# Marcy Prochaska: Hammered Dulcimer

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### Troubleshooting WordPress

Wednesday, October 12th, 2005

I have three unresolved issues with the layout — so far.

One is that there are no paragraph breaks, at least none that look like `<p>` breaks usually do, with a line of space before the new paragraph. Why is this happening? I am guessing it is in the CSS somewhere, but I’m not sure what to look for. Any suggestions?

Second is even more puzzling. On the front page, in Firefox and in Safari, the sidebar box is higher than the content box. In IE they’re even. What’s wrong there? I want them to be even everywhere. And in Firefox, they’re only uneven on the front page.

Third, the archive pages only show excerpts from each post. I’d like to find the code for that so I can determine how long the excerpt should be, and I’d also like to make the “More[…]” into a working link with the text “[Read more] ”

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Category: Site updates | Comments: 2 so far

### Help from UrbanGiraffe

Friday, October 7th, 2005

Woo-hoo! I found a helpful guide to dissecting WordPress themes at UrbanGiraffe, John Godley, who even answers questions!

Obviously I still have work to do, but progress continues.

Category: Site updates | Comments: None yet

### Yikes

Wednesday, October 5th, 2005

Sort of in over my head, trying to customize this template. I’m making progress with the background image, fonts, and main colors, but yikes, other details are overwhelming. For example, I want the body of each page to stay put — to clear the paisley border on the left (which I remember I had to remove for users of older IE… which reminds me I need to be testing all this to make sure there’s no problems for older browsers), and for the left margin not to move when someone changes the size of the window. But I still want the width to be collapsible, to avoid those annoying horizontal scrollbars. I’m not sure quite how to go about doing this. I almost wonder if I’d be better of building a template from scratch — I might understand it better than just experimental tweaking of an existing template.

I also don’t know yet whether I want to revise my whole site with WordPress (which offers static “Pages” as well as blog posts) or just keep existing static pages as is. That may affect how I customize the template — if I revise the whole site, I might change things more, but if I keep existing pages, I want the blog to more or less match.

And normally when I link to pages within my site, I don’t have to spell out the whole url, but just a slash and the desired page’s name. But since this blog thing is in a separate directory, I don’t know how to escape that directory without just typing out entire urls. And yet I don’t like the idea of having all the WordPress stuff in my main directory.

And…

———-

Not to mention I need to keep practicing for the upcoming anniversary concert and other events, and the rest of non-online life.

Category: Site updates | Comments: None yet

### Coming soon!

Tuesday, October 4th, 2005

Hi folks,

I am in the process of updating this website to incorporate a blog. Blogs are “web logs,” like online journals. Usually there’s a main page with the most recent entries or posts, plus a column of links to archives, individual entries, categories, and so on. Most blogs also allow visitors to make comments. My site already has a photo gallery, journals about recording three CDs, and a sadly neglected news page; I think a blog would be a great way to integrate these things, and will hopefully make it easier for me to keep the site up-to-date.

Some of the things that I’ll need to do include:

- creating a template so the blog pages match the other pages at this site
- transforming existing journal-like stuff into blog pages
- creating categories

I think this will likely take me some time, so please bear with me through the process. Thanks!

Category: Site updates | Comments: 5 so far

### StatCounter

Wednesday, May 11th, 2005

I’ve started using StatCounter for statistics for this site. Check out the link to see what kinds of information this free service provides.

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