Across the pond

Apologies to Hemingway for the headline, but making this small change to the header of The Daily Novel has taken hours in the past week, but days and weeks and months if I am brutally honest. Even though readers may think that this means I am either demented or stupid or a terribly slow learner. Because I first tried to use one of my own photographs at the top of the opening screen a month or two after I begain this blog in August, 2008. I then followed all the instructions on the WordPress help pages, and even bought a book on HTML to help me understand what was happening.

In this latest saga I began by downloading an alternative design from the band of WordPress developers, who offer help to bloggers. This particular design already had a photo in it and it also had several other features, which I wanted, like a four column format. I did manage to get my own photograph in, but the design made my blog much more difficult to read. And this affected all the blogs in the archives, as well as the new entries.

I tried to get in touch with the author, but his web page gave an error message as did his email address. Maybe he has been driven mad by writing all this computer code and has taken early retirement and has started a second career instructing Cailifornians how to surf the waves. Which must be a much healthier lifestyle than trying to help them surf the net.

So I decided to stick with the default design for WordPress called Kubrick,which was written by a 29-year-old Dane, Michael Heilemann. It is so called because Heilemann is a fan of Clockwork Orange. You can read about this in his blog.

Armed with the Visual Quickstart Guide to WordPress 2, I set about adapting the Kubrick design to my needs. I followed the instructions to the letter, and checked, and checked again. But nothing was changed.

So I went back to trial and error. In the header.php file I renamed the image for Kubrick, KubrickOld. Then I changed the name to my image to kubrickheader.jpg.

Movement at last. I could see the edges of my photo around the slab of green colour. I tried several ways of getting rid of it without success. But I thought I could make it transparent that would achieve my aim. More reading of the book and the help pages to find the right code to replace the 33CC33 code for the green slab. I could not find any code for transparency, but I did establish that 000000 produced the deepest black. So I keyed in 999999. And it worked as you can see.

There is much else that I want to change. But on this experience it seems to me that the problem for bloggers is not the shortage of help but the abundance of it. It is finding the crucial thing you need, using the book index and scanning (because not everything is in the best index) and going interminably from page to page on the WordPress Codex help pages.