We seem to be having an increasingly frequent problem with folks pasting in URLs that are too long for the width of the comment box, which then blows out the margins and makes text overflow into the sidebar.
Thus, we’d like to request please don’t paste long-links in the comments. If your link is long, use anchor codes to make a link. If you don’t know how to do that, go to tinyurl.com and your long link will be transformed into a very short one you can copy and paste into your comment. Thanks!
Elves, I’d like to make a counter-request. I’ve noticed that this does not seem to be a problem on SF; the editing window just adds a scrollbar at the bottom to access the overlong items. Surely there is a software fix that can allow an overlong item to flow into the next line instead of the sidebar.
As for using the exterior site Tinyurl, why not encourage people to use the self-contained tool above the editing window, that is, the bracketed link method?
By the way, I’ve found the bracketed link tool above the editing box to not be as easy to use as it might; instead I paste in the following tool (using square brackets instead of these curly braces):
{url=HTTPLINK}LABEL{/url}
Using this, I can double-click on the uppercase words and then paste in the link or the label.
Just some suggestions [url=http://resurrectiongulfcoast.blogspot.com/]from the Briar Patch[/url].
Br_er. We tried adding a scrollbar “overflow option”. It doesn’t work here since the format is different than Stand Firm. Maybe Greg G. can find some fix we couldn’t, but several months ago, I spent 4-5 hours trying different things and reading the ExpressionEngine users’ guide to no avail.
I’d be thrilled if we could figure out a fix
I just checked the Expression Engine forum for any similar problems, and didn’t see anything, so that told me the problem might be peculiar to SF/T19, i.e., in some of the customization.
So I decided to see if the HTML on the web page with the problem was valid. It isn’t. I think if the HTML is made to be valid, the problem will go away.
I went to
http://validator.w3.org/
and entered
http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/article/7426/
It reports that it is not valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. The page claims to be XHTML 1.0 Strict. All of the errors are listed, and can probably be corrected (in a template or something).
Testing the overflow:auto style…
http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/article_staging/7433/http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/article_staging/7433/http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/article_staging/7433/http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/article_staging/7433/http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/article_staging/7433/http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/article_staging/7433/http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/article_staging/7433/http://new.kendallharmon.net/wp-content/uploads/index.php/t19/article_staging/7433/
There ya go, folks…
overflow: auto;
🙂
Hey, that seems to fix the “too long link” problem.
P.S. – It’s so undignified when elves plead…
There must be code somewhere that detects raw URLs in a comment and “linkifies” them. Perhaps it could be modified to truncate the “text” of the link if it’s too long? So you might see something like http://www.thisisaverylong…
And as long as we’re talking technical matters, a minor one — the timestamps on comments seem to now be an hour in the future. I assume this is a DST issue of some sort.
Re DST: You need to unckeck Daylight Saving Time in your “Localization Settings”.
It’s located in “My Account”, located at the top right of this page.
Hey, if you guys are so proud of yourselves, how come I can’t read the right hand half of Ross’ last comment? It overflows into the link column, and the second line begins with “And as long…
Just checkin’
It’s so undignified when the guru goofs.
#9: Whaddya know, that worked.
#10: I was attempting to suggest a way the site could automatically shorten very long URLs, so I created an HREF where the text of the link was cut off and replaced by an ellipsis. While I was doing that, Greg did his overflow thingy, which makes it look as though my link was cut off by the right margin. In fact, that’s just the way I wrote it.
Well, Ross, this thread is illegible on my computer (XP,IE7). Your last line can be read as far as “link wa…” and then runs off the page.
I think it was The [b]G[/b] that done it.
#13: You’re exactly right. The “fix” fixes Firefox and breaks IE. In fact, the fix is worse, because it breaks it on comment #1, with no link at all.
Ah, I see. Now that I look closer, on my computer (Vista, IE7) the long comments are on top of the right-hand link column… which is an odd visual effect.
Everything is looking jes’ fine here (Firefox, Linux).
While we’re at it, though, maybe you elves and ogres could do something about the fact that the square bracket help notes show above the original composing window, but the usual (and ineffective with urls) angle-brackets show above the preview window…
I don’t know anything about setting up blogs, but the following links may mean something you you:
[url=http://bill2me.com/2007/04/25/using-css-to-hide-long-urls-in-your-comments/] this blogger looks like he has a fix and some other suggestions in the comments? [/url]
[url=http://www.village-idiot.org/archives/2006/06/29/wp-chunk/] chunk url [/url]
There is a special place in hell reserved for the folks who wrote Internet Explorer…
Hey all, appreciate the feedback, and Greg, much appreciate the attempted help. Greg, Sorry, I should have written you and explained that the overflow works in FF but not IE. I never came up with any other fix…
Randy #3,
Thanks for the tip about validation. Yeah, I knew about that problem. It’s on my long list of stuff to deal with some day. I knew very little about CSS when I was trying to help Kendall get the site set up and get the sidebar started, etc., so used a lot of HTML instead of CSS.
One day I’ll get around to fixing it I hope!
Dear Elves (#3):
If the problem is still there, here’s an idea I’ll toss out: The page as a whole is probably not strict anyway, so you might consider changing the pages to transitional, and restoring the code to the way IE liked it. Changing them to transitional may make FireFox behave differently. FF has a special “IE quirks” mode, which I believe is disabled when ‘strict’ is specified. It might allow FF to behave more like IE when it encounters bad HTML. I would be surprised if changing the page to transitional would affect IE’s rendering in the slightest.
Elves, I agree emphatically. I detest long blog answers and at most I will scan them or ignore them completely.
Truly, Nuff Said!!