Cosima Underwater

Thank you all so much for your wonderful emails! That you took the time to write them means so much to me. I am in bed with the flu this morning, fever, joint pain, and a murderous headache. My son caught it yesterday and now the whole family is down and out. To open my email box this morning and finding all these wonderful messages was the best medicine.

My comment function continues to be on strike. I think it might be a server problem here in Asia. Yesterday, some of your blogs wouldn’t load for me as well. I sure hope this will be over soon.

I wish you all a great weekend!

I had hoped that my beta blogger troubles were a thing of the past, but several commentators have told me that it is very hard/impossible to leave comments on my blog (Thank you for telling me!). I suspect that it has something to do with my blog using beta blogger, and not recognizing old-version commentators as registered.

I have therefore switched on the anonymous comment feature, so that anyone who wants to is able to comment. Please don’t forget to also put your screen name into your comment, so that I know who has visited.

…And to the person from Nepal, who had left sixty spam messages the last time I had turned on the anonymous comment feature: Please have mercy… it’s Christmas… I don’t want to spend hours deleting spam messages again!

Woohoo! I finally ditched Minima Blue and clad Cosima Underwater in a template of her own. The header uses a stylized wave pattern from a book on Japanese garden design, which I scanned, color-tweaked, and added the title to. Lecram altered the edge of the header, fitting it in with the background images (Thank You!). The turquoise and light-blue background images are from a template designed by www.isnaini.com, an Indonesian site with lots of beautiful blogger templates.

I then took a crash course in changing the xml-code of beta blogger templates at Beta Blogger for Dummies and Beautiful Beta. Reading these blogs gave me an idea about the overall structure of beta blogger templates and how to change them to make a unique template of my own. I was surprised, how easy it is.

Please tell me, if the template doesn’t load correctly for you. I will then try to make changes.

Because I ranted so much about the initial shortcomings of beta blogger, I thought it only fair to inform you that two of the bigger problems have been eliminated. As of this week, it’s possible to leave signed comments on older version blogs (yeah!), and I have regained access to my raw html template. So I have no excuses anymore to keep my unimaginative generic template. Ideas anyone?

I have found a simple way around this annoying comment problem for people who were so stupid to convert to beta blogger too early (like me). It came to me after two glasses of red wine. What does that say?

Just set up a new blog, using the old blogger version!

Lime, Lecram, and Cosima were having a blast with Lecram’s chat toy a while ago, and decided to continue the legend and do another Sarong HNT. I would be so thrilled, if even more Sarong wearers would join us next Thursday to celebrate this versatile garment from Asia. I haven’t worn mine in quite a while, and am already thinking about how to tie or perhaps just drape it around me. All suggestions are welcome :).

On another note, I would like to apologize to people who commented on my HNT yesterday, but didn’t receive a comment from me in return. It was not because I didn’t want to or didn’t try, but because I couldn’t. As described in this previous rant, blogger beta doesn’t let me sign in on old version blogs, and if you have turned the anonymous/other feature off, I am not able to comment on your blog. However, I have visited you all: babes and boys you look fabulous!

Every new week brings nastier surprises. I just discovered, that I can’t login to leave comments on old version blogs. This means, that I can only comment as anonymous or not at all (if that feature is turned off).

Could you please all convert quickly to blogger beta… please? Although, I sort of understand, if you find that too risky…

I have tried to post comments on several blogs today, but couldn’t. I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that I have switched to blogger beta, while the blogs I have tried to comment on have not. Haloscan commenting btw works fine for me. Sigh… I just hope they are working on this fast.

I have learnt my lesson. When the next upgrade comes along, I will be the last to convert.

I switched my blog to the new blogger in beta today. So far, I have come across only minor problems. One was that my hit counter code got lost, and needed to be reinstalled. The second, that I haven’t yet figured out how to put a recent comments feature in my sidebar, which I had before.

I am also worried, that those of you who don’t have a google account yet, might not be able to comment anymore. I have disabled the anonymous comment feature, because it had been used for spam before. Please send me an email if you have problems.

tags: blogger, beta