CLICK HERE to go back to the past changes "2013 MONTHS" menu.
V.18-HEY! IT'S TIME!!! It's a new year...well....not yet. We still have a minute. But, I had to do all the updates before 2014 so that when the year changes the updates are there. Here's what I did for the small but large update:
V.18-HEY! IT'S TIME!!! It's a new year...well....not yet. We still have a minute. But, I had to do all the updates before 2014 so that when the year changes the updates are there. Here's what I did for the small but large update:
- The New Update Blog!
- Well, it's not totally new. It all looks the same. The only thing that changed was the way I'll post updates. This is exactly what I did to the Site Changes...Site in update 12.7.1122. So, now I just post an update as it's own post instead of an ever continuing post. And then I use the archive links in the sidebar to organize the post in the menu and what not. It's a much better way to post. I should have done it when I changed the Site Update...Site and the Main Site.
- Speaking of the Main Site!
- There are a few new changes and updates that happened of the last month.
- The big new change was the Facebook comments.
- I FINALLY FIXED THEM!! Ever since I added them, they had the problem that I mentioned in update 15 and 17. I wanted them to auto detect the URL the comments where on. The comments need a URL to work. So, I set it to the Main Site. The bad thing is that since it has the same URL for everything, every comment appeared...everywhere! I had to leave a note above the comments to tell you to say what page you were on. Well, the problem is over. With some hefty research, I found out how to fix it. I just had to set the HTML code into a JS code which allowed me to use " + window.location.href + " to get the URL from whatever page the comments are on. Thus, solving the problem. CLICK HERE to see the code itself and see what I did.
- Moving on to the next thing, I updated the MY VIDEOS page.
- It was behind a year. As in, I didn't have the year 2013 in the YEARS SELECTOR! So, I added the playlist in there and even added 2014 in case I forgot!
- And of course, all the playlist updates means I need to have my YouTube Playlists...up to date.
- So I went through them all add made sure that had the proper videos and then added the new 2014 playlists. Everything all good to go.
- The last thing for the Main Site ONLY is updating the menu.
- I added ALL the 2014 things ahead of time.
- The Update Blog's posts, the Site Changes posts, and the Monthly Video Updates are all added are just need links. Well, only the Monthly Video Updates need links.
- Everything is all ready to go for a seamless transition into a new year.
- CONTACT FORMS!!!
- Across all my Blogger sites, there is this new section in the sidebar. Blogger added a new contact form that lets you directly send me a message to my email. It's an awesome new tool. If you have a problem or idea or just want to say hi, you can easily do so. You just need to have an email. I start this out on just my blog to see how things go. After a good test run I decided it needed to be everywhere!
- Speaking of my blog!
- I adjusted the width of the site again. I had this problem since update 14, where not matter what I did, I couldn't get rid of the bottom scroll bar when my blog was displaying on my blog. It was too wide and wouldn't go away. I couldn't really solve the problem because my little laptop couldn't handle the Blogger template editor. But since I added the new favicons at the bottom of every site, I can test it now. The favicon opens the corresponding site in a new window that's adjusted to be the size of my laptops screen. And I try to make my sites fit perfectly in that screen. So, I opened my blog in that window and then went to the template editor and was able to play with the width. After a little bit of tweaking, I got it right and the bottom bar was gone. I had to change a few things in the sidebar like titles and other words to fit better in the smaller space. At the end of the day, it's all good and it looks great.
- And the "Latest Photo" Facebook thing was still linking to Photobucket...oops. So, I changed it to just my main Flickr page. But then I realized that I have updating slide shows of what I upload. So, I don't really need another latest photo section. So, I removed it.
- The copyrights section!
- I reworked the copyright sections across all the sites. My name in there is now a link to my blogger profile and I moved them all to the bottom of the sites. Some had it in the sidebar, but I wanted it to be at the bottom with all the other codes and things. Most places have the copyrights at the bottom anyways.
- Lastly for the main changes, search boxes!
- I added search boxes to all sites that didn't have one or that need one.
- Also, the Christmas Music player and links have been removed from all sites. The time has past. But I left the lights because they are cool. :-P
- I changed the Hover Warnings AGAIN! I think it's good now. I did a width check and loaded my Main Site in the special window that loads when click on the footer favicons. I noticed that the warnings were being covered by the Floating Quick Links. So, I used the left hover mode inside of the center hover mode. Now, it's all good.
Time for the behind the scenes things.
- The end of the year back up.
- At the end of every year, I go through my codes on my hard drive and in Google Drive and update them. Like my hover warnings, I did that big update to them and didn't save the code in the proper spot. I have everything organized. And not only do I save the codes, but I copy the WHOLE HTML codes from the sites and save them too. And lastly, Blogger lets you export or back up a blog as in XML file. I download them all and save them as well. I had lost so many things from computer crashes or other problems. I like to make sure if I lose something, I can add it back.
- EXPERIMENTS!!
- I'm always looking into things like how my sites load and work and I try to make them work as best as possible. Most of my efforts go to the Main Site. I did a little test. My Main Site loads realllllyyyy slow on my laptop. I went three days without loading it and then randomly loaded it. It took 21m:15s to load. I timed it. Like.....WHAT! Then, I closed it out and loaded it again 30 seconds later. It took a minute. Then, I took out the menu and it loaded in 30 seconds. I put the menu back, it took a minute. So, just the menu added double the load time. I did this menu/no menu test on the big computer and it did the same. 10 seconds, 5 seconds. It's better than back in the day. My site would load at all on the little laptop. No matter what. I don't know how I did it back in the day. I always refining things and making it all better.
- The last experiment I did was with Github. Github lets you share and edit codes as a community. I wanted to see if it could host my codes. I have seen other people using it. And well... it didn't work. I added the menus .CSS code and Github lets you get the raw code and just a page. Like the way the code is now. Both pages look the same, but I guess the URL just isn't good enough for the menu. So, the whole experiment was a fail. I'll keep trying though.
- Finally, MORE RESEARCH!!
- This update had solutions to many of my sites long term issues. But one still eludes me... The menu overlapping issue. Since the dawn of time, in updates 12.7.1122, 15.5.1551, and 16, the menu has had the overlapping problem where the list of on section will be blocked by the section it came out of. I EXTENSIVELY looked into this problem again. I had done this before and found most of my solutions. Like the Facebook comments. That wouldn't have been solve if someone else didn't have the same issue and put it up on a forum or question site for some to solve. And then the people that solve the issue are amazing and everything wouldn't happen without them. I'm not smart with anything codes and stuff. I'm a very thankful for those who have solved the problems for me to come by and take and learn. I look into every solution to see how they did it and learn how to do it myself in the future. However, this did not pay off for the overlapping issue. I looked though many places, on the page where I got the menu, in the forums, and found people having the same problem, but no one ever answers with a solution. I even found other people with the menu I use and they have the overlapping issue on their sites too. So, I have just assumed that it's an unsolvable issue. I did find a way to have more than one of the same menu on the site. So, that might be a solution and I'll have to spread the links out so they never get to the edge of the screen and cause the overlapping issue. It's a work in progress. We'll see how things work.
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