Monday, September 01, 2014

"Hidden" text

By the way, I'm aware that the "hidden" text on my Lock In post isn't hidden, though I hope it's unreadable. But I just spent 30 minutes trying to decipher the source code and get that background color, and could not. And then I went to one of those sites where you create a color and it gives you the hex code - and even though it looked like a match to me, when I plugged it into the post it was anything but.

So I gave up. Sorry. The colors defeated me.

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Post's permalink - posted at 11:17 AM  

11 Comments:

At 3:48 PM, September 01, 2014 Anonymous Anonymous had this to say...

The background of the post is #446666, and the spoiler text is currently a little lighter than that (#557777).

(But from my point of view, it doesn't matter, because I read your posts through an rss feed, so I saw the green text against a white background anyway.)

 
At 5:54 PM, September 01, 2014 Blogger The Ridger, FCD had this to say...

Thanks! I've edited the post. I'll try to remember that about the RSS feed and see if I can come up with something...

 
At 4:32 AM, September 02, 2014 Anonymous Adrian Morgan had this to say...

For future reference, the best way to replicate the background colour (or any other colour on the screen) is to take a screenshot, paste it into your favoured graphics program, and ask it for the hex code (or equivalent) of a pixel of your choice.

The exact procedure depends on *which* graphics program you use, but one way or another, they'll all provide a way.

With Irfanview, it's simplicity itself (click on pixel, hex code automatically appears in title bar).

With the Windows 7 version of Microsoft Paint, it's more complicated, but doable. Select the Color Picker tool, click on the pixel you want, click on "Edit Colors", and the dialogue box will show you the RGB values. The rest is just converting to hexadecimal, for which you can use any number of tools. For example, type "68, 102, 102 to Hex" into Wolfram Alpha.

If you anticipate doing something like this again, you may care to experiment to find the procedure that works best for you, given the tools you have available and prefer.

 
At 2:07 PM, September 02, 2014 Blogger The Ridger, FCD had this to say...

Thanks! Usually I know what the hex is for the color, but the template I'm using is something Blogger offered and the color values are mostly trinomes and also don't seem to actually be labeled in any rational way!!!11!

Or maybe it's just me... Nah.

 
At 5:32 PM, September 02, 2014 Blogger Barry Leiba had this to say...

But the colour is kind of irrelevant if you want it to be masked in the feed also. You'll need to set both the background colour and the text colour to FFFFFF (white) for that. In the feed it will look blank, as the background of the other text is also white. In the blog itself there'll be a white blot where the text should be. And in both cases, highlighting it should reveal it (but one would need to test it to be sure).

 
At 6:39 PM, September 02, 2014 Blogger The Ridger, FCD had this to say...

Thanks, Barry!

 
At 4:52 AM, September 03, 2014 Anonymous Adrian Morgan had this to say...

Barry: are you sure? I don't use RSS feeds, but my understanding is they don't honour text colour settings. Ever.

(Which, by the way, is the basis of a little fantasy of mine. To reward people who read my blog directly and not via RSS, I could write a post in which I change the colour of selected characters to spell out a hidden message, like how the bold characters in this paragraph spell out "password". I could then make some sort of special offer available only to people who can see the secret code. Given a special offer worth making, I think this has potential.)

 
At 2:33 PM, September 03, 2014 Anonymous Kathie had this to say...

Adrian, the credits that roll at the end of each episode of "Endeavour" (the Inspector Morse prequel) on PBS contain the occasional letter printed in red, that taken together spell out something (won't spoil it for you). I don't know whether they're in the DVD version, although our virtual host could check.

 
At 4:35 PM, September 03, 2014 Blogger Barry Leiba had this to say...

Adrian, no, I'm not sure, which is why I said one would have to test it. I know that my feed reader uses colour, but it might just be generated by the feed reader in response to updates.

Anyway, why do you object to people reading through feeds, and feel the need to "reward" other behaviour. It's quite ridiculous to think of manually visiting dozens of web sites every day to see if anything's been posted. A feed reader is a tool, and expecting people to do without it is rather like expecting them to pound nails with their fists.

 
At 2:22 AM, September 05, 2014 Anonymous Adian Morgan had this to say...

Ridger, do you want to host a conversation about the pros and cons of different ways to read blogs? I feel we've reached the point where further topic drift would only be appropriate with the blog owner's approval, so ... up to you.

 
At 1:14 PM, September 08, 2014 Blogger The Ridger, FCD had this to say...

Sure, go ahead. I don't mind. Just be nice to each other :-)

 

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