This place has looked awful for three days now!
I know. That's what comes of reading 'The Guardian' weblog and feeling guilty.
The disaster started with a rant about 'Daring Fireball' just a day after the "paper" had praised John Gruber's blog.
I went on through to the Grauniad's favourite pundit on web design and his strictures. Though irritated by the man's superiority, I found grounds for thought at Jakob Nielsen's 'useit'.
The upshot -- given almost zero energy, nothing better to do and nowhere sensible to go in the dire state I was in for two and a half days after Thursday's deep probing of my innards -- was that I decided to render this log far more reader-friendly.
This will still happen.
The colours will change a little, the print will get bigger and the home page will be modified in such a way that it takes far less time to load for my reader on dial-up.
What I lack the skill to do is to follow good examples and offer a home page with a read-on option, of the kind that best suits news-reading software.
While I was at it, I ran revised templates through the gauntlet of the W3C.
With such success, after several hours, that each came up with a "congrats, this is valid HTML!" kind of message and looked good for style sheets too.
They even worked in all browsers apart from iCab.
Proud of myself, I upshipped them to the Radio Userland server.
Whereupon Radio crashed.
Irreparably. I could scarcely get the application up and running again long enough to see what was wrong before it quit on me without notice.
This morning, I nerved myself up for another go. Rien! Not even the weirdest cheats and fixes, checks on the Radio discussion board (when I could get there, which wasn't all the time) could keep me out of a "clean install" of the whole damned Radio app.
That, of course, was when I lost everything.
Including my marbles.
But at least I was able to go to "the canteen" and shove down my first proper meal in three days.
What the 3½ of you may -- or perhaps not -- see now is a possibly semi-busted backup. I have learned much about the inner workings of Radio, since the excellent Userland docs are more accessible at weekends than the forum.
I have also discovered how to use many hitherto unexplored parts of BBEdit Lite properly. It's such a good text and HTML editor for free that I was surprised to see no reference to it in the Bare Bones store or anywhere on the site, but can still be had via VersionTracker (on Feb 28, Rich Siegel of BB noted there that the Lite had been "discontinued", explained why, and said that "anyone currently using the software is welcome to continue doing do").
The Nigeria and Algeria pix are AWOL for now, but not gone forever.
They and one or two other goodies will be back.
Something's working, because while Radio is supposedly getting a fix right now, the NetNewsWire RSS reader successfully fetched the last 10 entries. Oh good heavens, I behold a blog!
When I pressed that button, I shut my eyes, but even the calendar seems to work again.
The new style sheet's waiting. Minus the bit that caused all the trouble. But. Not tonight.
10:25:34 PM link 
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