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! ;)
Aug/090
Eye creams: take your time, do some research and get it right!
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...This is a sponsored post:
I’ve been working with computers since I started university in 2001, and since then my eyesight has gradually been deteriorating! :( I don’t wear glasses or lenses, even though I probably should, and the reason is that I just don’t want to be burdened with them.
I can still see quite well even if I have to squint every now and then, but as soon as I get my eyes tested and have to start wearing specs, I’ll have no chance of being able to do stuff I take for granted at the min, like waking up at the weekend and grab a book to read.
Anyway, a friend of mine recommended me some zinc based cream he’d used on his eyes to keep them fresh, but it turned out I was allergic to it and ended up with a horrible rash on my face! :(
I read a bunch of Eye Cream Reviews and found a people talking about a different cream with an Aloe Vera base that really helped clear my eyes up and make me feel more fresh and awake! The website has loads of input and comments from real people on it. To make things easy, it also links to the places you can get all the creams it talks about! :)
If you’re struggling with your eyes, it’s important to do some research and choose the right product – reading other people’s reviews and seeing their results is probably the best way to find the product you need – I just wish I’d done some research from the beginning – the useful reviews I found on that site would have made things much easier for me!
Jul/095
Wordpress 2.8 automatic upgrade fails
(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5) Loading ...I’ve been trying to update my wordpress blogs from various versions like 2.5 and 2.7 to the newest 2.8 for a while now, but was never able to do it automatically.
Every time I pressed the “upgrade automatically” button, it told me it was downloading the latest file from Wordpress, but it never got any further than that. I logged in to my site using my FTP client and found a 0KB sized file called wordpress2.8.zip in the wp_content folder, so I thought I’d found the issue – maybe the script can’t actually download the file and save it to disk because of permissions. I chmodded the file and then the folder to allow write access, but no joy.
Of course, I could have just downloaded the latest install from wordpress and done a manual upgrade, but there’s about 8 million files in the zip file and I didn’t want to have to upload that to 5 different sites! ;)
After a bit of research, it turns out that the problem is that the auto-upgrade script requires PHP5 to run, and as my sites are hosted on 1and1 servers which default to php4, the script was failing!
So if you’re having the same issue, all you need to do is make sure your wordpress is running on PHP5 instead of 4! If you’re on a shared server and you can’t change the server’s config, you can still tell apache to run your scripts as PHP5 rather than 4 by adding the following line to your .htaccess:
AddType x-mapp-php5 .phpAll that does is tells apache to to parse all .php files with the PHP5 parser rather than whatever the server’s default is! So just throw that in the .htaccess you find in the root of your site – put it just after the “# END WordPress” line – save it, upload it and try doing the upgrade again – it worked first time for me! :)
If you’re still having trouble after that, or you’ve got a different solution, please post a comment here and let others know!
Sep/080
Creating Transparent favicon in Photoshop
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...I’ve found a handy little plugin for Photoshop that lets you save files out in the .ICO format – handy for making favicons for your website!
http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/
Download the “ICO (Windows Icon) Format” in Mac or Windows format, unzip and copy the “ICOFormat.8bi” file into your “File Formats” plugin folder located in “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS3\Plug-Ins\File Formats”. If you have Photoshop open, save your work, close it and start it again.
You should now see “ICO (Windows icon) (*.ICO)” in the “Format” menu when you try to save a file.
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!