WordPress replacing HTML tags, a workaround
With some of my posts I really need to struggle to get it to look just they way I want it to look. More often then not this is caused by the engine behind WordPress removing certain pieces of information from HTML tags.
I have put together the following list providing the types of tags that were giving me headaches and the solutions I have been able to find for them.
Hopefully other can benefit from my findings.
Using BR-tags
<img src="whatever.jpg" style="float: left"/>
If I want to make sure the image does not overlaps the end of the post or moves into the paragraph following the image I would insert the following
<br style="clear: both" />
However as soon as you save the post the above BR-tag gets replaced with a regular BR-tag and breaks the layout of the post.
Instead of insert the BR-tag you can insert the following piece of HTML code, which produces the same result, but does not get replaced or removed by WordPress.
<div style="clear: both;"><!-- --></div>
Using TH-tags
So instead of using TH-tag
<th style="text-align: left"> .... </th>
Just use a regular TD-tag to build your table headings and apply the wanted format to those elements, like so
<td style="text-align: left; font-weight: bold;"> .... </td>
After playing around with different themes it seems not only to be related to WordPress, but also the theme that you are using. Just so you know. When you change from one theme to the other, you might want to revisit some of your earlier posts to see if things are still looking correct.
Add news feeds to NewsGator from Firefox the easy way
When I am working on my Mac it is easy to add new news feeds to NewsGator since I have NewNewsWire installed, but when I am not working on my Mac, for instance when I am at my work doing some research I would still be able to add news feeds I come across to my NewsGator account.
I know that NewsGator provides toolbars for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, but I do not like to install additional pieces of software just to add a news feed. Also when I am working at clients using their hardware mist of the time you will not be able to install software anyway.
Firefox itself has support for adding news feed to some online services (Bloglines, My Yahoo and Google) as well as Firefox’s own bookmarking system (local to the browser itself).
Although Firefox by default has only three services defined, there is room for a total of six services (0 through 5). The settings for these services can be found within the ‘about:config’-page of Firefox. Staring from version 3 of Firefox when you try to open the ‘about:config’-page, Firefox warns you about the damage you could do to Firefox by changing settings using this page. So you have to confirm that you will play nice with Firefox by clicking on the button “I’ll be careful, I promise!”.
On the ‘about:config’-page type the string ‘browser.contentHandlers’ into the Filter-field, this will make sure only the relevant settings are displayed.
The settings for a unused entry (most likely this will be the one numbered 3) are
| Preference Name | Status | Type | Value |
| browser.contentHandlers.types.3.title | default | string | chrome://browser-region/locale/region.properties |
| browser.contentHandlers.types.3.type | default | string | application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed |
| browser.contentHandlers.types.3.uri | default | string | chrome://browser-region/locale/region.properties |
To add NewsGator as a content handler for news feeds we will change the settings for the first available unused entry
| Preference Name | Status | Type | Value |
| browser.contentHandlers.types.3.title | user set | string | NewsGator |
| browser.contentHandlers.types.3.type | default | string | application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed |
| browser.contentHandlers.types.3.uri | user set | string | http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/subext.aspx?url=%s |
Now it is time to restart Firefox to let these changes take effect.
From now on every time you click on a RSS feed, Firefox will give you the possibility to add the news feed to your NewsGator account.
Keeping my digital life in-sync
In the wake of my new iPhone I am working on making the efforts needed to keep information synced between the several devices I am using easier. Currently I am using at least 4 devices, being;
- an iPod, soon to be replaced with an iPhone depending on the speed of both Apple and T-Mobile
- an iMac
- a MacBook Pro
- a regular laptop running the Windows OS for work
The information I am currently most concerned about keeping in sync are;
- Contact information
- Calendar information
- Bookmarks
- News feeds
Contact and Calendar information
This one I have solved by buying myself a MobileMe subscription from Apple. Despite all of the negative responses revolving around the Push not being a real push and numerous outages around the world, I find myself among the lucky ones. So far I have no real issues when using MobileMe. I had however some issues with the iPod Touch initially, it would sync over the complete calendar down to the iPod regardless of what settings I was using. After some fiddling with the settings I found what was working for me
- Set the iPod Touch up for manually syncing
- Turn ‘Fetch New Data’ to off
- Fetch mode to ‘Manually’
- Open the Calendar application and wait for it to (first clear and then) receive all of your data
- Set the iPod Touch up for Push
- Turn ‘Fetch New Data’ to On
- Fetch mode to ‘Every 15 minutes’
Bookmarks
Since I mainly use Firefox for my internet browsing, keeping my bookmarks in-sync could be easily achieved by using the brilliant addon named Foxmarks (see also one of my earlier posts). The only downside is that Firefox is not running on the iPod Touch or iPhone. This means that I don’t have direct access to my bookmarks when I am on the road. I could be using Foxmarks website to access my bookmarks, but I would much rather have a way of syncing my Firefox bookmarks into Safari.
This is something I still need to figure out.
News feeds
For getting the latest news from several web sites around the world I have been using NewsFire on my Mac OS X based machines. This has always worked fine for me, but since the introduction of the new software version for both the iPod Touch and iPhone combined with the introduction of the iTunes App Store a whole new world of abilities has been opened for these two devices (unless you had jail broken your device, then you had access to third-party apps for quite some time already).
On the iTunes App Store I found the application NetNewsWire (the link will take you to the iTunes App Store), which is a RSS news feed reader. I already knew this application as a regular Mac OS X application, but I had never really looked at it since I liked NewsFire and was not looking for a replacement for it.
With the possibility of running NetNewsWire on the iPod Touch this has totally changed. So yesterday NetNewsWire has replaced NewsFire on both my Macs and has been installed on my iPod Touch.
The synching of the RSS feeds is handled by using the services of NewsGator. Just sign up for a free account and your are pretty much set.
NewsGator also provides toolbar applications for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, but since these are provided as a downloadable executable, these are unusable on a Mac. I have found another way which allows you to add news feeds to your NewsGator account without the need of an addon or applications. I will describe this in a separate post.
Blizzard Authenticator Available
The Blizzard Authenticator is now again available in the Blizzard Store after begin ‘Sold out’ for over two weeks.
I have just finished placing my order for it. Now let’s see how long it will take to be delivered…..
Hmm, last step of the ordering process does not go through. ‘There has been an error processing your request’, yeah right, not really helpful. Tried other payment method, same issue.
So it looks like it that I will have to wait a little bit longer for this authenticator….. :(
iPhone 16GB
After some fighting with myself I decided to go for it. Wow, I managed to delay my urge to order it for a full 4 days, partially achieved by being out of the country since Friday but still, I resisted the urge to line-up at midnight.
So far for trying to make me feel a bit better of chunking out a decent amount of cash to satisfy my need to new technologies.
Since T-Mobile is currently out of stock on iPhone 3Gs it could take up to 6 weeks before I can hold that little gem in my hands. So for now I have update my iPod Touch to firmware version 2.0 so I can enjoy the new applications, already found some nice ones that are now on my list to be tested as soon I get my iPhone.
Fixing UberInventory
Spent a lot of time trying out several things to resolve the earlier mentioned issue I encountered when the InfoPanel Addon was installed.
The image on the left show to incorrect tooltip, the one on the right displays the correct version of the tooltip.
I finally ’solved’ this issue by adding the following code after the real code that adds all the wanted information to the tooltip and just before calling GameTooltip:Show()
local line = getglobal( GameTooltip:GetName().."TextRight"..GameTooltip:NumLines() );
line:SetWidth( line:GetStringWidth()+16 );
line:SetHeight( 12 );
line:SetJustifyH( "RIGHT" );
I haven’t released a new version of UberInventory yet on Curse.com, first need to do a bit more testing to see if this really resolves the issue. But so far it appears to be working
Internet Explorer 6 on Windows ME…
Last weekend I tried to update Internet Explorer from version 5.5 to version 6 on my dads Windows ME machine.
I am always anxious when installing something new or updated on his machine. This time did not disappoint me, it failed. I would just like to upgrade the machine hardware and OS to something more recent, but with all the special hardware and software installed on it for his visual handicap, I am not that eager to take on that project. Most of the time I am out of the country for work, so if anything would need a bit more time it would take weeks to finish. My dad, due to his handicap, relies on his PC to read news, books and stay in touch with friends and family.
The installer gave the very unhelpful message ‘Set up was unable to install all the components’, the helpful message would have been something along the lines of ‘Set up was unable to install the following components X, Y, Z because we suck at creating proper installation routines and we Microsoft still don’t understand Windows good enough to make it work properly’. That would have made much more sense…
Today I did a bit of searching on this issue, because it always nags at me when these kind of things just don’t work the way they should. It appears we were not the only one hitting this issue.
From the posts I found some people suggest to download the full installation of Internet Explorer 6 including Service Pack 1 (ie60sp1.exe) instead of only the downloading-installer (ie6setup.exe). Sadly enough from the Microsoft download site only the downloading-installer can be downloaded. Using Google I was able to find a number of sites where it could be downloaded, but I don’t trust the kind of sites I was redirected to. Normally the site Oldversions.com is the solution, but I could only find Internet Explorer 6.0 without the Service Pack. So I might download a version from one of those sites anyway and then first try the installation within a Virtual Machine to see it is a proper install kit or something more devious.
Microsoft’s Knowledge base has some articles related to the message ‘Set up was unable to install all the components’;
1. Err Msg: Setup Was Unable to Install All the Components
2. Error Message: Setup Was Unable to Install All the Components
If all goes well I can install it on my dads machine in two weeks time, since coming weekend my girlfriend and I are going to Paris. Hopefully the weather changes for the better, the way it looks now we are in for 4 days of rain…
To be continued….
Updated to BagTips and MailTips
Yesterday or better said early this morning I have updated two of my World of Warcraft Addons, BagTips and MailTips.
I had installed the Addon InfoPanel and from that moment one the tooltips displayed by both BagTips and MailTips did not like right anymore. The names of the items from either a bag or a mail message was displayed using two lines within the tooltip instead of just one. After a bit of searching I found that InfoPanel uses the pipeline character in some displayed text (plugins RaidInfo and Zone).
InfoPanel_SetText(f, "%.1f |cffffff00|||r %.1f", x * 100, y * 100);
Somehow this has an influence of information added to tooltips and fontstrings that use the texture tag to add images to textstring
tooltip:AddDoubleLine( " |T"..value.texture..":0|t "..key, value.count, r, g, b );
It appears that when you are using the method and using the code InfoPanel uses the actual width for the fontstring is not calculated correctly. To quickly workaround this I just add two spaces after the item name like so
tooltip:AddDoubleLine( " |T"..value.texture..":0|t "..key.." ", value.count, r, g, b );
and everything works again as expected.
Now I only need to fix UberInventory, because it has similar issues. Hopefully I can get those issues resolved today as well.
Firefox Addons
Ever since the release of Firefox 3 I seem to a rekindled interest into the Firefox Add-ons out there. Currently I have a total of 10 Addons installed. Here is a quick run down of all of ones I got installed.
This one tries to block adverts from being displayed. Based on filter it decides whether or not a certain image or plugin is considered an adverts and if so it hides (or removes) the element from the page. So you never have to search between the adverts to find the content you wanted to read.
This one I really like. Form my daytime job I need to build web sites from time to time. But not that often that I consider myself to be an expert. This addon got tons of goodies that will help you view the layout of your site, validate your (x)HTML code, switch between style sheets and much, much more.
Just a few days ago I used it to finally make some of my web pages pass the XHTML 1.0 strict test. Of course I could have done it without using the addon, but it surely helped me getting the issues resolved much quicker, than I could have done manually.
To be honest I haven’t used this addon a lot yet, but it looks very promising. What I have seen so far looks nice. Definitely the inspect window is very powerful, on the left you see the structure of your web page and on the right it displays the related style sheet information. Within the style sheet you can see what gets inherited from other parts and gets ignored or has an override.
Combined with Web Developer Firefox becomes a very fully featured development environment for HTML designing/coding.
Just a little neat addon show a country flag for the sites you visit. Very funny to see, certainly when visiting web sites from larger companies, where all of there data centers are located, just as an example
www.oracle.com Finland
forums.oracle.com United States
otn.oracle.com Finland
blogs.oracle.com Singapore
Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer
This one I really love. For my work I travel from customer to customer. Depending on the customer I can either use my company laptop or I need to work on a machine the customer provides me. This is all fine, but every time it is a pain to the bookmarks I need to do my job. Previously I just copied the bookmarks.html file to an USB stick or mailed it to myself. But more often than not I forget to copy or mail the latest version of my bookmarks.
With this addon I can always access my bookmarks. You just add/remove bookmarks within Firefox, press a key and they get synchronized to the server. From another PC you do the same and everything gets nicely synchronized. I have been using it for about a week now and I already find myself
You need to signup for this service to make it work or move it to a private server.
Remove sections from web pages. Useful when you want to print a web page has not implemented a style sheet for printing the page. Using the addon you can remove to side banners and all the other clutter that really does not need to get printed.
ScribeFire is a blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. See also on of my earlier posts on ScribeFire.
Used ScribeFire again to post the blog message ;)
StumbleUpon discovers web sites based on your interests, learns what you like and brings you more. Just as Foxmarks you need to sign up for a service to be able to use it. So far I like it, this has brought me to some really nice pages that I would never have visited. I find myself pressing the ‘Stumble!’ button constantly, just wondering what comes next. It is just like an addiction, you know you need to do other stuff but just can’t wait to see what gem might be lurking around the corner.
Not only does TwitterFox notify you of updates to your friends’ statuses of Twitter, but it also allows to you make posts to Twitter, reply to posts. I am just to lazy to visit all of the individual Twitter pages, now the updates popup when the addon checks for them.
Fake your User Agent. Comes in handy when for instance a certain web site only will show a page when it detects Internet Explorer. Just select ‘Internet Explorer’ from the ‘User Agent Switcher’ menu and revisit the site. None the wiser :).
This addon generates errors within the Error Console of Firefox, but it seems to work regardless.
Blizzard Authenticator
A couple of days before the Blizzard Invitational in Paris, Blizzard announced the Blizzard Authenticator.
It looks like a key chain and spits out a new 6 digit number every time you press the little button it. Very similar to the access keys banks are using for the online customers for security.
Ever since it has been added to the Blizzard Store the authenticator is marked as “Sold out”. So I am anxiously watching this items, well I have Follow That Page keeping a watch on it, no need to do it manually :).
Although I keep my account information safe it never hurts to add that extra layer of security and with
the price tag of only € 6.00 (or £ 4.80) it is well worth it.
Now if they only would restock it…..
Social Networking
Wakoopa
