[Techtalk] Fixing up live.linuxchix.org

[Almut Behrens]

On Wed, May 25, 2005 at 09:12:51PM -0700, Meryll Larkin wrote:
> ...  Trouble is, I can't seem to
> access the Web site at ALL from my Linux box - are you using an unusual
> port?  Any ideas?  The error message I get says:
> 
> An error occurred while loading http://live.linuxchix.org
> Unknown host live.linuxchix.org

Actually, I can confirm that.  I've repeatedly experienced weird DNS
issues with the linuxchix.org domain (though I have no DNS problems
otherwise, AFAIK).  What usually helps is reloading the page (up to 5
times) until the lookup finally succeeds.  Once it's in the local
cache, everything is fine until it expires again.  So, as I generally
hate to debug DNS stuff, I've learned to just live with it.


As to the original problem: I also can't reproduce the cutt-off-on-
the-left rendering problem -- with current versions of Firefox, Opera
and Konqueror.  Even older versions of Firefox (back to Mozilla
Firebird 0.6) showed no obvious problems.
The only minor issue is the two somewhat larger images that extend into
the right orange column, if you resize the browser window to something
unrealistically tiny.  But that's no big surprise -- you can't really
expect a wide variety of browsers to agree on whether that image should
then be autoscaled, or handled by adding scrollbars, etc.  Not sure
what the standards say on how that's supposed to be rendered...

So - like Mary - I can't really play around with the HTML in order to
come up with suggestions on what to change...

On a side note, there seems to be problems with UTF-8 in embedded
content, as the main page is declared to be in ISO-8859-1 encoding. 
E.g., the blog of Jennifer, May 24, 2005 01:00 AM, is rendered
incorrectly, while, when visiting the original URL, there are no
issues (because there the page is declared as UTF-8).  Not sure if
there's an easy way to fix this, though...  Guess not.

Almut


P.S.  Just for fun, I tried it with Netscape 4.77.  Well, as expected,
the page is a Complete Chaos, and that is still a complaisant
description of what I see ;)   (Poor Almut, who's still got to write
HTML apps at work that need to run on this rotten piece of software...)

P.P.S.  I also tried it with "links -g" (that's the text browser links
in its exotic graphics mode), and I was surprised at how well it did
render the page.  Of course, no column layout and such, but all info
nicely arranged and perfectly readable.  Nothing missing, nor rendered
on top of each other.