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tearing my hair out

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tearing my hair out
Hi,

can anyone give me a pointer as i am going grey by the second and have spent what seems like years on this.

When links rebuilds (and I have done about 6 since yesterday) it gives me categories with links in them that have weird formatting.

The first link is ok but then the second one is center aligned then the third lnk onwards takes on a completely different format to what i set it to (i.e the first link).

An example is here with first link ok, second centered, rest .. don't understand.
http://www.ukpages.co.uk/...nd_Sports/index.html

what am i looking for, is this related to span and should I be looking elsewhere other than category.html or link.html.

Its really frustrating me.

After hours and days of workI thought my set up was ok but have had to rip it apart and I just feel I am going backwards.

Cheers
KevM
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Re: [KevM] tearing my hair out In reply to
This page looks fine to me. I'm guessing that you fixed it?
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Re: [afinlr] tearing my hair out In reply to
looks ok here as well.
If you still see it as a problem then maybe browser? Only a thought..
Am using XP pro - and latest explorer with ALL updates.
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Re: [Gypsypup] tearing my hair out In reply to
Hi All,

Had to take a break from this over the weekend as it was starting to get to me.

I have identified why and where the problem is occurring but not how, the page I posted had some tests done and has improved.

It appears that whenever I have a category and also some links the links get messed up with i.e

http://www.ukpages.co.uk/...Worcester/index.html

I will be carefully spending today (and I have put aside the whole day) to examine links.html and category.html from the original to my versions to see if there is a discrepancy.

The previous link was a step closer but there is still an problem as the link in this post shows. It's only the second link as well which is really strange as there is no obvious reason why that one would have anything unique about it, it's just a link.

There is a couple of things I need if anyone can help. I found a post to build staggered a single category but it was quite old and I could not get it to work, is there a command line command to rebuild one category (i.e not build all as it takes too long) I can then just build the link above category to get that oe right, then it should apply to all.

I tried
cd /path/to/admin
perl nph-build.cgi?do=staggered&s=5&p=17&o=200

From the post I interpreted this to be changeable to build category 17372 in blocks of 200 but I think I got it wrong somewhere. If I could just build this one (17372) on it's own today I will be able to make progress much faster as rebuild all takes too long.

I'll post what I find for the benefit of other users,
many thanks again for yoru help,

Cheers
KevM
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Re: [KevM] tearing my hair out In reply to
Kev,

If you want to view your site as it would look if you built it, just view it in dynamic mode (click on dynamic in your admin panel).

If you are having problems with the layout of your site, I recommend that you try Doctor HTML at
http://www2.imagiware.com/RxHTML/

Click on 'Single Page' and then put in the problem url and it will point out any problems with the HTML.

Laura.
The UK High Street
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Re: [KevM] tearing my hair out In reply to
Hi.

I might be wrong.
It looks like table and / or <div></div> tags.
The first result in the Local Links is inside a and <tr><td> stuff of the Categories table with a <td></td> at end.

Also not clear what the following is for (occurring after every link from second link onwards as the first links seems to be separated from the rest as mentioned above):

<
div align="center"><center>
<
table>
<
tr>
<
td><font color="#FFFFFF">-</font></td>
<
/tr>
<
/table>
<
/center></div>

Take the original template code outside onto editor, modify and preview there before modifying the orginal template. At least that's how i get to modify the templates and it could be really frustrating at times for beginers like me :)

Start from the original template, do one change at atime, preview in dynamic mode and if everything's ok move onto next change. Time taking for sure but less frustrating. Learnt this the hard way working with GMail templates

Anup
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Re: [anup123] tearing my hair out In reply to
the other thing is to use proper -- and liberal -- indentation.

If you use a tab every time you use an opening tag, and a matching closing tag, then when a tag doesn't match up, your formatting is all off.

Can be boring to redo all the tabs, but once you do it, errors jump out at you.

Just scroll your cursor down the line of tags, and if one is off, it's really, really obvious.

With the "compress" option on, all white space disappears, and even if you leave it off, each tab is only one character, so it's not much extra.

The frustration it saves, can be your own ;)

The only exceptions, and you can chose to do it, is that sometimes </td> and </tr> tags have to be at the end of the line, with no white space for formatting reasons. These are easy to spot, as the normal closing tag is missing. Even with the exceptions, it works really, really well :)


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Re: [pugdog] tearing my hair out In reply to
WinkHi All,

Thanks to everyone for your help, the snippets and bits of info have helped me immensely, the tip that clinched it was switching to dynamic mode, I'm still a bit of a newbie so I hadn't fully grapsed that to run in dynamic does not involve any or continual rebuilds to start off with .. obvious now I guess but at the time..

Anyway I managed to carefully pick through links.html and category.html and I think most of my problems were due to colspan tags which were creating additional formatting problems.

It took me a little while to clean it all up, I use FP2000 which I know I must change soon because it has a annoying habit of leaving or inserting bits of unwanted code which made things worse.

I was also trying to push things a bit too hard with desired layout to get my left and right columns in place which the main content (in the middle) was throwing quite badly if I got a long URL or category path.

I've managed to set up the links.html in a table and used a forced word wrap to 480 so it all sits quite comfortably with the extra long urls or category paths being forced to break.

I think I have got it ok now and have done a load of backups. Later this evening I can do a rebuild and switch back to static pages (shared server you see so it's less load)

At least i know all about dynamic now, if I had had to do a full rebuild each time (which i had been doing up until now) I don't think I could have got this one cracked, I think my head woud have fried.

Thanks again to everyone.

Cheers
KevM