Category Archives: Technology and Society

Administrative, Business, Technology and Society

My Site Improvements

22 Comments

For those curious about the differences between the out-of-the-box TwentyFourteen theme, and my child theme, I’ve done the following:

  • Changed header and sidebar backgrounds from black to dark gray.
  • Changed all instances of all caps to capitalized first letter.
  • Switched from the sans serif typeface “Lato” to Georgia.
  • Moved meta data from top to bottom of post.
  • Added time stamp (without seconds) to the post date, and the word “by” in front of post author.
  • Increased size of blog title.

Most of these involved style sheet changes, which will be preserved if I have to do a theme update, but a couple (adding time stamp and moving metadata) necessitated changes to the template and tag files in the parent theme. But they’re minor, and can be redone if needed.

One thing I’d still like to do, but have been unable to so far, is to change the color of the blog title from white to the same green as the search box. Not sure why a color change in the CSS won’t do it. I can change font size, but not color.

Administrative, Mathematics, Technology and Society

WordPress Problems

6 Comments

So I’m slowly beating the site into submission, but running into a few issues. First, I’m using a child theme of TwentyFourteen, in order to avoid making changes to the main templates. The way that works is that I add changes to the child style sheet, which then supercede the parent. But there are some things that can’t be fixed with the style sheet. For instance, in order to move things around in the post, I have to actually change the PHP code in the templates, in the parent. Another problem I’m having is that, in theory, a new function file in the child will override a function of the same name in WordPress. I want to display the time along with the date on the post, which is generated by a function called “twentyfourteen_posted_on” (the original can be found here). It retrieves the date, but not the time. In order to get it to do so, I’d have to modify it. But when I copy that into my child theme directory, and make changes, nothing happens. Anyone have any idea what the problem is, or how to troubleshoot?

[Update a while later]

OK, I think I figured out the problem. Apparently you can only override functions that are in the function.php file, in the main template directory. This is a tag, buried in the “inc” directory. So I have to edit it in there. Which means that I’ll lose the changes if I have to update the template. But it’s not a huge deal.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Technology and Society

The Email Plot Thickens

17 Comments

This is sort of an amazing exchange.

Here’s the thing. She didn’t just use a non-government email address, like Gmail or Yahoo, or her ISP. She set up her own domain and server (though the server may be shared, that’s still unclear to me). That means that she has total control over what data is preserved, and what can be destroyed. Now, in theory, people received her emails, and people sent her emails, so multiple copies exist, even if she purges the server. But if Huma had an address on the same domain, then her emails could be wiped as well. And there’s no explanation of why she did this. But it sure as hell looks like a way to avoid a FOIA, or subpoena. Which is classic Clinton.