Songcrafters down between 10pm and 5am MST

[64Guitars]

64 - the website appearance changed slightly for me on my laptop only. This was about a week, maybe two at the most, ago.

The width of the page is now too big for the laptop screen and I always have to scroll right-wards to read the right-hand edge of posts, see the "Jump to:" go button etc.

On March 4th, I increased the width of the site from 900 pixels to 1000 pixels. I checked the width of a bunch of popular sites and found that most were around 1000 pixels. For example, bbc.co.uk is about 997 pixels, ReverbNation is 1000, SoundClick is 995, eBay is 993, adobe is 978, etc.  So I figured we should be up there too. It gives us more room in our signatures and messages, and we've got more room in the page header in case I want to add any new features (although I have nothing planned at the moment).

I assume you're having the same problem with sites like BBC, ReverbNation, and SoundClick. What resolution is your display set to? Can it go any higher? If you can increase the resolution to the next higher setting, it would improve your web browsing experience, not only on Songcrafters but other sites as well since a page width of about 1000 pixels seems to be quite common on the most popular sites. I think it's based on the fact that most computers nowadays have a display resolution of at least 1024x768. The web browser's borders and vertical scrollbar take up a bit of that space. With Firefox running in ubuntu linux, it's about 20 pixels. So the 1000 pixel page width should just fit at 1024x768. I'm guessing your display resolution is set lower than that. The next lowest resolution commonly found on older computers is 800x600. If that's what your laptop is set to, then the site's full width wouldn't have fit on the screen even before I increased it from 900 pixels to 1000.

Firefox has a fullscreen mode which is toggled with the F11 key. This removes all borders and menus so that the web page uses the full screen width and height. I'm not sure if Internet Explorer has a similar feature. If it does, try that. It will probably only save about 10 pixels in the width because you'll still have the vertical scrollbar, but it might help.

and I'm using IE (not sure which number).

Yechh!!!!   

Seriously though, you should always have at least two browsers installed on every computer. It's extremely difficult to make complex websites that are fully compatible with every browser. So, no matter which browser you use, you're going to occasionally run into compatibility issues. When that happens, you can try loading the site in your other browser to see if the problem goes away. It's a simple and effective way of diagnosing website issues. I currently have six web browsers installed on my main computer (Firefox, Opera, Safari, Epiphany, Midori, and NetSurf). Most people don't need that many but I use them when I've made changes to the site and want to ensure that it works correctly with most browsers.

I recommend that you install Firefox on all of your computers. Version 4 will be available soon and it's going to be amazing. I'm really looking forward to using its new Panorama feature for organising tabs. See this video:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78hoObaDCx4

The Release Candidate is available now, so it shouldn't be long before the official final release is available.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/RC

Until then, the current official release is 3.6.15 which you can download here:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

And here are links to the other popular browsers:  Google Chrome, Opera, Safari

[64Guitars]

AM ?? ....... PM ?? ...... is that some kinda ancient way of telling time ? Like they used to measure length in feet and weight in stones

Until I looked it up just now, I didn't realise that much of the world no longer uses the 12-hour clock. According to Wikipedia, "The 12-hour clock is however still dominant in a handful of countries, particularly in Australia, Canada (except Quebec), India, the Philippines, Pakistan, and the United States".

How do you pronounce a time like "18:00" in conversation? Is it "eighteen o'clock", "eighteen hundred hours", or something else? Seems to me that that could be awkward. But maybe that's just because I'm so used to AM/PM.

[AndyR]

Hi 64.

Yep, my laptop is set to it's max 1024x768, and BBC etc are fine.

Songcrafters would be fine except for the grey border it has around the content. If I scroll to the right, the content part fits perfectly, I can see the thin black border on the content on both sides, even with the vertical scrollbar, the grey borders are then hidden off screen. But when I navigate to another page, obviously the left-hand border re-appears as it positions itself fully to the left. I've always assumed that this grey border is part of the web page design (because no other sites I use have it, and it's on Songcrafter on all the PCs I use), but I'm starting to wonder now...

I tried the F11, IE has that too, but I rarely use it. Again, BBC and Soundclick have no horizontal scrollbars, Songcrafter's still needs it. I'm on IE7 by the way .

I might give Firefox a go again over the weekend - I tried it ages ago and got in a right pickle, so I backed it all out and decided "If it ain't broke, don't try and fix it!"

Anyway, this laptop is starting to show it's age in various departments - so I don't want to spend too much time fiddling with it, I keep telling myself I'll upgrade but keep buying musical instruments instead...


EDIT: I did some screen shots so you can see what I mean - feel free to remove them when you've seen them (I'm no expert on graphics, so this was paste into Paint and save without fiddling - I guess I could have got them smaller, but not without a lot of messing about... and Mrs R wants her tea!! )

[64Guitars]

I fired up my ancient Pentium 3 computer with Windows 98 at 1024x768 and I see what you mean. The page content (the part that's set to 1000 pixels) fits perfectly, but there seems to be a left margin of about 30 pixels that makes it necessary to scroll horizontally to centre the page content on the screen. Once centred, the entire width of the content is viewable without scrolling. But as soon as you go to another page, it resets to the left again.

I'll try to find the cause of that left margin and fix it. If that proves too elusive, I'll reduce the page width slightly to make it fit. One way or another, I'll make it work at 1024x768 without horizontal scrolling.

[AndyR]

Good luck!

"One way or another..." - I know that feeling well .

I don't really go near website stuff, but I do write helpfiles, which are basically compiled "websites" (or least the stuff we deploy is) - sometimes it really is "kick it til it works - or until it's broken enough that we can bin it and no-one'll miss it..."

[64Guitars]

I fired up my ancient Pentium 3 computer with Windows 98 at 1024x768 and I see what you mean. The page content (the part that's set to 1000 pixels) fits perfectly, but there seems to be a left margin of about 30 pixels that makes it necessary to scroll horizontally to centre the page content on the screen.

I found the 30 pixel margin and removed it. The full page width should fit now at 1024x768 without any horizontal scrolling.

[Geir]

How do you pronounce a time like "18:00" in conversation? Is it "eighteen o'clock", "eighteen hundred hours", or something else? Seems to me that that could be awkward. But maybe that's just because I'm so used to AM/PM.

Usually we say "klokka seks" ... that is six o'clock .... and when in doubt add "in the evening" ...... 18 is still to awkward !

[Oldrottenhead]

my page is central with a grey boarder at each side taking up a good bit of space. i would say about a quarter of the page, if you combined both borders. is that how it should look

[64Guitars]

my page is central with a grey boarder at each side taking up a good bit of space. i would say about a quarter of the page, if you combined both borders. is that how it should look

That's the way it's supposed to look. The tricky thing about designing a website is that it has to work on a wide variety of computers and other web-capable devices, all with different size screens. It's not possible to use all of the space on a 30" widescreen monitor and still make it readable on an iPhone, for example. So most web designers compromise by setting the width of their page (the content part) to a minimum size which is reasonable to expect on most modern computers and devices. Nowadays, that width is 1024 pixels. Anyone using a very old computer or a device with a very small screen will probably have to scroll to see the whole width. But since most computers and devices now have a width of 1024 or greater, very few people will have to scroll a web page with a width of about 1000 pixels or less. On the other hand, people with nice big widescreen monitors are going to see wide borders of unused space on both sides of the page, as you do. That's an unfortunate waste of screen space but it's necessary to ensure that the page is viewable on smaller screens without having to scroll horizontally. At Songcrafters, the border (page background colour, really) is grey. At the BBC website, it's a much lighter grey; almost white. At ReverbNation, it's a darker grey texture. I can easily set the Songcrafters background to any colour or texture if people are tired of grey. For example, I used images for the backgrounds of PirateFest, TributeFest and several other festivals.

my page is central with a grey boarder at each side taking up a good bit of space.

I had some grey boarders once. They didn't take up much space at all but they never paid their rent on time so I sent them packing.

     

 

[64Guitars]

I checked the site again on my ancient Pentium 3 and it was still just a tiny bit too wide. I could see the whole page width but there was a horizontal scrollbar (though I didn't need to use it). So I've reduced our page width to 980 pixels to get rid of the scrollbar. It's not much of a difference but it means that people like Andy Flintstone won't have to scroll their stone tablets.