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Do you hate the new layout for the site that I hastily threw together right before I got married? Of course you do: all right-thinking people do. Well, I think I’ve managed to come up with an alternative, one will improve on just about everything. So if things look wacky for the next little while, it’s because I’m fine-tuning it. Feel free to post any comments on how great it is, or problems you have with it, on this post.

Update: OK, so that seems to have gone relatively smoothly. I’m sure there are quirks, though, so this is the place to gripe about ’em.

Update II: OK, I’ve managed to fix a lot of problems, but I’ve still got one that is held over from the previous layout — its been driving me nuts since I switched to WordPress 1.5. I am posting this as a plea for help from l33t CSS hax0rs. Basically, on my old WordPress 1.2 layout, images could be as wide as they wanted: if they were wider than the main column, they just cheerfully extruded over the right margin. But in both the previous template and this one, comics that are wider than the main column just get pushed down below the nav bar. I have been reducing the size of the comics somewhat to try to minimize the number of people this happens to, but my ideal would be to go back to the way things were, since I’m never going to keep the comics a reasonable size and accommodate all users. (You’d be surprised how many of my visitors have 800 by 600 screens.) But I don’t have a clue how to even begin figuring what the differences in the layouts were that caused this change. A clue would be appreciated!

Update III: Electric Boogalee: More tweaking imminent. Things may look funky in the near future.

Update IV: The new batch: OK, some of the issues, like the grey stripe and the post numbers vs. sidebar issue, should now be fixed. Still can’t figure out why the big comics don’t like the sidebar though. Please help, helpful people!

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I’ve been remiss in thanking our very own Islamorada Girl (who sent it) and our very own Beasley (who appraised it) for a fab wedding gift I received a few days ago: the Sunday comics section from the Baltimore American on April 26, 1942. My reactions?

• “Wow, every comic got, like, half a page each!”
• “Wow, everybody’s in the army!”
• “Wow, the Phantom sure used to be a lot more racist!”

Fortunately, except for the kids being younger, Blondie hasn’t changed much:

There’s a breast-feeding joke here somewhere, but I’m too classy to really go for it.

I’m taking a quick trip back to see the family in Buffalo this weekend. I’d say that it would interrupt the flow of comics, but that flow got interrupted quite nicely this week without any trips, now, didn’t it? So let’s just say that I’m going to take a pass on Saturday and Sunday’s comics, unless something really wacky happens, like more hand-jiving.

Stuff to entertain and/or distract you while I’m gone:

• Dub Not Dubya’s Gil Thorp-Mallard Fillmore mashup
• A deeply weird reimagining of Rex Morgan, M.D.

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Say, is there anyone out there who’s skilled in setting up WordPress and interpreting arcane SQL error messages and who’s been thinking, “I love that gosh darn Comics Curmudgeon — what can I do to make his life easier?” Well, here’s your chance. I’ve made a couple stabs at installing the SpamKarma plug-in, which everyone just raves and raves about as a killer of loathsome comment spam (I’ve had a bunch the last few days that featured the word “torture” a lot, so that’s another word that will get your comment put into a queue — sorry about that). But every time I activate it, posting a comment causes the blog to barf out a truly impressive SQL error message of some kind. If anyone would like to help me interpret said error message and possibly get SpamKarma working, e-mail me, please.

For those of you for whom the previous paragraph read like “Blah, blah, blah, blah, boring, stupid computer crap,” I apologize. Here, why not enjoy this image from yesterday’s post?

Ha, ha! Jeff has hairy arms!

Update: Upon further reflection I think I need a WordPress guru. WordPress in theory is supposed to hide all interactions with the SQL database from morons like myself. I can look at the error message and get the gist of what’s going on — there are some tables that WordPress and/or SpamKarma expect to find that they’re not finding, or that they’ve found and the permissions are wrong — but I have no idea why they haven’t been created and/or have the wrong permissions, and I’m really pretty sure that I shouldn’t be mucking around in the database directly, but rather fixing WordPress’s interaction with it (if possible). If you do know a WordPress guru, though, be sure to point them my way.

Yeah, apologies for the further dorkery. Look, the freaky Heat-Miser-hair dude from Gil Thorp has furry arms too!

(Thanks for Kevin Spencer for the cuttin’ ‘n’ pastin’.)