nobody asked…

Dang it, sometimes I wish I was not so damn stupid. I mean, I know some stuff. If it’s got wires attached, I understand it and can fix it. I understand the concepts and theories of information technology, data streams, distributed processing (dumbest idea of our generation), and can talk about those in general terms and chart things out on a white board (engineers can’t talk without a pencil or marker in hand) and explain them in layman’s terms so that even the least illuminated among us can understand.

But misaligned squigglies on a screen, the gibberish that underlies everything we do here in the blogosphere and on the internet… I’m lost. I’m talking about html, css, and php coding, the stuff that blogs are made of. Oh, I can dig my way through a piece of code and make a change in background color. Or change the title of a sidebar section from ‘About’ to ‘Who? Why?’. Or remark out an unwanted calendar. But that’s about it.

Since ungrading to WordPress 2.1 and changing to the current theme, I’ve had two problems, one major, one minor. The designer of the theme, whose name appears at the bottom of this page, is for whatever reason no longer available or interested in helping those who have chosen to use his themes, plugins, etc. That’s a pity as he does wonderful work. Bottom line is, I need some help. I am almost desperate enough to pay some nominal and reasonable charge to get things fixed. Here are the problems I currently have:

MAJOR: This theme, which I really like, for some reason does not have a Links list or Blogroll coded in. I have tried lifting the code from several other themes and dropping it into the sidebar.php file. Nothing. Or a parse error of some kind. I need to get my Links List back, preferably like I had it before, with hierarchical categories. By the way, this is not a WordPress problem since the links show fine with other themes.

MINOR: Look back a couple of days at The Haircut.. and the thick brownish line I use as a separator. Been using it for at least a year with other themes and never had a problem. It’s just a little gif file, although I converted it to a jpg, part of my shooting in the dark to solve the problem. The problem is that the separator image has a faint box or frame around it. The other images don’t have that. How do I get rid of the frame?

If anyone reading this has a clue and is willing to share it, I will personally see that the fabled Bird of Paradise drops glamorous gifts beyond imagination upon your head. If anyone can really fix this and feels compelled to charge for your time, give me an estimate by email.

All suggestions by email please. Use address shown on the Contact page. Thank you for listening…