So, we’re diving into the usual serial problem solving routine so often useful in solving complicated technologies (and web pages are way too complicated).
- The vertical picture table started breaking in FireFox when we turned on the new blogroll. So we turned it off. Picture table still broke.
- We tried putting text in both columns. Worked. Hmm.
- Put picture back in, with height and width parameters. Broke.
Put smaller picture in, still broke.
- Put height and width params, including padding, into picture column’s
td description. Works!
Now we’ll try turning the blogroll back on. Fingers crossed…
The good news: we figured out how to convert an HTML ordered list into an OPML list. The bad news is that, for reasons known only to Murphy, since we installed the new blogroll, the vertical picture post breaks (but only in FireFox).
This is a bit strange, because the blogroll HTML is generated downstream from the post (not that that always matters). And the page works fine in Safari…! Hmmm…
One of the things that isn’t built in to the new blog theme is a way to post a vertical picture with a caption in a column to the right. Since I did that often on gulker.com’s Radio blog, I was hoping to find a way to do that on the new one, which I figured would mean learning a lot more about how CSS works and interacts with HTML. A quick hack that has been lurking at the back of my mind turns out to work: make a table with two columns, place pic in one, type caption in the other.
You have to enter the table HTML by hand, but once it’s in, the WordPress rich text editor displays it WYSIWYG-style, and you can just drag in a photo and click to type, as seen in the post below. WordPress continues to be a pleasant surprise…
Hacking the blogroll: the old blogroll is flat HTML, which is one of the reasons it was hard to maintain – I used to have to go into a few thousand lines of HTML on the home page, find the start, and then carefully hand code and (usually) debug it. By keeping it in OPML – Outline Processor Markup Language – I can manage it using tools built in to WordPress, and it becomes easy to maintain and export. Trick is, its current form is an HTML ordered list. How best to convert to the XML syntax required by OPML?
