February 12:
Okay, now the Blogroll should work. Apparently the problem was, WordPress doesn’t like people using HTML, or doesn’t trust people to use HTML, and it kept adding extraneous code every time I saved it.
Regarding the fonts: apparently there’s nothing to be done about the grey default text; but I was able to replace the annoying-to-read Grasshopper Green text with red, which shows up nice and sharp and easy on the eyes.
They allow over a hundred different font types, most of them with a dozen size options and many style options (regular, bold, italic), but very few color options unless you want to create your own palette.
I should add that a lot of people are contacting me offering help and advice, and it’s all appreciated; but I can’t get back to everybody on a timely basis, and for that I apologize.
Still on the to-do list:
Switch to “newest comments appear first”? Apparently not a popular notion
Restore the comicsidontunderstand.com address
Find a better template Maybe I have; thoughts, anybody?
Set up an RSS feed
Set up blogroll Figure out why WordPress isn’t letting me set up a blogroll Okay, so the blogroll template is refusing to take input; but they will allow me to work old-school using HTML links. Which is fine, since HTML is where my understanding of web design peaked anyway. Not quite as “done” as I’d thought — but I know how to get it working now.
Bring the “expanded comments” widget home
Make the address box show the comicsidontunderstand.com address
Get a consensus on the “like” buttonsLook into acquiring cidu.us
Find out whether anybody hates the Grasshopper Green text as much as I do
Anything I’m forgetting?
Comics I Don't Understand 
Automattic customer service is not the very best I’ve ever dealt with, but it’s quite good. I don’t think you’ll have any problems.
Okay, that’s weird: apparently comicsidontunderstand.com already redirects to the wp site. So far so good. But the address line continues to read godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com.
I’m not too techy-minded, but I came across this problem with a site I was designing for a friend, and it’s to do with frames and stuff like that. She just bought a domain name only, and I actually host her site on a folder on my webspace.
You can have a domain name/URL (say, splojj.com) and point it to the place where your site is actually hosted (say biffboffbuff.com/beeble), and you can have the address read splojj.com BUT the content is in a frame, and won’t show individual bookmarkable pages, and won’t be responsive (so on phones it will look like the normal full-size site, just much shrunk, instead of reforming responsively to fit the size of the machine).
At least, that’s how it works for me – not sure about how wordpress works.
In my web provider, 1&1, the options for URL forwarding are “HTTP Redirect” (Recommended) (“Automatically redirects your domain to the destination domain. The internet address (URL) of your _destination_ domain will appear in your browser’s address bar.”) and “Frame Redirect” (“Automatically redirects your domain to the destination domain. However, the internet address (URL) of _your_ domain will still remain visible in your browser’s address bar as the content is displayed in a frame.”)
So if godaddymustdie&c.wordpress is where the CIDU site is actually hosted, with all the images and text, and comicsidontunderstand.com is just a domain name pointing at it, you might be stuck with the godaddy name appearing if you want a responsive site.
Remarkably, I understood that!
Would it make a difference if the domain was housed at WordPress?
Bill,
Do not redirect. Point the domain comicsidontunderstand.com at the WP site, via WordPress.com configuration. Costs a few bucks a year.
Thanks, I’ll look into that.
godaddy suggests your domain name registration expires on 01/31/2018. This might be a good time to switch to a different registrar.
Already renewed, but thanks.
Forgetting to renew comicsidontunderstand.com would be a poor idea indeed.
I’m still seeing “Share” and “Related” – don’t know if they crept back or never actually left.
I’m not sure what the “main” (attached to the original post) “like” button would be referring to in this case – the comic itself, the fact that it was chosen, the comment you attached to the comic, something else? I don’t think it brings anything useful – people who want to actually comment on the comic can certainly do so directly. The “like” buttons on the individual comments seem more useful (as an “I agree with this” mechanism), though those who feel strongly compelled to note agreement with a comment can just post that fact, and in the past people have seemed perfectly happy to do so. So I personally would be happy without either of the “likes”.
“Would it make a difference if the domain was housed at WordPress?”
I believe so, if wordpress sells webspace. Certainly in my own limited experience building a few websites is that if your domain name is directly connected with the webspace – say if you buy a domain name myname.com and 1GB of space together (webspace has to have _some_ address) – then everything is a lot simpler and works smoother (in terms of URL address, bookmarking and site size responsiveness) than if you buy a separate URL-only – othername.com – and point that at some a different space, say myname.com/site.
But as I say I am not that techy myself, and others here will know better than me! I wouldn’t implement any process purely on my ramblings.
I could swear, the first time I read Carlfink’s comment #1 he did say “Automattic customer service” — which would be the correct spelling since “Automattic” with the doubled -tt- is the business name under WordPress. (I believe because of the role of the guy named Matt.)
But now it seems to have been “corrected” to the plain word “Automatic”. (Since it starts a sentence, the capital letter as a clue to use of a name got disguised.)
Here’s a lookup from DNS. I’ll mention a couple salient points, but feel free to ask if there is something I say that is just opaque.
Salient points:
1. The DNS management of the name “comicsidontunderstand.com” has been taken over by WordPress. You can see that in a couple places. First thing in the Answer Section was the SOA — Start of Authority — and you can see two servers belonging to wordpress.com.
Further down there are three NS entries and they show NameServers belonging to Wo0rdpress.com also.
The only thing still relating to GoDaddy are the MX entries — these say where the email servers are that email for anyname@comicsidontunderstand.com ought to be sent to. If you weren’t paying for email service at goDaddy, and aren’t getting email service from WordPress, these don’t matter.
2. This isn’t either one of the kinds of forwarding or redirection that Narmitaj explains nicely at comment #2. Those involve the (web) server at the old host receiving the request and handling it by either telling the client “No, you need to go look at the new place” or doing a little more work and actually pulling in content from the new place.
But neither is happening with comicsidontunderstand.com. Nothing is going on here with the old GoDaddy web host. The A listings give the (two! why? I dunno!) numerical IP addressses of the WordPress new web host.
3. Getting “comicsidontunderstand.com” to show in the clients’ address bar after landing (instead of putting in the other) is a setting to get settled with WordPress tech service. Do you get a CPanel as well as the blog management panels? If so, you could try a couple things yourself. Without it, just ask them to change that behavior. (Probably not a matter of “fixing” it from their standpoint.)
I’d suggest just putting the change request in terms of what happens and what you’d prefer to see happen — the replacement of the site name in the Location Bar of visitors’ web browsers, and not drag in “how the redirection works” which might lead them away from what you’re really getting at.
When I spoke to WP Support the other night, I got more help in 5 minutes than I did in a total of about 10 hours with GoDaddy earlier in the month. Infinitely more, I guess, since the endgame at GoDaddy was “Yeah, your site is toast.”
Which is a roundabout way of saying “I’ll tell WP the problem and hopefully they’ll be able to fix it without my ever having to know how the sausage is made. Which itself is a roundabout way of saying “Mitch4, what you said in the final paragraph is exactly right.”
Was I hallucinating? Now it says Automattic again!
Carlfink says :
I don’t understand most of this conversation, which is okay, but just let me know when I have to change my bookmark, okay?
Re: What am I forgetting: I’m not seeing the tags at the bottom of each post anymore. (Unless this is covered by “find a better template”.
SO SO SO glad to see you’re back!
Actually, the limited availability of comics is why CIDU exists today: a friend in California and I would often mail one another comics we didn’t understand (since we didn’t have access to the same comics). Once comics became available digitally, the logical thing to do would be to email them, except her email system couldn’t handle attachments. Right around this time Compuserve was letting members create their own web sites, so I thought Why don’t I just put the comics onto a page, and she can look at them all at once?
Which I did, and I happened to mention this to a kinsman, and he mentioned it to a co-worker, and before long I was getting email from people none of us knew. And twenty-two years later, here we are.
Another vote for “welcome back from the abyss”!
I am just glad that you managed to get back. I am guessing I mentioned this, but in case not, shortly before you started having problems the main embroidery group I am on decided to relocate to a new site and name. She set it up in late December and I was still not going there yet (the old site is still going so people could find help there if needed) as we were in the whirlwind of the Candlelight nights reenactment night and I didn’t have to time to mess around.
Then when I started to sign up and find out how her new site works – CIDU went down. So I mostly was screaming at my computer at night as neither of my favorite places to visit worked. Her new site mostly works now, but there is still a problem going from page to page in “the forum” where we discuss things and we have to use a work around of going backwards on the site to go forward or backwards in the pages – and some people have still have not been able to sign up with her site.
So, it is a great relief that CIDU in some form is working and usable.
Thank you for all your work Bill!
Bill – I know one mistake I will not make again – and others may not be able to contact you due to the same problem. I never wrote down the site’s/your email address as I figured that it was always on the site when I needed it. I did all sorts of silly things trying to reach you – looking for your other group, chasing down things I found in searches (site has been moved – opps,that was the last move), etc. Then I remembered we had been in contact about your cousin’s book and I went searching for that and luckily I had not deleted it, so I had a contact for you and I knew it was your newer one, as you contacted me back with the newer one. I now have the address memorized – unless of course it changes now.
Meryl, there were plenty of things I could have done as well if I knew GoDaddy was going to torpedo the site.
My gmail address is easy enough to remember: billbickel. I don’t use it for CIDU matters, but it’ll certainly do for emergencies.
One thing that used to work on the old site is that the comic images were “linked”, so that you could click on them to open the image in a new window (very important when the template chopped off the last panel). This still (sort of) works with a desktop browser, but there’s no way to do it on my mobile devices. All I can do on my phone is “save image”, I can’t open it in a new browser tab.
I’m not sure whether those links were manual, or part of the template, but if you can restore them, it would be useful.
P.S. I’m not sure where you are collecting “consensus” votes, so permit me to repeat myself here: I hate the “likes”.
Next peeve: the WordPress URL still insists that I have to log in on my mobile devices before it will accept a comment from there. I managed to disable that nag on this desktop system, but have not figured out how to bypass it on my phone.
The upside is, I don’t think the new template ALLOWS an mage to be chopped — or at least I haven’t seen it happen on either my laptop or my phone so far.
I think I can fix that manually if it becomes an issue.
Kilby, do you hate the likes for the posts, the comments, or both?
Both. I don’t think it’s a good idea to collect votes on posts (unless you really think you need the feedback), and although some people may like to bask in the vanity of penning a popular comment, I’d rather not participate in that sort of rat race. Besides, every time somebody “likes” a comment, it generates an E-Mail from WordPress, which I haven’t figured out how to disable.
There is much wisdom in this. I’ll kill the “like” button tomorrow.
Tomorrow ? It’s already happened (I’m glad).
Next, kill the “related” thingy, please : it interferes with the comic above and the comments under ; plus, that’s what the tags are for, I think.
I missed you!! So glad the site is back
The site itself is not “back”, for me; but today (unlike previous days) it gave me a screen from which I could get to “Archives”.
And here I am.
Cicely, which address are you using? Comicsidontunderstand.com and godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com should both be working.
If the address you’re using ends in /wordpress , then you won’t get to the site.
I like(d) the “Like” idea for comments. Under comicskingdom, that makes an easy and noncluttering way to say “Yeah, I agree with you” or “I appreciate your posting that” when no further text is really needed.
I removed them for now pending closing arguments.
FYI, WordPress sent me an activation email, including this (which might or might not kick in the autocensor):
Blog Name: Comics I Don’t Understand
Blog URL: https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com
And the name and addy fields below do NOT remember my prior effort.
You did indeed go into Moderation, not surprisingly.
I agree with Olivier about removing the “related posts”. In addition, the navigation block (naming the previous and next posts, respectively) needs to disappear. As Meryl A mentioned (in a different thread), seeing the name of an unrelated (albeit neighboring) post close to the comment window is simply confusing.
P.S. A third item that could (should) disappear is the block identifying “Published by” (with the logo and the date, right above the navigation links I just mentioned). We know who publishes all of this, it doesn’t need to be repeated every time (or at least not in such a big font).
P.P.S. You mentioned it in an older thread, but it’s not in the list above: will the sequential comment numbers be returning?
Getting rid of “author” was a no-brainer, and it’s now gone. Numbering responses seems not to be an option on this template, but it is something I’ll be looking for in the new template.
I rather like the arrows with names of previous and next entries. It’s one way of getting to a post that is no longer listed in either Recent list.
Related Posts should be gone. Of course, I think I said that before.
Seeing as Mitch4 likes the “previous” and “next” thread links, I’ll admit that I’m not fundamentally opposed to keeping them around, but they need to be moved to a different location. All the way at the bottom of the page would be one option (note: below the “new comment” block, not above it). Another possibility would be directly under the “home” and “contact” links at the top of the page.
P.S. Another suggestion: for clarity, enhance the “Leave a Reply” title to read “Leave a new reply to “[thread title]”. “
My rationale was pretty flimsy, I now see — the desideratum was to be able to get to older posts that might be before the Recent Posts list (and whose comments are not in Recent Comments either). That could be satisfied by a longer capture on those lists.
Or a way of proceeding to other posts by scrolling or maybe clicking. The old site used to show about five posts in a scroll, then you could click for more, getting the next earlier batch. The present site does seem to have “infinite scroll on demand” which is cool. But only AFAICT from the Home page.
Increasing the number is the simplest thing in the world (and I’m a big fan of simple).
EDITED TO ADD: Done. It’s 10 now.
Kilby, I don’t think these templates are designed to allow people to move elements around: the options are along the lines of “LIKE BUTTON: YES OR NO”.
I can, of course, keep certain preferences in mind as I sort through the svailable templates.
I don’t know when it happened, but I see you got categories
showing up on the main page. Thank you.
As always I am late to the conversation, but I see that your ‘To Do list’ has fixing your RSS feed on it. I’ll pass on that your working RSS feed is currently ‘https://godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie.wordpress.com/feed’ and indicates that your channel name is Comics I Don’t Understand. I think even when you get your CIDU address to point to WP nameservers and WP maps it so that your new feed will be C_I_D_U.com/ feed/ the old one will still work as a backup. Anyway, late to the party, but glad you’re back.
How are the widths of the columns being determined? The left column is way too wide, relatively speaking – almost half of my screen. It makes the actual content awkward to read.
KN, I’m pretty sure the width of the columns are determined by the WordPress elves. In any case, it’s nothing I can adjust.
The only thing that matters is, if the template is problematic, I move to the next candidate.
What device are you using? On my desktop PC, the left column of the comments page (I assume that’s what you mean versus the main page) is about 1/3 of the screen. As I narrow the size of the window, the column gets narrower too (and the font gets smaller) maintaining about the same ratio until some point where it disappears completely.
Secondary: Make the address box show the cidu address
Bill, I’ve used the “set primary domain” switch (that I emailed you a screenshot of) on my own WordPress.com tryout site. It takes effect instantly (because it is just on their server that something changes, no need to propagate thru DNS) and allowed me to change back and forth several times without balking or causing any problems. In fact, no observable effect on the appearance at all, just the way the site name appears in the browser location bar.
And I’m that sense, no interaction with the Theme at all. So no need to be super cautious or worry that the theme should be finalized first.
BTW, did you already switch to a new theme on tryout? I’m on my phone at the moment so all I’m going by is that some colors look different : I’ll look forward to seeing it on a full desktop.
Wow, that is clear now that I am at desktop! so this new one must be what KN was remarking, with the wide left column.
The “Older comments” / ” Newer Comments” arrows are interesting; maybe good, maybe not, we can see.
Please don’t do this. It would mean scrolling down to find the
most recent but not yet read message. Then reading that and
scrolling up to the top of that message, then to the top of the
next message. Repeat scrolling up and reading down until we’re
back at the top.
As it is, I scroll to the point of new (to me) entries, and read
*and* scroll downwards, just like when reading anything else.
This makes sense, Arthur: I’ll leave well enough alone.
Yes, Mitch4, I’m test-driving a new template. Actually, I previously tried three others, but they weren’t around long enough for anybody to notice.
Have you tried the “Links” widget for implementing the Blogroll? It might be more automatic, even if less flexible, than the “Custom HTML” widget.
Even more automatic, but much much less flexible, is the “Blogs I follow” widget. The idea is that the blog owner, as a WordPress.com user, is also a reader and can specifically Follow other blogs … on WordPress only, I think. Well, if you add this widget to the sidebar (or footer widget area, etc, whatever the theme provides), it will just list off those WP blogs as links — text links using the titles, or image/icon links. You choose between those two formats, and can place conditions on which ones to show when, but not customize beyond that. But you never entered even a URL, let alone any freeform HTML.
Any chance ARLO content will be back?
John, everything will be back: if I haven’t come across anything yet that needed the Arlo tag, I’m sure I will soon enough.
Mitch4, I had that widget activated for about 5 minutes. It wasn’t selling what I was buying.
The HTML option will do just fine.
See your email for more detail, Bill, the widget (the “Links”one) needs to hook up with URLs you put in thru yet another dam interface!
Comments seem to max out at 50 before they go to multiple pages. Any way to increase or remove that limit?
Even worse: If you click on a comment from either the Recent
Comments list or from larK’s site, it’ll take you to the first
page of comments, rather than the page the actual comment is on.
Well, it takes *me* there. YMMV.
This new template is indeed a lot better than the previous one: it’s cleaner, and it doesn’t waste space on things we don’t need. In additon, it is extremely flexible, to the point that it may take a while for me to get used to it. Resizing the window causes it to rearrange the sections (when necessary). It took me a while before I realized that the “Recent comments” section wasn’t “missing”, I just needed to stretch the window, and they returned (to the left side: very nice to have them back there!).
One (semi-major) “bad” feature: This template does not subdivide the thread history into separate pages. Instead, if you scroll down far enough, it loads additional threads, eventually going all the way back to the “Rebirth of the Phoenix”. This is OK for now, but will be a big problem later on, whenever it becomes necessary to dig back into the archive. The old system (random sectioning according to criteria that I was never able to decipher) was better than this “all in one soup”. Even better would be a regular pagination according to date (weekly, biweekly, or monthly, depending on how many posts seems comfortable to keep on each page).
P.S. There’s a typo in the “Bogroll” complaint at the end of the menu, but it’s almost amusing enough to leave it as it is.
Kilby, I think I can limit how much will appear on a page.
If you can put any limit on the number of posts in the main page(s), that would be wonderful, and I will not complain about whatever criteria is used to decide where the breaks occur.
I’m still getting used to the “Older/Newer Comments” links. I’m not sure I like the fact that the “default” page is the one with the oldest comments, but I do agree that reversing the order would be a bad idea (keeping the “oldest to newest” that we are all used to is better than switching to “newest to oldest”, even if the latter would mean that the default page shows the latest comments.)
Could you check whether the individual threads could be switched to “infinite length”?
P.S. There is one very annoying new “feature”: add a comment to a long thread, and you have to click a link before you can see what you just wrote (or whether it got moderated). Icky.
There is one very annoying new “feature”: add a comment to a long thread, and you have to click a link before you can see what you just wrote (or whether it got moderated).
I’m not sure I’m following this.
As soon as I click on “Post Comment” for this comment, the page will refresh, and it will bounce back to the first page of (older) comments. This means I will have to click on “newer comments” to get back to this section of the discussion.
The problem also applies to the links shown under “Recent Comments”. When I clicked on the link shown for your comment, it went to this post. However, unlike the old system, where it would jump right to the relevant comment, it showed that first page of (older) comments, meaning that the comment I thought I was jumping to was nowhere to be seen.
Kilby, is this just with the new template, or has this been the case since the site’s resurrection?
FWIW- I love the “godaddyandthesquirrelmustbothdie” name so much that is how I am getting here each morning. I think it should be the unofficial second name of the site..
I did not notice either effect with the previous template – but I’m not sure whether any threads (other than this one) had gone long enough to force the “paging” effect.
P.S. Despite the understandable anger that we all feel toward GoDaddy, for me the extended URL is a “funny once”, it is simply too cumbersome for continued use. Is there a TLD anywhere on earth for which CIDU.xx is still available, and reasonably priced?
Re “Anything I’m forgetting?” — well, there’s always incorporating this basic business plan:
Step 1. Collect underpants.
Step 2. ?
Step 3. PROFIT
The original comicsidontunderstand.com works. There was no way I was going to keep the other one (I couldn’t even remember it all sometimes)
Ok, looks like cidu.us is available. There is the matter of 20% of the site’s traffic being non-U.S. though…
That doesn’t matter, as long as the registrar is one that is reliable. The “us” doesn’t have to be understood as “United States”, “we” could always subjectively consider it as objectively meaning “US“.
P.S. At one point I considered registering “kil.by”, but figured I didn’t want to have to deal with a Russian registrar, not to mention that the annual price was irrationally high.
Ah, good. I hadn’t thought about .us in terms of “us.”
I very much regret not having gotten bickel.com. I lost it, literally, by just a few hours.
To address Arthur’s point, it seems comments get moved after a second page is spawned, so that some comments that were on the first page get moved to the second page. Which is incredibly stupid as far a permanent links go (once upon a time the whole idea of a URL was to be a Universal Record Locator…). It seems any new thread automatically has /comment-page-1/ in the url, and the individual comment gets a unique, incrementing number. So far so good — my permanent link to my comment is site/thread-date/thread-name/comment-page-1/#my-comment-number. But then a second page is spawned. The link to the second page is site/thread-date/thread-name/comment-page-2/, and some (I don’t know how many) comments from page 1 are moved to page 2, which totally breaks the link for those, as they change from /comment-page-1/ to /comment-page-2/ — incredibly stupid!
From what I can tell, much earlier comments are OK, they stay where they are, their links are unchanged, and much later comments are also OK, they always were on page 2, so their links don’t change (until a page 3 is spawned?) — It’s the comments around the time of split that get screwed up, the ones that used to be on page one, but are now on page 2.
There is a substantial tradition of the two-letter country codes or geographic TLDs getting used for what they suggest alphabetically.
Probably the most famous case is Tuvalu, which controls (thru some agency) the *.tv names, and depending on the news sources you believe is either flopping or making a killing.
Bit.ly (the name shortener service), and other *.ly domains, are apparently having troubles with the government of Libya.
I recently noticed a popularity for *.fm domains, especially for podcasts and other audio services — maybe the intended association is to FM radio. There is some overheated promotional materials at https://www.dot.fm/ but you can see there the idea of radio or audio in general. That site doesn’t make much of it, but a lookup says the TLD belongs to the Federation of Micronesia.
Personally, I preferred it when the link to the comments was below the comics. It doesn’t matter with individual comics, but with the Sunday Funnies or other groupings of comics, you either have to scroll down and read them all and then scroll back up to click to the comments page, or click first and then scroll up there to actually read the comics. Just my two cents.
Wendy, all input is good.
The bottom line, of course, is that the templates aren’t very customizable; so when we settle on one, there will be features that we like better than what we had before, and features we don’t like as much (like Grasshopper Green text)
The links for Barney, Bug and Pop Culture need to be fixed. They currently have godaddyandthesquirreletc appended to the front.
That’s what I’m trying to figure out at this very moment. Everything SHOULD work.
But isn’t.
Okay, replacing the URLs with Tiny Urls fixes the problem. WHY does it fix the problem? Don’t know, don’t care. As long as it works, I see no real benefit in worrying about it.
So I’ll deal with this mess probably tonight.
Thanks, Bill, for already having identified the primary disadvantage of this current trial template: the
puke“grasshopper” green text color.P.S. One would think that there HAS to be a way to edit a template and replace that color definition with something less putrid.
There might be. Probably hidden in some dark corner of the Management Page.
“Grasshopper Green” hold a special — and negative — meaning to me, because that was the official color of my first car (which stalled out on me, on a steep hill, the third day I owned it)
Though… maybe the red is TOO sharp next to the dull grey default text color?
Red is much better than the green. Note that the green still persists in some contexts, such as when you try to mark text for cut&paste. You could try a dark blue, but that tends to get interpreted as “link text”.
As mentioned elsewhere, I’m starting to feel nostalgic for the previous “flexible” template (as opposed to this one). but I think we need to see two or three more before we start to make a selection.