Help

Mozilla FireFox and Netscape Browser Bugs

If you are using one of these non-MSIE browsers, you might encounter a glitch concerning one of the links in the left navigation bar (the left frame). When lucknow.com is first loaded into your browser, the page, "Welcome to Lucknow", appears in the main display frame. If you attempt to reload the welcome page by clicking on the "Welcome" link in the left navigation bar, the page will not reload (that is, the link will not work). Similarly, the link will not work if you click "Welcome" in the navigation bar when you are viewing some other pages in the display frame.

Work-around. Click on "Welcome" arrow link in the top title frame and the "Welcome" page will load into the display frame.

The bug does not occur in MSIE.

Sorry about this glitch. I am investigating it. I assume that it has something to do with the way that the non-MSIE browsers handle tables in the left frame. I will correct it as soon as I know how.

Character Encoding

Do our pages, as your browser renders them, have odd symbols and characters interspersed throughout the text?

The reason for the presence of the odd symbols has to do with the character encoding we used in the writing the text. We used UTF-8 code, a large alphabetic character set, which includes both Latin characters and several non-Latin alphabets. It also includes typographically correct characters, such as opening and closing quotation marks, which are curly marks (not straight marks like those made by old-fashioned typewriters); these characters are not included in the standard Latinate code that most browsers render automatically.

When the browser is set to render the Latinate character set and encounters the code for a alphabetic character that is not in that set, it simply puts in an odd symbol to indicate that it cannot render the character it encountered. After you have set your browser to render UTF-8 code and reloaded the pages, those odd characters will disappear.

All modern browsers are enabled to read UTF-8 characters. Getting Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, and FireFox to render these characters is easy. Go to the "View" menu in the command bar of these browsers. Then click "Character Encoding" or "Encoding". The menu for encoding will show you the many language alphabets that your browser can read. You will notice that "Latinate" is probably selected as the default language. Simply click UTF-8, then reload the pages.

Using Flickr photo sharing service

Flickr is, by and large, easy to use; however, the search function, which anyone can use on the home page of the service, does not seem to return all the photos that it should find (given the search text you enter).

However, when you open a (free) account, the search function that is available from your account page does return the photos it should when you search on tags (keywords) and groups (collective pools of photos from many accounts).

Using the YaBB discussion Forum

YaBB is a complicated looking discussion board. It has to be complicated, sadly, to defeat all the malicious bots and software viruses that hackers use to try to steal email addresses from the bulletin board or to prevent the bulletin board from working.

All I can say is, play around with the bulletin board and you will quickly master it. Register (using a fake name if you want, I don't care), then post messages in the Test forum. Start threads (discussion topics), write replies to your own messages.

Once you have figured out how to use the discussion board, go ahead and post messages you want others to read about Lucknow.

Using the Guest book

Well, at last, a guest book that is easy to use. Register and write the message you want to leave.

March 3, 2007.