owatagal

Check out this link: h*tp://alistapart.com/articles/fauxcolumns/ I think this is the basic thing you need done--an image that will tile down as far as your text needs to stretch; you'll just have one column, not two. You won't need to add any extra table cells; it should fit in nicely with your current design. If it looks like something that could work for you but you aren't quite sure how to add it in, PM me and I can walk you through it.

I think frames, like table-based layouts, are a stage designers go through--they're easy to use and they will get the job done. But the best designers I know abandon them for various server-side includes and pure CSS design. Which is not to say that frames and table layouts are useless--there are times when they can be useful or are the best option--but 90% of the time I find them inelegant, clunky, and a less than ideal solution to the problem they're 'fixing'. But I am a CSS junkie. I probably have a button somewhere and everything.

TCH-Andy's comment on blank lines rings a bell with me too -- did you already check and make sure that wasn't the problem? When you added $headers to the mail line, did you ever define what $headers should be? If you just added "$headers" to the mail line, it won't have a value and so it wouldn't have fixed the problem. Try adding $headers = "From: you@yourdomain.ext"; above the mail line and see if that helps.

Have you or your client changed anything on the site--file permissions or .htaccess or anything like that? Also, if the PHP version was updated recently on your server, that might have affected something in your script. Without seeing your code, it's hard to tell what's going on. Is it short enough to post?

One way to simplify the control of who adds credits would be to hard-code a password into your processing page. Then on the HTML page where you view credits and add them in, include a form space to enter the password as well; this would keep your daughter from adding credits at whim but would not add an extra login process for you--you just have to remember the password. On the html page, it's as simple as adding the following to the form that lets you update the credit amount: <input type="password" name="secret" /> On the processing page, you'd just have to wrap the code in: >$secret = (isset($_POST['secret'])) ? $_POST['secret'] : ''; if ($secret == 'password_you_choose') { /// code to add new row to the database } That doesn't help with the actual database stuff, I know (I wish I had time to help there, too), but it is a simple way to control who adds the credits in. [if you use GET instead of POST on your form, change the _POST above to _GET.]

Or if you really are just shunting traffic from one site to the next: >RewriteRule /.* http://mynewdomain.com/ [R=301,L]

I'm a little uncertain what you're trying to achieve. Do you want all the other pages/extensions to keep their old address but show the pages from the new site? Then why not just park those domains over the new one? That seems the simplist way. But if you want everything to show the address of the new site, so that www.oldsite.com/xyz.html will show www.newsite.com/xyz.html in the status bar, try this: >RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.oldsite\.com$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^oldsite\.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newsite.com/$1 [R=301,L] This won't mask the new URL--people will see they've been directed to it. But it should let someone who is trying to access a specific page on the old address find it on the new site. If you want the old URL to stay in the status bar, parking the domain seems like the easiest and least complicated solution.

You would need a database and some PHP/MySQL knowledge (or a program built on them). If you know PHP, it sounds like a pretty straightforward thing to set up. The email responder wouldn't be a problem. If you don't know PHP, you could always adapt existing software--a forum would work, a blog might work, a content management system like Drupal would work but would be a little overkill (although you could use it to control all your site content). The forum would probably be the easiest to adapt for your purposes, although you might have to look around for one that will send email responders. I couldn't tell you how all this would work with Front Page, though--I haven't used that program in ages.

I get a lot of my hints/tips/tricks from reading blogs by big designers--Zeldman, Meyer, Dunstan, PhotoMatt. They usually point to good resources, and I file the best of those away for later use. Then when that problem crops up for me, I have a solution waiting. Every couple of months I check the major PHP developer forums too, but usually I have something specific in mind when I do. The other forums I frequent are writing-related, not so much into technical aspects.

I'm just trying to check the logic of this idea, before I have to sit down and dump it in a much more complicated form. Say I have a set of data associated with links, and this data gets saved into a link table in my database. To edit the data, I have a form that pulls the information out of the database and outputs it something like this: ><input type="hidden" name="url_id" value="1" /> <input type="text" name="category" value="homepage" /> <input type="text" name="url" value="homepage.com" /> <input type="text" name="linktext" value="Home Page" /> Updating a single link isn't a problem. But what if I have a variable number of links, tied to an author ID? The author ID is defined elsewhere on the form, and doesn't play into this except that for one author I might need to update six links and for another eight--so the number of links will change constantly. Can I turn "hidden" and "text" fields into arrays like I would use radio buttons or check boxes? So the code would look like this: ><input type="hidden" name="url_id[]" value="1" /> ... etc And then on the results page, I should just have to count up the number of items in one of the arrays (say url_id[]) and then use a loop like: >for ($a=0; $a<$count; $a++) { update database, setting category=$category[$a], url=$url[$a], linktext=$linktext[$a] where url_id = $url_id[$a] } I know that's not valid PHP/MySQL, but is the logic right? It wouldn't matter how many sets of link data I have, because each element would be its own array. But will the data be stored in the correct order? When it gets to $a=7, will the seventh value in each array all correspond to the seventh link? Everything else I've tried isn't working, and I'm tired of testing broken code. If anyone can confirm the logic of this looks good, at least I'll know that, *in theory*, I have a workable model. It'll make error-fixing more tolerable... [i'm not the least bit frustrated... not me. No way.]

I don't think Internet Explorer can render transparency in PNG files; I think they end up as solid colors. I could be wrong, but you might want to check.

Users can override Google's "local" setting. I'm in the UK but it now feeds me google.com when I ask for it--I think after the initial IP check it uses cookies to track user preferences, but I wouldn't swear to that. I do know that every once in a while it reverts to .co.uk, but I haven't really tracked if it happens when I delete cookies or not. It's like trying to housebreak a puppy. This is why I don't *have* a puppy.

If I search "pope site:yoursite.net" in Google, your main page comes up. So I would guess Google's behind on indexing and the fact that it's a dynamic site doesn't matter at all. Since you decruft your URLs anyway, I don't think Google can tell it's dynamic. Can you sweet-talk Googlebot into swinging by more often?

I see the same sporadic shifting (Firefox 1.0.1 on Mac). I did notice the HTML doesn't validate; maybe non-Firefox browsers are compensating better and it would stop doing this if you fixed the markup? I was using the W3C validator to check: h**p://validator.w3.org/

Ok, now I'm confused. TCH-Don says: But after duffs said he was on a reseller account, TCH-Bruce said he could *not* point to a subdomain because it would violate the AUP. So can resellers point domains to subdomains/other folders or no? In line with this, what exactly is the difference between an add-on domain and a parked domain, anyway? I understand parking domains, so that's not a problem. I don't understand how an add-on domain is different. What is the dis/advantage to using add-ons vs. parking?

stock.xchange (www.sxc.hu) offers free photos. The quality varies, as does the licensing, but they can be useful. If you have the budget for it, Corbis has great photos (www.corbis.com).

Looking at your style sheet, I notice that it begins oddly: You need to define what this applies to--I would guess the body element: body { margin: 0px 0px 20px 0px; etc... } Later in the style sheet your banner has an empty background element: Also your have a blank ID element in there: And I think with font names you're supposed to enclose them in quotation marks if the font name is more than a single word. So all your Times New Roman declarations should be "Times New Roman" and Comic Sans should be "Comic Sans MS". I could be wrong on that, and I'm sure someone will correct me if I am. That might be enough to cause IE to do weird things. Add an identifier to the first bit of code, fix the background on the #banner, add something to or delete the #banner-img, and fix the font tags. See if that fixes the IE problems. I don't know what's causing the links to have problems, but it may have to do with that first bit of code, since the links come right after it. One thing you may want to think about--with your container div set at 990px, it's well over the limit for many people's monitors. People with 800x600 resolution are going to be missing about 1/5 of your screen, or will have to scroll horizontally for it. I have 1000-whatever it is resolution, and I still can't get all your page to show up without horizontal scrolls because I have my toolbar running vertically on the left of my screen instead of across the bottom.

All I'm going to say is that from Pendragon's link (which goes a step closer than Google Maps), I could see the jumper course a competing barn, figure out how high they were set, tell a horse was in the middle of jumping the course, and, at my old barn, tell that they were getting ready to trailer horses somewhere, which horses were turned out in the paddocks, and that while the outdoor ring wasn't being used for lessons it was being used for turnout. Did I really need to know all this? Even if the data is two years old? I don't think so. Although the jumper course is mildly interesting and has some fun-looking lines in it.

I think David's right and the difference does have to do with scalability/accessibility. Most of the major designers use ems and keyword-sizing to a greater or lesser extent: Zeldman uses a combination of pixels and ems. Eric Meyer definitely uses ems. Durstan uses ems and percentages. Dive Into Mark uses percentages and keywords (small, x-small, etc). I didn't look too closely at the style sheets, but I'm willing to bet Zeldman has some sort of hack to feed IE em-based font sizes so they'll scale. I think A List Apart also advocates ems over pixels--but the articles on that are both a little old: www.alistapart.com/articles/relafont/ www.alistapart.com/articles/sizematters/ Dive into Accessibility also has a detailed explanation of why pixels are worse than ems for visually-challended readers: diveintoaccessibility.org/day_26_using_relative_font_sizes.html I'll admit I still code with pixels, but I'm slowly making my sites more accessible; switching to ems and keyword sizing is on my list of things to do this summer. Generally I think ems are *better* but pixels are more convenient.

You can try adding a new class for the center images: >img.center { text-align: center; margin: 0 auto; display: block; } I think you have to have the margin: 0 auto; in there to get it to actually center. You may not need the display: block bit. Yout just have to remember to assign the new class to whichever images you're dealing with.

I'm not sure what the problem was, either. I tore the page down and rebuilt it, trying an entirely different approach to the syntax, and that seemed to solve it: Robert, did you just add in extra headers (it looks like an extra H1 tag?)? I'd be interested in knowing what the HTML was that fixed the layout that way, because it might help me figure out where things were going wrong.

I'm playing around with a new site design, which uses two columns in a centered container. For some reason, I can't get the two columns to work in IE Mac. I don't have access to a PC right now, but usually if IE Mac messes up, so does IE Windows. I've been trying several different box layouts for hours, and I can't get the columsn to sit parallel--one keeps dropping below the other. The relevant CSS is: >body { text-align: center; } #content { clear: both; // because of a #nav issue width: 650px; background: #fff; margin: 0 auto; padding: 0; } #left { width: 390px; float: left; } #right { width: 260px; float: right; } I can't see *anything* in there that would cause the right-hand column to drop down below the left, but it keeps doing it. I hate IE. The page I'm playing with is www.anothermuse.com/test.php The full CSS is at www.anothermuse.com/styles/test.css Any help/ideas/suggestions would be great. Everything I've tried has failed to work.

I use YourSQL for quick work/updates. It's ok (and free), although I don't think it's that much better than PHP MyAdmin. I had the chance to use NavCat once, and that's a very nice program if you want to pay the fees for it.

I'm part of a group that's trying to put together an organization, and we're at a point where we should pull together a website. While it might initially go on the reseller account I'm on, I think eventually it would get its own reseller account--one of the ways it could help fund itself would be by selling hosting to members (it's an NPO, but would need funding--don't we all). I know that to sell hosting space it has to be on a reseller, and it would be if we decide to go that route. But that aspect is still up in the air. My big concern is that one of the member features would be a premium directory listing--their own page listing their home site, short description, etc. This would come bundled in with other membership features, like increased access to the organization's content and such. The page would also be very forumlaic--they aren't getting anything really customizable--database entry sort of thing. Is it ok to sell one-page listings like this? Especially since the listings aren't sold singly, but are part of a membership package--and the rest of the package is about access to content and services, not hosting space? Or is this still considered hosting, which would be breaking the TOS? This is probably obvious, but my brain is fried right now.

I used this thread when I was trying to figure out how to connect YourSQL to the database. I would guess MySQL Front would require a similar process.