Coats Sez

Well, I’ve been doing this blogging thing for just
a few days and already I’m playing whack-a-mole.
I was taking a look at my logs to see where people
were coming from and right away discovered that
most of my visitors were spies for corporations or
bots trying to figure out how to spam me. After doing
some google research on the spies I could see that
their purpose was to read my comments to see if
I was speaking out against brand names so presumably
the affected companies and corporations would be
able to identify me and issue a cease-and-desist order
or some other such means to control me.

So, I’m doing the htaccess thing hoping to head
them off at the pass. It’s a sorry situation for a common
citizen to have to protect themselves from the people
who want to control us. I’m also running Akismet
and Bad Behavior plugins as additional lines of defense.
Not that I have anything offensive to say about anyone.
Except maybe the Republicans and Baptists.

Anybody know of other methods I can use? I am
open to suggestions. We have to put up at least a little
bit of resistance to the people who would control us.

teryc

Are you a Vietnam veteran with Type 2 diabetes? If you are,
you are probably eligible for veteran’s benefits. A few years
back the VA determined that Type 2 diabetes was a presumptive
disease for Vietnam veterans. That means if you have it and
you served in-country up until 1975 then the VA will give
you benefits for having come down with the disease. It is
presumed that Agent Orange is the cause.

This disease is one of several afflictions I am drawing
benefits for. You veterans should check in to this if you have
not already. In addition to monthly benefits in the form of
income your diabetes supplies are paid for. No out-of-pocket
expenses, and with the price of blood test strips, this can
help a great deal. I know it sure helps me.

Here’s a VA page that gives some links and a phone number:
Agent Orange – Office of Public Health and Environmental Hazards
We veterans need to stay active in seeking out benefits we
are entitled to and have earned. They are not advertised to
us very well.

teryc

I just made a favicon with the Gimp, the Gnu Image Manipulation
Program. I had noticed in my webpage logs that visitors’ browsers
were looking for “favicon.ico” but getting a “not found” error. The
obvious fix was to make an icon so I did.

The Gimp is a fun Linux graphics program but it is hard to learn.
I have to relearn how to use it every time I use it for something.
It is available for Windows also at http://gimp.org/ .

The favicon file is a picture only 16×16. I found it really difficult
to do any art in a square only 16×16 so I just stuck my initials
in there. I’ve seen other icons that look nice but I don’t know
how they manage to do it in such a small space.

Anyway, I’ve now got an icon going in the browser address bar.
It should show up anyway. I had to refresh and also restart
my browser to get the icon to show up though. Don’t know
what that was all about. I guess the browser cache was getting
in the way.

teryc

Well, I guess I learned something today. My idea had been
to use a div to put an image into the sidebar using the text
widget. The idea was to simply have an empty div with no
content and then use a background image in the css to display
my image. My expectations were that using a background
image would automatically stretch the image to the size of
the div I specified in css. Wrong. This did not happen. After
puzzling over it and doing some googling, I finally realized
that this cannot be done in css. Sizing the image to fit the
the div, that is. The background image is seen, but
only a portion of it as big as the height and width you specify.
Or all of it if you use the same height and width tags in
the css as the image is. I had expected my large image
to auto resize to fit the height and width I used in css.
So, the solution is to use img tags in your html for the div
and use height and width tags there and the browser will
resize the image for you. Or, use a graphics program to
make your image the exact size you want it and then use
that along with the same size height and width tags in the css.
Maybe that’s the way I should have been trying it all along.

teryc

I eliminated the necessity to login for people to make
comments. I don’t know why I had this enabled or was
worried about it. I guess it’s just because I’m a wordpress
newbie. I’m still learning. I’m just waiting for the first
time I get hacked. I want to upgrade to wordpress
2.8.5 but fatcow, my hosting provider, is the one who
controls the upgrades on the software and they
haven’t picked up the upgrade yet. Let’s get with it,
fatcow!

teryc

I was just reading some news on Google about the
Obama administration having a war with Fox News.
Everybody knows or should know by now that the
Fox news channel sounds like a political arm of the
Republican party. They continually sing the praises
of the Republicans and conversely try to make
Democrats look bad. Always. This is nothing new.
I stopped listening to them long ago. Well, actually,
I tune in every once in a while to see if things have
changed but nothing has changed. Obviously I’m not
a Republican supporter but they and their supporters
seem to have a problem with what’s real. Republicans
remind me of Baptists. Doctrine and dogma is the
only thing that matters to them and they sneer at
anyone who disagrees.
Anyway, I don’t see how anyone can see how Fox News
is anything but a Republican propaganda machine.
Isn’t this obvious?

teryc

I just discovered that the link to log in to make
comments was screwed up. Not by me. It came
that way with the theme. Some problem with the
php code not working right and causing a “page
not found” error. I fixed it by rewriting the code
by comparing a known working comments.php
from another theme.
Hopefully everything works ok now and I don’t
get any more surprises.

teryc

Well, my experiments with adding images to sidebars did not
go well so I decided to try a new theme. It sure is hard to
come up with a theme that complements the colors of my
webpages but maybe it doesn’t really matter. I’ll experiment
with this theme for a while.

teryc

Well, I finally figured out the deal with the little text widget
image in the right column. It turned out to be fairly simple,
after more googling to see how others did it. I forgot the css
and used a simple image tag in the text widget. Here’s the code:
<img src=”http://terrycoats.net/images/scaled1.png” height=120 width=165 alt=”picture of Rogue Valley Oregon” title=”Rogue Valley….I live out there somewhere”/>

The answer turned out to be the use of the height and width to size the image
and make it fit. I’m happy now, I guess. All I wanted to do was
add a little color to the page.

teryc

Man, it just took me two days to figure out how to get that little
picture to show up in the right column. And I did it in what I
think is a stupid way. I used a div and then a background image
for the div but in order for the image to show up in the empty
div I had to fill it with line breaks to put something in the div.
I never could figure out how to get a background image to show
up in an empty div. Is this even possible? Must a div have something
in it?

teryc