I have been off-and-on with blogging over the years, but I’m really happy I turned my 10-year-old website into a blog in 2006 and have kept it up all these years. WordPress has definitely made it easier to publish new content on DanielGreene.com.
The first year of Obamacare, I went to great pains to choose an insurance company my doctor took, only to have him tell me in 2014 that he didn’t take it. Last year, I once again went to great pains to choose an insurance company my doctor took, only to be told when the year began that he did not take it. I had to have my insurance broker — whose services I engaged the second time around — tell them that, yes, indeed, they had signed a contract to take my insurance. When I finally saw my doctor after over a year without insurance he took, I overheard him say to one of his associates “he has some Obamacare thing.” That “Obamacare thing” was a company I had never heard of — Meritus — which is now bankrupt.
So now I have to switch health insurance plans yet again, and neither one of the two doctors I listed in my HealthCare.gov application takes a single one of the 69 plans available to me— from bronze to platinum. One of them, a specialist, told me on the phone that they are still working out contracts. Really?? Seriously?? You’ve got to be kidding me. We are halfway into the 45-day open enrollment period, people!! My insurance dies on December 31st. The HealthCare.gov site says they do not yet have all the data from providers about who will accept which plans, and the doctors I go to tell me they do not yet have access to all the information they need in order to know which plans they will accept.
Health insurance companies cannot seem to make decent websites or mobile apps, either. In the last few years, I have had Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona, Health Net, and Meritus. None of them had a website that allowed me to do what I needed to do. What is more, when I look at the App Store to see which insurance companies make the best iPhone apps, what I find is that every single insurance company app is rated one out of five stars. The typical reviews are: “crap,” “useless,” and “crashes.” And don’t even get me started on HealthCare.gov…
And then there is cost. I was spending over $500 a month before Obamacare on a COBRA plan I kept after quitting a job. I was thrilled to find my first Obamacare plan for just over half the cost of my COBRA plan. The next year, the best I could do was a plan for $328. This year, it looks like the best I can do is a plan for $336. In two years, cost has crept up over 25%. If that keeps up, I’m going to back to spending over $500 a month by 2018.
Do I hate Obama? No. I voted for him two terms in a row. But I sure hate health insurance right now. Ugh!
Today, I added custom social media links to my secondary menu, which appears on the left sidebar in the Twenty-Fourteen WordPress theme I’m using now. I did this because Twenty-Fourteen doesn’t have social links in the theme, and I wanted them near the top of my blog layout. To learn how to add them, I started by reading the WordPress Support article “Add Social Media Buttons to Your Sidebar or Footer.” When I did a Google Image search of ‘free social media icons’, as suggested in the support article, I found my favorite icon set at GraphicsFuel: 20 Popular Social Media Icons (PSD & PNG). Thank you, GraphicsFuel!
I used the HTML shown on the support article, but I amended it with a bit of CSS to put some padding (space) to the right and bottom of the buttons so they didn’t look stuck together. While I was at it, I took the width and height properties out of the HTML and put them into the CSS where they belong (since they are style, not structure). Here is a sample of the style code I added to the img element for my customization:
style="width:35px;height:35px;padding-right:5px;padding-bottom:5px;"
Of course things will change with time as I change themes or widgets, but here is what my blog looks like as of this writing, with the new social media button links I added to the left sidebar:
I always like to share what I learn with others who might benefit, and I like to give credit where it’s due. I hope you find it helpful. Please let me know.
I recommend Work With Color’s Color Schemer to get complementary colors and multi-color palettes for blogs. To customize two of my blogs, I used the OS X color picker “eye dropper” to copy the color of an element of a blog’s default style and find out what the color’s hexadecimal code was. Then I entered the hex code it into this site, clicked some buttons, and it showed me color schemes to create a pleasing palette.
The other day, I expressed my concern on the WordPress Support Forums that my author bylines were gone from my posts in this blog using the Twenty Twelve theme. Today I got a response from staff explaining that, because of feedback from the WordPress community, they started using CSS (the style markup that composes the themes) to hide the author byline on some, but not all, themes. This makes the byline invisible in the normal, theme/CSS-enabled view, but if you view the page without the theme/CSS you will see the bylines.
This means the search engines can read the bylines and verify authorship. I checked this with Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool and found the search engine did, in fact, read my byline and verify my authorship. This is good to know!
For anyone who knows HTML and CSS and is curious, here is the HTML:
<span class="by-author"> by <a title="View all posts by Daniel Greene" href="https://danielgreene.com/author/danielgreene/" rel="author">Daniel Greene</a></span>
And here is the CSS that does the trick:
.by-author {display: none;}
If you are interested in viewing the code on your own blog, there are various ways to view source code.
