It appears that a problem I'm having with Outside in the Garden, is specific to that blog, which has no new posts since Oct. 18, 2003. The more recent post, dated oct. 19, won't publish.

It's throwing up an error suggesting the folders on my server dont exist.
However, they do exist. They existed before.
It's not a problem with my server space, since this blog is also located there and functioning fine.

Hmmm. Ideas, anybody?

-- posted by Pamela Shorey on Saturday, October 25, 2003

 
Matt's Formmail has become a target just as Microsoft has. Matt Wright himself now recommends people to use something newer, for instance: NMS scripts at source Forge.

I read that recently, and am planning to scoot over and give it a try!
-- posted by Pamela Shorey on Thursday, October 09, 2003

 
I am very interested in wireless technolcogy, because as a low tech person, I hate the tangle of wires behind my desk and the immobility it imposes on my setup. But I am cautious, and keep hoping for an explanation of how, if I can point and click to my computer, someone else outside can't also access all my data. Now comes Fred Langa:

... The proliferation of wireless access points has spawned a whole new activity called 'war driving,' in which people cruise the streets looking for 'hot spots' where a wireless signal leaks out into public space. (The name derives from the old practice of 'war dialing' where miscreants such as the youthful hacker in the movie War Games would serially dial all phone numbers in an exchange, looking for an unguarded modem connection to hijack.)

He notes the main reason for security problems is that makes of these products want them to be as easy to set up and start using as possible. But he warns that at the bareminimum, each authorized user should have his own user ID and password, not using the (well-known) defaults that come with the software.
If you're going wireless, read this article, it's worth it.

-- posted by Pamela Shorey on Thursday, October 02, 2003

 
Jasc Paint Shop Pro's website offers all sorts of tutorials
-- posted by Pamela Shorey on Wednesday, October 01, 2003

 
Q: What happens when a Buddhist becomes totally absorbed with the computer
he is working with?

A: He enters Nerdvana.
-- posted by Pamela Shorey on Thursday, September 11, 2003

 
Styles may be declared in external linked style sheets, internalstyle sheets in the HEAD section of a page, or in line inside anHTML element. See The W3C Web Consortium site for much more detailed informaton. Or, go to the W3schools (unrelated to W3C) CSS pages for some good introductory material.

External style sheet

<link rel="STYLESHEET" type="text/css" href="monk.css"> (substitute the url of your style sheet for 'monk.css')

A style sheet you want to apply to more than one page is most easily done as an external style page. That page does NOT use style tags (they are html, not css), but just jumps in with tags and attributes, and their styles. Save the file with a .css extension. If you need help preparing the style sheet, there are numerous tutorials. Or do what I did and download TopStyleLite (free). It takes you a few minutes to figure out how it works, but once you get that, it's pretty easy to use. I'm assuming you know basic html and have read a bit about use of css. TopStyle is excellent for getting the syntax right, so you don't have to remember it, or keep looking it up. And, like my other favorite program, Homesite, it teaches you as you use it.

Page style sheet

<style> h1, h2, p {font-family: Ariel, sans; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff;}
</style>

Styles placed in the HEAD section of your html page must be surrounded by STYLE tags. The form used as within the .css file, is to give an HTML tag with the designated attribues enclosed within curly braces, as you see above.

Inline styles

<TAG style="attribute:value;">styled text</TAG>
You can apply a style to a section of your page using inline styles applied to a DIV tag, or to a smaller section by applying style to any individual HTML tag, like this:
This sentence contains inline styling.


Since it's hard to remember these various syntaxes, I recommend keeping a 'snippets' file, that is, a text file with codes in it, somewhere handy so you can copy and paste from it, adapting as needed. One reason I like Homesite as a text editor is that first it helps you with the syntax, and second it provides for an easy-to-use snippets file. If you don't want to spring for Homesite, you might want to download HTML Kit. It's free and does a lot. I've just begun to delve into it. I use it pretty much for html, but it also offers assists in all sorts of other coding - ASP, perl, javascript,and more. For a free program, there is a lot there.


-- posted by Pamela Shorey on Sunday, August 31, 2003

 
Since the new verson of blogger (dano) came out, some new help pages have emerged, as well. The knowledge base is shallow so far, but the more questions, the more answers. The slightly misnamed FAQ is written in the standard Q&A format, but contains a lot of useful information most of us might not have thought to ask about. The release notes are a must-read for changes you may need to make in your blog. They also contain some new blogger tags, including template tags and owner tags.
-- posted by Pamela Shorey on Wednesday, August 20, 2003