Beware: this is a long and boring technical blog posting – if you’re into using wordpress for blogging and also do photo sharing on your wordpress website, you might be 5% interested in this post – otherwise, you’ll probably just think this is just another loony tunes post by yours truly, and should probably skip reading it. wink emoticon
About a year ago, I moved from using FLICKR to SmugMug as my photo sharing, photo cloud storage tool. Around the same time, I updated my personal website/blog to start pulling those same photos from SmugMug (in place of FLICKR).
This then caused something to break – the photos area of my blog mysteriously became opaque – you had to manually mouse over each photo to see the pic in its true color/contrast/etc. which I think is such a hassle. I knew (or thought) it had to do with the third party word press plug-in I was using but couldn’t figure out which setting/option was causing this to occur.
Spent some time on it, pulled out my hair a few times (now you know why my hair looks the way its been looking), and after several attempts, I gave up or got distracted by something else – lol. And, because of this, I then had to remove the menu choices/links on my blog for my SmugMug photo “galleries”, which kinda sucked – since I originally hadn’t wanted my blog readers (all two of them), to have to go to a separate website to view my photos.
So, for the past year, the Lailah photos area of my blog has been broken, and this just plain and simple greatly upset me – I know, I know – there are lots of other upsetting stuff in the world these days…what, with the recent confederate flag issue, the Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner transformation, and finally, that guy with issues over a truck driver and his use of “engine braking” (see Road Rage Caught on Camera), etc. But, this photos/blog thing was really important to me.
So, I’m not sure what caused me to look at the issue tonight, after not looking at it for the last several months (oh yeah, I was reading another person’s photography blog and he mentioned using SmugMug for his blog, etc.). Anyway, I then did some more investigation by going to the 3rd party plug-in’s support forum (which I had done previously), and lo and behold, there was a posting from (get this) 2012 inquiring about the same issue.
My problem was, the forum has 10,000 support issues/requests and I didn’t know what to search for. Tonight I figured out how to narrow the 10,000 down to 100, and I went thru the 100 posts to find the one that resolved my problem – the keyword apparently was ‘opacity’ – not a word in my usual vocabulary. The fix was a simple one line piece of CSS code. I changed that in just a few minutes, and look out: I now can see my photos again! [at least on the sample/test page, I now have to go and create some new blog pages and new menus to hold or link to the various photo galleries).
I still have a couple more blog/website issues – one having to do with something called “featured image” – which doesn’t see to work – at all. Whenever you create a “post” and want to associate a picture with it, you point the option called “featured image” to the picture you want to display, and the blog should then display it – well, it doesn’t. Yes, I researched this months ago as well – even printed off several pages of things to do/look for, but then got distracted and never followed thru with the trouble shooting of the issue, and subsequently lost the printed pages somewhere in my (3 foot tall) stack of “stuff to read later”.
So, there you have it – one problem fixed. Big sigh.
