) it's ancient. In fact, it is the Latin form of "garrulous," but I don't use it in the sense of that word's definition ( excessively or tiresomely talkative ). It's meant to be a play on my first name. Saith Strunk and White : 1. Form the possessive singular of nouns by adding 's . Exceptions are the possessives of ancient proper names [ending] in -es and -is, the possessive Jesus', and such forms as for conscience' sake, for righteousness' sake. Garrulus may not end in -es or -is, but since it is ancient and since it is deliberately being misu...

Why? Why not? Actually, it's to see how this page will look with a second post added. So, let's take a peek, shall we?

Well, this is a start, isn't it? Not a whole lot going on quite yet, but I've got a new template uploaded. I created a new blog and then exported the old blog to the new address, so everything is still intact. It was a bit of a mess at first, getting it all to do what I wanted it to do: creating a new blog, exporting the old to the new, updating the old to the new format, then importing the non-Blogger template I wanted to use. And now comes the long process of getting everything set up the way I want. It'll mean lots of editing, especially to get all the links and everything else I want transferred (that's the most laborious part of importing a new template, as those things get lost in the process — unless you take care to save them first). I originally wanted to go with a template called Reckoning , but I experienced too many problems with the damned thing. The original template, which you can see here , was not designed for Blogger. It's a CSS template (CSS = Cas...