The Playground

I spent the better part of tonight cleaning up around 50 posts on Toni's Corner of the World that weren't displaying in the monthly archives properly. The headings were there, but that's all. When I checked to see what the problem was, it seems that all the entries that had ASCII code inserted had errors, and I had to use the character instead of the code. In most cases it was an apostrophe, or three dots, or a copyright symbol. For some reason I ended up with that black triangle with a question mark in the middle.

  While I was fixing those errors I came across lots of bad links on the older entries. I upgraded to Movable Type 4.2 recently, and changed the format for the entry names. Instead of 0005328entry_list.php they're now called entry_list.php (without the leading numbers), and so any links to other entries were returning the dreaded 404 page. I've managed to clean them up from September 2006, but I'll need to go back to December 2004 and check the links on each entry. A time-consuming task.

Checking your entries for errors is a normal part of site housekeeping which we all need to do from time to time. Usually I don't look at old entries on my blogs and it's easy for errors to go unnoticed.

Posted by Toni at 9:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

For the past couple of months none of the forms on the website at work have been working. The server is Windows IIS and everything seems to be configured right for CGI scripts to work. In fact, the search script does work, and so does a test script. The contact and submission forms used to work fine, then one day an error message appeared and ever since we haven't been able to use the forms.  This is the error message:

The specified CGI application misbehaved by not returning a complete set of HTTP headers.

The folks at Microsoft Support suggested modifying the source code for the CGI application header output. The following is an example of a correct header:

print "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\n";
print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n\n";

I didn't even know what they meant by that! I poured through the code for the script itself, but couldn't see where it should go, and as for modifying the application itself, well....

Instead I signed up for a Form to Email Handling Service with Allforms, an Australian company, and for a premium service paid $11.70 AU for a one-year subscription. I just need to add one line of code to the forms that are already on the site and they will be process elsewhere and delivered to us at work without the hassle we're having at the moment.

Posted by Toni at 8:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

According to Elizabeth Castro, you can use any colours in you web design that you like. Here's an excerpt from Elizabeth's book, HTML, XHTML, and CSS, Sixth Edition: Visual QuickStart Guide:

Currently (mid 2006), around 80% of the Web surfing public use 24- or 32-bit monitors, 16% use 16-bit monitors, and fewer than 1% use 8-bit monitors. In 2002, those numbers were quite different: 50% on 24-bit, 40% on 16-bit and 10% on 8-bit. The trend is clearly toward so-called “True Color” monitors in which any of 16 million colors can be displayed. In the days when 8-bit monitors were the norm, you had to restrict yourself to only the browser safe colors in order to ensure that the colors you chose would appear correctly on your Web pages. However, as the numbers show, so few people are using 8-bit monitors, that it is no longer an issue. You may use any colors you like.

The only reason to use the browser-safe palette is if you have a concern that your web design work will be viewed from a 256 color (8-bit) computer system. Only 216 colours were considered safe for web browsers. Browser-safe colours can only contain 00, 33, 66, 99, CC, and FF values in each of the paired digits of the RGB spectrum.

The word from Lynda.com (who are credited with the distinction of having first identified and published the web safe colour palette) is that...

There may be resurgence in the need for the browser-safe palette when designing for alternative online publishing devices, such as cell phones and PDAs. Those systems are still in 1-bit (black and white) or 8-bit color. Right now, very few people are designing their web sites to work on those systems, so the need for the browser-safe color palette is definitely downgraded to a mere shadow of its former glory.

Below is a table of the browser-safe colours:

read more »

Posted by Toni at 7:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

Sala, over at Aharef has designed a javascript applet to graph the HTML of a webpage. He uses colour-coded dots to visually represent hundreds lines of HTML and the general structure of a webpage. It's fascinating. No two pages look the same.

HTML consists of so-called tags, like the A tag for links, IMG tag for images and so on. Since tags are nested in other tags, they are arranged in a hierarchical manner, and that hierarchy can be represented as a graph.

These colours represent the dots:

blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Play around with the applet and get a fresh view of websites. I graphed all the index pages on my various sites and am amazed at how different they all appear. I can see at a glance which of my blogs has a calendar on the front page.

read more »

Posted by Toni at 10:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

I added my site to Feedburner tonight, and have an extra couple of promotional images to add to my email signature. Of course you can add the links wherever you like, I like to remind people to check out my various sites.

Posted by Toni at 8:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

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Posted by Toni at 11:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |

The use of WYSIWYG webpage editors and content management systems that have their own converters and cleaners has made the need for knowing these special character codes nearly obsolete. Even if you don't want the code, the character itself is easy to cut and paste. A handy reference.

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Posted by Toni at 10:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) |

How to create a simple html email

1. Open your favorite html editor ie FrontPage, Dreamweaver (you can also use MS Word 97 or 2000 but it tends to bloat the code a little) to create your email.

2. Always use absolute URLS for your graphics (ie http://www.website.com/images/image.gif).

3. Graphics (ie images, icons, fancy fonts) must be stored on a web server to correctly appear in email software - you could save it as an attachment, however most folks will not open the attachment especially (and delete it) if it's from someone they don't know.

If you don't want to use graphics, you can use colored tables for different sections (ie header, masthead, contact information and footers).

1. Name and save the page you have created (ie html-email.htm).

2. Open your Email Software - in outlook express (since it's the most popular) go to create mail - insert - text from file - scroll to your saved html page. You are now ready to send your html email.

3. Email a test to yourself before your send it to your friends and family. You may want to send it to friends who have different email programs so you can be sure everyone can read it on their computers.

4. Once you have created an attractive html page or newsletter, save it as a template. Now you can just open the template whenever you want to send html mail and most of the work will be done for you.

Happy Emailing!!!

Posted by Toni at 10:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |