A couple of days ago in the early morning as I was opening the blinds I found that three young deer were wondering around the yard looking for food. For the first time in some weeks the ground was not covered in snow and at least at the top had started to melt.

Today is, arguably, the first truly spring-like day we have had this year. The temperature is in the low sixties and the sky is a brilliant blue. The crocuses are in bloom. The daffodils are still in bud but a couple of days like this one and they will blossom.

Warrenville Grove, 12 March 2014

DuPage River, West Branch, 12 March 2014

We are now on daylight saving. Spring will be here officially tomorrow, but there are other signs that it is on the way. Yesterday as I tuned into the street on which I live I noticed the tops of the first daffodil shoots. The tips were yellow, but the next couple of inches were green. Just a few days ago they had been buried under snow. While there are still a few much diminished mounds of grimy snow around, mainly in the areas that are shaded, a couple of days with highs significantly above freezing eliminated much of the snow. Yesterday it was sunny and in the fifties, not good for the life expectancy of snow.

The last significant snow we had was a week ago in the early morning of the 12th. By mid-morning the sky was beginning to have some blue areas and a lack of wind kept most of the new snow on the trees. The following two shots give some idea of the conditions. One was taken from the bridge across the former mill race at Warrenville Grove. The other was from the William Road bridge across the West Branch of the DuPage River.

The easiest solution to the problem of adding drop down menus was to switch to a new theme: Graphene. The new theme came with drop down menus already incorporated. However, it also had some features of which I was not overly fond, such as the drop shadow surrounding the main viewing area and a background beyond that area. I wanted a plain white background that seamlessly flowed into the viewing area.

Once again my daughter provided some quick help. She introduced me to the quick way to look at and edit CSS. Then it became a matter of trying to find out where the author of the Graphene theme stuck the things I wanted to modify. after a fair amount of playing around I managed to get rid of the shadow box around the viewing area. I also eliminated a grey box on top of the footer box and converted the latter to a white background. In Graphene as it initially loads the footer is set up with styles similar to those of the menu bar. I also changed the footer information by making the text regarding copyright the same color and eliminating the references to WordPress and Graphene, though I will have to check with the instructor to seem if doing the latter is strictly kosher.

There three horizontal lines I would like to eliminate: two medium grey and one very light grey. So far the codes in CSS used to create the lines has eluded me. Perhaps I can get some helpful hints tomorrow. With any luck the revised site won’t have the same embarrassing problems its precursor did.

I completed re-sizing the images for use in the galleries and uploaded them. I then bulk deleted the problematic larger versions from each of the four initial galleries. I thought the problem was solved. As usual a new problem arose. When I uploaded the re-sized images thumbnails were present for both the older larger versions of the images and the newer smaller versions. Once I deleted the older larger files the thumbnails for the newer smaller files disappeared. Well not quite, one file in each of the four galleries showed a thumbnail. As there were about twenty images in each gallery this was not a high percentage.

I tried to get the software to create thumbnails. It tried but told me the process failed. In the end I tried uploading a second copy of the re-sized images to the galleries. Once the second copy was uploaded the thumbnails appeared. Attempting to delete any one copy of the images caused the thumbnail to disappear. I will have to see if I can find out why. In the meantime the site works again. The images display faster as one would expect with considerably smaller files.

Now I have to see if I can figure out how to make a drop down menu for the images item on the main menu.

This was demonstration day in class. I had been up late Wednesday night replacing the image files in the galleries with larger images and testing that the site worked. Everything seemed to work fine.

On Thursday I went to class for the demonstrations by the students of their sites. When it came my turn to show my site: disaster! The site wouldn’t load. It kept showing up at the page of the server provider. After a while several of my fellow students were able to load the home page, but the images for the other pages wouldn’t load at first. After a while several got it to work. The instructor managed to get it to work enough to show some of the images.

In a discussion after class as to what had happened the best guess was that the new files were too large. At home I was working late at night on a fast connection so I didn’t notice the problem. At school the connection was slower and it was during a time when a higher demand was being made on the servers of the outfit providing a home for the site.  and took too long to load. At home it wasn’t a serious issue because the images cached in the computer and so were not actually downloading. Later when I told my daughter Anna what had happened she suggested that in future I use a browser other than the one I used to work on the site to check it. This would get around the situation where the browser cached images. Using cached images would make the site seem more responsive than it would where each image had to be downloaded. In short it would give me an experience with the site similar to someone visiting it for the first time.

As the saying goes, you live and learn.

The site is not yet ready to go. There are more images to upload, more text to add. I managed to get rid of the “Leave a reply” apparatus on all the other pages, but it also disappeared from this, the only page on which I wanted it to appear.