Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I’ve been tweaking the blog again. If you’re using Netscape 4.x and you want to see what I fixed, compare this now-legible blog to the Moveable Type default template at papascott.com. I did with a sneaky trick that imports the style Netscape breaks - Netscape 4.x doesn’t understand @import, so it doesn’t import the things it doesn’t like. I don’t like the fixed font sizes, myself. All remaining minor style problems remain.

On the html side, the recent entries list doesn’t seem to be linked - I’ll have to look into that when I do the list for the category archives, and see if I lost something important when I edited the default templates.

Ok, all set. You didn’t see me off doing that because this entry was still in draft mode. MT is too cool for words. Now that the blog is sufficiently yellow, I’ve been trying to find a good definition of particularism for Lori.

There are also historical and political versions of particularism. As a term, it’s similar to intuitionism or constructivism, which is to say, it gets around.

That quote just doesn’t look right, now, does it? I need to fix the fonts. The serif font is going to be the first thing on the chopping block.

(The category of this post is geekspeak.)

My eyes were starting to bleed from all that blue, but the blog is now properly khaki and in with the site theme.

Lori reports success with the F11 button - if you’re using IE6 for Windows and you can’t scroll down, hit F11 twice and that should clear things up. There’s another fix I could apply, but it looks like it would slow down the page download. Microsoft ruins the web yet again, with its bad shoes. (You remember in the Hitchhiker’s Trilogy, how a civilization collapsed from an oversupply of bad shoes? Everyone had to keep buying new shoes, until the entire GDP was going into footware. Bad shoes drive out good.)

Speaking of Microsoft’s long-term plan to eradicate human civilization, IE5-point-whatever for the Mac isn’t displaying the background of the sidebar properly, so the cute dotted (well, probably not dotted in IE) divider looks like it’s a quarter-inch too far to the left. Of course my standards-compliant browsers are doing just fine.

I think I’ll just leave a note down the bottom where the scrolling stops - “If this page looks like crap, then your browser is crap. Hit F11, or better yet, hit opera.com.” Strangely enough, and despite rumors to the contrary at the MT site, Netscape, the World’s Most Incompetent Browser, is displaying the pages moderately well. It eats the outside margin, but that’s nothing compared to IE nuking my borders.

In honor of the end of ASC voting, I posted my new filk to the newsgroup. AAA ends Friday. Vote now or forever hold your peace.

I finally got to an Evil Microsoft™ computer to look at my new style from the Other Side. Opera, of course, displays it perfectly. Netscape, as usual, gets it right most of the time but suffers from a few kinks, especially on the sample viewer page. I was warned that IE would be a mess, though IE on the Mac is pretty good with style. The funkiest thing IE is doing is putting the yellow border around the edge of the page, instead of at the margin next to the inner border. It looks kind of cool that way, but it’s not As Designed.

The stylesheet madness that was Filk of La Mancha has spread. All non-trek pages have now been restyled. For samples, see the sitemap (tan) and the Buffy pages (verdigris). The style sheet sample viewer script has been updated, so you can see it all from that link as well. As per my copyleft statement, all stylesheets are free and snatchable to the public.

I’m trying to get over the filking sickness, but I’ve already been inspired by a tasteless idea for my next musical, to one-up Liz:

I think I need a twelve-step program.

Before this goes any further…

Seema, you must fix your blog links. Now. Open your blog template. See the bit that says <a name=”<$BlogItemNumber$>”> </a> ? That has to go before <$BlogItemBody$>. Republish all your archives, too, please, so we can get back to the serious business of conscription and blood-taxes.

Freeshell is still in DNS limbo (207.202.214.130, if you’re looking for it) so I can’t POP my email and my spy cameras are down.

On the bright side, I now have all 400 megabytes of space, ftp and so forth. If only I wrote fast enough to fill it all up… I moved my little zendom backup site there, though not much is backed up yet.

And now for some appropriate blog content: Shatner Rocks - click if you dare! Also, the new Opera for Macintosh is out.

Well, another first for me: I thought I’d never do the squicky unpopular couples until I went all C/7, all the time; I thought I’d never switch fandoms and now I’m Buffying; and I thought I’d never pay for free web space, but the check is in the mail. Soon I’ll have somewhere between 200 and 400 MB of space on Freeshell - the details are a little vague to me - as well as ftp and ssh.

The flurry of feedback is over - it’s a good thing it ended before it went to my head. Adrian Hilton wrote, “you have a twisted, twisted mind.” Thank you, Adrian. That’s my kind of feedback.

I’m off to fight the newsserver again.

You may be wondering how it took me an entire weekend to see one Harry Potter movie. Well, it involved a turkey dinner, leaving for the theater two hours early to get the good seats, reading the book the next day to see what they’d left out (not much), plenty of sleeping in in the mornings, and a side trip to Sears for tension rods to hold up my new curtains.

Today, however, I have managed to do something more productive. I sent out my first story to a magazine - I’m expecting my first rejection letter in two to eight weeks. I also managed to put up Jade’s new story, England Swings, as well as a sitemap for my not-so-fast-growing web site. Right now I’m negotiating with the mirrors about uploading the files. They’re not in the mood. Maybe I’ll just pay for the good service on freeshell rather than go on fighting my evil mirror sites.

Envy.nu seems to be blocking all files with hyphens in their names, and Crosswinds cut off my email a while back. (That was actually a blessing, because it was all spam, all the time.) The days of the free web are so, so over. Even freeshell wants that buck to fully activate the zendom backup site. I think I’ll mail smj the check tomorrow…

I’ve been learning about relative links. So far, I have them installed on Jade’s pages, including her new story Epiphany. Speaking of my lovely hostees, if you haven’t read MJB’s Revolution, then give it a try. It comes in easily-digested parts - ninety or so of them.

Sorry, I get distracted easily after midnight. Relative links: like the stylesheet link, relative links hide in the head of an html file. If you have a really, really smart browser like Lynx or Opera for Mac or iCab, it reads those links and makes a separate toolbar menu out of them - the standard stuff: up, next, previous, home, etc., all relative to your all-important site. It’s too cool…if it’s not in Opera for Microserfs yet, it will be soon.

Thanks to Phil Ringnalda in the blogger discussion forum, the little link problem has been clarified. Basically, the only thing I can do is what I did. He’s also responsible for the new, clean archive listing to your left. You can get the javascript for your archive template from Phil’s page on the subject.

I was too busy permalinking yesterday to talk about my moving songfic experience earlier in the day. I took my mom to see Mamma Mia! at the Colonial Theater here in Boston. It was…indescribable. I think only fanfic writers can truly appreciate the skill required to fit a story to the music. There’s nothing like it, except, of course, The ABBA by monkee.

Mamma Mia! is going to Broadway next. If you’re in NYC, run, do not walk, to see it.