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How to Adjust the Margins on Disqus Commenting

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I run a myriad of WordPress blogs.  On most of them, I utilize a commenting system called Disqus.  It’s just cool.  There’s one thing that I was troubled by when I first implemented it.  When enabled, the comment section seemed to be aligned flush with the width of my content, leaving no aesthetic margin to delineate a separation in design.  Thankfully, using Firebug, I was able to inspect the Disqus comment area to find the class identifier so I could modify the design slightly to fit my site.

Notice the following image.  The dark gray background and the Disqus comment area butt up against each other.  Not cool.  The right side of the comment form (not shown) also squished against the right hand side-bar.  Not attractive at all.

Simple Fix

There’s a very easy CSS style that you can apply to your Disqus settings for a given website and you do it from the Disqus website:

  1. Simply login, choose the site profile that you need to address.
  2. Click the settings tab, then click Appearance on the left.
  3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and paste the following into the Custom CSS box:#disqus_thread { margin: 0px 20px 0px 20px; }

Save your settings, and re-load your blog.  The setting above essentially squeezes the entire Disqus comment section by 20 pixels on the left and the right sides.  You can modify this to suit your needs, but it should help you line up your comment box with the other content on your site.

Here’s how it looks now:

Hope that helps.

Dear Wells Fargo, I’m Leaving You

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Dear Wells Fargo,

After nearly 20 years of banking with you, I am leaving.  I will be finding someone else who cares about me more.  I will find someone who doesn’t charge me to hold my money, who doesn’t rip me off when I use the ATM that’s part of the “network,” who doesn’t eat up my money every month at a rate of return that makes what you pay me look like a fee in itself.

I will find someone who makes decisions based on who I am as a customer, not as a number.  I will find a company who is in touch with their client, and who doesn’t hire a team of people to “handle customer service issues” through one twitter account with canned responses.  I will put my money where I can shake the hand of the people connected to the pulse of the company’s culture, who understand and believe in the vision of the company, who aren’t sheep, controlled by a corporate attitude.

Bank of America?  No.  Chase?  No.  Citi?  No.  Don’t worry Wells Fargo, I’m not going to leave you for another famous bank.  I’m going for the bank next door, cause she’ll care more, and we can raise a family of children named Benjamin, Lincoln, Grant, Jefferson, and Washington together.

When I deposit my certificates of appreciation, I do so trusting that you appreciate it, and so far, you have not appreciated me.  So, farewell.  I’ll never come back.

For a Better, Or a Worse

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…part of my life, I have depended upon what other people think, about me, my actions, my talents, my surroundings, and the overall environment I live in.

Existing is a part of life that I can no more understand than the greatest of philosophers, if you should call a philosopher so great. Identity is something that has eluded me for too long, and not being able to put a name to the face has pushed me further and further towards an unbalanced life.

When we first began meeting as a group, prior to our first service, during New Valley’s conception, there was an evening where I was able to eloquently express who I am. If only I could remember the words I spoke that night. I’ll try to explain where I was then.

I am a romantic. I am an artist. I feel deeper than most feel but not without consequence. I speak as I think, but not without consequence. My identity has been defined by the reflection of me in those around me and my perception of their responses to me.  But not without consequence.

The result in me has become someone who has depended on others to define what I need to do in my life to be successful as a Man, a Friend, a Son, a Father, a Lover, and a child of God.  I am not yet a father, and only recently in life do I feel that I have qualified as a Man.  I have been a good Son, and I cannot claim that I have never loved, else I would not feel as I do.

There are people in life who do what they do because they thought it would be cool to do that.  There are people in life who do what they do because they don’t see any other way.  There are those who would find a passion and pursue it with all of their heart until they reach the pinnacle of their career, only to realize they have nothing.  Then there are those, like the previous, who find that passion, live with passion, and learn how to truly live.

I am as human as the next person, and I would assume that the possibly imperfect picture of people that I’ve painted is something you have also noticed in life.  I would not assume that you know that someone like myself faces all of these things as well, but with an added challenge of coping with a very real disorder.  Attention Deficit Disorder is something that I have, and it is something that I will live with for a better, or for a worse part of my life.  Knowing that there is a name to the face, I can pursue a solution, and choose for a better, and finally start listening to me, and trusting in Him.

Proverbs 3:5-6 is a verse in the Bible that is widely known by many, and can be claimed by many as their favorite.

5 Trust in the LORD with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;

6 in all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make your paths straight.

We Are The Bucket

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I often use the metaphor to help me understand intangible truths and to help others understand me.  Some people get it, taking in the parallels that I draw, and others miss it completely.  Sometimes the metaphors are not well thought out, and other times they are, but every one of them goes through a series of changes and revisions until the truth of the matter at hand is more greatly understood both by the author and the reader.

We Are The Bucket

I liken my life to the characteristics and experiences of a bucket.  Perhaps any container would do, but the bucket is what I thought of, so I’ll run with it.  Should a bucket ever have the opportunity to speak for itself, I’m sure it would see how much like me it is.  Although, I don’t have Home Depot printed on my chest, and I’m not orange, and I’m quite sure I won’t be having a conversation with a bucket any time soon.

Cast in a pre-determined mold, each and every bucket starts off with a clean slate and is considered flawless, yet is not.  For on the surface of the bucket are tiny, jagged pits and bumps that are invisible to the naked eye, but nonetheless are there, and as smooth as the surface of the bucket seems, as soft and fresh as the baby’s skin may be to our weathered adult hands and our aging eyes, the flaws remain, and are inherent, and ordained.

Picture a brand new bucket, empty, with a new handle.  There’s a vast space inside that bucket designed to hold a lifetime of experiences coupled with the essence of God, pure and holy.  At birth, this bucket can be filled from the bottom to the top with pure, clean, refreshing water; water that will be spilled, poured, and that will slowly evaporate over time.  How clean that life is when it starts.  Yet it doesn’t stay that way.

As our lives progress, we bump into other buckets, sometimes spilling our water into their bucket, leaving a little piece of us behind, inadvertently or sometimes intentionally.  Others also spill over into our bucket.  The water that we started with becomes entangled with that of others.

Throughout our years, we, the bucket of water, find ourselves and others scooping from time to time little bits of debris into our bucket.  Dirt, glass, garbage, cement, you name it, we shovel it in ourselves and others dump it in too.  Every time a little bit of the world gets poured into the bucket, there’s a little less room for that clean water.  And, when we refill our buckets from time to time, or when someone else pours some of their water into us, the sediment at the bottom is stirred up, clouding the water, making it harder to see the clarity.

It is at these times when it would make sense to filter out some of that debris.  It would seem that when the muck that was settled at the very bottom of the bucket is agitated and swirled about, we would be more likely to see it, more likely to capture it and toss it out of the bucket, making more room for more clean water, but sometimes, we make sure our bucket doesn’t get jostled, and we set it aside and wait for the dust and debris to settle again; a perfect picture of our unwillingness to allow cleansing and our delusion that ignoring the junk that has settled into our lives, into our bucket, will simply stay put forever and won’t muddy up the water again.

Sometimes other buckets that are full of gunk and that are stirred up so much that the water looks dark and muddy spill their mess into our bucket, clean water or not.  We may identify this right away, or sometimes we might not be paying attention as the crap in someone elses bucket is unloaded into ours.

Other times we don’t fill our buckets at all.  We isolate them and let the water slowly evaporate.  The more water, the longer we can sustain, and the more debris we have at the bottom, the closer the bottom is to the top, making less room for the water that we need.  When this happens, the debris can dry up and if that debris is heavy enough, if that debris is cement, it hardens and is no longer affected by the water.  When we have that cement poured into our bucket, and it hardens, and we fill our bucket again, the cement doesn’t leave.  It stays there, and we cover it up with muddy water, hiding it from ourselves enough that we may completely forget that it even exists.  But, we know it’s there, because cement is heavy, and our bucket becomes heavier and heavier over time, as layer after layer of cement is poured into us.  As long as we keep the water moving, pouring in and pouring out, we are able to filter the cement out before it hardens, but once we stop and let that water evaporate, the cement hardens.  Some people have a little cement, some people have a lot, and the amount of water that their bucket can hold is determined by how full of cement they are.  By this time, it’s safe to say that all of the space above the hardened cement appears to us to be all the bucket will hold.  We look at this small space for water as 100% of the space that we have for water, and we forget that the cement has eaten up most of the space, and in fact, the bucket is only half available because it’s clogged with baggage.

Adversity

Until adversity.  When we are tilted so quickly by another bucket, or by ourselves, it’s likely that all of whatever water is left spills out and we feel completely exposed.  We see the thick layers of concrete, and we find ourselves sideways, with a heavy load, unable to pick ourselves up because of the weight of the cement.

That is when we cry out for help.  It seems to take vast adversity in our lives, or what the world would call “rock bottom” to realize that we need help.  But if I’ve been knocked over in a room full of other buckets who have been knocked over, who is going to grab that little handle and tilt me upright so I can be filled with more water?  Who is going to pour their clean water into me?

Bitterness

That cement is the bitterness that we carry from experiences in the past.  I believe that we are only able to be loved as deeply as the pain in our past.  In other words, that cement is in the way of our ability to be loved, and until it is chipped away and scooped out, it will continue to block the good water of others and the fresh water from the tap from getting to the bottom of our hearts, or the bottom of our buckets, and we’ll find that when we move around through life with a heavy load of bitter cement, we can easily mow over buckets that don’t have as much cement because of our mass.  We’re so heavy, we just don’t stop when we get going, and we can just crash into others with our problems and cause lots of spills.  Imagine trying to clean the bottom of the inside of your bucket while it’s half full of cement.

this metaphor is a work in progress.  Please follow me on twitter @realscottsdale if you would like to know when this metaphor is updated.

Adding to the Madness

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A recent conversation between me and a good friend at a great coffee shop near down town Phoenix has sparked my interest in looking at the social benefits versus the social detriments of Facebook.  I’m by no means an authority on human behavior, but I am interested in a few things as is he.

Addicted to Facebook

I too am addicted to Facebook.  It’s been a great place to re-connect with people I have lost track of.  I can see what they’re up to, how many kids they have, where they work, where they go on vacation.  In the course of one year, I have reconnected with over 200 people that had some sort of influence over my life either recently, or in the distant past, some significant, and some not.

Brandon Stark, (scouterblue.blogspot.com), writes:

We have created an Open-Door policy to our lives. We exploit ourselves…posting all the details of our lives on our carefully crafted page, giving people no reason to interact by other means. In many ways it eliminates the need for real relationship.

Too Much Information

For me, the truth of the matter is, I don’t want to know that much detail without having the opportunity to sit with you and connect, for real.  As I update my status, staring at the wall trying to think of something nebulous to spew across the system, I can only wonder whether or not I’ve forgotten that 100+ people that I normally wouldn’t say anything to are going to read it.  When I post my status, my initial thought is that those who I see weekly, those who I hold valuable to me for one on one quality time, they are the ones who have become the object of my silly status updates.  The rest of the “friends” that I have on Facebook are so far distant, so far removed by a long, lonely gap of inactivity over many years that what comes out of my mind becomes of no use to them at all, yet they still see it, and they still know what I’m up to.

Reliving the Past

At first I thought Facebook was a great place to gather your friends.  Then I started to chalk it up to a place where I can quickly catch up on where people are, simply to satisfy that curiosity, to answer that occasional “I wonder where they are” question.  In the past, that question typically went unanswered as we quickly reminisced about the past in a few seconds, and then filed it away for another day.  And you know what?  We were okay with it.  Now, the answer to that question has become, “I’ll find them on Facebook and then I’ll really know.”

Yes, you’ll really know.  You’ll soon really know how cluttered your life can become with the plethora of social networking that has become the “norm.”

Social Outcast!

“You mean, you’re not on Facebook?  What’s wrong with you.  It’s the greatest thing since…”

Since what?  It’s only 5 years old and it dominates our every social situation.  Just like anything else on this planet that we experience, there’s a good twist to it, and a bad twist to it.  If used productively and wisely, the twist you experience might just be a good thing.  But don’t let it twist you out of control.

On Blogging for the Right Audience

The very fact that the word blogging has become a verb drives me as mad as the word ‘texted.’  Texted isn’t just a new word, it’s poor english.  However, I’ll use it, because our language is alive, organic, and ever changing.  Blogging is writing.  Writing is something people can do or cannot do.  If you can’t write, don’t blog.  But, if you happen to enjoy writing, then stick to it and spend time creating meaningful information for the world to see.  If you’re too personal, you’ll lose the average reader as they probably don’t care about the fact that your cousin visited last night and made the best sweet potato pie you’ve ever had.  However, if you write about the experience in a manner by which every reader can find value, or at least every reader who is interested in the general topic, then you may find success in publishing.  Otherwise, why in the world would you publish such personal information in a public location?

Rant of the Week: Techno Trail of Dust

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In an age where it’s nearly impossible to keep up with the changing technology, it becomes absolutely critical to the success of many businesses to be the first in the door with a new tool, process, trick…you name it. If you fail to join the technology revolution, you will be left behind with a bronze shield fending of laser guided photon plasma beams.  It is equally important if you are not a pioneer of changing technology to adopt it in order to remain competitive.

Every day thousands of documents are created that need to be verified, signed, stamped with blood. Signed documents make the world go ’round.

Rant #1: E-mail attachments are old news.

Sending messages through e-mail is a great way to quickly communicate a request. Sending attachments through e-mail is a disaster. The initial purpose of e-mail was to carry a very small message electronically to one or multiple recipients. The transport that carries the e-mail could be likened to a Yugo, or more appropriately, a Smart Car. Someone’s brilliance entered the picture (believe me, it seemed brilliant at first) and introduced a way to attach files to the e-mail. Immediately abused, this method, to illustrate it properly, was like attaching a cargo trailer to the hitch of a Smart Car with 50,000 pounds of pewter flatware, dishes, and goblets. To this day, sending attachments is still a horrible way to deliver large files over the internet.

The best way to accomplish sending large files is to create a central location where multiple people can go to retrieve the file at any time. When you send a huge attachment to 20 people in your e-mail list, you’re sending multiple copies, clogging up your outbound e-mail highway, eating up space and time on everyone’s system.

Try changing your way of thinking. Instead of sending the information through e-mail, upload it to your website or a file sharing site. Imagine if Hewlett Packard were to send out drivers for printers in e-mail. It would cost them a fortune and would make the lives of thousands of e-mail server administrators hellish.

Rant #2: Stop Printing What you Can Sign Digitally

Docusign is an absolutely brilliant tool that allows you to send anything you have on your screen through a printer driver to a digital signature website. The recipient clicks a few tabs on the document and the document is stored online permanently for you to access at any time.

Handwritten signatures expose you more than you know.  Did you know that you can scan a document with a hand-written signature, extract the signature using a photo-editing program, and insert that signature on just about any legal document you wish, then pass it off as legitimate?  It’s so easy to do (I’ve never done it, of course.)

Digitally signing a document builds multiple layers of security to prove that the person who signed the document is the person that was actually supposed to sign the document.

Not only will you find it more secure, you’ll also find it saves you time.  One example of how you can utilize Docusign would be in signing a document that was sent to you as an e-mail attachment (yuck.)  Okay, so we’re not going to be able to change over night, but we can get better.  When you receive that document, rather than printing it, signing it, scanning it, and re-attaching it, simply print it to Docusign, mark where it needs to be signed, click to sign it, and download the signed copy.  Then, send that copy to whomever needs it.  It can all be done without leaving the same spot.

It’s time to get with the times.  If you’re unfamiliar with these methods, then you’re already behind, and you might want to consider reading up on what’s what in the world of technology.