Regular visitors here may be even more confused than I am — and that’s saying something — about various mysterious layout changes in the last couple months. At the moment, just to list a couple things:
- The right-hand menu — including a Google-based search form and various other ways of accessing old comment (chronologically, by category, and so on), as well as links to my various other online presences (Instagram, Substack, etc.) — has drifted to the bottom of the page, where it looks ridiculous.
- The header image — the Japanese woodcut of the guy chasing his hat in a windstorm — now also appears in the footer, for unknown reasons.
As you probably know, RAMH, and many other blogs which have been around for as long (or longer), runs on a blogging platform called WordPress. The standard WordPress look-and-feel has itself changed over time — on top of which, many blogs (like this one) are built on “themes” which control stuff like colors, fonts, the placement of elements on a page or within a post, and so on; there are free themes, and professional themes you can buy and then customize further, on your own. Once you’ve got those general things set up to your satisfaction, you can proceed to add various so-called plug-ins which add other capabilities: audio players, image slideshows, and so on…
All of those elements — core WordPress, the selected theme, the look and behavior of plug-ins — are managed, i.e. controlled, by different entities: corporations, individual developers, groups of them. And they’ve all got to be kept in sync with one another or, well, weirdness creeps in.
I don’t know what the hell is going on with it all anymore, and I no longer have the patience to make it all “right” when the changes are obviously being done without notification. Stuff Suddenly Just Doesn’t Work the Same Anymore. So, alas: for a good while, at least, I’ll just fix things that don’t seem to work at all, period. I’ve got too much “stuff” here to pull the plug on RAMH for a good long while, and I’ll continue updating it from time to time (including the “whiskey river Fridays” series). But I’ve got other things competing for my attention and I just can’t keep diddling with the stuff around the edges here.
To repeat what I hope underlies all the content here: I sincerely appreciate everyone who visits here, comments, likes posts, shares them elsewhere, and so on. Thank you all, VERY much.
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