It has been a while since I posted photos of my creative projects, so here is one I’ve finished recently.
The new shirt, with two bracelets.
My cousin, who has done a lot more sewing and clothing-making than I, helped me with the shirt, and I got to learn how to use her serger — what a cool machine.
I did finish the shirt in time to take it on my recent weekend trip to Houston. And even though it’s not a tee-shirt, it is actually cool and comfortable. Who’d've thought?
Here’s the technical dilemma. I’ve been driving computers for quite a few years, and I like them. I’ve mastered (at least to the level that I need at the moment) word processing programs, spreadsheets, web browsers, e-mail, and, to a certain extent, even databases. But I’m no expert. Even though I learned some basic HTML and CSS coding, that was a long time ago — ancient history by today’s blinding pace of change standards. So when something that is labeled as “automatic,” isn’t so much, and when an “upgrade” acts more like a “downgrade,” I’m just as much at sea as a rank amateur.
The WordPress blog platform that I run my blog on was just upgraded last week. I ran my “automatic” process, backing up the files and databases it told me to back up when it told me to. Then I went back to using it as usual. Strange things happened. Not as bad as what has happened to some of the people I’ve been reading about on the forum at WordPress.org, but stuff I noticed. Like I don’t have the handy little button that lets me toggle between the little editing window in the dashboard page and a full screen editing window — which is nice for doing on-site composing, etc. I also discovered that when I pasted text into the little editing window, it disappeared. Now, there are two ways to use the little editing window. The default is “Visual,” which looks like an ordinary notepad program and that’s how you use it. The other tab takes you to “HTML” where you can see, change, add, or eliminate the HTML tags. What I was having to do was click on the “HTML” tab to see what I had just pasted into the page. It was there, alright, with all the appropriate tags. And it showed up in my “Preview” window the way it would/should look when I published it. Weird.
I ran into another glitch when I tried to put two other photos into this post. Some of the code for one of the photos showed up on the blog page when I published. When I went back to the editor and deleted that line of code (because I thought maybe it was a duplicate) it messed up the padding around the photo, and the caption went away. More weird.
So I tried to find out if there was anything on the forums that would help. I’ve changed to the drab “Default” theme, although I was able to change the color of the header (and of course, what do I pick but grayscale — more drab), but that hasn’t resolved the problem on the admin side. I don’t do anything fancy on my site at the moment — don’t have a lot of plugins, gadgets, widgets, or gizmos to blame.
I reckon I could uninstall the upgrade and revert to the previous version, like some people on the forums have said they did — after their blogs vanished completely. Heavy sigh. I can imagine the buckets of sweat I’ll sweat over that operation. Or maybe I’ll just use this tired-looking old theme for a little while and see if they release a patch of some sort.
In the meantime, the other photos I wanted to post will just have to go into their own articles.
“It’s always something.” — Gilda Radner
