Wednesday, January 02, 2013

Why is Amazon a Mac hater?

Amazon offers a publishing service that delivers blog content to Kindles and kindred e-readers. The subscription costs $.99/month, one-third of which goes to Amazon.
I set up an account and will make this stream o' bits available through the Kindle channel. (If anyone subscribes, I will donate my proceeds to charity. I'm interested in the publishing process, not in making money.)
One annoying hitch, however, is that, when I go to the publisher's page to log in to my account, I'm greeted with this warning.
Prompt to install IE or Firefox
Internet Explorer isn't available and you really have to dig to find Firefox versions older than the current  (17.0) release.
It turns out that the message is benign. Safari and Chrome, the two browsers that I have installed on my Mac, work ok.

Monday, December 31, 2012

Beware the unmatched brace

I've been tinkering with the new WordPress Twenty Twelve responsive design template for a couple of other sites that I maintain. Given the increased use of mobile devices, such as phones and tablets, websites have to accommodate those smaller displays. Doing so with multiple style sheets for each possible configuration is possible but a testing and maintenance nightmare. Responsive design templates, where smart people figure out this stuff for us, are the easiest way to get to a good common solution.
The basic Twenty Twelve design, admittedly, is a bit bland. It has a quirk of placing the header image below the website title and tag line.
It also puts a box shadow, albeit faint, around the image.

I cloned the default template, moved the image above the title, and then set about to remove the box shadow. All that I'd need to do is reset the value of header-image in the style sheet.

img.header-image,
{
box-shadow:none;
}

WordPress offers a built-in style editor so that you can make changes to your design as you go.
In a simple case such as this, little can go wrong. If you are making a bunch of changes, however, you discover that it's easy for an extra character can wander in during a copy-and-paste editing session.
The code editor doesn't do syntax highlighting. As a result, if you leave an open curly brace:, the style sheet will fail silently and you've left with a simple change that doesn't work.

{
/* a bunch of code copied from elsewhere
that goes on for a while and then is missing a closing brace.
*/
img.header-image
{
box-shadow:none;
}

Tip: if you've spent what seems like an inordinate time tracking down a style change that's not working, copy your code into a proper editor and let it help you see what you're missing.

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