Aug/093
HTML email with images broken in Windows Live Hotmail and Firefox
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading ...If you’ve ever had to design/build HTML emails for work or fun or whatever, you might have run into a bit of an issue getting your email to display consistently in the multitude of email clients out there. I tend to just test my emails in Gmail, Outlook, Windows Live Hotmail and occasionally Mac Mail.
I used to only test in Windows Live Hotmail using IE as I was resigned to the fact that it never worked properly in Firefox – until now! I finally got hassled into finding a solution for the only issue we had left – a 3 or 4 pixel gap appearing in between all the images.
It turns out the problem is the way the browsers in quirks and standards mode align images to the text baseline – the 3 or 4 pixel gap is there to allow room for the descenders of lowecase letters like “p” and “y” – even if there are no letters in the <td> with the <img> in it.
There are 2 things you can do to resolve the issue – force all the images to be aligned to the bottom of the <td> rather than the default (text baseline):
<img src="something.gif" alt="..." style="vertical-align: bottom;" />Or you can take the issue out of the rendering engines hands and fool it by making all the images block-level rather than inline:
<img src="something.gif" alt="..." style="display: block;" />I prefer the second option, but the first one should work fine too! ;)
Feb/096
Album artwork doesn’t show on iPod touch
If you find that your iPhone/iPod Touch isn’t displaying the album artwork in coverflow, but your computer that you sync it to shows it fine in iTunes, you’re probably wondering what’s going on!
This happened to me a few days ago, so I did some searching – most people seem to think it’s only just started happening in the latest versions of iTunes and on iPhones/iPod Touches with the 2.2 firmware on – I didn’t notice it happening before I upgraded my firmware, but then I only noticed it happening now by chance, so I can’t really say if what these people are saying is true.
Anyway, it’s a solution you came here for, so here goes.
I tried resetting my iPod, incase it was just something dodgy going on on the file system, or another process interfering. No Joy. :(
I’ve tried clearing all my album artwork in iTunes and then finding the images again using a combination of the “Get Album Artwork” feature in the iTunes store and some Amazon.co.uk searches, then syncing the device again. Again, no joy.
Finally, I decided to just delete the offending albums from my iPod and upload them to it again. To do that without losing the albums from your iTunes library, just plug your iPhone/iPod in, start iTunes, click on the device name in the list on the left and tick the box that says “Manually manage music and videos”. That will allow you to browse the library on your device, select the albums in question and delete them. When you’ve done that, untick the box you just ticked, hit OK in whatever dialogue box iTunes pops up and let it sync your device again.
This should copy the songs/albums from your computer’s library back to the device, and hopefully send the album artwork along with them!
Well, that’s what worked for me – if anyone has any better method of restoring artwork on an iPhone/iPod Touch, please leave a comment and let me know what you did!