Keyboard Face

Weird error today I thought worth posting the solution to.

If your style sheet has this line at the top Safari won’t display certain background colors.

@charset “utf-8″;

When you create an HTML file in Dreamweaver and add CSS directly to the HTML file, it will automatically insert this into the style section. If you then copy the entire style section and create an external stylesheet, it will then remove all of your background colors. Luckily, it’s an easy fix. Just remove the charset. It’s not needed for CSS unless you’re using a foriegn language that has non-ascii characters (in the code, not the text).

I found a weird thing today. IE6 will remove the top margin of a hover link when it’s in a list if it has hover attributes. It’s too hard to explain without the code, so here is the code to re-create the phenomenon. This will make a list that when you hover over the links they jump up as the top margin is removed.


<p>&lt;style&gt;<br />
ul li a {<br />
display: block;<br />
width: 155px;<br />
margin-bottom: 3px; <br />
}<br />
ul li a:hover {<br />
color: #FFFFFF;<br />
background-color: #FC7C00;<br />
} </p>
<p>&lt;/style&gt;<br />
&lt;body&gt;<br />
&lt;ul&gt;<br />
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;#&quot;&gt;test&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;<br />
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;#&quot;&gt;test&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;<br />
&lt;/ul&gt;<br />
&lt;/body&gt;</p>


The only fix I could find is simply to add a space before the closing a tag like so:

&lt;ul&gt;<br />
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;#&quot;&gt;test &lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;<br />
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;#&quot;&gt;test &lt;/a&gt; &lt;/li&gt;<br />
&lt;/ul&gt;

If you know of a better way to fix it, or if you know why it does this, please let me know!

I had been extremely unhappy with my host, MediaTemple.net. Unfortunately, I had a client who was using a Gallery2 installation that had been installed on the server ages ago and I couldn’t figure out how to successfully move it.

There were steps that I used that finally solved it:

My new host is JustHost.com by the way. It appears to be very fast, cheap and reliable so far. And best of all they cpanel which makes it so much easier to administer.

0. Of course, back up everything before you delete or change anything.

1. Zip up the Gallery folder. Mine was g2data followed by a bunch of random letters. You should be able to find your gallery folder in config.php. The line looks something like this:

$gallery->setConfig(‘data.gallery.base’, ‘/home/user/public_html/yoursite.com/g2data-idfdsakd/’);

2. Backup your mysql database.

3. Create a new blank database on the new host.

4. Change the name of the mysql database in your backup file and restore it to the new blank database.

5. Upload all of the files for a fresh install. I do this by uploading the zip file of the install files and then unzipping it on the server. Much faster that way.

6. Upload your gallery folder (g2data-…)

7. Chmod your gallery folder and everything underneath it to 777.

8. Run the installer. It will ask you were your gallery folder is and your MySQL database. Oh, and one other file that’s needed is the versions.dat file. This must be there or it will think it’s a broken install. The path to this on my install was g2data-…/versions.dat

Don’t do a clean install when it asks you.

9. Upload any custom files that you might have created. This includes template files now.

At this point you should be done. I wasn’t. All of my thumbnails were broken. I finally found a solution from a forum post that said:

Go to Site Admin > Plugins
Uninstall Dcraw, Exif, Ffmpeg, Getid3, jpegtran, NetPBM, GD

Then I deleted the cache’s and rebuilt the thumbnails. Now the thumbnails show up.

To rebuild the thumbnails, go to Site Admin -> Maintenance and select rebuild thumbnails.

I don’t know if it would have worked without disabling the plugins. It may be that because of the transfer, I needed to rebuild the thumbnails anyway. It seems likely, but did the trick for me and now I’m up and running after too many hours of wasted time. Almost not worth the money and annoyance saved from staying with MediaTemple.