old stuff from June 2008

wrapping text around an image in y! groups

Friday, 27 June 2008 6:38 pm by noel
posted in places, tech | tags: , , ,

i have been using yahoo! groups to send out newsletters. in the pursuit of making these newsletters look a little more attractive i wanted to have some small images with the text wrapping around them. easier said than done. yahoo! groups only allows a small, specific subset of css and html to be used in posts. if your html and css tags are not in that specific subset then your code either gets stripped out or replaced by their “safe” tags. that made things a lot more complicated.

adding css style tags to an image tag doesn’t cut it. its not allowed. i checked the docs. wrapping the image tag in spans or divs doesn’t work either. the end result would be that the text will be placed below the image instead of wrapping around it.

the solution i found is to go retro and table the image — wrap the image tag in a single cell table, i.e.:

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" align="left" hspace="10" vspace="10">
<tr><td valign="top">
<img src="url/imagename.ext" width="150" height="150" border="0" alt="" />
</td></tr>
</table>

of course, you replace the url/imagename.ext with the address and name of the image you are using and, depending on your alignment inclination, replace the align=”left” to align=”right” in the table tag if you want the image to either be on the left or right side of the page.


one other quirk with regards posting/sending out newsletters in a yahoo group that you have to watch out for is the margin to the right. because of an advert, the width of the upper part of the newsletter is limited to about 500 pixels, give or take a few (arrows 1 and 2) . you’d have to set the width of your text table to about 490. if you go over that, there a large possibility that the advert will overlap and cover your content (arrows 3 and 4).

links:
list of allowed css and html code in a y! groups post

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yahoo booboo 2008.06.25

Wednesday, 25 June 2008 8:50 pm by noel
posted in mine, tech | tags: , ,

yahoo mail suddenly acted up — web access to both the free yahoo mail and the bizmail part is not working. i don’t know if its a maintenance thing and if it is then yahoo should really inform their user base. as of this writing, there’s no mention of the downtime in the yahoo mail blog. logging in to yahoo mail classic doesn’t work either.

other services — at least, the ones i use like webhosting, yahoo groups — appear to be working fine. only the mail services appear to be down.

bummer. really. :-(

update: 2008.06.26: Y! mail is back online. from what i have gathered, yahoo mail moved the javascript serving duties to another domain (yimg.com) which noscript — a firefox add-on for the paranoid — was blocking. i just unblocked the site and everything’s good again.

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underwater

Sunday, 22 June 2008 9:59 pm by noel
posted in mine, places | tags: ,

typhoon “frank” (international name: fengshen) left our neighborhood under 12 inches of water for most of the day. i woke up at 4:00 in the morning to strong winds but no rain. there were already a handful of broken off branches along the street.

the cars in the photo are actually parked on the sidewalk already. the curb is about 6 to 7 inches high from the street. the white thingy is a lampost (the picture was taken from the 2nd floor). it was still raining at around 8:30 pm so i expect the streets around our neighborhood to be still flooded by tomorrow morning. the department of education has already called off classes in the elementary and high school levels. the announcement has made robin a bit happier, of course ;-) .

internet access has been intermittent so i haven’t really checked my mail that often today. its sunday anyway and its cool. its really a day to be lazy.

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firefox 3 out

Tuesday, 10 June 2008 9:38 pm by noel
posted in tech | tags: , , ,

firefox 3.0at least with the linux version, it is. as of this writing the version for windows is not yet available but i would assume it will be soon… mozilla.com is even asking for help in setting the guiness book of records for the most software downloads in 24 hours.

as for the software itself, the good news is that it really uses lesser memory than version 2 and it even feels faster.

fox 3 memory footprintthere are some small features that seems insignificant but turns out to be a time saver. one of them would be the smart bookmarks. i especially liked the fact that i can type the first few letters of the title of a page, instead of the web page address,  in the address bar and the browser will search the history for it and give you suggestions. nice.

its only been a few days but i’m liking my fox even more. its definitely worth the download. :-D

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not idle

Sunday, 1 June 2008 9:32 pm by noel
posted in cycling, mine | tags: , , ,

i have been preoccupied with my recovery lately. that’s the main reason why i haven’t been posting or writing anyone for the past few days. i have been walking, exercising my arms and legs, stretching and doing more walking — just about everything to get some improvement however small it may be. i got myself (and robin) a rubick’s cube so i can exercise my fingers and wrist; i have a rubber stress ball so i can make my grip stronger and, these days, you can see standing on one foot at a time like a pelican to help improve my balance. that last one is actually a very good yoga tip from bernard (my thanks). i think and feel that all these things are doing some good. of course, i have been working also — bills to pay and debts to settle.

during the past week i saw my physical therapy doctor and my neurologist — both saw good improvements i think but i still have to see them after two and one month, respectively and my cardio in three months just to make sure. yup, i’m getting there.

and yes, i can solve the cube.

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