Anything goes

Writing about the blog is kind of beginning to *be* the blog.
Here is a picture:

See the difference?

So, what do the posts have in common? They are written in the same day. If you look at the blog, you will see that this always happens: for several posts from the same day, only the last post has the day added.

It seems like a bug of the theme. I will try to find a solution. The list is growing… grrrr!

I was writing the other day about the trouble I was having with the XHTML validation of the blog. And I must say: at one point I was getting pretty mad, going through the output of the validation and trying to solve issues one by one.

I mean, I understood that the code provided by youtube was not standard compliant, but then I tried to validate a post without clips and it failed too. I kept getting these errors about target=”_blank” in hyperlinks and that kind of cut my enthusiasm, because it all seemed just too complicated. I mean, I *am* an engineer, but I work with embedded stuff and that just seems more simple than all this XHTML stuff! This is not true, of course, but I was mad then and was feeling this way.

In fact, I had removed the link to the validation altogether at one point. I had understood the solution was not in removing all the reported errors, but the fact that the page was declared as Strict XHTML 1.0, but I really didn’t feel like modifying the template to Transitional. I had just tried too many things and was getting too tired to try this last one, too, which I wasn’t 100% sure about anyway.

But all that has changed, thanks to some very useful help from fellow Romanian blogger SaltwaterC. It was his comment for that post that convinced me to modify the template to Transitional. In the end, the change wasn’t very difficult and involved 2 fairly simple steps, both on a single line in the file header.php from the theme. Basically, it is just replacing Strict/strict with Transitional/transitional respectively in 2 places in the file. This simple thing made all the target=”_blank” errors go away.

Next, youtube embedding.

Again, SaltwaterC saved the day, with his cool plugin XHTML Video Embed. So I just installed the plugin, made small changes to the posts and voila: perfect validation for the whole site. So now I am able to place the XHTML validation link back on the page.

Let’s move on, then. There’s work to do, still.

I gotta say: this blogging thing is turning out to be quite an adventure. After the technical quirks and down right problems I had, here is another one:

Notice anything strange? Yeah, I know. And this is the new and better version. Previously to this, comments were all with a light gray on white background. So I put some good hours into figuring out how to work with css and get this result. Not too good, is it? Still, being the first css editing I ever make, it’s not bad either.

But here’s the thing:

This is how the comments for another post look like. See the difference? I wonder where it comes from…

But don’t get me wrong! I really love the Freshy2 theme, even though this issue came with the original Dark Drax skin of the theme, from which I modified mine. I just wish things were simpler. I’ll keep trying during the next days, but it may take a while.

PS: also related to this, you will notice that if you try using the search on the blog, you will not be able to see the writing. This seems strange to me, because the comment blocks and search box seemed to have the same entry in the css file of the skin. I mean, initially they were changing together. Then, just when I got the comment blocks right, *this* happens… I will work to fix this, too.

PPS: I am also working on adding some borders to the images I place in posts, so they don’t blend quite so much in the background. All in good time…

Well, I just spent the last several hours putting the blog back online. I have no idea what I did to break it, but it stopped working at some point. I started wondering whether I was hacked, but I don’t have the time to search how to investigate this possibility.

Anyways, I was without options and decided to reinstall. Good thing I had made backups…

After this, I did some research on how to make it more secure. I found some methods, but I couldn’t really make them work. Even more, I made the site unavailable again for a while. :)) Then, the hosting provider locked me out of cPanel because they discovered a brute force attack, but I think that was just me playing. Or?… Well, as I said, I don’t have the time to research about how to investigate all these things.

So.. if any of you tried to stop by while all these things were happening, sorry for the inconvenience.

OK, OK! I know I have a link to XHTML validation at the bottom of my blog, but the pages don’t validate correctly.

There are 2 reasons for this:

1. It simply came with the theme and I am too lazy to remove it… Joking :). The truth is that I want the pages to validate correctly and have that link for a good reason.
2. The invalid parts are caused by embedding the youtube clips and I just copy paste them. Now, I may be an engineer, but I haven’t had the time yet to research the cause and solve it. If anyone stumbles upon my blog and can give some advice on this, please do not hesitate!

In the meantime, I’ll just hope nobody notices.