Example of Navigation Bar Problem

This is a demonstration of how WordPress.com handles footnotes created with  href and id tags. Go ahead and click on the footnote (the little 1) at the end of this sentence.^[1] Did you click on the 1 and then click on the caret (^) below to get back here? If so, and you were logged into WordPress and displaying the navigation bar, you didn’t see the start of this sentence until you scrolled up.

There are several possible ways to address this problem. I’ll list them in order of preference:

1. WordPress.com could fix their interface so it behaves properly.
2. Someone can explain what I’m doing wrong and how to put in HTML that does what I want. Currently, I’m using <a id=”reff1″ href=”#f1″>^[1]</a> to take people to the footnote, and <a id=”f1″ href=”#reff1″>^</a> to bring them back. Maybe that’s not the right way to do it?
3. Put the reference tags two lines above the place I want it to reference. Then, when people click on the tag, those two lines will be obscured by the navigation bar and the first line they see is the one I really was directing them to. Unless they’re not logged into WordPress. In that case, they’ll see a couple of random lines before getting to the text I’m referencing. Definitely an unsatisfactory kludge.
4. Include a disclaimer in footnoted or otherwise href-tagged posts that you’ll need to scroll up two lines to see any references if you’re logged into WordPress.
5. Stop using footnotes and href-tags.
6. Port my blog to another service.

Is there any chance that option 1, option 2, or a mysterious unnamed option will be available and will solve this problem?

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

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NOTES

1.^ The answer is “not well”. At least not in Firefox 12.0, Chrome, or Internet Explorer 8.

2. If  you clicked on footnote 1 and can’t see it, that’s because WordPress is hiding footnote 1 under the Navigation Bar. If you scroll up, you’ll see it. So the only way to get these internal href tags to work properly is to log out of WordPress. Go ahead and scroll up, if you haven’t yet, to see footnote 1. Click on the caret next to the 1. (Looks like this: ^).

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

SOWPODS vs TWL

As Scrabble mavens know, players outside the US, Canada, and apparently Thailand, get to use a much longer word list. We North Americans (and Thais) are stuck with TWL, which stands for Tournament Word List. The rest of the English-speaking world gets to use SOWPODS.

SOWPODS is a combination of OSPD (Official Scrabble Players’ Dictionary) and OSW (Official Scrabble Words). Once upon a time, North America used OSPD and the UK et al used OSW. Then the UK decided to combine the lists and declare all those words  fair game. Since the resulting combination of titles–OSPDOSW or OSWOSPD–is unpronounceable, the anagram SOWPODS is used.

I don’t know why North America (and Thailand) have chosen not to use the expanded list. It seems odd. Britain is being broad-minded and allowing that American English is acceptable. Americans are insisting that only our form of English is proper.  Isn’t it usually the other way around?

In any event, the result is that British, Australian, and Kiwi Scrabble players have fully 89,060 more words to play with. WordPress won’t allow me to load such a long list in a single post. Nor will they allow me to upload a text file. (Has to be a Word DOC, which would be unwieldy. What’s up with that?) So here are some links to relevant text files. Click on the DOWNLOAD link to save the file. Or click on the lefthand link to view the words in Dropbox.

Words in SOWPODS that aren’t in TWL06 – (DOWNLOAD)

Words in SOWPODS that aren’t in TWL06 – Grouped by Length – (DOWNLOAD)

SOWPODS – (DOWNLOAD)

SOWPODS – Grouped by Length – (DOWNLOAD)

TWL06 – (DOWNLOAD)

TWL06 – Grouped by length – (DOWNLOAD)

SUPERMARTIAN

This is a comic strip done by a friend of mine. It says copyright 2000, but I think the original creation date was in 1990. He did several dozen of them back then but never found a newspaper or syndicate that wanted to run it.

The premise of the strip is that the title character is a Martian who is stuck on earth and fancies himself a superhero. Just for the record, my friend came up with the idea in high school in the 70s, long before the debut of ALF.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

How do Internet comic strip artists make money off their creations anyway? I wonder if he’d want to try that.

Evil Killer Zombie Bug

Here is the bug I was talking about.

Here’s another picture that was taken much closer up. The flash washed out the picture, but I corrected for that in Irfanview. You can’t see the leg or antennae, but the body and “stinger” have more detail.

 

It’s not in great condition, and may be missing some of its factory parts. These are the best shots I could get before it started moving again and I had to kill it even deader.

Identify this Mouse

Here is the mouse the new cat caught. It doesn’t quite look like your standard  Mus musculus to me, but I’m no expert.

Bumper Sticker

Here’s a link to an explanation of why surveyors sometimes take notes from the bottom of the page up. Some of our British AFCAns couldn’t see the Googlebooks PDF that was linked to on AFCA:

Plane Surveying PDF

Murder for Dummies