gary.turner's blog

Rethinking quotations

As many of you know, I published a little write-up in July, 2006, on marking up quotes. After my hosting company went belly up, I rewrote it for my new site earlier this year: "How to Mark Up Quotes".

Lately I've been having second thoughts about the suggested methods for the <q> element. I added a new section to the article, titled, oddly enough, "Second Thoughts".

Centering Inline Elements Vertically in their Containers

Back a week or so ago, say in May of 2006, Chris..S brought a problem to the forum, http://csscreator.com/node/16105

In a nutshell, he needed to have multi-line inline elements align themselves centered vertically in the container. Not a problem with modern browsers, but not so easy with IE.

The problem was solved when IChao (Ingo Chao*) brought an example and an explanation of some work done by Bruno Fasino.

Chris posted a nice demo page, which he seems to have taken down.

Further adventures with Verizon

Last August, I wrote of my frustration with Verizon, my ISP. At the time, I thought the issue fixed. Not so. Sit back, grab a beer, thank the gods you don't—never mind. I've heard the Baby Bell and BT tales, too.

So here's the latest adventure. As you read, note that if a single Verizon employee had simply done their job — nothing extraordinary — just their job, none of this had to happen beyond that point.

In June, 2007, a $1200+ charge showed up on the phone bill as past
due. Since we weren't in arrears, and since the charge was from

When bad things happen to good sites

As many of you know, my longstanding site at garyblue.port5.com went dark on 1 Nov., 2007, or there abouts. I started the site, using Portland's free hosting, in order that I could simply provide a link to the various demonstrations I created for the forums and lists. There were no beautiful designs or even planned organization. It just sat there, enjoying about 2000 unique visitors each month. No Yahoo!, but it had enough folks linking to it that many of the pages had Google page ranks of 4 or 5.

August, 2003 – November, 2007 R.I.P.

Bad clients are a pox!

I haven't done a lot of web development. I mostly fix things for people who do, but have hit an html/css bump. It's pretty simple really. I look at what they've got and what they want, and either fix it or suggest another approach. No hoohoo.