TIV.NET

2011-12-19

IE7 text-indent bug

I've been debugging an HTML/CSS combination that was supposed to show a button with a nice background while keeping the button text still available (for accessibility, SEO, etc. - have no idea, the code wasn't mine). Users with IE7 (sigh) could not see the button.

The bottom line: there is a situation when IE7 moves the parent element together with its text, having a text-indent CSS rule. Below is a code demonstrating this behavior:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<style>
.notxt {
width: 100px;
text-indent: -9000px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>

<form> 
<button class="notxt">AAAAA</button>
</form>

<form>
<button class="notxt">AAAAA</button>
</form>

</body>
</html>

Note the   between the form and button tags in the first form. This is the "cure" for the IE7 bug. Any text will work, including <br>.

See also a solution that did NOT work for me but might work in some other related cases:
http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/remove-button-text-in-ie7/

"Using Squidoo for SEO" : Dec.19 update

Nothing happened in Google/Bing so far. The phrase search for the words in subject still does not return ~~any pages~~ the page I made from the Squidoo site.

Let's place a link to the "lens":

Using Squidoo for SEO

I am aware of the low level of that article's content and design. This is done intentionally and is a part of the experiment.

A side note: my first impression about Squidoo is: a large well-done piece of junk, a huge MFA ("Made For Advertising") website, which should have been demoted to zero by infamous Panda, together with all "article" websites. This impression is based on reading of a few articles in the "Giant Squids" area. I seriously doubt anyone goes there to read. A "writers'-only" website.

Update: the link worked immediately. Google shows this blog entry and my Squidoo lens as crawled at the same time.

2011-12-17

Using SQUIDOO for SEO (experiment)

SEO experiment: Squidoo

2011-12-14: I registered on Squidoo

2011-12-15: Created a first posting there (they call it "lens"). The post was marked as "in progress", because not all of the items in their "checklist" were competed. The "lens" was "published", however.

2011-12-15: Checked in Google if my "lens" appears. Did a search on the exact title match and on some special "words" that I placed in the text. No results.

2011-12-16: Finished the "checklist", and re-published the "lens". Now it's marked as "featured", and not as "in progress"

2011-12-17: Checked Google again. No results

Conclusions so far:

Posting to Squidoo is complicated and time consuming. The resulting article looks ugly.
Google is not "pinged" with the new entry URL immediately after the "lens" is published.

Next steps: I will wait a few more days and if Google still does not know about my "lens", I will place a link to it from somewhere. Then will check the results again.

BY THE WAY: this post appeared in Google search immediately (as expected)

RSS Graffiti tests so far

Here are the results of my first tests:

RSS Graffiti does what I expected it to do: my blog posts go automatically to my FaceBook
The "Standard" format has many configuration options allowing to make your FB post quite nice
The "Status Update" format does not show any link to the actual blog entry (or I did not find how to do it)

The next test I am planning is to post to one of my FB pages instead of my wall.

2011-12-16

RSS Graffiti - Test No. 2

My first blog post appeared on Facebook in less than half an hour. However, it did not look nice, because I selected the "compact - status update" format, and (a bug?) there was no link to the full story. Only the blog title.
Let's see how this post will appear. I also added an image to see if it will appear in the FB post.

RSS Graffiti and Facebook

http://www.rssgraffiti.com/

I just discovered this today and am writing this post only to check if it will be posted automatically to my Facebook page.

2011-10-21

Netbeans 7.0.1, SVN (Subversion) 1.7, CYGWIN and TortoiseSVN

Environment: MS Windows

I upgraded the CYGWIN, and the version of SVN upgraded to 1.7

$ svn --versionsvn, version 1.7.0 (r1176462) compiled Oct 11 2011, 10:36:16

Everything went smooth with "svn upgrade" of the folders.

$ svn help upgrade: Upgrade the metadata storage format for a working copy.usage: upgrade [WCPATH...]

NetBeans, however, gave me an hour of headache.

Here are my discoveries (things to do are marked in bold)

By default, NetBeans uses internal SVN client and not the on specified in Options - SVN command line.
To use the command line client, there is an option:
-J-DsvnClientAdapterFactory=commandline
Adding that option to NetBeans config file did not help. Had to add this as a parameter to the shortcut launching NetBeans
CYGWIN does not like being called from NetBeans. First, it complains about MS-DOS paths (C:\blah-blah), and when it is fixed by setting CYGWIN=nodosfilewarning, still produces some weird error messages
http://tortoisesvn.net/ worked perfectly, however. Do not forget to install the command-line client (which was unchecked in the default setup). You still have to run NetBeans with that -J switch.