Frustration not a rant

General Discussion
1

This may sound like a rant to some but I want to clarify it is meant as a discussion. I am running Mojave 10.14.3.

I have been a Blocs user since v2. This will be my second web site. The first was for a business 12 years ago and I used RW. I read about Blocs and bought Eldar’ v3 entry class and even reviewed Bootstrap via Lynda. This gave a better appreciation for the process but the devil has and continues to be in the details with this program. I think I have only posted a dozen times back to V2 so I am not looking for hand holding.

I have spent months off and on trying to get this web site to work and the frustration comes down to strange things that I can not explain. I know that it is my site and not Blocs since I go to the forum and do not read of others with the same problem(s). Over the months I have learned that if I can not explain what i am seeing or can not get it to do what I want - the solution is delete the entire bloc save and close Blocs and reopen.

This works most of the time. Sort of a reincarnated three finger salute. For example

A couple of weeks ago I had a problem getting H1 text to not be greyed out. Nothing worked. The side bar / the custom class did not seem to be a problem. I deleted the custom class and still had the problem. I asked for help and Norm said that something was over riding it. No classes were assigned. I assigned a new custom class and looked at the settings & nothing was set. I looked at the shadow and nothing was set but when i clicked on opacity I got the three dots and noticed it was set to the left. When I dragged it to the right the text was now normal. I wondered why would Norm assign limited opacity to a text shadow field?

I went to another existing bloc with no custom classes assigned and created a custom class for an h1. That shadow slider was also set to the left but the text was normal however a different swatch was assigned. It turns out that the swatches both were black but one of them was set to very low opacity shadow in the custom class. Yet the slider in both cases were to the left and 0. AND neither swatch icon displayed the checker board opacity icon.

However this one registered on my richter scale and hence this post.

Today I created a new bloc single column on a two bloc page. When I clicked to add a bric (expecting to see the bric menu) a popup search bar bric appeared and was waiting for an entry in the search box. ??? I could not click out of it, select the side bar or anything else. I deleted the bloc but did not restart and I could recreate the problem. I do not see a search bric in the 3.2 library. I was in the process of doing a recording when I decided to restart. The problem was gone. Nobody on the forum talked about this issue.

Not being a coder I think this has to do with custom classes. This is one web site that I have changed and modified (but I started it as new with V3). I have adjusted margins and padding etc for different view points over and over again as I learned and retried things and now i have a lot of classes that I have no idea what they do. Any time you adjust something a new class is created. Nor do I know if they could be fighting one another.

A month ago I left Blocs and bought RW8, stacks, foundry and packs and it offered several stack advantages. What prompted me to return was I did not have the same degree of control in the various add on stacks. In an image stack I could add a caption. I could change the text and make it bold. I could not center it, after the size, color etc. I would need another stack. In other stacks I had more control. These basic things were a show stopper.

I tried doing a new Blocs site. Since I could not have them running at the same time to flip back and forth for visual reference and copy basic text I dropped that effort.

My last alternative is to delete all the custom classes. I do not know if Blocs needs any of them to function. Maybe I could duplicate the project and test.

Would anybody be able to look at the site code to see if this would be feasible or do I need to do a clean slate restart? I really want this to work.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks
Rich

2

Hello @etdronehome, sorry that you have so much problems creating your site. Can you add your website url please and tell us what is you do not arrive to achieve. As I understood, your h1 problems is already solved?

1 Like
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Hello Rich,

I am sorry to hear you had so much trouble with Blocs. I am happy to assist you in any way I can. I am not a coder, so I won’t be able to help you with examining the code, but I would be happy to take a look at any issues you might have inside Blocs.

1 Like
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Thanks for your replies.

Eldar I would appreciate it if you could look at my Blocs project. I used the word code referring to the project. I have no css or any other code in this project. How can I send it to you?

This project is not live yet so I do not have a Url.

At this moment I do not have any specific problems. Each day I seem to run into something. I did not expect to run into that search bar bric issue. How when I click on the plus sign to add a bric in a bloc did i get a “search bar bric dialog” and not the normal bric library? Where did that come from?

One question is: Can I delete all the custom classes and reformat everything without crashing the program? I would like to clear out this classes.

This project was first a learning experience. I was trying different bric and other things on multiple pages without real regard for the overall project. I looked at competitive sites and tried to replicate the design idea with the various bric. Kinda like I don’t know what I don’t know.

Eldar i learned from your course your strategy to create a multiple column bric, create and design the first column and duplicate it across the row and duplicate the rows if necessary. I did not do that instead i created each column separately in the row. Then I duplicated that across multiple pages. Each time I adjusted something on one page it impacted others and compounding with breakpoint adjustments it sort of snow balled. Since it was a learning experience I did not use the bloc id so now I have lots of custom classes most are not used nor understood where is bloc #bloc-18 -xxx. Bloc 18 on what page?

Now it seems like a daily wack a mole exercise.

For the person starting out I would suggest when learning start with one page using the Eldar create, design duplicate strategy & taking his course. Learn from that page apply it to the next page etc.

Thanks
Rich

5

Sorry to hear you’ve had a few issues.

I’m confused. Are you now using RW or Blocs?

If you can share a link, we can all take a look.

Also read the docs on freehand classes, they don’t all need to be new classes, they can be assigned and a single freehand class can be assigned to multiple elements.

6

Norm

I am using Blocs 3.2. The site is not online yet so i can not share a link.

Rich

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Hi Rich,

It’s difficult to understand what’s causing the problems in your project, and whatever it is a bug or something related to your workflow.

You can find all of contact information here: https://eldargezalov.com/contact.html

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Cheers,
Eldar

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This may be useful to you. When I have a website to show to clients I copy it across to a subdirectory of my website and give the client the URL. By creating a sub-directory on the webserver and FTPing to that the test website is not visible on the main domain.

So, if I created a subdirectory ‘/test-website’ on my webserver, then FTP there, I can supply my client with the URL as main-site/test-website/ and they can see a preview of the site I am building for them and that site is not part of my own website.

It’s normal practice to do this kind of thing even if you are building a site for yourself, so you can test on the server you will eventually use.

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Pauland that would be great if I had a server. This is a one and done website for an aerial photography business that I want to start. I will use a hosting service.

However the concept could be a business opportunity for a temp host site to give someone like me a chance to view their website without the world seeing it.

Thanks again

Rich