Ryan's Currently Unnamed Blog

So, its been brought to my attention that trackbacks are broken... hmm.. wonder if i just broke it by adding the comment stuff....

I'm thinking it works (and it still a potential way to spam me... will probably have to figure out some way to prevent that)

OK, so... it only took a few weeks for my blog to get HAMMERED again by the comment spammers. Yay... So, I looked around and added a small Turing Test (For those that don't want to read, named after the Brilliant Alan Turing, a machine that can pass the test can fool a human into thinking that the machine was human). Basically, i'm trying to keep people from posting automated comments to my blog with links to their casino site or whatever else they are selling.

So, from now on... you'll have to enter in one of those annoying little verify the number things. I used one that should be really easy to read and not annoyingly difficult. I might even make it so that if you are registered on my site (just have to give me a name and an email address, nothing too invasive) then it will skip that part, but for now, I just wanted to stop the bleeding!

On another note, You probably noticed that I'm working with placing images in my posts, and getting them to display nicely. I came across an awesome looking piece of CSS code that works well in all browsers. I was having some trouble with a few of the implementation details, and sent off a not to the author, and amazingly, I got a very detailed response! So, this post will probably appear to be fairly broken as I try to illustrate some of the problems I'm having with using his work. Perhaps its something in the CSS on my side, perhaps there's some browser issues at play as well. So, I'm going to have some random images sprinkled throughout this post, and I'm trying to ramble on long enough to have some filler text that goes around them.

So, i get to post of the pictures from my recent trip to Florida on a post... never did get around to recording my experiences there.. and now that its almost a month later, its already turning to mush... oh well...

Now, when I post an image within the middle of a paragraph, it breaks the current paragraph. My current configuration wraps all paragraphs I type in a <p> tag but I'm not so sure that has anything to do with it as I think the div is what's breaking the flow of the paragraph. Its nothing major, of course... just not sure what's causing it. I haven't yet begun to change any of the overflow properties that are preventing the images from being displayed outside of the column containing the posts, and I have to see if that setting is critical for anything.

This picture is the same exact code only aligned to the left instead of the right. The left ones work, but the right ones don't, but I want to check this post out in IE and see what it looks like. (Aha! The right aligned ones DO work in IE, but I'm pretty much a FireFox only person... so Scott was right, the right aligned stuff does work.. but not in FireFox! ) So, I've just been sticking to the left side for the pictures. Also, the flow seems uninterrupted when I started this paragraph with a <div> but that may just be because of the way that b2evolution wraps each paragraph in <p> tags. Lots to look into.. fun fun.

So... sorry for the technical detour.. but I'm working on some stuff and without a public post showing some of the strangeness, its harder to test out. And a big thanks to Scott for helping me out with this and for spending a lot of time on his little gem. I'm well aware of the amount of time and effort that goes into writing elegant and cross-browser CSS.