Unbiased Reviews by Real People
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Unbiased Reviews by Real People
Take Your Epinion, and DON'T Shove It!Aug 31, 2000 Write an essay on this topic.You may be committing this Epinions blunder that makes it harder for others to read your reviews, and not even noticing it. What you see will depend on your browser version and screen resolution, but it is possible you are causing some users to see the main body of your review "shoved" far to the right, either compressed into a narrow column or extended past the right edge of the screen (necessitating a horizontal scroll bar). The cause is the use of content in your member profile that includes a long sequence of characters without a space in it. Since the text describing yourself will show in the left column of your reviews as well as on your profile page, anything there will affect the formatting of all of your reviews. Some browsers don't like to word-wrap anywhere in a string without a space. Internet Explorer is less picky there, and will break at a number of other characters, but Netscape pretty much waits for a space before breaking. Thus, if you have a lot of stuff without a space, Netscape will put it all on a line, and stretch the column out far enough to encompass it, even if it leaves little screen space for the main body to the right of it. Avoid this problem by using more spaces in your member information. The Wrong Way: Interests:Badminton,Swimming,Chess,Parcheesi,Comic-Book-Collecting The Right Way: Interests: Badminton, Swimming, Chess, Parcheesi, Comic Book Collecting A special instance of lengthy strings that often appear in profiles is URLs. You can't add spaces to these without making them fail when pasted into browsers, so they often force long lines if you use them. Please think twice about putting them in the section of your profile page that is shown to the left of all your reviews. For that matter, even in the main body of your review, a particularly long URL might be problematic, as it can force the whole text block out beyond the right edge of the screen. But if you must use URLs, try to keep them short. One common way people unnecessarily lengthen URLs is by failing to understand how default index files can be used to shorten and simplify a URL. On most servers, the default file of a directory is called "index.html" (or "index.htm", "default.html", etc.; ask your server administrator or ISP tech support rep if you're not sure which is correct for your site). If you name your main file by this name, you don't have to include the name in the URL; you can put http://www.somesite.com/yoursite/ instead of http://www.somesite.com/yoursite/index.html A lot of people don't seem to realize this, and they unnecessarily type the default index name at the end of the URL, or else they name their main page something else like http://www.somesite.com/yoursite/yoursite.html This makes the URL longer than it needs to be. I discuss this issue and other related ones at: http://www.dantobias.com/webtips/subdir.html (and, yes, I do use a default index in that directory, but it's the main index of the site, not the specific page within it that I'm now referring to!)  |
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