I rebooted Spanner Wingnut’s Muddleware Lab on Blogger to assist me in Blogger template choice and customization. That is the 4th incarnation.
I think I have learned how to get reflow and margin extension working, at least on the default Blogger template. It remains to confirm that the technique works here with what I suspect is a theme of the “Simple” family with no background. I’ll now when I replicate it there and see if my discovered customizations succeed.
I was despairing over how the sidebar leaks over images that are too wide for the body column. It was my main annoyance with how the current Blogger was handling my images.
Looking at the legacy Orcmid’s Lair, I realized that the solution I already knew was to put the sidebar on the left of the body, even though the body does not reflow well as the browser window is expanded/shrunk horizontally, thanks to “improvements” in the HTML specifications and the styling used by Blogger. I don’t know if the level at which Blogger provides advanced formatting control will allow me to solve that problem. Being a proud card-carrying member of Raymond Chen’s Backward Compatibility cult, this annoys me no end.
Notice that a new category/label, “Professor von Clueless” has been added along with this post. That’s in homage to geeky, developer-related posts and another legacy Blogger blog.
I’m not certain preserving media, whether floppy disks or CDs, is getting the job done, although it certainly can’t be done without that much. #WDPD2019
This is not the first Orcmid’s Lair. Reconstitution here is an effort to make blogging easy to restore and continue, especially on behalf of the Miser Project, my career capstone effort.
I am torn between using Blogger for reconstituted and continuing blogs and, for The Miser Project, using GitHub as a place for publishing blogs as well as project code and other documentation.
I expect I will continue casual use of Blogger in the manner of this post, and still look for something better for The Miser Project, probably based on GitHub.
The advantage of using GitHub is having version control and a way of archiving everything.
The disadvantage is having to use Markdown, not having the convenience of Live Writer, and needing to be devops for the blog creation and publishing process, likely based on Node.js with all that entails. More freedom, many more dependencies, yet more control, maybe even having MathJax.
The advantage of Blogger is that I can use Live Writer, there is next to nothing in terms of devops, and I have all the Live Writer drafts on my PC for archiving any way I want, including via OneDrive. And RSS feeds are also available as another form of preservation.
Definitive Miser Project materials are still version-controlled on GitHub and I can make Markdown pages there to have more-appealing technical documentation.
The disadvantage of clinging to Blogger is the lack of version management and the tendency of Google to “improve” Blogger from time to time. I am also quite restricted in terms of formatting and plug-in options.
The original Orcmid’s Lair blog was initiated via Blogger on 2002-10-28. It took a while to figure things out.
After having a number of posts lost due to disconnects and other interruptions in the midst of editing, I learned to use an early version of BlogJet as an authoring tool.
Later I came to know and love Windows Live Writer. I am creating this post with Open Live Writer, despite some deficiencies with integration in its Blogger setup.
I also succeeded in using Windows Live Writer to recover some older posts and reconstitute them here under the Miser Project category.
I have succeeded in preserving all of my old blogs, their archives, and the RSS feeds. This was mainly possible by preservation on my own web sites. I love that continuity. And apparently, there are posts that still catch the attention of others. I want to continue having that durability.
