I'm Gonna Wash that Grey Right Out of My Blog!

So, you heard me whining the other day about those "little grey spots" that started to appear on my blog (but only if you were looking on a Mac) about two weeks ago. My pal Chewy couldn't see it on his end, and thus was unable to assist me. I contacted Blogger through their Help Forum, but naturally didn't hear back on this, though I never really expected anyone to do so. And as I said before, I signed up for email responses to my inquiry, which enabled me to happily (grrr...) receive a daily email, in which dozens of new and old Blogger problems were made even more confusing by the general public's inability to construct even a halfway intelligent missive. (Just because you don't have to write letters anymore doesn't mean that you shouldn't be clear when asking for help...) And, naturally, not a single response on any of these emails to my problem with the little grey spots.

In receiving the latest version of the Million Problems on Blogger email, and upon not seeing, yet again, a solution to my misery, I decided to check out my original query in case I had missed something along the way. Assuredly, there was no reply logged there, so I did a search for the word "grey." Instantly, tens of similar inquiries to mine popped up, all of them wailing about these little grey spots appearing on their Blogger pages. The one logged just before mine, from Pop Guru on March 29, detailed nearly the same sad story of which I had made great and public despairing, and checking out his blog, there was indeed a box sitting right on top of his opening post. But then, checking the "grey" search page again, the message just below Pop Guru's was from some kind soul responding to yet another grey-embattled blogger.

They supplied a link to an earlier thread detailing how to fix the problem: reduce the number of posts on one's homepage. So simple. Myself, I had the Pylon set to only 30 days, which sometimes could mean about 20 posts or so, and sometimes only a dozen. But I went into my settings page and knocked it down from 30 days to 15 posts.

In the immortal words of Mumford the Magician: ALA PEANUT BUTTER SANDWICHES!! POOF!

The spots are gone!

Fearing that Pop Guru would go unanswered (after all, his blog appeared to still have the problem for at least three months), I replied to him with the same thread in order to keep this thing moving along. It's sad Blogger doesn't have a clearer way of alerting its users to these various problems. It would seem to me that with proper organization and design, a way could be found to make these things less vexing for everyone, including Blogger. Certainly, they don't have time to answer everyone personally, but man, is it a pain in the ass when something weird happens out of the blue (for a long time I had about a 100 posts on my homepage for three years, and never had this little grey spot problem; I knocked it down to 30 days only about six months ago).

But, Blogger is absolutely free. So, what do you want for nothing? R-r-r-r-r-rubber Biscuit?

There's A Little Gray Spot On My Blog Today...

...It's the same old thing as, well, the past week or so...

Somewhere, somehow, a large rectangle of grayness has splashed down on the Cinema 4 Pylon in the past ten days. If you are reading this on a PC, you probably won't see it. I have checked on about a half dozen computers at work, and it never shows up. But if you are looking on a Mac -- and I have checked on three different ones in this time, and it shows up on all of them -- then it's a different story. Since a large proportion of my personal friends and family use Macs, I am hoping that some of you out there can tell me what the hell is going on here.

If you glide down the Pylon homepage about three or four posts, you will encounter the aforementioned blot of gray, superimposed basically over about a paragraph or two of whatever post it is splotched over at that time. As I add new posts, the position of the blot on the blog changes, but since I didn't post for a couple of days over the weekend, it stayed fixed over one post in particular, for a good while. (Luckily, it only occurs on the homepage. If you click on the title of a post, it will not show up -- so far -- on the individual posting pages.) At first, I thought something had merely happened to the code in that post, so I grabbed the text and deleted the post. Once the post was gone though, the blot just jumped to the next higher post, meaning that the opening paragraph of my latest Spout review was getting trounced upon. I reposted the DVR post, and the blot moved back to its original position. At least I knew it wasn't the fault of any post, but now the question was: where the hell is this coming from?

A look at my layout HTML betrayed nothing to me, but then, I am not fully immersed in HTML-speak. And it definitely didn't show up as a result of my playing around with the layout, because except for tweaking the font size every now and then, I have not touched the layout for quite some time. Certainly, I have learned a lot about it in the past two years since I started working with Dreamweaver and even here on Blogger, but I am not fully confident that I can just remove something willy-nilly on the Pylon template and not screw up three years of diligent posting. I will probably have Raw Meat take a crack at it here in the coming week, if he is willing, but for now, after looking the template over for the umpteenth time, I have no answers.

And especially no answers from Blogger itself. I went to their immensely cluttered help area, and left a message on their Something Is Broken page, relating my frustration with this mass of gray blankness -- which grows ever larger in my mind every time I think about it, evolving slowly from a simple blot to a veritable blob in its destructive capability. To be able to leave this message, though, I had to subscribe to their email updates to the page. Couldn't they just send me an email automatically when some faceless tech-head finally responds to my query? Because now I have gotten four straight days of emails with nothing relating to my problems whatsoever, just endless answers to questions for which I care not a single iota. Assuredly, I am not holding my breath waiting for a resolution from this angle.

So, if one of my pals out there might have some advice, please toss it my way. It's not a major concern, but I have gotten a couple of emails asking me why I have a big gray rectangle hovering about the place. It would be nice to get this fixed up once and for all.

And I haven't even started on the weird shit that has happened on the Cinema 4: Cel Bloc...

[A footnote: Once I put this post up initially today, another gray spot showed up -- right smackdab in the middle of the post about this very problem. What perfect effing timing! Smiles, everyone...]