Blogospherics: Template troubles
*Color
I'm still receiving emails about color problems with my template for Mac-a-ro-nies. I am more than aware of them. In Internet Explorer for OS X, the colors look as well as they ever do. The only problem is the gold print in the description not standing out enough from the background, which I altered to a lighter blue to make the page less dark when some readers requested a brighter blog. However, in Safari, the colors are a disaster. There are two greens, neither the one that should be there, and no blue. The red is a muddy magenta. Safari offers no way to change how colors are viewed within the browser as far as I can tell. The same appearance occurs in Netscape, which Safari is based on.
What do I plan to do about it? Not much for now. I would love to fix the color problems, but I don't know that I can as long as I am on Blogger Basic using one of its templates. I may fool around with color charts a little. But, the template I have pasted in for Mac-a-ro-nies is not even the real one. That one disappeared one day without a trace. Call it the Invisible Template. And, it is not clear which template controls the blog. The previous tenant still seems to have a presence. Some of what is there, such as a gap between two blogroll listings, comes from the old template. But, blogs I have added to the blogroll since the real one disappeared show up, too. Feel free to explain this to me. Under the circumstances, doing much of anything to the template is likely to lead to an unpredictable result.
*Busy blogs
Meme Cauldron is a blog I think has really good content, but I have trouble linking to it. It is difficult to copy what I need to use in an excerpt. The same is true for some other blogs, especially Radio Userland blogs. I don't know if the problem is something about the frames or that there is so much going on on the page. For that reason, I think of them as busy blogs. Each blogger gets to make the decision about how his or her blog looks and operates. However, maybe owners of busy blogs might want to reconsider their busyness just like I need to fix my colors when I can do so without causing further damage. (The site link for MC seems not to be working.)
*Strange code
In Internet Explorer for Mac OS X at least, some blogs, this one for example, load with a third to half page of code at the top. An example:
Warning : fopen("semaphore.ref", "w") - Permission denied in /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/jayreding.com/httpdocs/lgf-reflog.php on line 35
Warning : flock(): supplied argument is not a valid File-Handle resource in /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/jayreding.com/httpdocs/lgf-reflog.php on line 36
Warning : fclose(): supplied argument is not a valid File-Handle resource in /usr/local/psa/home/vhosts/jayreding.com/httpdocs/lgf-reflog.php on line 48
No offense is meant to Jay. He is already aware of the problem and I am sure he would love to solve it. If anyone has the knowledge to solve the strange code problem, please email him and me, and post the solution to your site if possible.
We struggle to make our blogs as technically proficient and as attractive as possible, but there are these and other template stumbling blocks in the way.
