British Expat Forum

Found some better tutorials and advice. Making use of them, I have finally launched www.dontstoptheworld.com.

Some of the navigation links are still blind - I haven't created the Table of Contents pages, etc., yet. But I have a home page and one article with thumbnail pics. If anyone feels like testing it and giving me feedback, I'd appreciate the input.

Hi Mike

Nice clean layout! In WinXP it looks fine in IE6, screen res 1024x768 (although I've just noticed that the bottoms of your descenders on "I'm enjoying the ride..." don't quite show up).

Firefox 1.0 (same OS, same screen res) has problems, though:

1. The grey masthead doesn't extend down to embrace the whole of your pic - it stops just below "I'm enjoying the ride...". So your pic spills down into the menu column below. (On the plus side, your descenders now appear in full...)

2. Your menu links appear to have been displaced (most likely by the image) so that they now spill over the vertical line and encroach into the main body of the text (which has wrapped to accommodate the menu).

3. In the Swindon article, there's no horizontal spacing around your images, so the text abuts it directly. (There's not a huge amount in IE either, but the pixel or two makes some difference.)

Screen res 800x600, both browsers: You're a bit short on line spacing in the article title. It shows up particularly in Firefox because of the crowding from the menu.

Hope this helps. I'll have a look in Linux some time soon.

Yes, very nice clean layout, Mike.

My only criticism is that having your email address on your site will undoubtedly lead to the address being harvested and you receiving a lot of Spam.

Use a "Contact Me" form. You can pick up free scripts from a number of sources, if you don't want to write your own. We use one which Martin Pickering gave us. If you want it, I'm sure Martin would let you have it too.

Great idea for a site.

Kay

PS: I wrote an article about getting older about five years ago. Crikey! Time flies!
http://www.britishexpat.com/life/older.htm

Alternatively, create a graphic for your e-mail address and obfuscate the address by encoding it.
If you look here, you will see that the actual e-mail address is really a graphic and if you view the source of the page, you won't see the e-mail address even though clicking it will open your e-mail client with the correct address in it.

I find this works very well for avoiding the harvesters. If you need to obfuscate your address, I have a "e-mail address obfuscator" on my web site which will generate it for you.

Alan.

OK, Mike, here's the Linux report:

Firefox - same problems as in WinXP, both resolutions.

Konqueror - same as Firefox. Not that many people use it...

Thanks, everyone. I'll obfuscate the e-mail address pronto.

A friend using Netscape on a Mac also had the problem with centre column overlapping the left margin.

A bit of padding should fix the thumbnails in the Swindon article.

Now I have someWeb searching and experimenting to do to fix the other things. Won't it be wonderful one day when all browsers implement the CS spec correctly

Thanks for the obfuscator - do none of the harvesters try parsing the escape sequences? Probably not worth the effort - move on and steal the radio from the car without an alarm...


Note to anyone else who uses this trick: you must leave the obfuscated link in one line. Tidying up your source with line breaks will truncate the mailto address at the first break.

Oho! Now that's clever. I expect that most users will prefer it too. No one really likes filling in forms, do they?

I went through the process of yours and would never have been any the wiser if you hadn't already said.

This is really useful, thank you.

Nice trick, Alan. No doubt some spammers will eventually get wise to it, but that's always the way - once someone creates a code, cypher or encryption method, it's only a matter of time... and, as someone's already pointed out (I think it was Alan-Cheam, elsewhere) the vast majority of spammers are going to pick the low-hanging fruit.

Hi Folks.
My first post here On my site I have contact details so old pals from our small area in Scotland can get in touch with each other initially through me. I use an alias email such as mailforwarder04 at my domain. I've been changing this annually - only takes a few minutes to abandon the old and instigate the new. Any spam that does come only comes to me. Guest books are a different thing - lambs to the slaughter and something I'll have to look at.

Hughie ~ www.threetowners.com

Hi Hughie

Welcome to BE. Nice site you have there. I was just having a quick look at your contact list. It's amazing how many people have left the threee towns to go and live in Canada or Australia. Can't say I blame them, same for me - Scottish living in Thailand. But it makes me wonder if there is anyone left there?

Kay

Yes, the old country is still home but I know where I'd rather be. Looking forward to contributing every now and then to BE.
Regards Hughie

Alan and the Mac users, could you spare a moment to check out this page?

http://www.dontstoptheworld.com/thepast/dentdale.htm

In IE6, the borders of the central column have breaks in them, apparently triggered by the 'float:clear' used in the second and fourth thumbnail images.

Hi Mike,
http://savannahsoftware.com/Mike1.png
http://savannahsoftware.com/Mike2.png

These are what it looks like in Mozilla Firefox in Fedora Core 3 (Linux)

Alan.

Oh, dear... I'd better download Firefox and play around. Maybe the hacks to fix IE bugs are causing trouble. Thanks, Alan.