Sexuality in Art – Blog Changes & Considerations, a New IE 7 Feature I Enjoy, & a Possible Issue for WordPress Admins

If you are a regular reader, you’ll notice I changed blog templates yesterday.  The reasons for this include the following:

1)  IE 6 users were seeing the entire pictures in full format.  However, IE 7 users, receivng the same WordPress template, were receiving partial images, truncated to show only the left side.  Art and this blog are about aesthetics, so I have chosen a template that does not downsize pictures “to fit” nor truncate them to stay within the margins (it’s poetically consistent I would choose a template that would allow for larger, more beautiful pictures that can bleed past the normal boundaries).

2)  I could not find another WordPress pre-fab “2-column” template that did not either chop off or downsize the pictures.  I wish WordPress had a 2-column template like “Light 1.0″ that allowed you to change from a white to a dark background (which of course would change all the font colors to compensate for the needed contrast).

3)  I’ve added the Visual Thumbnail Index a new section: “E-L”.  An FYI for other WordPress blog admins, the pages in the ‘contempt’ template list left to right in alphabetical order (I could not get the ‘page order’ function to override the alphabetical ordering).  So you may have to make creative page names to list them in your preferred order.

4)  For new IE 7 users: IE 7 has a lovely function that allows you to create multiple “Home” pages.  So each time you start Internet Explorer, it could automatically load for you in different tabs all-at-one-time-without-you-having-to-do-anything (for example):

a) Your favorite portal (Yahoo! or Google or whatever)
b) Your internet based email inbox. (super-cool)
c) Your blog admin page (for fellow blog admins)
d) Your favorite blog & news pages (like your blog’s front page, your best friend’s blog page, SIA’s blog page (wink-wink), your favorite sports news page, your del.icio.us page, your favorite . . .).

So now you can open up 2 or more “Home” tabs without having to individually load them from your favorites.  I think that’s delightful.  It really tailors bringing up the tabs for your favorite web sources.  And if you have a slower connection, this can be a time saver, loading content in the background while you do other things.

One caution about IE 7 and WordPress ‘Sidebar Widgets’:  I could not get the sidebar widget to move widgets from active to inactive, or vice versa.  I believe Java and MS are not as integrated in IE 7, but I don’t know if that is the IE 7 functionality that the WordPress ‘Sidebar Widget’ feature is working off of.

Work-around solution – I used my Mozilla Firefox to edit the sidebar widgets after I converted to IE 7.

Another side note:  I uninstalled IE 7 and reverted back to IE 6.0, because the page load times with 7 were visibly slower.  Luckily, the reversion backward went smoothly.

As always, if anyone has any other solutions, work-arounds, or corrections to my possibly incorrect causal inferences, please comment.

- – - -

Most Recent Artworks   All the Artists’ Artworks Index   my43things