JIM what camera should i be buying, remember i am a Sony Boy
- Skinny 5-06-2003 6:22 pm

p.s. the < MORE > thing doent work here
- Skinny 5-06-2003 6:23 pm

Whoops, thanks. That's a problem with the last HTML entities hack. Should be fixed now.

I never look at Sony cameras because I would never buy one do to the memory stick storage. But this isn't really a problem for you since you have the VAIO. But I don't have any advice on their models. They do make good products in general. And I think Alex has been happy with his, although I don't know the model.

The camera I am recommending now is the Canon S400. Take a look at it at least.
- jim 5-06-2003 6:31 pm

The added text ('Read the rest of this post...') is now wrapped in a span (class="more") so you can style it if you want. Remember that most of that line is a link, so you'll probably want to add styles for A and A:visited and maybe A:hover as well.

So putting this in your style sheet:

span.more {color:#333333;}
span.more A {color:#333333;}
span.more A:visited {color:#333333;}

would make the 'Read the rest of this post...' line gray.
- jim 5-06-2003 6:53 pm

i just cut and paste that into the style sheet and it looks like my page is messed up. the post the top one are resized.
- dave 5-06-2003 7:00 pm

jim the Canon can interface with any labtop??
- Skinny 5-06-2003 7:03 pm

p.s. the < MORE > doesnt work yet
- Skinny 5-06-2003 7:04 pm

Dave, you didn't close the blockquote in the first post. I think that's the problem.

Skinny, yes it connects via USB to any computer. Are you buying right away? Maybe you should wait until I see you tomorrow and we can talk more about it. What's the model number of your VAIO? (I'm curious if it has a PC card slot, or just a memory stick slot.)
- jim 5-06-2003 7:10 pm

Skinny - what do you mean by 'more' not working? It shouldn't work in comments, only on a top page (it should work on sustenance for example.) The 'more' has to be lower case.
- jim 5-06-2003 7:11 pm

hmm. i cant put the "more" within the blockquote and font because it sends those signifiers to the end of the post on the comments page. except now the more is too far to the left and supersized. how can i get around that?
- dave 5-06-2003 7:19 pm

You could make it smaller in the style sheet

span.more {font-size: smaller;}

or with a point size:

span.more {font-size: 10;}

But I can't see any way to get it inside the blockquote.
- jim 5-06-2003 7:23 pm

Now there is also an untested <moreblockquote> tag as well if you want to break inside a blockquote
- jim 5-06-2003 8:07 pm

I'm having a bit of trouble with -more-. Posts which appear below a post which uses more have the wrong font families for a couple of the span classes. You can see this problem on the War of Words page.
- mark 5-07-2003 4:17 am

I think I have an idea what's going on. I don't specify the font families for two of my span classes ("hd" and "cm"). They just end up being the default (sans serif, etc.) defined for the page while the body of my posts use explicitly defined font families. Above the first apperance of the "more" class the "hd" and "cm" are okay and below the "more" they're bad. I think the fix is to specify the font families explicitly.
- mark 5-07-2003 4:27 am

I think I've got it now, but I still have to be careful with clashing span classes. Since -more- in the input yields a "more" span class in the html, using a -more- inside another span may cause bad things to happen.
- mark 5-07-2003 4:38 am

jim i cant find a price for the camera, me ready to buy!!
- Skinny 5-07-2003 6:18 pm

$509.95 at B&H.
- jim 5-07-2003 6:24 pm

If you get it today bring it to dinner tonight!
- jim 5-07-2003 6:29 pm

Mark - Yeah there are all sorts of pitfalls with CSS. Nested span tags shouldn't be a problem, but it does get tricky to figure out inheritance. And different browsers do it differently! In other words, like you are finding, if you don't specify a specific argument for a span, that span will inherit a value for that argument from somewhere. But sometimes it is tricky to figure out from where.

Our pages here could probably be used as an example of how not to do things. At least to an HTML/CSS purist. The problem is that if you take the effort to do everything to spec so that pages actually validate they won't render correctly in a lot of browsers! This leaves me with no energy to invest in the problem, and I just go with a "good enough" attitude.

Still, maybe someday we'll bring someone on board who wants to tackle this problem. Probably about the time we convince the last of our friends to abondon 4.x generation browsers.
- jim 5-07-2003 6:37 pm

Jim they have them on sale for $440!!!
What else do we need to get BEANing.....
- Skinny 5-09-2003 5:18 pm

I bought the $509 version, the $440 has a diddly squat memord card......JIM how long to batterys last??....YAHOO we joined the digital MT age.....
- Skinny 5-11-2003 8:11 pm

Batteries will be good. The flash runs them down faster than anything else.

Now we have to get you a program to resize images. That's the only thing you'll have to learn. Not hard though. But necessary, since you'll want to keep the full resolution (4 meg) images on your computer, but you'll want to upload much smaller (size & resolution) to the server here.

I resize to 500 pixels wide and try to get the size down to 50k - 100k. Linda and I will teach you how to do this.
- jim 5-11-2003 8:14 pm

This program: irfanview was recommended by someone as a good free image editor for windows. I think someone here (Tom? Mark?) used it and didn't complain too much.

Linda - maybe you should download it and give it a spin. Looks like it has batch conversion support, so hopefully we can set it up so Mike can just drop a folder full of pictures on it, and it will resize and shrink them all.

- jim 5-11-2003 8:17 pm

A friend in DC does a lot of digital photography, has tried a lot of different photo editors, and during his last visit seemed pretty happy with something from Adobe. If, no, when, I come up in June I'll try to bring the software, or the DC guy, who is often in NY can pass it by Bill and ya'll can all load it, try it out at least.
- jimlouis 5-11-2003 8:43 pm

excellent. thanks all. just downloaded irfanview.
- linda 5-11-2003 8:57 pm

I don't know irfanview. I use Lviewpro, primarily because I was using it in '95. tucows is a good place to browse for cheap or free windows software.
- mark 5-11-2003 9:33 pm

The irfanview person was me. I haven't had any problems with it to date. But haven't done any resizing.
- bruno 5-12-2003 12:01 am

This is getting a bit technical ... Lview pro does a decent job with anti-alias during resizing, but sometimes needs extra help from a blur filter to prevent jaggies. It has a simple crop tool that works well. Crop and resize are the most commonly used functions.
- mark 5-12-2003 9:31 am

jim the reason i ask about the battery is i dont havean adaptor for Greece to recharge, not sure i will have enough time to find one.....
- Skinny 5-12-2003 3:34 pm

Modern electronics are good to go on a wide varitey of electrical systems. Greece is 220 / 50hz. Your Canon should have no trouble with this, although I'm having trouble 100% confirming this. I'm sure it gives the operating range either in the docs, or probably printed right on the recharger (or battery.) It'll say something like: 120 to 240 v / 40 to 60 hz - meaning that 220/50 would be no problem.

Anyway, I'd be amazed if it couldn't work plugged straight into the wall in greece. You only need an adaptor for the style of outlet. Greece is the same as Austria. You can use this common adaptor. I'll bet Linda has some, and if not I do, or you can find them very easily (here for sure, and probably there too.)

Still, more batteries are a nice luxury. One will not last all week. (Two won't last all week either unless you don't take many pictures.) Are you bringing a laptop? Remember the full res photos are huge, so 256megs of storage (not sure what you have) will only hold 60 pictures. But maybe that's enough. Or if you bring a laptop, then it's unlimited.
- jim 5-12-2003 4:27 pm