Final Update for today :)
Well, installing the Zend Optimiser failed abysmally because it now needs the latest version of PHP and we don’t have that on yet, so we have to get that first. Ah well, it can wait a couple of days 🙂
Netscape sucks, I just wanted to say that.
I was informed that the front page was looking horrible with overlaying text on the Recent Updates panel so I checked it under Netscape and sure enough there it was. It took me about 20 minutes to trace the problem but you are not going to guess what it was.
In HTML you can specify that an area of text may not be wrapped, but enclosing it inside a ‘NOBR’ and ‘/NOBR’ tag pair. This was how we were doing it, it’s a lot more space efficient than putting the nbsp tags instead of every space.
Turns out that Netscape doesn’t bear this in mind when it sizes up the tables, it sizes them up thinking it can wrap, then when it can’t it just blats all over, making an almighty mess.
So i’ve switched it to using the nbsp’s for all the spacing and now it seems to render fine under both browsers again, not quite as efficient but it does the job atleast.
In response to one of the comments I’ve had on the journal over the weekend, the ‘spamming the hell out of the server’ bit referred to lots of connections coming from the same place – but I want to make sure that everyone understands that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing 🙂
The same symptom can come from Search Engines that are spidering the site to include us in their indexes, it can come from people using those ‘net accelerator’ programs (which basically go and get all the links on the page you’re reading so that when you click on a link it will be pretty much ready to go immediately), it can happen by someone simply having many browser windows open and reading a few things at the same time, it can come from many people sitting behind the same IP address (that’s what would happen if my wife and I were to go and read things on the same site – we both look like the same IP address to the rest of the world), and finally, it can come from someone running web mirroring software.
It’s only the last one we really have a problem with, and our problem with it really isn’t all that big – but if you’re doing it, then please turn its speed down and not beat the hell out of our server needlessly please 🙂