How do I display fonts that can be re-sized by viewers?

The best way to allow your site visitors to be able to zoom in on the fonts on your page is to use percentage [%] for the size; rather than using pixels [px].

How do I know what the percentage is for the font pixel size I normally use? Here is a quick lookup chart that should help you figure out what value to use when setting your font size percentages: (based on YUI ver 2.7 font sizing guidelines)

PX  —  %
10  —  77
11  —  85
12  —  93
13  —  100
14  —  108
15  —  116
16  —  123.1
17  —  131
18  —  138.5
19  —  146.5
20  —  153.9
21  —  161.6
22  —  167
23  —  174
24  —  182
25  —  189
26  —  197

As an additional note, IE has its own little quirks that are not found in fully compliant browsers. So, for IE 5.5 and IE 6 you would want to use the * [star filter] hack in order for the fonts to be viewed at the same size in those browsers:
(e.g. * html p {font-size: 77%; } )
Likewise, for IE 7 you would use something similar
(e.g. *:first-child+html p { font-size: 77%; } )

To add to the above note, do not use the quirks mode. Use the “Standards/Strict” rendering mode, displayed below:

< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

Don’t forget to omit the extra blank spaces in the doctype declaration above.

Where is the debugger or host application running?

• Localhost
• Other Machine

Enter IP Address: _________________________

Are you experiencing this pop up every time you open a website that has a Flash banner, or Flash movie of some type playing? Surely, you have tried to click on Localhost … only to see the popup reappear again. You can enter an IP address in the text input box, but the popup still reappears again. Then after a couple attempts and you select to not connect or ignore, the popup goes away … until the next page you open with another Flash movie playing.

So, why is this happening? It could be a couple reasons. You may not have downloaded and successfully installed the Adobe Flash Player 9, or it may have been a corrupt install. I have Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari browsers installed and dealt with this perplexing and persistent problem until I went back to the Adobe site and downloaded and installed the browser-specific Adobe Flash Player 9 plugins.

The Plugin that addresses IE browsers and Active X can be downloaded here.

For Firefox and the Netscape/Mozilla flavored browsers you can download the Plugin here.

Not long back I wrote a couple posts about SPAM and then started getting more SPAM. I did not have the Askiment plug in installed at that time. The reason I had not installed the plug in was because I did not have a Wordpress API key. I would have already given the Askimet plug in a try, except when I had gone to their site I thought it was only for Wordpress sites that were hosted by Wordpress.com.

I contacted the people at Askimet and found out that all I needed to do was setup an account at Wordpress.com in order to get the API key. It was not required that my Wordpress blog be hosted there, only that I opened a user account. How easy was that? Very easy. Since, I installed the Askimet plug in I have not received any more spam because the plug in works. It has blocked all of them so far.

So if you have a Wordpress blog that is self hosted and you are receiving spam, or want to insure that you do not get a bunch of spam posts, then hopefully the clarification in this post will allow you to get the protection now, rather than thinking it was not available to you.

Happy blogging

Recently, I started writing a blog related to US News, on Today.com. Not only do I get an opportunity to write thought provoking content, it also gives me a chance to create a corresponding graphic each day with my post. Rather than simply posting my rants, raves and insight, this provides an outlet or forum to shed some light on my graphic design capability, too.

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I have seen the help wanted ads, where small businesses are trying to hire someone who can run an office, do accounting, graphic design, coordinate and support their sales people plus they want them to take care of their website … yet they offer little more than minimum wage. If that is not you, great!

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