evanroberts.com

As per usual, once I get my head wrapped around the desire to tweak the settings of my site, I’ll sit here for hours until I get it just the way I want… or eventually give up as things aren’t working as how I expected them to. In this case, I finally fixed an issue that I’ve had for months.

For the longest time, I wanted to have a different header image, chosen at random, whenever the site was loaded up. Some may find it irritating, but I’ve always liked them. Gives the site a bit of randomness, and I also get to chose a number of header images that I like. However, with this theme, I couldn’t figure out where to implement the code. I found some sites with some suggestions, where they said to place a bit of CSS after the stylesheet was called, yet my attempted “randomness” was always ignored. It drove me nuts, and the worst part is that I’m not really a PHP/CSS expert, so I got irritated when my poke-and-see-what-happens method of updating the code didn’t work.

Fast forward to tonight, things just seemed to make sense. Perhaps it’s some experience in PHP/CSS that I might have gained without realising, or just because my head was clear or whatever, but I figured out where the hidden extra call for the stylesheet was, and took it out. Voila! I now have random images. Now the only issue is figuring out what images to use. I have three to start off with, and we’ll see how long it takes to get some more together.  

Other than that, little things that I’ve been meaning to do that I finally got done:

• Bring the “Daily Shots” out of their own page, and put them in with my regular posts. I found that I updated the daily shots more than I posted regularily, yet they were hidden away. I like how I’m taking daily pictures with my iPhone and am able to post them up when I feel like it, so I’ve made it a regular thing on my main page. Woohoo.  
• Enable Lightbox for the “Daily Shots” category. As I am posting my daily shots from my iPhone, I don’t have the ability (or desire) to add the code to have Lightbox bring the images up nicely when they are clicked. I hated how they would be enlarged on a separate blank page, and so I installed an updated version of Lightbox that will do it all for me. The gallery will still be displayed with Thickbox, until Lightbox has proven itself to me.
• Ensure that the comments are always on by default. A while ago, I set it so that I would have to enable comments on the posts I wanted. This was when I was mainly updating my blog with my “Meals & Activity”, and didn’t see the need for comments to be submitted for those posts. I kept forgetting to turn them off, so I set them to be off by default. However, as I started to post more and more outside of my eating habits and daily activity, I would occasionally forget to enable comments. Not a big thing, as I don’t get as many comments on my site as I used to, but still… it irked me.
• Added a link to a larger graph. When I started to track my weight and have it displayed in a graph, it was fairly legible. However, as time went on, and more data was entered, the graph started to look more like a blob than anything else. I still want to keep the starting weight, as I like seeing the decline, but I figured that a larger version of the graph would make it easier to read, so I included a link.

Anyway, just a few updates, and I guess I’m mainly posting this blurb about them for myself so I can keep a record of what I did.

Aren’t you glad you wasted some of your precious time reading about inconsequential tweaks to my site?

I am. 

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