The Table Dance, Plus Nazi

Around And Round The Table Around The Title
HTML code is always a weird business for me. There’s no such thing, usually, as “self-taught”, but I didn't know anyone who knew about web sites so I read the things I could find on the Internet and a couple of books from my local library and learned enough to create my Southern Exposure web site a few months ago. I turned with great relief to this blog, thinking how they do everything for you and I could just write, not plan and plot and write perplexing lines of code that were always biting me on the ass.

But you know what happens. You mess with it, just a little at a time. You get rid of that bizarre orange color behind the title. You steal a rat drawing and glue him on. You toodle and toddle, left and right, swing and sway. Then you figure out how to wrap a table around the blog title. Woo, that’s major, you think. But it’s got that weird gray-and-grayer border that you’d just love to change, but you can’t run across the right code. Somehow I’d gotten it switched from the default gray over in Southern Exposure, but I realized 2 or 3 weeks ago that I don’t know how it happened! It was a miracle! A few days ago, I ran across these commands that resolved that problem. At the beginning of the code that starts the table you talk this gibberish after the opening tag:

table bordercolorlight=”shade1” bordercolordark=”shade2”

and that’s it. Include any other code required at that point and finish the table line with a closing tag. Only put a real color name or color number in there, not shade1 or shade2!

I know that’s gobbledygook. But it’s simple compared to how slow it is to sit there and Test all the pairs of colors there are! You know, some don’t go together well. And the blogger preview, though it works well enough, Does Not work fast! So it took probably two hours just to change all the pairs of colors until I settled on those two border blues above. After all that work, back to the regular blues.

My word of advice to the rest of you? Don’t even put a table in! And if you do, don’t change the default border colors! And if you’re stupid, really stupid and stubborn, and decide to do it anyway… Well, okay, you might be smart and handle it quickly. I could help you with the code perhaps, but no one on Earth can help you find those two perfect colors. You just have to run the gamut. Or do I mean, the gauntlet? Both, apparently.

After all, if you were easy to please, gray-and-grayer would have suited you. Two or three weeks (plus two hours) ago.

Hermann Goering: "Why of course the people don't want war... It is the leaders...who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along...all you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."