VeronicaRose

Well this person acted very surprised when I told them that I was not using Times New Roman and insisted that it wasn’t because of them, so maybe I should go validate my css right away. It was fine on my computer too, so I don’t know what the problem is, but apparently it’s not happening for very many people.

In fact, I asked for feedback on this forum a couple of days ago, got about 70 hits coming from that thread, and no one suggested that the font was strange. I’d even asked if the font was readable, so they should have been paying attention to it.

This is starting to make me kind of suspicious actually.

Yeah, I put the x’s there because I read (on the website of the author of my theme – https://www.huddletogether.com) that if you’re not sure about making a change permanently you can x it out. Maybe I should try the comment thing you mentioned next time.

And you’re absolutely right – I do need to validate my css. I hadn’t thought about that.

Great tips.

Okay, that is very interesting Otto42. Maybe I am wrong about trackback. I also just got the idea that it must depend a lot on what type of blog you are running. Mine is very personal, but yours seems to really offer something to the public and you’d probably want to know how that was working out. So maybe for some people it is a really good thing.

And for some of us, maybe a bit unnecesary?

From the amount of complaints I was reading when I browse blogs I just assumed that spamware wasn’t working or something. I don’t know why someone would complain about a problem without having tried to fix it. But I will definetly think about what you said if I start getting spam. And for now I won’t delete my trackback.

Thank you so much!

I have implemented your suggestions.

I thought the question was different. Did you mean how do I disable trackback or how do I stop spam? The wording is a bit unclear. If you meant how do I “Disable trackback comments,” as the title suggests than go to Options in wordpress. From there go to Discussion, and then unclick the box that says “Allow link notifications from other Weblogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)”

x1984x deleted the trackback.php file when the spambots still kept getting through.

Thanks for the tip x1984x

Spam seems to be a hot issue and I’ve heard tons of complaints about the trackback feature letting it in. I’m sure that there are plenty of first time blog users who who haven’t thought much about the trackback feature, so it you’re worried about spam here is my two cents regarding whether or not trackback is necessary:

Unless you plan on writing lots of articles about other people’s articles and then sending them trackbacks in the hope of netting traffic it just seems kind of useless. And frankly I don’t really care too much if somebody wants to say something about me on their blog so I don’t need to receive them.

I don’t like the trackback function anyway since (in my own personal opinion, so don’t get mad) there’s a bit of a desperate quality about telling someone “Hey look at me. I wrote about you, or the same thing as you, on my blog. I really want you to come and look at it.” If it was important I’d notice the traffic coming in on my referral logs. And if my visitors care so much about the topic they can google it and get good quality results about it. Who knows what jerk is going to write some trash and then trackback to you.

And sometimes when I check other people’s trackbacks it’s annoying because another person just used something you said and commented on it in a useless and unoriginal way to get attention. So it seems to encourage spambots and also spamhumans. The more popular you are personally, the more I imagine that this would be a problem. Why can’t the person just leave a normal comment saying what they want to say like everyone else (even including a link if they must). Sending a trackback seems to be a selfish attention getting thing to do if you ask me.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I suggest deleting trackback if it’s becoming a problem – unless someone can convince me otherwise.

I have a draft email where I stick stuff I’ve deleted from my blog in case I ever change my mind and want to go get those things and put them back. You could make a file like that anywhere and put notes to yourself about where you got the things from.

P.S. Anyone who uses trackback please don’t hate me. Just tell me why you like it and maybe I’ll change my mind.

Did you fix your problem yet?

* If I’m not mistaken I think that it is actually “&raquo” that needs to be removed.

I found this symbol on the single.php and index.php of my template so I didn’t realise that both of them needed to be edited at first.

It seems that a lot of people are still coming to my site from this post so I want to say that, I just put the finishing touches on it a few minutes ago.

1) I’ve changed the links in the body to underline when hovered over.

2) I’ve sobered up the color scheme from a pinkish/purple background to a more burgandy colored one – which I think makes it look a bit less ‘young.’ I was afraid to do this before because I thought the colors would be too harsh, or jarring. But actually I like it a lot better.

Rather than increase the font size, since most people thought it was okay, I’ve increased the line height by .1em (from 1.5 to 1.6 to be specific), which has helped legibility.

I know some people really liked it the old way, and I did too actually. I just feel that this version is a bit more “Me” and more closely matches the feel of my old site. So I’ve addressed most of the major issues now, but I’m still open to critique, of course.

Thanks for the suggestion. I’d also been thinking that an underline on the links in the body might be nice (the sidebars have the highlighting and I think they’re fine).

Increasing the size didn’t actually make the links that much easier to see and increasing the font weight made things look garishly out of proportion. I think an underline when hovering would be a good solution. It wouldn’t really change the look at all but would help people see what’s what.

And thank you also for the positive feedback. It’s very reassuring.

I’m not actually going to change anything for a few hours, and maybe not until tomorrow (it’s late at night where I live). I want to give people a chance to criticize the site and voice opposing views, sort of like what you just did. I’m thinking outloud right now but if I get opposition that makes sense I can change my mind very easily – I’m not too stubborn.

Thank you so much for your compliments. I’m glad you liked it.

Wow! That’s great.

With my old site it was always a mystery to me and even though I eventually discovered several problems when I used my friend’s computer, no one had ever said anything to me about them.

As soon as I get some money I’m going to buy my own computer and then I’m going to download Firefox because so many people use it.

Bad different, or something that doesn’t matter too much?

I know web designers are supposed to download different browsers and test these things but I don’t have tons of resources and this isn’t my computer. I live in Delhi and we don’t even have electricity all day.

Okay, good. It’s probably just me because I actually have terrible eyesight.

So text is fine, links are not…

Okay, so other people agree about the links. The colors and fonts are the same from my old site but the size is smaller and the weight is lighter. This theme had a very small text size in my opinion and I already made it a bit bigger, but I’m wondering if anyone else has to strain to read it. You can always adjust it, though, because I used percentages. If nothing else, I will at least change the links.

Thank you for the feedback.

My problem was resolved by physically resizing the image.