How to Lose Unwanted Inches From Your Blog

So earlier today, Journaler Dee asked me about a
problem she was having with her blog, Dear
Diary. Something she had put in one of her recent entries was
breaking the layout of her Journal, causing it to become too
wide.

Now, "too wide" is a subjective
thing, but in most cases, if you have a horizontal scroll
bar (so you have to scroll from side to side in order to see
the content on the page), then your page is probably too
wide.

In most cases, it's because of a
photo is wider than the page layout and/or browser
window will allow.

In other cases, a really
long URL or other unbroken line of text
will cause do it.

I took at look at Dee's blog, and
saw that in one
of her entries, there was a long string of non-breaking
spaces at the end of one of the lines. [Update: Nonbreaking spaces are spaces that by definition won't break to the next line, so they keep going and going. This can push out the edge of a page area.  If you look in HTML view, nonbreaking spaces look like this:     ]

She took the spaces
out, and her Journal returned to its normal
width.

If you ever have a problem where your Journal
gets extra wide when you don't want it to,
try the following:

* Look at your
most recent entries, or think back to when you
started seeing the problem, and look at the entries you posted or
edited around that time.

* Check the width
of the photos;

the non-scrolling maximum will depend on the number of columns you use

for your Journal; for a three-column Journal (that is, 2 sidebars and
a

center column), a safe maximum is 550 pixels (remember that your

readers may not have monitors as wide or resolutions as high as
yours).

* If it's not the photos, it will have to be
the text. Scroll all the way to the right of the
page and look for anything that sticks out.

* If
nothing is immediately obvious, it might be extra spaces at
the end of a line.

In the edit window of your blog's entry, click and drag the text with

your mouse and look for extra spaces at the end of a line. (You can

also check the HTML view -- change the pull-down menu in the
formatting

tool bar from "Text" to "HTML" to see the HTML
tags.)


* Just added: If all else fails, try looking at the HTML source code
for the entire page. You can do this typically (using Internet Explorer
on Windows) by right-clicking on a blank area of the the blog page
that's too wide, and choosing "View Source." This will show you all the text and HTML tags that makes up your page.


Even if you don't understand it, you can usually see what's making your
page too wide -- just scroll all the way to the right, and scroll down
until you see characters.  Then, look around for some of the
accompanying text so you can figure out what section it's in, so you
can go back and change it.

Hope this helps. -- Joe