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.

<!-- email link -->
<script language=javascript>
<!--
var username = "davidfromblogdom";
var hostname = "blogdom.org";
var subject = "Hello from Blogdom";
var linktext = "Click Here To Send Me Email";
document.write("<a href=" + "mail" + "to:" + username +
"@" + hostname + "?Subject=" + escape(subject) + ">" + linktext + "</a>")
//-->
</script>
<!-- email link -->

As usual, I ended up modifying the example a little. I like including a default subject, so I added that into the snippet. The %20 are necessary for the subject string to be parsed properly. If you use spaces instead, everything in the subject after the first space gets truncated in the resulting link.

Note that I am also using a unique username so I can see if any SPAM is being generated by the link.

Here's my code:

<!-- email link -->
<script language=javascript>
<!--
var username = "davidfromblogdom";
var hostname = "blogdom.org";
var subject = "Hello%20from%20Blogdom";
var linktext = "Click Here To Send Me Email";
document.write("<a href=" + "mail" + "to:" + username +
"@" + hostname + "?Subject=" + subject + ">" + linktext + "</a>")
//-->
</script>
<!-- email link -->

It never ceases to amaze me. Just about anything you could ever want to know is out there on the Internet. And Google is usually so good at finding it quickly and easily.

For S&Gs, I decided to do some hunting for a script to give the user the option of whether links should open in the same window, or a new window. This was prompted after I visited a blog that had this option.

I'm happy to report that it couldn't have been much simpler to make this change.

Just go here, and follow the incredibly simple two steps. I didn't even have to modify any of my existing entries.

I did make one little tweak to the the form code. The standard is to default to not having the check-box checked, and therefore opening links in the same window. I prefer to have links open in a new window, so I added the CHECKED option to the FORM tag in the INPUT TYPE section.

End of quandary / debate. Now you can have it your way. The default is (now) to open links in a new window. Un-check the box if you want to have links open in the same window.

Someday, maybe I'll even set a cookie to remember the visitor's preference (but don't count on it).

This may be pure hubris on my part, but I figure that people will want to return back from whence they came after they finish their tangential exploration.

And since one link can lead to other links, I don't want them to have to click the back button until their index finger goes numb to get back to my page.

By opening another page, when they are finished wandering, all they have to do is click once on the "x" to close the new window and they're back.

I think all sites should set their off-site links to open in a new browser window. It is easy to do, especially in M-T. One hack to set M-T to always cause a new browser window to be opened when the URL button is used on the entry template can be found in this thread.

I guess the ideal would be to provide a preferences option on your site where you would allow the user to choose their preferred functionality, but that's more work than I'm willing to entertain at this time.

In the mean time, I'll continue to set my off-site links to generate a new browser window, and hope that other sites do the same.

The php code fragment that I thought should work to suppress displaying the "Categorized under:" text if the category was blank didn't work. I tried just about everything I could think of to get it to work - no luck.

So, I put a post up on the M-T support forum, and this morning, just like in the story of the shoe maker's elves, there was my answer posted in the forum. Not only was the answer provided, but, there was a thorough and understandable explanation of what was happening, and why what I had tried was not working.

There appears to be a core of people who give unselfishly of themselves by monitoring the forums and providing help for those of us who are not (yet) as enlightened.

You folks rock!