After a lengthy brainstorming session, I made the decision to let go of my original domain name jeaology and continue to expand my home under this new one, puncprosody.
In keeping with the aim of an old blog entry in which I explained what the original domain name meant to me (now, obviously, no longer relevant), I figure I might as well do the same for this new name.
My original name and impetus for making a site was to create a space where I gave myself permission to experiment and display my work, however rough it might be. It had been pushback against an emotionally rough (or at the very least stifling) situation; an overcorrection based on someone else’s mistreatment and my own inability at the time to stand up for myself. I am thankfully at a very different place in my life now, and so I wanted to change my site’s name to reflect that. Instead of pushing back against something, the name I chose embodies the way I want my creations to feel.
Punctuation helps create the rhythm and musicality of prose — its prosody.
Truncating the word punctuation made for one hell of a good pun too.
“Hey! What does that punc over there think it’s doing?“
“Creating an excellent flow, my friend.Shaking things up, gettin’ it just right.“
At a certain point, I updated the site logo to read The Anthologist instead of Jeaology as well. That, I plan to keep for the foreseeable future, as I think it works well with the feel of PuncProsody.
Given that I have been on a semi-hiatus when it comes to The Side B Anthology podcast, I started to re-think what I wanted to make of it and decided, for starters, to switch hosts. I’d been with Podbean since the podcast’s inception, and they’ve been a great host, but at this point, switching to Acast just made more sense. It’s more cost-effective (especially in this semi-hiatus stage) and has a nice array of features to make upload and distribution of new episodes simple.
All the episodes of TSBA are still accessible through Apple Podcasts, and they have a new homepage through Acast as well. Once I edit current episodes a little bit and record some new ones, I aim to distribute the podcast on platforms like Spotify as well (the service I use most, personally).
All this being said, I have not yet finished replacing old episode links on this site yet. All episodes are ready to stream through the widget on the TSBA main page, but clicking through to individual episode pages may still result in broken links.
Since this website’s inception, I’ve been using the Orvis theme, which is intended to be used to display photography portfolios. It’s a sleek, classic theme with a navigation configuration that I like. However, since the beginning, the Orvis theme has had one major issue: while you can enable a comment submission form on your posts and pages, the theme itself (at least using a white background the way that I do) makes the comment box and submission button invisible. Luckily, you can add your own custom CSS to the theme.
I have some experience with HTML/CSS, enough to be able to modify code to a degree, so I scrutinized the code on a page with a comment submission box enabled and tried to fix the issue. The strange thing was that the comment box, any text entered, and submission button were displayed all in white, which you could see if you highlighted everything, but which appeared invisible otherwise.
Aha!, I thought.
And added CSS to make the textarea’s background and the text within it a colour other than white. I made the submission button a colour other than white too.
It worked!
Well, sort of.
At that point, I could finally see the comment text box, but as soon as I clicked inside it and started typing, it would all disappear. When I clicked outside of the box again, both the comment text box and the text itself would magically appear! What the hell?
No matter how much I scrutinized the theme’s original code, I couldn’t figure out where the issue was coming from. There was nothing that I could see that would cause the issue. Google did end up having the answer (…eventually, after a lot of failed queries).
Focus.
Even though there was nothing related to it that I could find in the CSS on the page of my site that I had been combing through, the right query finally led me to finding out how to modify an input area that has been selected (that is, which is in focus). I’ve been coding webpages casually for years, and I’d never come across that before. I am not embarrassed to admit that I threw my arms up in triumph when that finally worked.
So now anyone can see the comment box to reply, not just spammers and bots!
If anyone else is using the Orvis theme, wants to enable comments, and runs into a similar issue, add the following to the Additional CSS for your site and change the colours to whatever suits your site:
