Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Heck with Haloscan

You may have noticed the comment section changed from working to not working and then back to working. Haloscan, the folks who had been servicing the comment section and trackback functions for my blog recently notified me, via email, that their service was being “upgraded” to a “pay fer” service and that unless I sent them some money I would lose all the comments previously entered. My Scottish ancestry prevented sending a check and so I lost the use and historical bounty of several years of comments; oh well.


Now I have the old Blogspot version to accept comments; but in so doing I have unintentionally reformatted the way my blog looks. It may be due to only one article entry; then again it might not. I will eliminate the one entry, “But we don’t own a bird bath”, see what happens and then attempt to re-post that article. Cross your fingers, toss a strangled chicken over the fence and say something in Latin; here goes.

I just noticed that the one article which I had hoped would solve the format issue is NOT the location of the template problem.  I will have to figure out a better solution.

10 comments:

David said...

So, found the "Settings... Comments" thing and fixed the issue, eh? Good on you.

David said...

BTW, I've found that a dreadlock wig and chicken bone rattle work for me...

T. F. Stern said...

David,

Actually, no. The Settings/Comment thing didn't work. I found an old copy of my template, pre-Haloscan, and inserted the Comment section lines to my present template.

That part works; however, somewhere there is a format code line which has messed up the way some posts are formatted and so it has moved the side bar down all the way to the bottom.

T. F. Stern said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
David said...

That's exceedingly strange, TF. I'd not have suggested the Settings... Comments fix had it not worked on my old blogger blogs that had Haloscan code in the templates.

Perri Nelson said...

You lost your comment history? I thought Haloscan would at least let you retrieve them before killing your account. Bleah!

Perri Nelson said...

Now, if you can work out how to make it so I don't have to use my Blogger account to post comments, I'd appreciate it.

Tigersue said...

I wish I knew more about HTML to help you with it. I have asked my sister to redo one of our blogs because I can't figure out how to get the proper codes back in once I remove the haloscan ones. Fun stuff isn't it? NOT

T. F. Stern said...

Tigersue, Same here; later, when I have time to play with codes I'll start swapping or deleting lines from older saved versions of my template and see what happens. I can live with these odd results until then.

MathewK said...

One way to figure out which post is causing the problem, goto layout, then in the blog posts section, change the number of posts displayed on the main page to 2 or 3.

That way when you refresh the main page it'll show a few posts and just step through the pages and when you find one that displays funny, it'll be one of those posts in that page.