27 February - A matter of choice
I have spent all morning and half the afternoon tinkering with the code that
runs this site. In recent months I have had the occasional comment that the blog
text is a bit too small to which one answer is to use the Text Size options of
the web browser to make it bigger but the problem is that it will make every web
page bigger. It’s the sort of unhelpful response you might expect from Bexley
council but not really good enough. To fix the problem I have placed a new item
on the menu above (it appears on all blog pages) named ‘Configure’ and if you
select it you will get a page which allows a choice of three text sizes. By
default the blog text is a bit bigger than it was until yesterday but
I think that is still my favourite. Go and have a play.
To get it to work I had to change an important bit of the menu code which I
always thought was vital, but the alternative seems to work OK. Pages other than
blogs are still working the old way, you shouldn’t see any difference but if you
do please let me know. I was once told that justified text is more attractive
than left aligned; I have no particular preference but for good measure you can
have text justification on blog pages too.
Tinkering with the code reminds me that councillor John Davey said he designed (and
paid for) the Bexley Arts Council website and doing so excused him putting links
to the Conservative Party on the website of a tax-payer funded body. He had a
choice and he chose to not to respect the Arts Council’s integrity. It occurs
to me that I fund Bexley council’s main website so perhaps I should ask them to
put a link to Bonkers on it. It’s the same logic as John Davey uses to justify
him subverting democracy.
The report of Davey’s
dubious tactics has brought forward a not very
different story from a reader involving Bexley’s Youth Council. One of the
young men on the Youth Council has long worked in support of the Labour party,
handing out leaflets etc. but his political zeal took him further and he went to
the party conference last year and was photographed with several
well-known politicians. A Labour version of a 16 year old William Hague perhaps? However
his associations didn’t meet the approval of Bexley council and he was asked to
leave the Youth Council. Another undemocratic choice. Would a youthful Conservative have been singled out for
the same treatment? Surely it is good for ‘youth’ to do something responsible?
Actually I have been sitting on this story longer than I should have done because I have today
discovered that someone has climbed down. Strange though that the Arts Council is allowed to
lean towards the Conservatives but the same people get twitchy when the Youth Council includes
a Labour Party activist. What next? Replacing Harold Wilson’s ‘The
Governance of Britain’ in the public library with a novel by Ann Widdecombe?