Category: Bloggery

Sunset for Kubrick

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
The sun sets on our old WordPress theme.

Thanks to everyone who tooled around the dimly lit, undermanned, and poorly maintained corners of the Innertubes to inspect and comment upon the options for a virtual urban-renewal project here at the DogS(h)ite.

I think I’ve touched all the bases, repackaged the necessary bells and whistles, and preserved all data for the Permanent Record. And thus, sometime today or tomorrow, I will probably tell the WordPress Blog-O-Mat 9000™ to knock down this old hovel and erect in its place a Shining City on a Hill.

Or maybe it’ll look more like rattle-canning a fresh coat of camo’ on the old single-wide, hoisting a new Anarchy flag, and raking up 15 years’ worth of dessicated dog turds. I tell the neighbors they’re Art, but they don’t believe me, about that or anything else.

If all goes well, you shouldn’t notice a great deal of difference. I anticipate a round or two or three of Whac-a-Mole, but the plan remains to hawk the same old hooey, just out of a new window, minus the bullet holes and duct tape.

If it all goes horribly wrong, well … let’s not think about that, shall we? You’ll probably be able to hear from me without need for a computer, browser, or Innertubes. (“Gaw dam cog sug muh fug sum bidge. …”)

But if you can’t hear the caterwauling, leave a message at the New Wheeled Order sandbox or email me at maddogmedia (at) gmail (dot) com.

Theme song redux

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 28 Comments
A screenshot of what the new DogS(h)ite might look like.

Hear ye, hear ye: I’ve been experimenting with two newish WordPress themes on two unused blogs — Penscratch 2 on New Wheeled Order and Independent Publisher 2 on Town & Country — and I’m getting close to a verdict on which one might be best suited to serve our little coven of malcontents here.

Not knowing exactly how readers “interact” with this blog leaves me thinking I should probably focus on how it looks on a phone. I prefer working it on a laptop — and a laptop hooked to an external monitor when possible — but I am a confirmed Luddite and may be the lone exception.

With that in mind, Penscratch 2 looks cleaner to me. There’s a menu right at the top for easy navigation. In Independent Publisher 2 I seem to be restricted to parking items like search, archives, bio, and whatnot in a widget area, like a sidebar or footer. And to my amateur designer’s eye, which is deeply rooted in the Before-Time, it seems to waste a lot of space.

Penscratch 2 seems easier to work, too, even in the Block Editor (curse its name, yes). I spent some time with it yesterday and almost got to where I was feeling comfortable. Dropping a photo with caption into a post was nearly as simple as working in the Classic Editor. In the editing window a sidebar at right gave me the option of selecting a resolution, aspect ratio, and a custom width/height.

And really, that’s all I want from a new theme and editor, if I absolutely have to have them, which is coming to feel inevitable given the ongoing hiccups with the old setup. Publishing should be easy, because writing sometimes is not. Also, any changes should not blow up Ye Olde Blogge, which has muddled along for 15 years in its present incarnation.

I’ll spend some more time tinkering over the weekend, as the weather is forecast to be heavy on the suckee-suckee.

Meanwhile, if you can spare a moment, have a look at the two links up top and post any comments here (if you can). I’m starting to think I need to either embrace the Block Editor with a new theme or relocate the entire operation to Substack, Medium, or some other alternative, all of which is unknown country. Who knows what dragons might be there?

Shot with a water back

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments
Snowpocalypse it is not.

It’s an ill wind, etc.

Yesterday a real window-rattler blew through, stripping all the brown needles from the pines and scattering them along our driveway and into the cul-de-sac. Also, and too, the back yard.

Then overnight, we got a little drizzle, followed by a soupçon of — wait for it — actual snow this morning.

Little accumulation is expected, but our widget said we’d gotten 0.06 inch by 8:15 a.m. (which became 0.22 inch by 4:15 p.m.), so ’ray for us, amirite? Something to blog about other than genocide, sedition, and creeping idiocy, against which a vaccine there is not.

Speaking of which, Herself got the latest Bug shot on Tuesday and it knocked her flat on her teensy little keister. Spent most of Wednesday in the bed and lost all interest in the delicious meals prepared thrice daily by Your Humble Narrator.

Yesterday she began shambling around and about a bit and today she seems much more like Herself (haw), though her appetite remains AWOL; breakfast was coffee and a bite of whole-wheat toast with butter and jam.

I haven’t gotten stuck yet. My last shot was almost exactly a year ago, at one of the local senior centers, and I suppose I should go get myself the latest and greatest, though it apparently targets the variant before the one that is currently dominant.

But goddamnit it, I like my food. And blogging from the bed is unsatisfactory.

On that topic, no word from the Happiness Engineers about the overwrought comments window, which seems to have magically downsized itself overnight to the version I saw over at Better Burque.

I suspect that some of our WordPress issues might be resolved if I were to abandon the Classic Editor for the Block Editor, but I consider this a last resort.

A theme change might help — as I’ve mentioned before, this one, Kubrick, has been “retired.” But I like its simplicity and several test drives have failed to turn up any suitable replacement that doesn’t somehow start inching me into that goldurned, consarned, dadblasted Block Editor, like some old fart tottering into assisted living with Big Nurse on his six.

Not yet, goddamnit. Not yet.

No comment (yes, again)

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
This way to the Egress?

We seem to have been detoured off the Infobahn and onto yet another long and winding washboard gravel road to Hell as regards what should be the simple process of posting a comment on the DogS(h)ite.

I first noticed the latest WordPress “enhancement” the other day while trying to comment on the Better Burque blog. Being logged into WP, I assumed — wrongly, as it turned out — that I could write my comment and post it under my nom de blog.

But when I wrote my little piece, then clicked the “Reply” button, nothing happened. Or so it seemed. There was no visual cue that the button had been clicked. My comment just sat there, like a fresh turd on a flat rock.

So I clicked the “Reply” button again and immediately got a popup that said something like, “Oops! Looks like you’ve already said that!”

And so I had. The comment had been posted, but not as me — as Anonymous, who seems to be everywhere these days, and mostly up to no good, too.

Anyway, I forgot all about it because I comment on the DogS(h)ite from the Comments tab in WP and never actually see the preposterous clusterfuckery that appears at the bottom of each post, the way you Little People do.

Nevertheless, there it squats, like a poison toad, a probe from the WP Block Editor that has infiltrated my Classic Editor environment, bent on mischief.

Now, I just viewed the blog using my backup MacBook and a different browser (Chrome) that was not logged into WordPress. So I got the full nickel tour of Whatthefuckopolis.

And what an ugly neighborhood it is, too. Frank Lloyd Wrong on the brown acid designing the Hotel California for a Wes Anderson movie.

It seems navigable, but I didn’t go through the entire process of logging in with an email address or my Google, Apple, or WP deets because I don’t want to get caught in some digital Doom Loop that drops me onto the Event Horizon just before everything goes sideways in orbit around Neptune.

I will ping the Happiness Engineers about it. There must be a way to return to the simpler days of commenting, before some engineer decided to go all carbon-fiber, hydraulic-disc and electronic-shifting on us.

Shine on, Harvest Moon

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

I wish I could tell you that I’ve been enjoying all the decades-overdue dope-slaps Cheeto Benito has been getting from judges lately. Incidentally, you wanna wash those hands afterward, Your Honors. You don’t know where this mook has parked that fat orange mug of his.

Or that the GOP pestilential “debates” featuring the also-rans — a junior-varsity rogues’ gallery that Batman would hand off to Robin (“Here, kid, take care of my light work. …”) — have been must-see TV. I haven’t watched a nanosecond of them, preferring to let Charles Pierce (“doomed and useless”) and Kevin Drum (“shitshow”) handle that thankless bit of heavy lifting.

No, I’ve mostly been riding my bikes, awaiting tonight’s Harvest Moon — the last supermoon of the year — and fiddling idly with the WordPress Block Editor.

I’ve had several back-and-forths with a WP “Happiness Engineer” name of Liz about the Strange Case of the Spastic Comments, and she’s been very patient with this senile old fool, who basically wants to keep driving his 1954 Studebaker Conestoga of a blog editor until the wheels come off.

Which they may very well be doing. Who knows? My WP theme is retired, and so am I, but at least I remain functional. Most days, anyway.

Anyway, with one eye peeled for that instant when a wheel or two or three passes me and my Studwhacker as we’re getting our kicks on Route 66, I’ve been under the hood of an unused WP blog, banging on greasy bits I don’t recognize with a good hammer and a bad attitude.

Any of yis who are still experiencing technical difficulties with commenting on this blog are cordially invited to visit that one and try to comment, see if its swinging door leads to a jukebox and a barstool instead of the Three Heads of Cerberus (Drunk, Confused, and Angry).

It’s a one-post blog, with a new(er) theme called “Hemingway Rewritten” — yeah, I know, the gall of me — and none of the usual bells, whistles, and aaaooogah horns in the sidebar. Plus, since it’s a free blog, there are ads. Ick.

Frankly, you’d be better served by howling at the moon.