about the ?bfa_ata_file=css - it's not there because that is just a dump of the CSS, it's not building a page - interesting if you switch css to internal, you will get a blank page when you use that option, but you can view the page source. '?bfa_ata_file=css' is just a debuging tool

When was the last time you re-orged your database?

But it removes the same amount of bytes from http://www.larchmontgazette.com/?bfa_ata_file=css which wouldn't be used anymore.

OK, I did all that.

I noticed that all the CSS info in that file is on a single very long line, side to side. I pasted it that way into styles.css but did break it up a bit. Usually we see CSS in nice small chunks, so I'm wondering if it matters how it's formatted.

Another issue has come up.

The new posts are in the Recent Posts widget in the left sidebar in the order of posting. But in the center column of the front page, they are not in that order. Why is that?

which recent posts widget are you using?

I'm using Query Posts, order by Date, Desc. As I said, the sidebar list is fine. It's the center column that isn't matching up by order of publishing time. We're talking different hours or minutes of the day, since the most recent were published during a span of several hours the other night.

Hmmm. Another big problem has popped up.

Now my custom template files are no longer appearing in the drop-down post template menu.

re the post order - can you check the default template and see what order they are there? the order of the posts shouldn't be an Atahualpa issue (but who knows...)

re: templates, did you move them into the new atahualpa343 folder?

Using the default theme, the posts appear in the correct order. Not in Atahualpa.

RE: the templates

Yes, they are all in the new theme folder. And until this afternoon, they seemed to be working fine.

I notice something else odd: In the themes area of Appearance, Ata 3.4.3 looks strange now. When I clicked on it just now to reactivate it, where it says the theme name atop the shadowbox, the whole description was arrayed out to the right, off the shadowbox area. I'll attach a screen shot of how the theme image looks.

I'm wondering if somehow, when I followed Flynn's instructions to combine the 2 css files, this corrupted something else?

In that new style.css, the line breaks appear to have gone when you edited and re-uploaded the file. This does not cause any harm but to get it in order, the top of the style.css should look like this:

A few of the ad images are very big. I've sent you a list through PM. You could shave off around 150 KByte by making the image file sizes smaller, without visible loss of image quality. Only photos should be jpg, graphics should be gif.

On every single post page view, a live anti-spam graphic is being created. That will also cost some time, I'd look either for a plugin that can create and display that image after someone wants to submit a comment, or use a "question + answer" plugin instead, i.e. a math question "What is 3 + 4?" instead of an image.

Good thoughts! Thank you.

Regarding template files I'd check whether the formatting has been changed, i.e. asterisks were added again or something like that, when you copied/pasted/uploaded.

Recent Posts Order: maybe caused by the Featured Content Gallery because that is also running a query_posts. It seems that some posts that are there inside FCG, do not appear in the article list in the middle column. Did you paste the FCG code into index.php, after get_header(); ?> ?

You could remove FCG for a moment and see what happens to the post order.

You should be able to remove that without issues, it is supposed to provide the ability to post to your site from within a desktop software, without being logged in to Wordpress.

It sure can add some slowness like every other bit in the code. It may be just a few ms though.

That's caused by the setting Configure CSS & JS -> CSS: Compress?

This removes comments, line breaks and unnecessary spaces from the CSS. If you'd rather have a better readable CSS file, set the above menitoned setting to No and repeat step 2 of post #19.

Oh, OK.

For now, I've reverted to the "old" way since I'm doing a lot of style changes for the next couple of days. I'll go back to the method you suggested later on.

Do you ever sleep?