Integrating the Derivative

I’m baaack!

My last posting was back in September of last year, right before I got really busy working for the Obama campaign.  We did very well here in Newaygo County, earning nearly 47% of the vote (as compared to about 40% in 2004).  I’ll probably post more about those experiences later on.

In other political news, I was elected Chairperson for the Newaygo County Democratic Party at our County Convention in November!  I should now direct your attention to the disclaimer over on the right.  Everything I write here on the blog represents my own personal views and opinion, not those of the Newaygo County Democratic Party.

As you can see I changed the theme on the blog.  I’ll try and keep things relatively up-to-date here!

By the way, I think I feel a Caturday coming on…

You may have noticed (or not) that my sidebar was getting placed below the posts recently.  I just noticed it today.  I tracked the problem down to some stray div statements in the HTML on the local governments post.  It’s fixed now!

Wow.

I was a little concerned that I’d eventually run up against the former 50 MB limit for uploads. The limit has just been expanded to 3 GB.

Very nice!

I’ve been fighting the WordPress WYSIWYG editor for a long time trying to save the breaks I put in between lines. Now I think I have a solution!

First, here are a few tags that don’t work: <br />, <p></p>, <p>&nbsp;</p>

If you put any of those tags into the HTML editor in WordPress it ends up not saving them in the final version.   However, if you use the <p> tag with the align attribute, it appears to save your breaks!  Use it like so:  <p align=”left”>&nbsp;</p>

It may work with the other alignment options but I haven’t tested them out.  Keep in mind that I found this in the context of trying to create a list (using just blank spaces, not the list tag) of board members that included their pictures.  This solution appears to work in my case but may not apply in other situations.  Also, the view in the WYSIWIG editor still looked funky after I put in the blankspace tags but showed up correctly formatted when I previewed or published it.

What do you think of the new theme?  I think I like it better than the old one.  The only thing that really annoys me about it is that the column width is smaller than before.  I had to adjust the image size on the Michigan gubernatorial map to make it fit into the column.

I’d like to change the header image too.  It’s set at the default image for now.  I’ll have to dig around my picture archives and see if I can find something suitable.

…and my blog stats page will look normal again.  The graph has been skewed ever since the election when my candidates and proposals posts got tons of hits.   I’ve been averaging about 20-30 hits a day since then.

I don’t think I’ll be seeing these kinds of numbers again for a while….Maybe in ‘08. Hopefully they all found my candidates and proposals threads useful!