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With Apologies to My E-Mail Subscribers

11/30/2014

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If you've seen this website at any point over the last couple weeks, or are an e-mail subscriber to my blog posts, you might have noticed some bizarre changes to my text color choices. Light pink text against a white background, for instance. I apologize for any confusion or inconvenience—once again, I'm a victim of "progress," or so it would seem.

Time and again, my enjoyment of the major websites I use has been negatively impacted by factors beyond my control. I've complained. I've gotten angry. All I ever ask from an upgrade or redesign is to make things better, but all I ever seem to get is something different, which throws out the baby out with the bathwater and attempts to raise a new child that bears some resemblance to the first one. When Exfanding Your Horizons (powered by Blogger) went on indefinite hiatus, I chose Weebly as the platform where I'd continue blogging: I was tired of Blogger's unwelcome changes, and equally importantly, I wanted something consummately simple.

I know enough HTML and CSS to make some simple changes to a website without breaking it—Exfanding's visual design is the result of my liberal tinkering with a basic template—but I find it exhausting to work with code. Gimme a GUI and I'll treat it like a playground; gimme HTML, CSS, or even a DOS prompt, and I'll treat it like a playground where I have to perform extensive research before I can identify the slide and the swing set, let alone use them. Weebly didn't have all the features that Blogger did, but it was hard to argue with an interface where I could drop text boxes, buttons, and divider lines into place without ever touching a line of code.

For almost two years, Weebly was a safe haven where I could be creative without compromise. If I sat down to write a post or add to my Series Opinions, I could trust that 100% of my time would be spent doing what I wanted to do with my site, and not spent muddling through reorganized menus or updating my settings to work around unwanted new features. The few updates I noticed were both innocuous and welcome—Weebly gave me a toolkit and left me the heck alone. Then, sometime between September 23 and October 1, everything fell apart.

A new post editor interface was introduced. Now an obtrusive white box was taking up space at the bottom of the screen, post-related options were spread all over the place, and the clear distinction between writing a blog post and modifying the website in general was lost. Once again, things were different, without any obvious or compelling improvement. I was irked by the sudden intrusion and inconvenience, but everything still worked as I needed it to.

Shortly after my first blog post with the updated interface, I got a message from one of my e-mail subscribers notifying me that the e-mail subscription text—normally black against a white background—was light pink. I hadn't changed any settings in Weebly or Feedburner for at least a year. My subscription text was spontaneously illegible. As of this blog post, it still is.

One Feedburner message board search and two Weebly support tickets later, I determined that anytime I add a new text box or make any changes within an existing text box anywhere on my website, a bunch of unnecessary HTML tags get added to the text box. These tags force the text box to be a particular color, overriding whatever's in the CSS. If I create a text box while my website's global paragraph text color is set to pink, any new text boxes will show up as pink. If I decide to change the global color to green, only the text boxes created after making that selection will be green; anything before then will still be pink, unless I manually change the color. And anything before that September 23 - October 1 window is completely unaffected by this mess and will globally change colors as usual, unless I touch them at all, in which case they'll sprout the same HTML tags that lock the currently selected color into place. Weebly being less robust than Blogger, I can't go into the HTML for individual posts to fix this myself.

So, my e-mail subscription text color is being overridden by whatever the HTML tags say. I either pick a text color that miraculously looks fine both against the dark background of this blog and the light background of my e-mail subscriptions, or I wait for a fix that may or may not ever come. That's part of why I've written so little on this site in the last month: the more I write, the more I probably need to manually correct if this issue is ever resolved. I give credit to Weebly support for being friendly with a can-do attitude, but it's worrisome that someone at the company essentially broke my website during a routine upgrade. This isn't an isolated incident, either; I set up a separate test blog and was easily able to duplicate the issue.

I understand that this is a free service I have elected to use over a plethora of other services, but I am getting really tired of people messing with my stuff, on purpose or not.
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Retrospective: October 2014

11/2/2014

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Depending on where you were looking, it might've seemed like I'd disappeared from the online scene entirely in October. In fact, I was doing loads of writing and editing behind the scenes for GameCola's top-secret new Style Guide wiki for the staff. A little GameCola archive cleanup was involved as well, and I set aside some time to finish off my penultimate Mega Man 7 playthrough video for YouTube, which was technically ready to go in October but couldn't be screened by a test audience (my wife) until November. Toss in a few road trips and a whole lot of relaxation time to recuperate from a busy few weeks at work, and you might never know I was still around. Here's what I do have to show for myself, though:

This Blog:

This was a sad, sad month for updates on this blog, and on this website in general; I barely even touched my Series Opinions. In addition to having my attention focused elsewhere, I had been notified that Feedburner e-mail subscriptions to my feed were showing up in pink text on a white background all of a sudden, and I was holding off on writing another post until I could get that fixed. I'm not even sure the issue has been resolved yet, and it's not exactly easy to test out without writing a new post. Of the two things I did manage to write, the first post is one I see myself linking back to in the future, and it satisfies the "Holidays" category in my ongoing efforts to write a post on each of the post tags I've used, in order.

- 1997, October 1, The END DAY
- Retrospective: September 2014

GameCola:

Another sad, sad month for updates. My first contribution's not bad (actually, I'm pretty pleased with it), but the second one is another "Oh, we have absolutely nothing to show for ourselves today, do we?" post that got thrown together at the last minute...that's I'm also pretty pleased with, now that I think about it. Guess things turned out fine after all.

- Q&AmeCola: Your Guide In Life
- GC Podcasts #51-53 on YouTube: Just Another Turtle, Paul & Jeddy!

YouTube:

As part of GameCola's END DAY celebration, I lent my voice to a neat six-way race of the NES cult classic RPG. This one's an interesting watch even if you're not familiar with the game.

- Let's All Play Crystalis BLIND: Race to the Statue!

The Backloggery:

Oh, good! Proof that I did something to account for the dearth of updates everywhere else this month. You'll notice several new games on the list, but I only shelled out $1.99 the entire month for video games. Broken Age was my wife's, and she wanted me to try it out; Dragon Age and Pizzarian were free giveaways, FTL was gifted to me by a friend, and Quest for Glory II was free to download; having now played the first game, it finally occurred to me that I could give the fan-made VGA remake of the second one a shot.

It's not often that my wife gets to show me a game she's played that I haven't, so she was excited to watch me play through Broken Age and Botanicula as part of our irregularly scheduled couple bonding time. I finally finished off the last of the Tomb Raider games I'd picked up from Good Old Games, and was relieved to be done with that chapter of my gaming education—I have a knack for finding wildly popular game series to be tedious and frustrating, and despite some periods of fun here and there (mostly in the second game), this one was no exception. At least I got to start on Star Wars: Dark Forces, the game that kicked off one of my all-time favorite game series (Jedi Knight)...after the obligatory struggle with DOSBox to get it to run correctly. It's another rough relic from the same era as those first three Tomb Raider games, but at least it's a style of gameplay I'm very comfortable with.

New:
- Broken Age  (Steam)
- Dragon Age: Origins  (Origin)
- FTL: Faster Than Light  (Steam)
- Pizzarian  (Desura)
- Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire (VGA)  (PC)
- Star Runner  (Desura)

Started:
- Botanicula  (PC)
- King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow  (PC)
- Pizzarian  (Desura)
- Star Wars: Dark Forces  (PC)

Beat:
- Botanicula  (PC)
- Broken Age  (Steam)
- King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow  (PC)
- Pizzarian  (Desura)
- Tomb Raider III  (PC)

Completed:
- Botanicula  (PC)
- Broken Age  (Steam)
- King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow  (PC)

Mastered:
- Broken Age  (Steam)

Looking forward to November!
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