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INVASION OF THE PHOTOBUCKETS
UPDATE 12/15 9:56 p.m. It was Blogger and SLIFR friends Nate Y., Chris Stangl, Tommy Salami and Greg Ferrara all checking in with all the help I needed to get my good ol' burgundy background back on and flying early this evening! All the details are in the comments column, and once again, gentlemen, you are fine and true geniuses and friends, one and all! Thanks!
What the hell?
As you may be able to observe for yourself (unless this is a phenomenon restricted solely to me and my hallucinating eyes), I have been besieged by some sort of Photobucket onslaught. According to a Blogger help forum I was able to connect up with, this error may have something to do with linking directly to a Photobucket image from someone else's account that has gone out of service. The rather overwhelming and disturbing implication, if this is true, is that somewhere in the five years of archives of posts on this blog there is an image I once linked to that is no longer available and thus causing this disruption.
But unless I'm mistaken, I never directly link to the originating source of the images used on this blog. Instead, I save them first to my own hard drive and access the images through Blogger from there. This is the way I was initially advised to use photos that would be safe on my end and not result in "stealing bandwidth" from anyone else.
I am awaiting advice from Blogger on the problem, but in the meantime I wonder if any of you in the blogosphere have ever experienced this before. I see a lot of blogs and I've never come across it myself, so I suspect (hope) it's a fairly rare phenomenon that can be easily fixed. Otherwise, I guess I'm in for a very time-consuming fishing expedition to try to find the image amongst all these images that is causing the problem.
Any advice those of you who are far more schooled in the Internets than am I could give would be greatly appreciated! And I will try my hardest to clear my template of this ghastly visual blight as soon as possible!
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7 comments:
The offending image can be found in your body tag in CSS: http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b78/wanderingmoon/slbck.jpg
I can't recall specifically what your background image looked like, but hopefully there's a cached version you can upload to your Blogger account and then make the appropriate changes.
To be more useful, here's how to fix the issue, assuming you have a copy of your original blog background image uploaded on Picasa or something.
From your Blogger dashboard, click "Layout" under your blog's heading. On the page that comes up, click "Edit HTML" (near the top of the page). In the text box labeled "Edit Template", scroll down about three page-lengths until you find a line that starts like "body {"
Somewhere under that line should be another one that begins "background:". On that line, change the Photobucket URL to whatever the new location of the image is and click the "Save Template" button.
I bet it's something in a template for the blog. Many of the templates use hosted images.
... and I believe the offending image was just a burgundy color swatch; you'll likely be able to just fill in a background color in place of the image. Referring to a random screenshot nabbed from the webs, Photoshop tells me the color's hex code was "650103"
body {
background-color:#650103
Maybe ought to do it. Probably. I ran a test on my template and it worked, anyway.
The background swatch is still present at the Photobucket address, if re-uploading it to an image host would be easier.
I do use Photobucket, and had all my images go down, after legitimately exceeded the bandwidth of my free account (I imagine that is what happened here). It caused an immediate feeling of total panic that everyone would hate me forever. So I paid them. Whew!
Chris beat me to it. He's right, Dennis, just put in the color for the background, that's all.
Gentlemen, I came home from eating my CostCo salad (Chris, the Inglourious Basterds DVD and Blu-ray is there at an unheard-of low, low price!), and not only did I find all of your genius-level help in the comments column, somehow (at least on the browser I use on my laptop) the burgundy background was restored!
I thought maybe one of you had fixed it for me, or maybe someone from Blogger. But when I went in the HTML page, the same Photobucket code was there taunting me. So I saved the burgundy color image on my hard drive and hosted it via Image Shack, and after a few tries (a misplaced quote mark can be hell on one's HTML existence) I finally got it back up and hopefully running just fine.
How did you guys know to zero in on the template so quickly? And that you found the specific image, well, that was a great relief! I am amazed, impressed and thankful!
On that day when all bloggers unite for a summit meeting (or perhaps one day even sooner than that), I hope to buy y'all a beer in gratitude for having such brainy friends who would take the time to help me out. Skoal!
Sorry about the blog problems, Dennis. I host some images at Photobucket (including ones I used for your blog layout) and forgot to pay my service fees. They've been paid for the next two months.
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