Meryl's Notes Blog

In 2000, I earned a certificate in Internet Technologies in hopes of becoming a Web designer. Working on the blog today reminded me why I changed my mind and went into writing instead.

Based on advice (you know who you are — I don’t want to put your name in here again and have people thinking I’m trying to make nice nice), I took off the excerpts on the main blog page so you don’t have to click the entry to see the full content.

But in doing this, my paragraphs disappeared (the extra blank line). The blog entries looked like a ruddy mess and hard to scan. I looked at the code and don’t see anything that would make paragraph <p> not add a blank line.

So back to excerpts because the unformatted content broke too many web content rules. Oh, the bolding was there as were the bullets, but the whitespace was terrible. Content overrules features when it comes to the following:

• Bold headings.
• Bulleted lists.
• Easy to find paragraphs.
• Short paragraphs and sentences.
• Text and background color contrast (too many blogs and web sites use gray for text with white backgrounds — this resembles reading in a fog. Black isn’t boring — black works.).

If my blog breaks these rules, then the feature will have to go away until I can solve the problem. So, the main blog page continues to use for technical and readability reasons and not for usability reasons.

Using a blog application, bloggers deal with the application’s quirks, CSS, templates, plug ins. So a problem might be buried in layers of CSS or code. In fact, Peter Shankman had problems with his WordPress: “… all of a sudden, after switching to Firefox and upgrading AVG, I can no longer upload photos to WordPress.”

I’ve had problems like this happen in the past where the solution meant disabling a plug-in. The problem with computers (especially Windows-based) is there are too many variables that can cause a problem. Even if you add one thing, it could be something you installed long ago that could be the cause of problems.

My computer needs a clean up as it has various problems. However, using registry cleaners and other cleaners could make things worse. I’ve used Registry First Aid, but it requires carefully reviewing changes before accepting them — and that took time.

Also tried CCleaner a long time ago — don’t remember why I stopped using it. I downloaded Revo Uninstaller, but haven’t tried it. Anyone have luck in safely cleaning a computer?