Writing kind of a trivial post today. At least, it's trivial in the large scheme of things. It was a big deal for me, anyway. :^)
Back in January when the idea of starting Grace Notes back up was gaining momentum, there was a huge speed bump that just about shut things down before it even had a chance to start. The "cookie consent" situation. There were a log of changes to manage, new things to learn. Last time I was paying (a lot!) for hosting and using Wordpress. This time we're taking the budget express. Google Blogger is free, and you can have a BUNCH of blogs if you really want to. Google charges $12 per year for the URL domain, and $12 for Google Office.
The URL name is a compromise. It's not the original one for Grace Notes, but it is my overarching URL ever since Galaxy Quest came out. Crewman6 was the redshirt who lived, and it's always been an inspirational name for me. Google Office gives me a custom email, more storage for whatever files I use on the blog. Some other benefits I haven't looked into yet. Pretty much, this is everything I need to manage Grace Notes. WordPress was a great blogging platform, and was more versatile than Blogger. But it was a heck of a lot more expensive to maintain, and the hosting company just kept leapfrogging the rates up every year. As things stand, I pay about $156 per year for this setup. The old Grace Notes, with Word Press, hosted on a proper site... was costing nearly $500 per year by the time I pulled the plug. Blogger is far more cost-efficient for me.
At some point I'll turn Adsense on, but it's not a big goal here. Grace Notes cost much more to maintain than it ever made me last time around. If it can pay the $12 per month fee this time, I'll call it a successful hobby and enjoy it.
Now we get to today's subject. To properly manage the cookie consent requirements, I had to paste some code into the Blogger theme. I also pasted in some custom lines for a couple of features that weren't easily available on Blogger. Not really a skill of mine, but I did manage to follow a couple of guides. Afterward, the initial menus for Theme management were gone. There was a comment about some features not being available now. I took that to mean I could no longer change the advanced features of my theme, without reloading the base version, making my changes, then re-inserting whatever custom codes needed to be done manually. For a few months I looked for other theme templates off-Blogger, but didn't find any that seemed worth changing the whole blog for.
With that in mind, I've been leaving a lot of 'tidying up' undone for months. Mainly the link colors, and making a custom Banner. Woke up this morning, and it felt like today was the day to finally fix all that. Found some websites that gave pointers on changing the link colors and sat down to puzzle them out. The first one wanted me to start off on the Theme tab. As usual, the first line read "Theme Preview is currently unavailable."
If you're familiar with Blogger, at this point you've probably realized I've been mistaken this whole time. The ability to customize my theme was always there. As was the Advanced options. Maybe something changed, maybe I just read it wrong. I was clicking the down-arrow on the orange button to get the drop-down menu. Took me ages to realize I just had to click on the orange button ON THE WORD "Customize!!" in order to get to the customization options. Now that I know, fixing the link colors was very easy.
It was a bit of work to get the banner done, but at least it was legitimate work, not a figment of my own imagination. My previous keyboard was a Yamaha DG-640, and was a grayish-silver color. That worked really well against the black background of the blog screen. The Hammer 88 was more difficult. A black body on a black background doesn't stand out a lot. I played with it, even tried to use an external image for the background, but it didn't come out perfect. It will stand for now, I do like it a lot. But some day in the future, I'd like to have better lighting so the keys will be a clean white. Today's lighting was partly sunlight from a window, partly incandescent bulbs from a ceiling fan light, and the keys aren't consistently white.
It's been a learning process, and a matter of finding the right software all over the internet. I started with PixLR, used Irfanview, and tried several online tools before getting something that worked. At the moment, I'm calling it a day, and an improved banner will have to be a project for another day.
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