Sunday, August 13, 2006

A Bad Day for Spanners

I should know better. In spite of being an otherwise rational, if not anal, human being, I am highly superstitious. This is something I will, no doubt, write about at some length in due course, as one of the ways in which I justify my existence is to embark on that famous journey of searching for the meaning of life.

My present problem is that over the years I have found a very clear relationship between disaster and the date of the 13th of the month. This is not something I want to be true. It is something I have, dare I say it, scientifically observed to be true.

So this is not a good day to be tinkering with the web site. Several days ago I applied for the Reuters news player which you can only have on your site as a syndicated item. In other words you apply for it and they take a look at your site and say yes if its OK and no if you're pushing porn or terrorism. Since my site has neither of these I was accepted. Fitting it in then became a major problem, or, should I say, project.

These ready made blogger templates are brilliant for getting started and if you wonder why they look so good I can tell you. They are so good. The Player was just slightly too big to fit at the top of the page. The result was that all the stuff in the right hand column got shunted to the bottom. Now I have a nodding acquaintance with HTML from one of the many books I read up to Chapter Six (my favourite chapter, mainly because I rarely get as far as Chapter 7). However, nodding might get you by in German but teutonic precision pales in the face of HTML!! According to the book (Chapter Six) you can only advise browsers what they should do with your code. You cannot actually tell them where to stick it (although I came close a few times). As if in sympathy with the codies my last post decided to play the shunting trick on me all without provocation. So, if things look a bit odd around here just ignore it because it will all return to normal at midnight - it always does.

Pierre

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