5:30 Design Tip

I know that Eudora 7.1 and how it works with Windows Vista has very little to do with designing a Web site but I have found so little information on the Web about this that I figured I would try to help out those who are running into some of the same problems that I did.

When I first installed Eudora 7.1 on my new Windows Vista machine I would get an error regarding the history file. The error would say that the linkhistory.tmp file was not found or access denied. I would also have issues with the filters.tmp file and other .tmp files saying they did not exist or that access was denied. I discovered that published ideas to turn off the Vista User Access Control (UAC) would indeed help this problem, but then Eudora would be configured differently. Also, I didn’t like the idea of disabling the Vista UAC because it is a security mechanism even though Microsoft admits to there being some problems with it.

After several hours of tracing what exactly Eudora was doing and finding some documentation on line about Windows XP and Eudora 7.1, I did finally get everything configured and made it work correctly. There are still a few unanswered questions, but hopefully this information will help someone to use Eudora 7.1 with Windows Vista.

In order to install Eudora you must have administrator privileges on your machine. This has been true for several previous versions of Windows. Previous versions of Windows would automagically run all programs in an Administrator account with administrator privileges. This is NOT the case with Windows Vista. Vista, as a security measure, will run all programs as a normal user even in an account with Administrator privileges. You must specifically tell Vista to run a program with Administrator rights. This is the key to running Eudora without all the error messages. I haven’t found a way to permanently set this using the start menu, but you can run it from there. Simply right click on the Eudora executable and choose the “Run as Administrator” option. If you utilize a desktop shortcut you can configure this to happen all the time. Right click on the shortcut and select properties. In the Shortcut tab of the properties click on Advanced. Check the check box that says “Run as administrator” and click on the OK button. Each time you start Eudora using the shortcut Windows will ask you if you started the program. While this is a tad bit annoying, it allows you to keep UAC enabled and still run Eudora.

If you were running Eudora and just ignoring the errors, which did work sometimes, you may have made some changes to the configuration that will disappear when you start running Eudora as an Administrator. This is where I got really confused. Perhaps a Windows aficionado can explain why at some point because it doesn’t make much sense to me. Unless Windows is running as the administrator it cannot write to the Eudora data directory that is initially configured. For illustrative purposes I am going to use the default Eudora install directories. When you start Eudora it copies everything from the install/data directory into a directory C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Qualcomm\Eudora. Windows uses *this* directory for everything so this is where your configuration is located. If you copy this directory over (make a backup of the original directory first, just in case) to your C:\Program Files\Qualcomm\Eudora directory then everything works as you would expect it to and your configuration is as you would expect it to be. My guess is that upon closing Eudora, Windows attempts to write your data to the actual Eudora directory but UAC stops it from doing this. I wasn’t able to confirm that. Why it copies everything to the VirtualStore directory in the first place completely confuses me. This causes you to have 2 copies of all your email, etc.

However, these steps helped me to get Eudora 7.1 working with Windows Vista. I look forward to the stable release of Eudora 8 and hope that the Mozilla project does something really great with an already great mail client!

Did you know that a search engine will look at what you have in the alt attribute of an image tag?

Some people will not put captions on photos with a person’s name in it. Instead they will just put something like “Baby and Nana together at Christmas.” However, then in the alt attribute to the image tag they will put “Little Johnny Someone and Nana Someone.” A search engine will find that as part of your page.

You should always use the alt attribute to describe what is in a picture, just be as vague there as you are in the captions.

Tomorrow, the two ways to tell a search engine not to index your site.

Well, from writing that is. You may have noticed. A little over a week had gone by before my post yesterday. Why do I bring this up in a blog about tips on how to write your own Web site? To point out that it is going to happen. It happens to everyone: you, me and everyone else.

When you are working on anything there are always other circumstances. Things happen to make it so you run out of time to work on your site.

What happens when you take a week off from writing your site? When you pick it back up do you remember where you left off and what you were going to do next? If the answer is no then you may not have your site documented well enough.

You should always start out with a sketch of what you want your site to look like. This can be as complex as a picture done in Photoshop or it can be as simple as a piece of paper and crayons. For those of you writing a site to post pictures of the grandkids for their grandparents, the crayons may be easier to find. With a sketch you will always have a picture to look back on to remind you what your goal is.

Then the next three steps:
1. comment
2. comment
3. comment

A comment in HTML is simple. You start with:

&lt!–

then you put the information you want to remember and then end with

–>

Your actual comment might look something like:
<!– my new picture goes here –>

That way, when you need to take a week off for whatever reason, you remember what you were doing and can jump right back into creating your home on the Web.

Angie

In I.E. you will notice that sometimes it acts funny.

For instance if you use this code:

<div style="border-top: solid think black; border-bottom: solid thin black>
<img src="mypic.jpg">
</div>

in Firefox or almost any other browser you will notice that you get two very nice borders that go across the top and the bottom of the image.

However, if you look at the same code in I.E. you get extra whitespace at the bottom of the picture before the border!

This is a rather annoying problem because it will make cohesive layouts not look right. There used to be a documented bug in I.E. that somewhat related to this and you had to utilize a precise DOCTYPE to get it to go away.

That, however, is not the cause of what is happening now. In order to make the extra whitespace disappear in I.E. you must write the code like this:

<div style="border-top: solid think black; border-bottom: solid thin black>
<img src="mypic.jpg"></div>

Notice how the closing div tag is right next to the image tag. I have never seen this extra white space written up as a bug in I.E. but I would call it such. My understanding of the standards is that white space within the HTML text is to be mostly ignored with the exception of the actual space character. Otherwise a new line would not need a <br> at the end, a simple newline within the HTML would do it.

I say bug, they say interpretation differences. Either way, the above code gets rid of the annoying extra line.

Angie

Yesterday we discussed that there are 216 Web safe colors. Did you know that one of the most popular images types on the web, the GIF file, only allows 256 colors. You may have noticed this is you ever tried to save a GIF file and you noticed that it started to dither. Interestingly enough, there is not a finite set of 256 colors that a GIF can use. You can use up to 256 colors but that is the only limitation.

The files size of a GIF file can be smaller than the other main image format used on the Web, the JPG. But, for complex graphics, using a JPG is better. The intricate gradients used in many photos, for example, take far more than the 256 colors allowed in a GIF file.

The main thing to remember here is that a GIF file is limited. This can be very useful for file sizes but can also make designing graphics more challenging. When using the GIF format, always save the file and look at it in a Web browser before publishing it to ensure that it looks OK. Some issues will not show up in your graphics editor.

Angie