Monday, March 31, 2003

Attack of the Formatting Phantom It's amazing what a few rogue HTML tags can do when put in the wrong place.  I had attempted to post some of Jon Udell's description of InfoPath.  In the process of editing his HTML in the Radio UserLand in-browser editor, I missed a few closing table tags.  When Radio put in its two-cents-worth of <P> tags, all semblance of nice formatting went bye-bye.  Funny Feeds For a brief moment, I thought this was some quirk related to me changing computers with my Radio installation, but I'm thinking that it wasn't.  Some of this may be due in part to some folks' daring use of intra-RSS formatting.  Sam Ruby did it when he was trying to switch his subscribers to his new RSS feed (some like to call it "social engineering").  He turned the text of his old RSS feed white to annoy those using it into investigating and switching to the new one. There's nothing at all wrong with that.  I just have to be more careful when carving up other people's stuff, that's all. Jon used a right-aligned table to distribute thumbnail graphics of InfoPath screen shots.  After looking at the original weblog page, I'm positive that the impact on the RSS feed was entirely innocent.  The article was designed for the web page and was just munged into an RSS feed later. Clicking Your Own Links With that in mind, it pays to visit your own weblog page on occasion, just to see how it's fairing.  Radio presents a different view as "Home" to the blog user, so seeing your weblog the way others see it is important.  By checking my public weblog, I've caught upstreaming problems as well. On one occasion, posts weren't making it to the public web as expected.  I finally traced to an unexpected date change on my computer.  For some strange reason, the date on my computer reset to April 2001.  The reason my posts were not appearing was because I was posting in the past!  Straight to the archives it went! I also make a practice of clicking the links I post to other people's sites, just so I might pick up some traffic from those curious about their referrers.  I haven't yet studied the TrackBack phenomenon that seems to be popular with Movable Type. Someday I will catch up with all of the things I would like to know...yeah, right!

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