#“ah yes i am an idiot - just like remington steele! 1982! pierce brosnan and stephanie zimbalist!”

[nokingsonlyfooles]

"I've identified the murderer, Miss Holt!"

I've been getting back into Remington Steele from the Internet Archive, and I'm giving it a namecheck - because it's fun and you can watch it for free! - but also because Steele's only right about the murderer... Maybe 50% of the time. Last episode I watched, he was convinced it was a ghost.

He's not a real detective, you see. He's a conman. Laura Holt keeps him around because he makes her detective agency look plausible, and he's cute. Eventually, he learns enough to get a bit better at it.

Well, nor am I a real web designer, and I've identified a problem I've been fighting most of the week. I won't keep you in suspense, it's Jetpack. Jetpack is WordPress's in-house website management software. If you build a free site with them, it's the only plugin you get! So, of course, it's horrible. This is like saying "the butler did it."

*sigh* I knew it wasn't playing well with the comment plugin I was using, but that plugin stopped releasing compatible updates and I had to get rid of it. (Thus, I have an Ask Blog now.) Jetpack periodically pops up an ad, if you've uninstalled it, and asks you to reinstall it. You need it! It's lite! It's better now! And a couple weeks back, I bit. It didn't hurt anything at the time, so I left it alone. But then, the updates. The updates with the "global colours" that made everything screwy. I remapped the colours as well as the theme would let me (I still have a few I can't get at, and some remain unmapped, because if I map them, they get flagged "invalid value.") but that wasn't the end of the errors.

I spent about two hours yesterday trying to figure a workaround for buttons, which were no longer customizable. They were using the defaults, even if they were illegible or hideous. They'd display fine in the editor and refuse to work on the front end. I thought something about WP was causing my themes to turn into default despots, because I'd tried switching themes and some problems persisted. I thought I'd have to roll with it until another update.

Nope!

I re-did my New Readers page, to account for the new Ask Blog, and I read myself warning everyone I can't code for shit. "Jetpack and I are not friends. Tech support and I are." And, much like poor Mr. Steele, I got a clue. I disabled Jetpack and made a custom button. Now they display on the front end just fine!

I have no idea if that was causing every problem. I mean, it certainly didn't screw up the colours all by itself. I can probably put some things back that I had to disable, and of course I can make buttons again. But I've wasted a lot of time bashing my head on the site and I want to finish the illustrations. I'll get back to it over the next few weeks, and I'll try to keep my tinkering to the small hours (PDT). It's a bit of a mess, but you should be able to find and read the next instalment on next Tuesday.

...Unless I'm wrong about the ghost, Miss Holt, but I don't think I am. Just like The Uninvited! 1944! Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey!