More on new template

I've spent a few hours over the past several days fiddling with my new template. After I was forced to switch to New Blogger, I decided to switch to a New-Blogger-compatible template, which happens to look a lot like my old one.

Much as I disliked the way I was forced to switch to New Blogger, I think it's an improvement -- at least in the sense that the template is easier to fool around with. There are still issues with certain types of modifications. For example, you may have noticed that my permalinked pages have a list of "Newest Posts at Pillage Idiot" at the bottom, just as they had in my old template. This is done with FeedDigest, but the implementation in New Blogger was tricky. Not only did I have to figure out where to place the code to put the feed in the right place but I had to add some "if/else" code to make sure it didn't show up at the bottom of my main page. It shows up on archive pages, too, but I haven't figured out yet how to stop that.

I did some research and discovered that you can put the Newer Post/Older Post links at the top of permalinked pages, not just at the bottom, and that you can also change the text. You'll notice my text says "Next Idiotic Post/Previous Idiotic Post." No one has explained to me -- and as far as I can tell, no one has even questioned -- why the "Newer Post" link is on the left and the "Older Post" link is on the right. It seems obvious that older should be on the left and newer on the right. What are we? Israelis? We read from left to right, and older to newer should track that. But, for New Blogger, it doesn't.

So far, my favorite hack, which is still a work in progress, comes from The Last Word. This young Indian blogger named Aditya Mukherjee has a nice hack in which clicking on the labels in a list in your sidebar brings down the titles of the relevant posts, and you can click on them to read the posts. In New Blogger, clicking on a label brings up the complete posts on a new page. The hack I got from The Last Word is far better. There really are some creative people out there.

UPDATE (2/8): Aditya's post suggests using CSS to adjust the layout of the post titles in the hack described above. I know nothing about CSS, except what it is, but I did some guessing here. I remember that I'd removed some CSS code about lists, because the way my template was set up, list items had an orange arrow bullet point and were separated by dotted lines. Fortunately, I'd saved the code in a TXT document, and I guessed about how to apply it to my drop-down list of post titles. It seems to work in Firefox, but not in IE6 or IE7. Go figure. It's the opposite for my extended posts code. The basic code works in both Firefox and IE, but I was able to get the font of the "Click here to read more" text to appear larger and in blue in IE, but not in Firefox, where it's the standard size and link color. I've heard that different browsers render code differently, but maybe this is just something I don't know how to do.

Click here to read more . . .

Mortgage scam, or not?

A federal judge has allowed a class action suit to go forward claiming that Chevy Chase Bank violated the Truth-in-Lending Act when it entered into a mortgage agreement with a Wisconsin couple. Here's a summary of the story:

With college costs looming for their four children, Bryan and Susan Andrews were looking for a way to cut their monthly expenses.

The sales pitch that came in the mail seemed perfect: A mortgage at 1.95 percent, fixed for five years.

"It sounded like a really good program," Susan Andrews recalled recently.

But after the deal closed, in 2004, the couple realized to their horror that the $191,000 loan they got from Bethesda-based Chevy Chase Bank was an adjustable-rate mortgage. The rate has climbed to 8.3 percent and, because of the way the mortgage is structured, the couple now owe more than they did when they signed for the loan.

The libertarian in me says that when you borrow huge sums of money with your house as security, you should pay attention to the details.

But I've heard enough outrageously misleading radio ads for mortgage lenders that I really can understand how someone could get snookered. Here's what allegedly happened in this case:

At the core of the dispute are some words that appeared on the top right corner of a document the lender must provide under the Truth in Lending Act. One line read: "WS Cashflow 5-year fixed," and the line under it said "Note Interest Rate: 1.950%."

The Andrewses said those words led them to believe the loan was a fixed-rate mortgage for five years, at 1.95 percent interest, and that they were reassured of its meaning by the broker at First Mortgage who handled the loan on behalf of Chevy Chase. In fact, the 1.95 percent offer was a teaser rate that lasted one month, and the interest charged on the loan started rising the next month. And the "fixed" feature had nothing to do with the interest rate. Rather, it meant the lowest possible payment stayed the same -- $701 a month -- over five years, although the interest rate rose, with the additional expense deferred to the end of the loan.

"This statement was confusing because although it is true that the payments on the loans were fixed for five years, the interest rate was not," the judge wrote.

And I can't feel too sorry for lenders who use one-month teaser rates, or set up loans where the monthly payments don't even cover the interest, so that the principle of the loan actually increases -- unless they grab the borrowers by the lapels and shake them, saying, "Do you understand what this means?"

So while I'm an economic libertarian in many ways, I don't think we have to let lenders play three-card monte with the borrowers. (Go ahead, kick me out of the club.)

Click here to read more . . .