OAQ: How do I change the background on one of my posts?

[Joseph Dunphy]

Posted here:

http://groups.google.com/group/stumbleupon_and_ebay/web/background

[Joseph Dunphy]

A few days after I posted that last message, I noticed something odd.
Where, before, I was seeing a dark grey textured background on my
page, now I was seeing one that was absolute pitch black. Was that a
change in format that Stumbleupon had carried out, or had something
changed on my computer?

Looking at a few old screenshots I had laying around, I'm left
guessing that the latter is a lot more likely, which does leave me
with the question of whether what I'm seeing on my screen is very
similar to what others are seeing on theirs. Out of curiosity, I went
over to somebody's profile, unrendered it, and then went to the url of
the stylesheet. While, not having learned css yet, I'd still be
guessing, I saw a lot of what looked like the html color codes with
which I'm familiar, and if I understood what I was seeing well enough,
a lot of them - background colors included - definitely didn't look
browser safe. My best guess, at this point, is that people aren't
generally seeing much the same thing, and that this might be why.

Which actually might be a halfway decent argument for occasionally
changing a background - 000000 is one of the few things that is
reliable on the Internet. I am noting, with a little dismay, that some
of the images that were relatively well designed for a dark grey
background, set against what now appeared on my screen as something
more akin to a pure black background looked a little chewed up, the
blackness of the image along portions of its edge fading into the
blackness of the background, leaving the eye with momentary doubt
about where that edge was - very much NOT an effect that I wanted.
Much of the subtlety in the shading on the screen would seem to have
been lost, with many shades of grey simply turning into what is now
just now an indistinguished blackness. I will have to look into why
this is, though I'm guessing that part of the problem might be the
fact that somebody I know with a bad case of "what does this button
do" syndrome has been on this computer. A misfortune of sorts, but
perhaps an educational one, as it raises a question - just how browser
safe are the results when one adobes an image?

Of course, I had already complained about what I had found to be
inconsistent results when I touched up some of the first images I had
posted to my Chicago gallery, from that near north photographic
walking tour, regions that seemed to smoothly transition on one screen
being glaringly contrasting on another, so I guess that I shouldn't be
completely surprised that these greys should prove to be a problem,
but I am a little disappointed.

[Joseph Dunphy]

On checking on another computer, what I found was that the shade of
grey was as I remembered it, but the texturing of the background was
now so faint as to be almost indiscernable.

There is, then, still something to be said for doing those black
background boxes - and for using text colors brighter than that soft
grayish green I've been using on one of the posts toward the back of
the Abyss, which now seems to just fade out. That is the frustrating
thing about the inconsistency in the way most colors display these
days - we are sometimes forced to use more garish color schemes than
we otherwise would, if we work against a dark background.