Archives for May 2005

The Shmata Queen, she of Walking Kleenex Fame has contacted me to ask if there is anything I can do to adjust the size of the fonts on my blog.

I appreciate her concern and understand that the blog may render strangely in Internet Explorer but it does not do so in every other browser.

More to the point I spent hours wrestling with code yesterday and finally reached a point at which I felt it looked fair enough to leave alone.

If nothing else the larger size should help her older eyes. Hee hee.

In the prior thread I wrote about being disappointed with reviewing my blog. I received some very nice feedback and am appreciative of it and instead of responding within the comments thought that I would provide some elaboration on the intial post.

Not unlike many people I am very hard on myself. I have high standards that I try to live up to and I do my best to hit the mark. Sometimes I fail miserably and sometimes I exceed expectations, I am only human.

In my life I have found that many things have come easily to me, but in varying degrees of ease. If we were to use school marks as a way of measuring this you could say that I average a B+ in life. I do well, but there is better. There is always better.

Since so many things have been relatively easy I have at times given in and taken the easier path. Sometimes that is ok but it is not a practice I want to make a habit of. I know that if I made the extra effort I could benefit from it and that it would help me in many areas. But sometimes I just seem to muddle through when I know that I if I only pressed a little harder I could improve things.

I don’t think that it is any different from most people, but I don’t want to be like most people and I don’t want to always settle and sometimes I think that I do because it is the path of least resistance.

So yesterday when I reviewed hundreds of posts it appeared to me that I had settled in a number of places when I didn’t have to and that irked me. I don’t expect every post to wow me or you. I don’t drive myself to constantly be the best but to constantly feel good about what I do. And I felt like I had let myself down here and there.

It is going to happen for one reason or another, there will be things that trip us all up, but I don’t have to accept that or make excuses for it. If I am going to strive to improve than I have to be critical of myself.

Life is about growth and I am still growing.

I spent a chunk of time today trying to figure out how to add a drop down menu to my blog. In theory I wanted to find a way to organize the best out of more than a 1000 posts as well as provide myself with an easier way to reference stories/posts for future use.

What I found was that I am far more repetitive than I had realized. The same topics continue to pop up with little to no new insight. There are no new angles, just a slightly different way of saying the same silly things.

It made me feel foolish. It made me feel disappointed in myself. I can do better. I love the interaction. I love knowing that people are reading this blog and that I am able to engage in a dialogue with people I might not ever encounter.

But ultimately this is one of my places of refuge. It is a place I come to in times of happiness and sadness. It is a place that I use to gain a better understanding of what my thoughts and feelings are about life, parenting, religion and myself.

And if I fall short of the mark it is not you who is being sold short, but me. Ultimately I am the judge and final arbiter of what is good and I haven’t produced enough quality relative to the number of posts.

I am going to try and do better because if I do not improve then this becomes a pointless exercise and a waste of time.

It appears that things are relatively settled in IE, but Firefox doesn’t look right to me. I am ready to tear my hair out. AHHHHHHHHHHHH. But I am going to figure this out, somehow.

Hi Folks,

As you can see we are in the process of making some adjustments to the Shack. A number of you have supplied some helpful hints and I am busy working on trying to fix things up so that they look nice in multiple browsers.

In Firefox things are cool but IE seems to have a problem with the layout. We are on top of it and tinkering away.

Please be patient and the ride will resume shortly.

-J

Hi folks,

I want to make some adjustment to my blog and am interested in adding drop down menus. Does anyone have the code for doing so? I have a rudimentary understanding of how to make things work so any help you can offer is appreciated.

Thanks,

Jack