css

I went and did something productive today! It was small, but I still got dressed (in record time, too... usually takes me so long =_=), went out and did something responsible.

I just had to go and call to cancel my health insurance in the U.S. My mom couldn't do it herself because they needed confirmation straight from me. But I couldn't call from home because the phone line isn't working right now. :(

So that meant I had to go outside to use a phone there. Which could have totally been a freakout moment (agoraphobia + anxiety from responsibilities) but I went and put on a little bit of "Archana attitude" and it actually worked. o.O I was okay!

I'm pretty content now for once... I mean, I won't say it'll last (it rarely does) but if I can have those moments more often than not, I'm doing something right.

I've been working on a layout -- and I mean a very SIMPLE layout -- for the new Caduceus site. I had everything done, more or less, but then discovered that the top banner (which was a centered image) was always shifting a few pixels to the left compared to the splash page.

Yeah, so it's just a few pixels, who cares, right? ... I do! D:

So I raged for a while (all last night, in fact) trying to figure out the issue, when it finally struck me just a few minutes ago. It's the *scrollbar*. The scrollbar was messing up the centering for short pages. x.x So I followed the advice I found here and put in a

html { overflow-y: scroll; }

in the CSS to force a scrollbar all the time. Gah~ I really do hate CSS, have I said that before? n.n

I really hate when I lose my posts... Now I have to rewrite all about Soul Collectors. Grrrr.

It went all right, though, and the players were great to work with (even the ones I originally thought might flake out or be problematic somehow.) Thy are used to a faster-paced game than I usually play/run, though, and I found that a bit hard to get used to, at first. Keeping up will be something I'll have to try hard at whenever I run -- though on the other hand, since everyone's posting so fast, there isn't nearly as much need to spend on detail.

Unfortunately, that ALSO means that when I do want detail, I have to describe as much as I can ahead of time. x.x

The players *seemed* to like the premise, which was to bring a Solar sorcerer to the center of the Black Chase and protect her as she casts the Benediction of Archgenesis, on the new moon of Ascending Water.

Just did a few changes to the node layouts. So exciting, huh? :P

I decided (after editing Talliska's journal to do the same) that I'd only display categories on the teaser, and put the tag list at the very end of the full node view. Makes things look less cluttered, though it doesn't actually reduce db queries, since I have to traverse the terms *anyway* to pull out the categories separate from the tags. But that's to be expected.

Also I tweaked the code so the author/date/categories will only display for blog entries. (Pages are static, and events have their own dates on them anyways.) And I went into contemplate and edited the node template for events so it wouldn't use <h3> any more.

Now I really want to play Talliska in DR, but I keep futzing around with the journal instead! =_= And making things like this (a placeholder page, helped me practice basic CSS) and this (made with Nucleus - I'll stick a PSU screenshot in the layout later to make it look more interesting.)

(Also, this post ended up LONG!)

But I've mostly gotten things set up the way I wanted them, now. Here's some of the annoying things I had to contend with:

1) The user login box had odd formatting for the list bullets. I was actually ranting to Kalli about this for a while. I finally fixed it, by taking out the line-width argument the creator of my base theme (it's called marinelli, by the way) stuck in the loginblock CSS.

2) I made the BAD mistake of trying to activate the theme developer module packaged with devel. I don't know WHAT was wrong with it, but it started eating my PHP memory like crazy whenever I loaded the modules page. Geez... I had bumped up the max allocation in php.ini to 40M and it was still trying to allocate more! And it started spitting bunches of raw code at me, too.

Bleargh... I hate CSS. I really, really hate CSS!

On the other hand, though, I have Drupal 6.2 running now, after a day of slaving over database backups (I had to do a restore at one point, it was painfully slow and nervewracking), manually updating modules, having to redo my URL aliases at least twice, and *re*-learning Views because Views 2.0 has an entirely different layout to it. (I managed to get all my views working again, though, woo.)

I'm still poking at various little niggling details of things. Having such a beautiful monitor is a blessing and a curse... I *love* the way my site looks on my screen, but some of the colors just look horrific on Jon's. Argh. I grew out of sticking to web-safe colors a long time ago, so I guess that's to be expected, but it's annoying looking over his shoulder and thinking to myself "Bleah, that looks SO much uglier than I thought it did!"

Oh, I managed to find a non-database query intensive way to print categories and tags per entry. But I still have to tweak the full views... now they print tags twice. WTF! Ahhhh, going to be a long night still, I can tell.

Believe me, it's hard to move whole CMS's to other directories. And now I'm facing the fact that Drupal's watchdog logs EVERY error that occurs on darksiren.net, including all the 404's that will keep happening until google and other indexing systems figure out that hey! I don't have those pages on my site any more. >.> Gonna take a whiiiiile.

On the other hand, I mostly have everything installed, though I still have some layout things to fix (like, making this text box I'm typing on not look this ugly white color, argh!) Also, need to set up the new feed, which is going to be a whole NEW headache to deal with. BAH.

At least I can say that once I get the details hammered out, I shouldn't have to touch the code or anything else related to the backend of this site for a long, long time. x.x I'm so impatient! I had to hold up on writing in my journal for days and I don't like that!

Anyway, hopefully people like the soft colored/lighter background layout and stuff. If you don't mind, refrain from signing up user accounts until I give the okay? It probably won't break anything if you sign up already, but I can't guarantee it will all look good and work right until I've tested it. *goes back to tinkering with site!*