Sexy Facelift

I got an email today from my friend Caryn, the first real friend met through this blog, saying that she and some of her friends were seeing a lot of HTML code when they tried to see my blog.



Now I was well motivated by the message because Caryn wrote a great book called The Pied Piper of South Shore, Toys and Tragedy in Chicago, and was going to include my site in a newsletter mailing with a really big and intelligent audience, just the sort of nice people I would like to read my blog, and come back and visit often and I had to get cracking fast even though everything looked fine to me on several of the browsers I tried on my Mac.

On my Mac. Aye, there's the rub. On my Mac running OS X it looked fine. I'll just leave that there for you to think about.

The fastest way to eliminate the problem seemed to be to jump to a new more vanilla template and rebuild it carefully so that whatever HTML error I introduced would go hasta-la-bye-bye. In other words, I gave The Peter Files Blog a radical facelift today.

As you can see the green and orange design is gone and replaced with this more placid design. But I think that it is also much easier to read.

I made too many changes to the sidebar to list, but it should be more useful. Sadly some of the ads now missing will reappear, but more innocuously, I hope. So far they have only netted me about 56 cents in fictional cash. That is its fictional because Their host doesn't write a check until you have 50 dollars in your account. That's a lot of clicks. I am working on a new host that has very subtle ads that may pay out maybe twice as much, say, a buck a month.

So if you wish to help this blog, buy your books, cd's, electronics and other gifts through the Amazon link at the top, or any other Amazon Ad on the page. 'nuff said. Back to changes.

My profile information on the front page is either going to be displayed in a shorter format or replaced altogether.

Notice that you can click on the "Click for My Favorite Posts" link at the top of the page. That will take you to a page that I will update over time of what I hope will be the "Best of" The Peter Files Blog.

I did enjoy writing it though, and so I will close this post with it, to be sung to the Gilbert & Sullivan classic "I am the very model of a modern Major General" correct title to be inserted when my eyes can open. Maybe at some point I will pull in something where I actually sing it. Like the blog themesong at the top. That's me.

PLEASE leave a comment if you have monitor or other problems reading this blog. Most monitors that have 800 pixels wide of resolution should be able to read it. If you cannot, please, please leave me a comment ASAP!

Thank you.

The Song:

I am the very model
of a modern
writer general,
and write in ways ephemeral,
in most reactions veneral.

So if you like
my wit then please,
and if you have
the time and ease,
then use the letter form you see
to tell your friends to visit me.
Then I will upon seeing you,
did to your friends
refer me to,
will wonder at your derring-do
and say to myself,

Oh, I thank you!


Peter


P.S. The Peter Files is RSS enabled so that you can see new postings on your browser bookmarks tab or desktop. See this post for details.

P.P.S. Midway through the changes, Google/Blogspot the host of my blog started tinkering with their publishing software making me think that that problem was not with my code but with them. Sigh!!!! That means it probably got fixed by itself and would have been fixed without all the work.

On the other hand, I like the sexy new facelift I have given the blog and I was able to trim a lot of poorly edited code at the same time. More work needed. Comments welcome.

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