New Jersey Scuba Diving

In a WordPress site like this, the look and feel are determined by the 'theme'. Working on the theme seems to be a never-ending task. First, I keep thinking of new features, and almost everything is baked into the theme, rather than in a stand-alone 'plugin'. When a feature is built into the theme, it can't be accidentally disabled.

But what has been giving me the most trouble lately is that WordPress has tons of built-in CSS, and most of it is crap. I keep having to root it out and then figure out how to over-ride it without breaking something else. This is especially troublesome with Gutenberg, which was definitely styled by monkeys.

WordPress contains so much excess unnecessary CSS code. For example, some idiot discovered the 'max-width' property, and slathered it all over everything, whether it makes any sense or not. Most of the 'max-width' specifications make no sense at all. And 'max-width' is far from the only thing that is over-specified and all screwed up.

I finally decided to just nuke all the built-in CSS and start over clean, both the front and the back end. The result of that is that I am continually finding things that I need to fix, but eventually, I will find them all. I only want WordPress to handle the database, I don't want it to handle the presentation.

Your typical computer programmer ( including me ) is absolutely certain they are creating the Taj Mahal, and everything they do is perfect. All but one of them are wrong. Then again, maybe the guy at the top of this page is me.

In other news, I added captcha to the comment forms, and the spam level has dropped to zero. It's gotten virtually lonely here at njscuba now. I used to enjoy deleting that stuff.

My stupid Dell laptop keeps shedding keys. They are easy enough to replace, at ten bucks a pop. How much would the whole keyboard cost? I don't want to do that math. Right now the 's' is held on by Scotch tape, and it's a little wonky, so any mis-spelings are not my fault. My old Mac never lost a single key.