I have been having a lot of problems lately with comment spammers, and have tried to take some steps to cut down on the mischief. One of those was to default to closed comments for new posts.
However, I didn't really remember doing that, so no comments were allowed on the last post, and I thought surely there might be some interesting discussion about it. SO, for anyone who'd tried to comment on our Dear Leader's recent award in the previous post, that was the reason for not being able to comment. Well, that, I didn't want to subject him to even the remotest possibility that someone might say something unnice about it all.
I'll close them back up after a few days to forestall anymore comment spam later on. Maybe.
Well dang.
You might remember I made a move a couple of weeks ago to try to limit the amount of comment spam I have coming in by closing the comments as they popped up. Wasn't really a big distraction to most readers since it seemed that there were only about two or five very old posts that got the most spam, so I figured as spam came in, I'd shut off the offending post, which I didn't like doing because the comments are a lot better than the actual posts, but I got tired of having to come in and delete ten or twenty stupid messages every morning.
Making it even easier, Miss Jordana pointed out that our Mu.nu blogs have a handy little bit of code where you can close comments older than a certain date, so I inserted that in my template, and made it to where any post has its comments shut down when it gets over 21 days old.
These efforts seemed to have worked very well. There was an entire week there where I didn't get a single spam comment.
However--it's started back now in earnest, and apparently since the old, rarely ever seen posts are unreachable, it's all coming in on new posts. ::sigh:: And it's not even real spam for fly-by-night p00rn dealers and freelance pharmaceutical salesmen--it's those things with web addresses composed entirely of random letters, and the messages are likewise random letters.
Anyway, the comment spammers are back, and it sure would be nice if the people who do this were crushed by a bulldozer.
UPDATE: Well, well. Seems comment spam is a nice way to make money.
I noticed a while back that for whatever reason, a lot of my comment spam seems to recur in the same old posts. I've been dutifully deleting and blocking these, but it finally occurred to me that if I would close the comments on these posts that seem to draw spammers like flies to honey it would probably save me a lot of time deleting and blocking. Then I figured that I might as well close comments on any old posts that get spammed. I'd rather not do this, because the comments are a lot better than the posts, and sometimes people stumble upon something that's been hanging out there for a while and would still like to comment, but I am also tired of having to police these things, and closing the door seems to be a good way of cutting down on the amount of flies in the house.
So, basically, if a comment gets spam, and the post is over three months old or so, I'm just going to close it. If you somehow manage to stumble on these old posts and find it closed and would still like to comment, just drop me a note and I'll add it in.
The lovely Jordana Adams sends along this e-mail:
You've probably heard this before, but did you know your spacing is funny and that the sidebar is missing from Possumblog?
Such a sweet-talker, that one!But no, it looks okay to me from this computer. As I told Jordana, though, if you're viewing this with Firefox, it does NOT look the way it looks in IE. It's laid out using IE, and my crappy 800x600 monitor. If you're using something else, it's going to look wonky and I don't know how to make it property display for all settings and browsers.
SO--are any of the rest of you having trouble with the way it's displaying? Is it a new thing? Are you using something other than IE?
UPDATE: Okay, I've undone a change I made this morning--hit reload and let me know if anything changes, please.
Being that we all want Possumblog to be the hippest, most niftyest place on any of the Internets, we are adding yet another NEW FEATURE for your entertainment and enjoyment.
POLLS!!
That's right! Over in the sidebar will be a rotating assortment of polls for your amusement and/or edification. Some will be serious questions, others not, and supposedly they will rotate in order as you reload the page or make a return visit. Also, it is alleged that you're supposed to only be able to vote once a week, but we all know that's not necessarily so for you savvy computer people.
If you have a topic you'd like covered, drop me a line and let me know what it is. Otherwise, just play along and act like it's fun. Needless to say, these are in no way scientifically significant or accurate or anything like that, so no wagering, please.
Seem to be spotty lately. The Mu.nu folks were doing some server work yesterday, and that caused (and might still be causing) some difficulties, and as always there are kajillions of spammers out there trying to let you know of all the wonderful mortgage p0rn that's available.
Anyway, sorry for the disruption, but there's not much I can do except ask for your patience.
IN case you've noticed, I haven't been my usual comment-answering self today. The reason is that apparently the thingamajigger that sends me an e-mail when someone drops a comment is on the fritz, meaning people have been commenting all day without any corresponding correspondence from me.
Now some people are very hands-off when it comes to comments, but I like to chit-chat in there and it often leads to much funnier content than the actual post.
Anyway, that's why the lack of interaction today.
I just realized that I didn't fix my blog timestamp on Monday.
Everything on Monday through Wednesday, please deduct one hour.
**$&$^#@!@
25 spam messages--no WONDER my post got eaten. I hope the people who do this meet an horrible and untimely demise.
Y'know, I think my template is still messed up. Shouldn't there should be a bit more left margin space so that the blog text and the quote-of-the-week text align? I think it was like that before, because it sure does look odd after I had my little snafu yesterday morning. What do I need to do to get it back the way it should be? Or, at least the way I thought it was?
Something's wrong with my template. Don't know what's going on with that.
Psh. Figures, don't it?
If you've been by in the last hour or so, you probably noticed you'd gone blind or something. You knew it would happen eventually. Or not--seems it might have been a "computer" error.
Movable Type is acting strange and annoying. Not necessarily MT's fault though, given the weird setup we have.
Anyway, a bunch of blogs went blank. Rebuilding them was... iffy. I have no idea why that is; it was working; it should have worked.
I went and reset all the permissions on the MT2.6 blogs to something simpler, and rebuilt the ones that are listed below, and they all seem to be fine now. (Munuviana went blank somewhere along the way, so I rebuilt that too.)
If your blog has gone blank, either edit and save your most recent post, or go into Rebuild Site and choose Rebuild Indexes.
Maybe not to you, but it is to me. The way the comments are set up on Possumblog, I am supposed to receive an e-mail notification when someone leaves a comment. This is one of the ways that I preserve the illusion that I constantly monitor the silly thing and why I tend to chime in so quickly. But for the past three days or so (might have been longer, but I haven't noticed), I haven't been getting the notifications until late in the evening, and they come all at once.
Computers are very strange.
Well, I'm still having to deal with intermittent pop-ups due to stupid malware stuck on my work computer, but to make things worse, when I got home last night and tried to use the Internets, my browser (I.E. 4.x) window would open briefly, then shut right back down.
Stupid computer. Reba had been using it earlier, so I thought she might have clicked on something she shouldn't and messed things up. I found out later she hadn't--it had worked fine for her.
But at the time, I had no idea what it might have been. It's worked fine until now. I dumped all the cookies and cleared the temporary pages, did the disc cleanup routine, sprinkled the blood of an ocelot around the monitor, and fired up the browser again. ::blip::
Dang.
Finally after much fidgeting, I finally figured out that I could turn off the DSL line, open the browser, THEN turn on the DSL. This worked. Kinda. It would usually first go to a diagnostic screen from CenturyTel, because SOMETHING was still screwy, and after it had run through its fix routine, I could get to a few pages. Then the browser would shut itself again.
ARRRGGGHHHHHHH!!!
After trying with all my might to figure out the source of the instability, I gave up and decided it was a troupe of homunculi in the form of Ned Ludd.
And I still couldn't tell if it was something wrong with the DSL line, or something on my machine.
Stupid computer.
Well, one way to figure out if it's the browser--download something else and see if it works.
Went though my 'open browser, turn on DSL, diagnostic routine' deal and downloaded the newest version of Firefox. And hey--guess what? As soon as it had downloaded, the browser window shut itself down again. Grr.
Installed Firefox, fired it up--BING!! Works perfectly now, which tells me it was something wrong with the Internet Exploder, so I took away the IE icon and moved my new button there.
::shakes fist at Bill Gates::
Stupid COMPUTER has decided to start acting like me--not doing what it should, when it should. To make matters worse, even though we aren’t allowed to have any control whatsoever on our machinery, and even though we’re all operating with generations of browsers and applications that are at least two versions removed from the most current versions, I found out that such control doesn’t prevent malicious websites from scurrying onboard and dumping a load of malware on my hard drive.
I was trying to find a good definition of passive-aggressive yesterday, and the first site I went to was a nest of evil, stupid DeluxeCommunications garbage, and since I don’t have control of my control panel, there’s still a bit of the thing lying about and creating pop-ups whenever I go online. I guess I could tell the IT folks, but I fear getting reprimanded for trying to find out a good definition of passive-aggressive.
And there’s just the whole general buggy-ness of the system--none of it works well, and I still will get random complete shut-downs when Adobe Reader pops up, or a cloud passes overhead. And right now there’s something going on with the network and the Internet connection won’t work at all--we have those sometimes, too, so I know it’s not something my machine is causing. It’s just the way things are.
Stupid computers.
People who send comment spam are evil, and should be beaten with shovels.
--more technical difficulties late yesterday afternoon. I do apologize for this, even though it's beyond my control. It's very frustrating to have a link or something smart-alecky to say and then have the whole works shut down. Mu.nu is in the process of migrating to new servers and new software--not that I understand what that means, other than it's supposed to be more stable and less likely to be brought down by comment spammers.
The move to Minx editing software has me a bit befuddled--I barely know how to use what I've got here with MovableType, and I'm not sure if I'm going to have to go back through and reformat everything or not. I sure hope not.
IN ANY EVENT, hopefully today we won't have anything untoward happen, and the usual stream-of-consciousness "style" of blather you're used to around here will continue unabated.
Mix in a 'Grr,' too. Stupid computer is acting up again, not loading images. Which means lots of the page I'm trying to see won't load, either. Which makes it QUITE difficult to find suitable news fodder for mockery.
The recent discomfort you all suffered by not being able to access this lumpy, lukewarm gruel of pixels now has an explanation. From Pixy Misa, the chief of the land of Munu, we find out this:
I don't think it was an attack this time, though I'm checking the logs to see if I can find anything.
Twice, roughly a week apart, the Apache server on Yuri (that is, the software, not the hardware) locked up and stopped serving web pages.
There's an automated system in place that restarts Apache when this happens.
It didn't work.
Manually restarting the web server didn't work either.
I had to reboot the machine to get it back again.
Right now I don't know why this is happening. It might be some sort of attack, but I have no specific reason to think so.
Unfortunately, this time it waited until just after I went to bed to screw everything up.
Pixy Misa commented on July 18, 2006 at 10:19 PM
Well, that was fun. I got the server fixed, then the entire network went down.
Pixy Misa commented on July 19, 2006 at 02:54 AM
And transfats.
If you’re reading this, I count that as progress. Sometime earlier in the morning, Mu.nu had some kind of outage and shut down a swath of blogs, including this one. Which just figures--not that I have anything good to add to the ether, but no matter--I couldn’t do it if I WANTED to.
Dumb stupid computer things.
Anyway, as of 4 in the afternoon, it seems to have fixed itself.
Well, I have finally managed to resolve my issue with the Revolvoblog template. It took some doing to get an answer, but one finally arrived this afternoon--
Hi Terry,
Thanks for writing in. We're afraid you've fallen victim to a bug in our system which occasionally loses template data. Your posts are still safe, but unfortunately we were not able to recover your template for you. The manner in which you retrieved your (partial) template is preventing new posts from publishing. To use one of our default templates, you can click the Pick New link on the Template tab. This will let you publish your blog again while you recreate your old template. We apologize for the inconvenience and we are working on getting this problem fixed. However, it is always a good idea to save your own copy of a template if you make extensive customizations.
Sincerely,
Danish
The Blogger Team
IN any event, I have now fixed the thing as detailed above, pasted in my old links and such, copied the template and saved it to a safe place, and given Chet the E-mail Boy the key, and now all is once again right with the world.
More or less. I still have to fix the font. If I dare.
I'm not sure what was going on with Gmail yesterday, but it had to have been some interference with our firewall because after I got home from church last night, I could access it fine from my machine. And, whatever it was, it seems to have cleared up this morning--working just fine like nothing ever happened.
In OTHER matters, for some reason Revolvoblog is still down, but I have a feeling it must have been related to that sudden template disappearance. The other Blogger blogs I have rights to edit don't seem to be having the same problem, but thankfully, I have the crack Blogger debugging team at work on it right now. I expect to be fully functional again somewhere in the next 10 to 15 years.
Now it seems as though Gmail is acting up--if you've been trying to send me something, that's why I haven't answered back this morning.
Until it gets fixed, questions and pithy rejoinders and such may be sent to my Yahoo address, terryoglesby AT yahoo DOT com.
Meeting went well this morning, with only a few cases and no controversies. Right now, I am composing an EXCITING and INTERESTING post on Volvo repair, which I will grace you with shortly! (Since stupid STUPID Blogger is still broken.) I know you simply must be beside yourselves with anticipation, but I beg you to calm down!
Stupid computers.
One of the things I noticed when I got back to work last week was that one of the MIS guys had been up here messing around with the machinery--no big deal because it IS their equipment, after all--but ever since then, the thing will get bogged down and take forever to go from one webpage to another, and will sometimes quit responding, and other times will just completely shut down the whole works. Freeze, then black screen and the ::skwik:: sound when the speakers go dead.
I can't tell what's been changed, other than the fact that it doesn't work nearly as well anymore.
"Progress," I guess.
Sorry, but Nate McCord reports that it seems Munu is acting up again and comments aren't working properly.
As you know, I usually don't just stop for the weekend without bidding you all goodbye, but Friday afternoon Mu.nu seemed to have had a downage for several hours, which severely impinged upon my ability to post meaningless drivel. The boss of things on the lovely island of Niue, Pixy Misa, had this to say about the difficulties:
Yuri (one of the three servers that mu.nu runs on - and the one that hosts most of the blogs) has decided to take a little nap. I've logged a support ticket, and she will get rebooted shortly.Well, obviously it's back up and running, but I am so tired right now, as my dear late father used to say, I couldn't fart above a whisper. The garage has had some more cleaning and such, and I am once [this should have said "...once more sore and tired and dirty and..." before going on--apparently I was too tired to catch what I'd written. Ed.] dirty ready to hit the hay.
This is the second time this has happened, so I'll have to see if I can identify what's causing it.
Update: Back online now. Currently no clue as to what happened. The server was running, but not responding to requests. Log files don't show anything unusual, except that performance stats collection was delayed, which might indicate a runaway workload. Still investigating.
ANYwho, all of you have a good rest of the weekend, and I'll see you all on Monday.
Has your tongue ever gotten wrapped around your eyeteeth so you couldn't see what you were saying? Well, the same thing can sometimes happen when you're writing an e-mail or a blog entry. BUT, you can now rest easy with a new software product called Untent Chectm.
And believe it or not, it was developed by a burrowing, nocturnal ant-eating mammal.
Science is truly amazeing.
If you've been trying to leave comments here (or at other mu.nu blogs lately), you will sometimes notice this message popping up:
Due to high levels of comment spam, commenting at mu.nu has been suspended for a brief period. You will be able to comment again as soon as the flood of spam abates somewhat. Please try again in a minute or two.
We apologise for this, and believe us, we hate spammers even more than you do.
I doubt it. It's like the people who deface buildings and utility poles with signs advertising for tattoos, tax prep, and back waxing. Human nature, I guess, but it sure is aggravating.
I do have to thank the folks at mu.nu for taking down the comments when a spamalanche hits, because even more aggravating than not being able to comment is having to go in and delete spam that gets through.
Anyway.
Nothing, really.
Except for the Unnecessary Anger Generation portion of the script that the customer service reps have to read.
I'd had AOL a long time ago, and it wasn't great, but the latest go-'round with them was much more pleasant. I signed up for one of those 1070 free hour deals with a disc I got in the mail, and I have to say that the service was much better this time. Only a few unexpected times when it knocked itself offline, but overall, about as good as any other service, and they had a pretty robust popup/spam/virus blocking system. So, after the free trial, I let it go on for the next few months. Then they had a price increase from $21 (which is too high considering services such as NetZero) to $26.
26 bucks for dialup? When I found out my phone company had DSL for the same price, it seemed pretty dumb to keep paying for worse service--and the inability to use the telephone during the ultralong sessions of Googling.
After I got my new service fixed up, I called AOL customer service last night to cancel it. After the usual round of 5,000 voice prompts to make sure my information is kept secure, I was routed to the pleasant voice of a young woman in Southwest Asia. And then I went though all the same questions again.
Finally got time to say that I wanted to cancel my service, so I had to give some reasons--1) I can get DSL, and 2) DSL is just as cheap. More questions, more reading from a prepared script about how great and wonderful AOL is, more begging to stay with them, last-ditch decreases in price, the reminder that I can still access AOL over my DSL for only $9 extra per month--on and on.
Nope. Nope. Nope. Not interested. Nope. Nope. No thank you.
Until something in the script called for the girl to challenge me--"You say that price is important to you, but you do not want to save money with this plan!? Why would you say you want to save money if--"
GRR!
DO NOT CHALLENGE MY DECISION!
"Because I want to cancel my service, and I want to cancel it now, and I have tried to be as patient as I possibly can over the past ten minutes, and I am not interested in ANY additional services, nor in continuing to pay for anything from AOL, and I want my account cancelled now!"
Another five minutes of script reading.
::sigh::
Got an idea, here, AOL--don't be a butt towards me if I decide to cancel my service. My money, my decision, and I don't need you to berate me for it.
Hmph!
Stupid AOL.
...Gmail is STILL messed up, which makes me very angry.
UPDATE: It works now! For some reason, I had to go in and clear the browser cache, which is nearly impossible to do on our computers because the system administrators have hobbled anything that might let people change settings on their desktop machinery. You have to be very quick on the mouse click, because the dialogue box will only pop up for a split second unless you manage to zip down and click on the right button. Silly computers.
Sorry, but if anyone has tried to contact me this morning, my Gmail account is acting weird and I can't access it right now. If it's an emergency, you can always use the old address of terryoglesby@yahoo.com.
Well, dern. Something's wrong with Gmail at the moment, so if anyone is trying to send me stuff, I can't read it.
On the other hand, my Szechuan combo is very good; thank you for asking.
Not sure what's happening on the hap-hap-happy island of Niue, but Dave Helton was trying to post something in the comments and got back a page with a weird string of spam site stuff, and I just tried a test comment to see what was going on and got the exact same message, leading me to believe that something done blowed up real good at Munu headquarters.
I figure it's some kind of server problem. Or monkeys.
In any event, Chet is at work today, so if it's vital, he's standing by. Asleep, but standing by.
UPDATE: (five seconds later) Pixy Misa over on Munuviana says it was fixed, but I'm thinking not completely.
Seems comments aren't working right now, so for all of you snake namers out there, you'll just have to wait for a bit. UPDATE: Well, poop--as soon as I posted this, they started working again. Oh well.
Not sure quite what's going on, but I've had to delete three or four different spam comments, but they don't actually have spam links, but rather links to regular sites such as msnbc.com, fark.com, theonion.com, newsweek.com, and washingtonpost.com. I'm not sure why, other than if you don't clear out the real URLs, MT's blacklist comment cleaner will ban them from being posted in comments. I suppose this is intended to mess up people trying to leave links to news stories, but I'm not sure why that would be desireable. The IP addresses for all of them are part of the melbourneit.com domain.
Silly antipodes.
In the tropical paradise of Niue? NOT LIKELY! Anyway, this post from the exalted Pixy Misa of Munuvia says that the servers suffered damage from a freak ice storm and quit working, disabling everyone who wanted to read about my trip to Wal-Mart, and didn't think to go see if I had posted it at Revolvoblog. Which I did. As well as a warning sign of the Apocalypse.
Anyway, to add insult to insult, although you couldn't get into Possumblog (or any other mu.nu place) the SPAMMERS could! Bad spammers!
BUT, all is not lost. Sometime yesterday they put some heat tape or poured warm water on the servers to get them unfrozen, and they seem to be working again, and to make matters even better, someone's getting a new gift of servers for Festivus! Yay. Just remember, though,
"During the move, which will take a few hours, blogging and comments will be disabled, although people will still be able to read your blogs."I'll try to warn you when the changeover will occur, and will be using Revolvoblog as a backup.
ANYway.
In the one month between September 3 and October 3, my Gmail account accumulated 1414 spam e-mails.
That might explain why Chet the E-Mail Boy always seems so exhausted.
I really miss having the old-timey version of MS Picture Editor that had the posterize and pen-and-ink and watercolor and all those other effects with it. Do any of you know of a similar freeware (and I do mean FREE) program that will do all that? I downloaded AutoImager from Mystic Media last night that is very nice, but it only has a 15 day free trial, and after that you have to give them money. Blah.
I don't need a lot of power or anything like that, but it would be nice to be able to do the simpler manipulations.
Suggestions gladly accepted. Just remember the primary criteria is FREE.
Anyone ever use PhotoPlus? It looks purty. Although trying to pull 19Mb through a weak dialup connection at home might be kinda like sucking ice cream through a coffee stirrer.
IT'S BACK AND KICKING!
Despite what you might have heard, I had absolutely nothing to do with the Great Munu Splodey Mess of Two Thousand Ought 5. Not a thing.
ANYway, I have been blogging this morning over on Revolvoblog, which, for future reference, in case there's another Blowed Up Real Good Episode on Mu.nu, will be the Possumblog Backup Site. So, please, all both of you make a bookmark for it, just in case.
I don't know why Possumblog has started doing this, but some of you might be experiencing a bug where you cannot get past a certain point on the page. There's stuff on there, but you can't scroll all the way down and read the whole entry.
Again, I don't know the deal (although I suppose I could figure it out if I wanted to) but a quick way around this is to press the F11 key twice. The first time reduces the menu bar at the top down to a little sliver and makes it to where you can scroll as far as you can. The second press returns the menu bar to its normal size.
Sorry for the bother.
Since when did Photobucket have a bandwidth limit!?
I've never had any trouble at all until today. Something is amiss.
UPDATE--Hmm. 1500M of bandwidth per month. And I'm over?! Sure would be nice to have some sort of warning. Or, maybe if I would read stuff beforehand.
UPDATE 2--I really doubt they want you to go and start another account to get around the bandwidth restriction.
As you will note below, I have inserted a bit of text to prompt you to click on the permalink to leave a comment so that your information will be remembered--JIM AND SKINNYDAN. (And everyone else, for that matter.) That should make it a bit less onerous for those wishing to make comments.
One day the pop-up box will be fixed, and one day the header on the extended entry/permalink window will match the pop-up, which matches the main page.
Or not.
I have been trying my best to get some content posted AND try to work on the remembering-me portion of the comments, but our Internet connection seems to have gone on the blink and it's been nearly impossible to get anything done.
But I'm working on it.
As noted previously, if I have an extended entry, the comments will remember your data. If you post directly from the pop-up, it doesn't. Very interesting.
Or not.
I realize there haven't been any posts since this morning, but surely you've enjoyed hitting reload every five minutes and seeing something new in the arrangement of various pixels!?
Maybe not.
ANYway, after a concerted round of consternation and head-scratching, it looks just like it does right now. Unless it doesn't.
The banner was giving me the most problems, so I copied the code for the popup comment box, and got rid of the banner and description code in favor of something else that I can't remember, and finally messed around with it forever. I was having some trouble with double PossumblogPossumblog titles on the archive headers, and nearly wore out the MT servers trying to fix it before I just figured it out a minute ago.
The list of horizontal links like the old site is back for your viewing pleasure, although they are a different color just to be different (and to match the template I'm using.)
The text is still not going to go all the way across, though, because I kinda like the sidebar, and having the daily calendar of posts over there, and the search box, and the category listing, none of which I had before. And having the sidebar also allows me to have the whole list of other MuNu sites on here without making the entire top portion take over. I'll be posting the quote of the week over there as well, instead of the top, and will probably move the silly saying as well. Or not. Still figuring on that one. And I'm still trying to get it a bit narrower as well so the white space is a bit bigger.
AND, I am still in the middle of a paperstorm here! I got paying work to get done REAL QUICK, or else--or else, uhhhh. I don't know. But I need to get it done.
But, keep checking back every five minutes and see what else changes!
I'll be playing with the template some more throughout the day to try to get the top banner to look the way it does on the old site, so bear with me.
A certain professor says he prefers having the text block over on the left and the sidebar on the right. I kinda like it the other way around, but not being one to wish eye injury on my readership, may I have a show of hands in the comments about which side you prefer to see the sidebar on?
There's going to be a break in the goings on for a bit while I try to export and import my Blogger archives. This might work, or not. Please stay tuned.
UPDATE!
Yikes.
That looks hard. The good folks who let me in here said they were working on a way to transfer files that is easier, and I think I might wait to see what happens with that.
As it stands, the MT manual includes some instructions that must have been based on a much earlier version of Blogger, because some of the stuff mentioned to be changed or jiggered just doesn't exist anymore in the system.
With all of the template changes and futzing around you have to do, I was a bit nervous about how this was going to work, and then, there's the whole thing about not really understanding this thing about computers. I was saved from having to go back in and see if it worked because Blogger had a problem when it tried to republish all the templates and settings I had gone through and tried to change.
For once, I think I was glad Blogger messed up.
So, anyway, go on about your business.
...the blogroll. I suppose I should get with the times and get the Blogrolling service so these things would be in alphabetical order. But there are some things I don't really mind being disordered. Does make it a bit hard to find people, though.
Okay, the outer border is now 5 pixels, so I have a bit more width to work with for the main body, and the body is now 69% of the page. Any more, and the stuff on the side still drops down to the bottom--but there might be a fix for that. We'll see, I suppose.