Fixing My Blog Backgrounds

Good morning, peeps!

It's time for me to do my online spring cleaning (we'll get to the house later, oh, and the deck-- ugh!).  I am fixing my backgrounds to make them more readable.  My husband, Bob, has been complaining about the distractions for a long time.  Actually, since I first put them up!  At first, I was oblivious to it, but it's actually starting to bother me now too.  So, here goes.

Mainly, I'm trying to make just the scrolling part plainer, and get the annoying graphics from flopping all over the words-- like this overgrown rose!  Over it goes!!  It's some work, but not that bad, so I've just been lazy.  It's time to do it.

If you have any suggestions, complaints, or reasonable advice, please post it in the comments, or mail me on Facebook or at painting4jesus@yahoo.com
Speak now or forever hold your peace!  (Just kidding! You can tell me later, but I may not respond-- or you'll have to wait til next spring!)

Lots of love!
Karen

Update:
OK, this is a newer version, cleaned up.  There is still a little bit of design behind the words.  Am I paranoid of a blank space?  Oh, maybe a little.  Is it distracting to you when you try to read?  I can't fix the header image to make it fit the border, even though it's supposed to auto fit.  Any help?  And the image I use for the background is the right size when I upload it to Flickr, but it seems to shrink when I put it here, and the edges are tiled a bit (you can only see this with a very large screen like mine 1900 X 1200 px.  Don't know how to fix that either.

OOps!  Silly me!  My screen resolution is 1929 X 1200.  That could be the problem!  I told you I wasn't good at numbers ;)

An Unhappy Surprise

I made a discovery today, and it wasn't a pleasant one. ;( I usually post the entries of this blog from Internet Explorer, and had formatted all these blog pages from there as well. Today I opened it with Firefox and everything looks totally off! Yuck!!

I recently opened a gmail account to use as an address with this blog, to keep my other address personal. I also got Firefox installed so I could use an application a friend needed as I helped her with some design work. I don't generally use Firefox, as I don't like how things look and work on the web as I use it. I've been using Explorer for so long, I'm used to it. I do really like a Firefox plug-in I have which is colorful tabs. It is very helpful, and I wish I could have that on Explorer.

So now I'm in a quandary. I don't think I can make my pages look good in both formats, so I'm letting you know that if it looks bad in Firefox, maybe try it in Explorer. I guess that's a bummer for Firefox users. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. In the mean time, I'll explore some alternatives for fixing my looks so they work for everyone. I guess that's what happens when you try to "push the envelope". I just don't want to look like every other blog. Is that a hopeless goal? I certainly hope not. Please leave me a comment if my pages look messed up to you. Thanks so much for your feedback.

Reconstruction

For a while some of my blogs may be offline (marked "private" for a little while) as I create and tweak the backgrounds. Hope that's not too inconvenient for you. Sometimes it's a bit tricky and it takes a while for me to get it right. I'm working on it. I have a widescreen monitor, so the backgrounds are optimized for that, but I'm trying to make them good for smaller monitors too. Hope they're enjoyable for you! Let me know if you're having a problem with anything. Thanks.

New Backgrounds and Virus Attack

OK, I'm feeling a little bit proud of myself for learning how to do code for these new backgrounds! They're not perfect, but I'm liking it much better. Soon I'll have them all done. Hope you like them! Now, it's a stupidly late "wee hour of the morning", and I am going to try to go to sleep. I'm praising the Lord especially tonight, because He and Bob saved me from a trojan attack on my computer. My carelessness I'm not so proud of. I think it's going to be alright though, and I'm very grateful. Be watchful out there!!