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| Slow Progress (Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash) |
As I wait for the latest version of Microsoft Office to download onto this newer PC, I thought I'd update readers on how the blog is progressing. I'm making progress. Slow Progress is still progress.
The Template
I'm not all together happy with the template, but most of my dissatisfaction is directed at a modification I chose to to make to the theme. I decided I wanted the hotpage widget to be a category widget. I would use a redirect trick to make a menu post and then redirect the menu post to the label page. In this manner, I would have a large graphic menu. The idea being that one could quickly get to "tools" or "journal" by clicking on the large graphic elements. This worked well but for one problem. The menu posts by themselves were showing up as posts because they are places in Blogger where the posts can be sorted in reverse chronological order.
Excluding a label from the home-page
In WordPress, the need to exclude a label would be handled handily by some plug-in. In Wordpress, I would install plug-ins and remove them until I found one that worked as I thought it should. This was a tedious process, and by the time I had a constructed a website that worked as I wanted I was often running 25+ plugins. These plugins would in turn need updating. The process would create a job for someone. I had things to write. I had content to create. Playing with add-ins was not helping me achieve my goals.
Reliving a past life
To accomplish what I wanted would require the modification of the Blogger equivalent of the "The Loop", a chunk of code that Wordpress loops through to display the content. A few Google searches later I found the Blogger equivalent and a couple of suggestions how I could exclude the "menu" label. The best solution appeared to be to call the menu label "Zmenu" so that it would appear last in the list of labels and then to skip it. All is someone working. However, I'm reliving a past life in Wordpress hell, I'm now in Blogger hell.
Pages are a problem
My loop modification has affected the ability of pages to display. When I removed my coding modification, the pages reappeared. I only have one static page at present, and so I'll continue with this until I have found a solution. It is a persistent annoyance.
