So, after my whining last night, I decided to take a break from work for a few hours today and play with the blog...
There have been two things that have bugged me (well, actually there's lots more - but there were two things I addressed today) about the blog...
The first was that the "display recent comments" didn't properly display the date the comment was actually posted, but rather the date of the entry for which the comment was made. I found the solution here at Rogers Cadenhead's wonderfully informative site.
The second was that it was really hard to tell from looking at the calendar which dates had entries. I knew that the solution revolved around customizing the way links were displayed, but I had been unable on a few previous attempts to figure out how to customize the links just for the calendar, while leaving the format of the links for the rest of the page alone.
I had to reference a number of pages found from Google searches to put it all together in my mind. The most helpful pages were a "CSS Link Styles" tutorial from projectseven.com and especially the sample style sheet provided on the last page of the tutorial.
I also ended up having the change the character in front of the "calendar" style section in my style sheet from a # (pound sign) to a . (period)
It took a bit more searching to make the last adjustment I was seeking - to display the dates with entries in "reverse text" but this page from htmlite.com gave me just the information I needed.
One final change was to change the class entries in the Main Index for the days of the week from class="calendar" to class="calendarhead" to use the formatting for the calendar head for the day names (which looks better to me than using the formatting for the calendar entries).
My new css section for the calendar looks like this:
.calendar {
font-family:verdana, arial, sans-serif;
color:#666;
font-size:10px;
font-weight:normal;
background:#EEE;
line-height:14px;
align:center;
padding:1px;
text-decoration: none;
}
.calendar a:link {
background-color: #336699;
color: #99CCFF;
text-decoration: none;
}
.calendar a:visited {
background-color: #336699;
color: #EEE;
text-decoration: none;
}
.calendar a:hover {
color: #99CC66;
text-decoration: none;
}
.calendar a:active {
color: #FFFFFF;
text-decoration: none;
}
.calendarhead {
font-family:verdana, arial, sans-serif;
color:#003366;
font-size:10px;
font-weight:bold;
background:#EEE;
line-height:14px;
align:center;
padding:1px;
}
While I was in the blog, I also removed the last month's worth of comment and trackback spam, and manually added two comments that had been emailed to me because the commenter couldn't enter the comment directly due to my previous disabling of comments for old entries. One of these days I'll implement a new comment module that strikes a better balance between the current pretty much "closed down" approach and the previous "wide open" approach.
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Posted by David at February 12, 2006 07:05 PM