Monday 7 January 2008

Do you wee in your compost?



Here are the results you've all been waiting for! Many thanks to everyone who voted in the Daughter of the Soil compost widdle poll.

Do you wee on your compost heap?

Yes - 43% (88 votes)
No - 26% (54 votes)
Sometimes, if I'm in the mood or get taken short - 11% (23 votes)
Uuuurgh, how could you even ask? That's disgusting. - 8% (16 votes)
Yeah! I love it so much I wee on other people's compost too! - 12% (25 votes)


I confess, the closure of the poll was not entirely deliberate. You may notice a few design changes on the blog, and they weren't entirely deliberate either. I took the brave step of upgrading my blog template because I needed to introduce a system for indexing my posts, on account of having no idea what I've written or where to find any of it. I know this is old hat to most of you, but the new advanced layout has enabled me for the first time to put a list of topics in the side-bar, which you can click to find all posts referencing that topic. I'd put off upgrading because the new editor isn't fully compatible with my browser. And what Blogger didn't list among the whizzy new features was "Dumps half the content from your template!" and "Now screws your fonts up automatically!"

After a couple of hours of tinkering with the new layout tools, which crashed my browser five times, I managed to get most of the page elements back where they were. And while I was at it I changed some of the colours. But one thing I wasn't able to reinstate was the compost poll. I tried to copy and paste the HTML code straight across from the old version but the new template wouldn't accept it.

Some of the new upgraded features are very useful and time-saving, and I hope the blog will be more user-friendly for readers now that everything is indexed. But do let me know if you see any technical problems with it. Even now I can't get the layout to work properly in Safari, my usual browser, without the fonts getting all squidged up, but in Firefox it has a completely different font and looks fine. I'm only able to test it on a Mac so I've no idea what it looks like on most people's computers.

5 comments:

jinx said...

Couldn't resist replying to this one! I don't actually wee directly into my compost - that's hard, since it's one of those plastic monsters, and I'm not equipped with a hose. I wee into a jam jar in the bathroom, and just nip outside to pour wee onto compost. But I heard that women's wee isn't as good for your compost as men's wee. I really find that hard to believe--is there really gender difference in wee?

Celia Hart said...

I can understand how frustrating the layout changes must have been. I've just started to use Firefox for blogging (used to use Safari which occasionally scrambled some blogs and didn't allow me to use some of the editing tools). Any instructions seem to be PC based so if you're using a Mac leaves you in the dark!

Thanks for being persistant and reconstructing your blog with the useful index.

Celia

Joanna said...

I missed the original post about weeing on the compost ... I wonder how many of the 43% are men? It's so much harder for women ;)

I need to mess around with my blog, and keep putting it off for similar reasons ... very inspiring that you've come out the other side of Blogger hell

Thanks for that - the index is great, and timely, too, because this is when we all need the seed info

Joanna

Rebsie Fairholm said...

Thanks for your responses all!

Jinx - yeah I have the same issue, as I guess most women do. I mostly use a plastic tumbler compost bin and I'd have a heck of a job trying to sit on that. I do have an open compost shack too which is nicely secluded on two sides but is in full view of another garden (and house) that backs onto mine. I really wouldn't want to drop my trousers in front of the dear little 94-year-old lady who lives there. So a bucket in the bathroom has to serve as a compromise.

I don't know if it's true about women's wee being inferior ... seems a bit unfair, as there's no chance my husband would ever wee on compost. I must find out more about that.

Celia, Joanna - it's nice to know there are other Mac users in blogland. The new drag-and-drop layout editor still doesn't work in Safari, although I moaned to Blogger about it a year or so ago. It does work in Firefox, but repeatedly crashes, so you have to keep saving it as you go along. As usual, if you're a Mac user you're treated as the 'poor relation' and it seems they can't be bothered to fix the bugs which only affect a minority of users.

On the whole it was worthwhile doing the upgrade - up until now I've had to organise the content of the blog sidebar by manually editing the HTML, which was complicated and time-consuming - but it took a couple of very frustrating hours to get it sorted.

I'm reluctant to switch to Firefox because it doesn't integrate with the Mac system the way Safari does, and the interface is kinda ugly.

The new template allows you to create polls directly in Blogger, so I may introduce a new poll at some point. But it's frustrating that I can no longer use my old one which had been running for nearly two years.

Anonymous said...

apparently, the oestrogen in a womyns' urine acts as a preservative, delaying decomposition.

great blog. I'll try to keep in contact @)