Tuesday, February 19, 2008

The Exasperating Simplicity of Layout Mode

I was on the verge of becoming fairly pleased with my accomplishment with this blog. Here I had written two somewhat coherent entries, if longish. My teachers in college were always telling me there had to be a paragraph break before the page ended, surely, and that sentences didn’t need to span four lines. That was when I was a Computer Science major. The day I became an English major, I started getting comments about how terse my style was. So I don’t know. But anyway, I have distracted myself from my point at hand. Partly that was because there are screaming kids in the yard next door and it’s only not even ten in the morning. At least some of these kids are old enough to be in school is what I’m thinking. I’m racking my brain, thinking, is it still Christmas break? Did somebody die a while back and now we have a holiday for it? I even got up to ask Kaye whether kids ought to be in school now or what? I mean, one of these kids has got to be what they used to call junior high. Kaye said she didn’t know. Meanwhile there’re kids I don’t even know behind the back yard, down a little cliff, in the parking lot of some apartments running around screaming. And next door on the other side, where grandparents live and their grandchildren used to be little like a meatloaf or two, now they’re up to screaming age and so what we have now is like Dolby digital surround sound screaming kids. They’ve all quieted up just now. I’m getting a little paranoid about my powers as a writer. Maybe I ought to blog a lot more. No, they just started up again.

Well my point was going to be that I spent yesterday mostly trying to make my blog sexier in a boring way, in that I was just copying everybody else, but still. I had successfully copied this insane guy’s code for the thought of the day generator and put in some new thoughts. It worked. Really. If you’d logged on between a certain time and when all hell broke loose, you could’ve seen my thoughts. But now you just see a little button below nothing saying, “Random Thought” with just a couple of blank lines above it before it moves on to the next part of my blog. The reason is that the new helpful “layout” version strips out all my thoughts. I put them in. Repeatedly. They just get taken out again.

Why, oh why did I switch to “layout” when everything was going so well? Because of the damn thought cloud or whatever you call it. You have to be in layout version to copy the code. Then it turns out the code doesn’t work, and the thing says if it doesn’t work that it’s probably because I did something wrong, like that’s useful or surprising to me. Gets them off the hook, though, I guess, and they did do all the work.

So for now, get used to a random blank thought because I have had it. Unless you have any suggestions, because at this point, I will try anything.

6 comments:

Snark said...

Thanks to Qalmlea, I have found out what made my quotations disappear. I had double quotes within double quotes. Who knew? Yes, I have books on the subject, but I want to know stuff now. There might not be later. So now, you can see that I have a mysterious extra line between the quotes and the next thing, but I'm not worrying about that now. I'm just happy to have more than a button. Live and learn.

Anonymous said...

Technology has kind of passed me by.

With DOS I was a god. I can do anything with DOS.

With Windows 3.1 I was expert. I could pretty much make anything work.

With Windows 95 I was competent. I could usually poke around and eventually cobble something together that worked.

With XP I just gave up. If it's working, I don't monkey with it. If it's not working, I learn to live without it.

Snark said...

Yeah, I've gotten to the point where I obsess over it slightly less. I mean, if it were 1985, or, better yet, 1972, I'd blow you away with my smartness. Now, I'm just an almost-was. But then I had to listen to my mother instead of the other way around, so it's not all bad.

Anonymous said...

The last few posts don't seem to have comments enabled. I hope I'm not irritating you by leaving one anyway-

but after reading your Woody Guthrie post I thought you might enjoy seeing this poster available from Northern Sun: LINK

I had a copy hanging on my wall for several years.

Snark said...

thomaslb,

The moderating thing is set to "on," just because I read that there were viruses and SPAM and all kinds of nasty stuff going on blogs. I'm glad to get your posts -- I'm glad someone's reading this stuff! If it's still not showing up, let me know. Every day so far, a new technical glitch happens.

Anonymous said...

I have comment moderation on at my blog, too. (Really, though, spam isn't anywhere near the problem it used to be. I'm deleting about one spam comment per month.)

But what I'm not seeing on your last two posts is the link you click to leave comments. On your posts from Feb 19 and earlier there's a link that says "0 Comments" or "3 Comments" or whatever, but on your last two posts that link isn't there.