theblogbitme

Tonight’s internet surfing led to a few minor changes here at The Blog Bit Me. It all started when I followed a link to the This American Life page on Showtime. I am a big fan of the radio broadcast of This American Life and have joined the ranks of the weekly listeners who tune into the program. I am very intrigued by this new version of the show for television. Recently, I listened to a podcast of Terry Gross interviewing Ira Glass on Fresh Air, another favorite NPR program, about the new television series of This American Life. It was a thoughtful and clever interview with Ira sharing how certain story bits from the radio program would not translate to the television broadcast and vice versa. It is fascinating to think about taking the exact same story and producing it in two mediums - for a purely audio audience and then for a visual and audio audience. Even though I do not have a television, I will find a way to see at least one of the episodes of This American Life on television.

And….because I am such a big fan of This American Life, I found the blogger badge on the promotional page within Showtime and thought, hey, well, that’s an idea. But, how to implement? My resident expert was not available for consultation, so I bravely went where I had only rarely been before - the internal pages of code within Wordpress. Much to my surprise I found where to insert the code and remembered how to center the image so that it fit under my calendar plugin.

Then my eyes went to the calendar plugin itself. The rendering of the plugin had bothered me for a long time, so I did go to my resident expert for some assistance. What I found out was by finding the ID for my calendar, I could change the font size and width of the columns within the calendar quite easily without messing with the stylesheet for the rest of the blog. It changed my life. I understand how using IDs in your code can also be beneficial for a small segment of the bigger project more than I did before as well. Take a look at the before and after of the calendar below.

While it still is not “perfect”, it is a big improvement. I get a lot of pleasure from these little steps forward and it gives me more confidence to experiment more with my Wordpress code instead of relying on the templates provided. I look forward to more learning and experimenting! And I look forward to checking out This American Life. I hope you do too - let me know what you think of the new show.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 16th, 2007 at 10:54 pm and is filed under Blogging 101, NPR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.