Blogger posters often have problems with huge spaces at the tops of tables. There seem to be three main solutions.

1. The easiest solution is to change your formatting settings under "Convert line breaks" to "No" (the default is "Yes"). This will fix the table but will completely annihalate other posts because everything in a post will now effectively be in one continuous line without line breaks. Tables will look peachy but you will have to apply div styles to every post without a table.
   
2. Another solution is to create tables in Notepad and paste the into Blogger posts. Whatever you do, if you want to use this method, do NOT create the table in Word or even in Blogger because both applications include a lot of problematic formatting. This also works but is cumbersome and really unpleasant to edit because you have to go back to the original in order to be sure not one single Blogger code slips in.
   
3. The third solution was provided by the wonderful Malaysian blogger Peter Chen (a/k/a/ Blogstar) and modified by FamilyNutritionist in a comment (bless him!). Here are the steps:
   
   (a) paste or type these two lines at the end of your css style codes (you may have to experiment with ideal placcement but I find it works best at the end):
   
   . nobrtable br { display: none } (do not add spaces after the periods)
   . nobrtable p { margin: 0px; } (do not add spaces after the periods)
   In blogger posts, table formatting doesn't mirror post/text formatting and therefore it may be good to add font size and line spacing to either or both of these, too, such as
   . nobrtable p { margin: 0px; font: 8.5pt/1.4 Verdana; }
   
   (b) at the start of your table, type or paste this line:
   
   < class="nobrtable"> (without spaces)
   
   (c) if you want a new line in a column without having to make a new row or column, press enter and at the start of each line, type:
   
   < "p" > (without spaces or quotation marks)
   
   (d) at the end of your post, type:
   
   < /table class > and < /div > (without spaces except between table and class)

If you have any problems with any of this, as I do if my table has dozens of lines, add this at the start of the post too, even though it's already in the css code. Sometimes redundancy works, right?!

< type="text/css">.nobrtable br { display: none } < /style > (without spaces at brackets)
< class="nobrtable"> (without spaces)

Labels: blogs (mine), web design

I have no personal use for a kennel in northern New Jersey, having neither a dog nor a residence anywhere near there, but Highland Kennels is apparently one of Color Addict's web clients. It's a nice website - informative and fun to look around. A kick just to look at the pictures. If I had a dog and lived in the area and wanted to let my dog go to a playgroup, I'd definitely go there.

Labels: blogs (others'), web design, websites

The blogs listed here in the lefthand column are ungettable-to today because of an I.E. abort error that started last night and altogether prevents reading. A clue is a long long pause when you click on the url.

These blogs are getting the I.E. abort error. Do they use Site Meter? If so, Site Meter might be the problem. Barb the Evil Genius Dadvocate Dustbury Music and Cats Penniless in Paris Semicolon Small World Reads Texas Scribbler Wide Awake Café

These blogs are not getting the I.E. abort error. Do they use Site Meter? If so, Site Meter isn't the problem. Color Addict I am a Cheeseburger Laura's Musing Present Simple Regular Life Seablogger Spiced Sass

Apparently Seablogger was advised that Site Meter was causing the problem so Alan removed S.M. and his blog works fine now. But since everyone was fine yesterday (which I know personally because I did in fact visit) it's puzzling what happened. Why would S.M. suddenly be incompatible with sites that used it all along. Did Site Meter or I.E. change something on August 1st? I can't switch to Firefox since I've had major security problems with Firefox but I also want to be able to read my faves.

Update: Site Meter has apparently fixed their update so it plays nice with I.E.7 again. Whew.

Labels: blogs (others'), web design

This is the closest it's going to be for a while to balancing (a) something I can stand looking at all the time, (b) appears [nearly] the same in I.E. and in Firefox (don't know about Mac yet), and (c) is a bit snappy. If anyone has any serious objections or thoughts or comments, please let me know.

Labels: blogs (mine), web design

Well, I'm getting the design a bit streamlined and cleaner. At least it doesn't annoy me just to look at it, which is progress. I'm afraid it still doesn't render right – or the same, for that matter – in Firefox, which annoys me no end but at least it's not all over the place. I wish I knew the tricks but no matter what I try it doesn't display the same or right in both browsers. I guess that's why web designers get the big bucks.

Labels: web design

Among other issues for me at the moment is that I love my previous design but it was unreadable on Firefox and on Macs, and the world is now filled with people who use many different browsers and at least two different platforms. Since I blog in part because I want feedback and reactions (I'd keep a journal otherwise, if I did anything at all), it defeats my purpose if this is viewable solely in I.E. So I redesigned a bit, pushed here, tweaked there. Do you like it? I almost do but there's something that needs something and I don't quite know what it is. If any rare readers want to make suggestions- while remaining kind, of course - I would appreciate it. I'm looking for something a bit less strictured that the usual boxy lines of most blogs and this isn't quite there, though it's pleasant enough.

Labels: blogs (mine), web design

If you use Firefox, please accept my apologies for the weird display. Several weeks ago, I'd worked it out so the display was fine in both browsers but now, only in Firefox, not I.E.7, the first title and date appear but everything else drops down to begin below the sidebar and spread out across the whole screen. All the div and /div codes seem right so maybe it's something else. Any suggestions will be very much appreciated. In the meantime, I need to check and doublecheck, and don't have time right now unfortunately. I don't use Firefox as my default because it's wildly less secure for me (every time I've used it even for a few moments, I've gotten third-party invasions). But I know lots of people use it so I want to accommodate them too. So bear with me....

Labels: blogs (mine), web design

I fiddled a bit and now the banner and sidebar are readable in both browsers although they don't look identical. One hears moaning and groaning about I.E. from various people but my own issue usually is simply that something looks peachy in I.E. and cramped or differently positioned in Firefox. Anyway, for now they're both readable, at least. This time, just for variety, the Firefox display is closer to what I want.

Labels: blogs (mine), web design

Two cool things about me me me. One is that, inexplicably, my level has risen to "adorable little rodent" in the Truth Laid Bear categorization hierarchy. There's been no marked increase in readers nor any other obvious change that I can identify, but it's fun to zoom up the ladder even if only for a short while. The other is that I finally have figured out how to lay out this page so things don't overlap wildly when it's reduced or expanded within reasonable limits. Maybe after three years I've finally learned something constructive (heh) about page design.

Labels: about me, blogs (mine), web design

I almost didn't notice and therefore failed to remark on the fact that September 4th was just muttering's 3rd blogiversary. All those hours spent designing and redesigning, reading about html, fretting about crashing browsers, writing sometimes amusing and sometimes boring stuff. It all began in San Francisco in the fall of 2004, while visiting one of t2cgitw shortly after her birth, when I asked an apparently innocent question of my s-i-l. "What," I said, "is a blog, anyway?" He smiled, reached for his laptop, opened I.E., went to blogger.com, fiddled around for a couple of minutes, and said, "There, you have a blog." The rest, as they tritely but accurately say, is history.

Labels: blogs (mine), web design

I'm liking simply and cleanly designed blogs more and more, so I've pared down my design a bit. Everything is still here - just organized along one side instead of two. There are links to subject matters under "site menu" but blog readers are smart and this isn't rocket science so I figure anyone can find what they want. I suppose a tag line about what's here would be more in order now, though. I'll ponder that one.

Labels: blogs (mine), web design

It's been ages - well, three months - since I did a Thursday bloghop. I'm really bad about anything I set myself to do every day or regularly, in any case. Good thing I like to eat.

1. Started at Wide Awake Café, one of my favorite daily stops. The last couple of days Laura's written eloquently and with great feeling about the General Petreaus testimony and reaction (here and here). She's always terrifically articulate, about everything but her impassioned and compassionate writings about being a military commander are really exceptional. She covers a wide range of subjects from her own art to her classroom work to her family to traveling to cultural observations to politics. Never a dull moment and always very worthwhile reading.

2. Red Sugar Muse is tidy and attractive. It seems more buttoned-up than it turns out to be once you start reading. Unfortunately there is no "about" or similar way to find out who this interesting Tanya person is, but she uses words to awfully good advantage and makes me laugh while I'm finding out what she thinks about things. I particularly recommend her 9/11 post, although you should be warned that it's not all sweetness and light. I also recommend this post on a man who keeps finding dead bodies (well, that's not really what it's about) and a couple of other things. I'm interested to see that among her high selective list of links is one of my daughter's favorites, Dooce, to which I clearly need to give more attention. As for Red Sugar, I'll definitely be back.

3. Couldn't resist the name: One Sentence, and the intriguing idea: one-sentence "stories". The blog discusses stuff about the stories so they kind of go together. One of the ones I like a lot (and have said in real life, as a matter of fact) is this one: "I told my three year old son that he was putting his shoes on the wrong feet and he responded that they were the only feet that he had." Yeah, okay, that's not a story with any kind of beginning middle or end, but the rules are just that they have to be true and they have to be fun to read. I suppose it's an extreme version of extremely short stories, right? I have to say, too, that I see that One Sentence also talks about Dooce, she of my daughter's and Red Sugar's appreciation. Is there something going on here?

4. One Sentence doesn't explicitly have links but it mentions people who have mentioned it, and I found one I particularly enjoyed, CTV.ca, so there it is. It's a bit of this and a bit of that about technology and tv, with a Canadian slant (.ca) but no limitation on wit or excitement about the gadgets and things. He mentions an "exhibit" on the Nikon Japanese website, for example, of master Origami paper work, and it's phenomenal.

So many websites, so many blogs, so many things to see and read and write about. . . .

Labels: blogs (others'), web design, writing

Since I'm very willing to whine about Blogger when things go wrong, I should mention that the problems I was having the other day are fixed. One of my CRRs* would like me to switch because of the difficulties non-Blogger bloggers have when they want to make comments. It may happen one day.

Labels: blogs (mine), web design

Something's going on. Technorati doesn't display any posts. The comments and/or the script that displays them hangs up the page. This has been going on for the last hour or so. It finally occurred to me to troubleshoot by disabling possible culprits but what the heck is that about and who's responsible and can I whack them upside the head? (P.S. 4:35 and all's well.)

Labels: blogs (mine), web design

Everything has run fairly smoothlyat Blogger for a while, until that momentous day recently when they added a "save your drafts automatically" feature. Ever since, there've been various spates of sticky wickets and several episodes of not saving at all, not only here at JMBM but at seeral other blogs. You hit "save" and sit there. Or you hit "refresh" and nothing happens. I really hope we're not heading into another patch of unreliability.

Labels: blogs (mine), web design

Shoot me now. First, blogger went kerfluwe and then I couldn't satisfactorily recover the backup I'd done and then I started getting antsy . . . and this is what happened. Forgive and forget is all I can say. And/or make me stop trying for the perfect mix of sophisticated, easy-to-read, cool, colorful, and generally fantastic template.

Labels: blogs (mine), web design

A bit more fiddling with the "look" of this. I can't help it. I think it might be a congenital illness. Anyway, I wanted a bit more simplicity. Less is more, right? It's tough to get lots of white space when you also want to include billions of interesting links.

Labels: blogs (mine), web design

For two entire days, I've been unable to access this blog - and presumably any rare readers were also unable to. I've had a ubiquitous "bx-" error message whenever I tried to open or view or save or . . . anything. Words cannot adequately express how frustrating it's been. I sent in a report at Blogger itself and posted at Google's Blogger Help Group. As did several other people saying similar things, although we each had different suffixes. It's astonishing how hoity-toity some responders are, too. Why offer help if it annoys you, one cannot help wondering!? Anyway, after reading and posting and reading and posting, I learned a couple of things. One is that the "Blogger help group" is not run nor staffed nor necessarily even looked at by anyone from Blogger. Several of us have reported the problem via blogger, internally, as well as on BHG but there has been no response. This happened about two years ago, too, when everything disappeared. I hadn't done much yet, however, so I just started over. Now there are nearly a thousand posts and it would be sad to lose them all. Sure, I have a RSS back-up but it wouldn't be practical to repost each one. I guess one must conclude that Blogger is uninterested in assisting people when semi catastrophes strike.

Bottom line is two-fold. I searched high and wide and found this awesome template that works very nicely but not (at least not yet) with the new layouts, so I'm in so-called classic template mode. Over the weekend I'll see if I can get tweak it enough to widget-ize. Fold two is that I will now investigate other hosts and see what's out there that I might be comfortable with. One person at Blogger Help told me to bite the bullet and look at blogging like shopping at K-Mart insofar as one is one's own customer service. First of all, K-Mart and WalMart and Target stores cater to masses of people but *do* care about their customers and have always been superbly helpful whenever I've been there. And I really do appreciate the service that Blogger offers, enormously, but customer-service callousness is unacceptable, especially on this scale. If you don't want to put energy and money into supporting something, why do it at all?

Labels: blogs (mine), web design

Again there is a problem, as witness the hundreds of messages at the Google help group about people like me who can't access their front page because of those heinous bx- error messages. Evidently I can write posts but I cannot view them nor access my blog. Doesn't it seem that there have been an extraordinary number of problems in the last 4-6 months, far far more than before that?

Labels: blogs (mine), web design

You know how they recommend that you test things in a test blog? Well, let this be a lesson to you. I figured I'd mastered things by now and didn't need to do that. Ha. And I can't do much work on this right now. My blogging - not to mention my readership - will plummet the next few days, logically enough. Sorry, all. (Update. Was able to grab a little time and did some remedial work so at least what's here is readable - I think. I'm considering being a little less design-y now, partly for readability's sake, but we'll see how long I can stick with that idea.)

Labels: blogs (mine), web design