Code Switching

This next post is going to be something a little bit different than usual. It will be a blog about blogging. Weaksauce, some might say. But some hurdles were cleared in order to make this post, and the end result is going to mean a more visually appealing blog. At least, that's my hope.

Today, (as some of you already know) I posted a preliminary test blog. I wanted to see if I could post through e-mail. Blogger, or Blogspot (I just realized that I'm not really sure what it's called), has a setting that allows bloggers to post by e-mailing their blog to a secret address. Ooooh, it's a seeecret.

But the test results were sub-par. The post was full of line breaks, so it looked jagged and unpleasant to read. Clueless as to the cause, I consulted that glorious modern day oracle, the one called "Google" to tell me the reason for those distracting line breaks, and how I can get rid of them.

As it happens, the Oracle was wise about what causes the breaks. The reason is Google itself. In the plain text e-mail editor, Gmail imposes a 78-character limit on lines of text. Apparently this has to do with downward compatibility with older e-mail clients. Not too sure, not too concerned. Like a tire with a hole, I just want a fix.

The seemingly obvious solution is to use Gmail's rich-text editor, which has no character-limit line breaks. But (isn't there always a catch?) the reason I want to post through e-mail are for those times when my only access to the internet is through my phone. And since Google and Apple don't play well together, my phone has no rich-text support. In other words, the Oracle is telling me to go fly a kite.

Somewhere in the back of my mind there's the voice of this computer guy I knew at Vandy-land telling me, there is a way there is a way there is a way. Uuuusssse the coooode, Luuuukeee.

Actually, he would probably have used less of a Star Wars allusion and more of a Street Fighter reference. But I digress. If I could figure out how to send an e-mail in HTML, I thought the code would bypass the character limit. I found an app that would do the trick and sent a test run to my e-mail account. Eureka! It worked! So I leveled my X-wing fighter, switched off my targeting computer, put my finger on the trigger, and unloaded two HTML torpedoes down the exhaust port of this internet/iPhone frak-up and... dragon punched that beeyatch in the chinny-chin-chin. (Star Wars, Street Fighter, and the Three Little Pigs--I promise, folks, I'll get back to Vietnam with tomorrow's post).

Anyway, voilà, no more line breaks. However, this was not the first of my trials and errors with coding. For the first couple of posts, I used the native picture uploader in Blogger. But I was really unsatisfied with it. Blogger is way behind the ball on design functionality, and there was no way to my knowledge that I could slap a caption on a photo and have them both nested in a paragraph. I figured out an alternate way by setting up my design template with a CSS code (whatever that is). And voilà, I have captions under my pictures nested in the paragraphs. Better yet, I can make the pictures hyperlinked to anything I choose.

But like the Lernaean hydra, computers have a way of spawning two new problems for each solution. I just realized I'm running into browser issues with Internet Explorer. The pages load perfectly on the Chrome browser. But IE is being a royal pain. The captions are halfway or completely missing, the tables have borders, and the title element encroaches on the leading image. If you're running IE, I apologise. I still have to tweak with the code to make it look right. If you're surfing with Safari, Firefox, a mobile browser, or some other program, I hope Riffing Indochina is showing up right. Or at least readable. If you're on Chrome, well, it'll look right until it doesn't. I think Yogi Berra said that.

As a matter of fact, I'm still hoping this post sans line breaks works as well. If it does, than the next step is to figure out how to attach a photo to an HTML e-mail. And if I figure out how to do that, my techie friend's voice in my head will gurgle, code is strong with this one.