The Designspace

Safari shows blank pages

For a short time now, Safari has been showing blank pages on certain sites, most notably my OWN sites. This was extremely irritating. I am not certain if it is related to the recent security and Java updates, since I installed them several weeks ago, and this has only been happening for a week or so now.

I believe I fixed the problem for good by deleting all cookies.

There is a lot of discussion about the matter on MacNN:
GoDaddy services unavailable to Safari users and the Apple Support forums:
Topic: Page not viewable in Safari and
Safari weirdness with versiontracker.com

CSS selector names can't begin with numbers

After trying unsuccessfully to make some class styles show up in a document recently, I realized I had labeled the class "3column" which does not work. "Col1_of3" works fine, though.

Setting Finder to show invisible items in Tiger

There was an application called "TinkerTool" that made it easy to toggle the view of invisible items in Panther (10.3.x) but since Tiger came out, I have had trouble finding one that does the same thing. "TinkerTool System" does many things but does not have an option to view hidden files.

However, it turns out the setting is an easy one to change by entering the following into the terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles 1

Then restart the Finder!

Change the 1 to 0 to turn them off again.

Or download Invisibles

Thanks to Pope Stewart for the tips.

Creating simple transparency effects with CSS

The red div has no special effects applied - it is just there to show through the blue div. The blue div has 3 versions of the opacity effect applied to it, to take care of different browsers.

The result:

<style type=\"text/css\">
<!--
#Layer1 {
	position:absolute;
	width:200px;
	height:115px;
	z-index:1;
	left: 199px;
	top: 244px;
	background-color: #CC0033;
}
#Layer2 {
	position:absolute;
	width:200px;
	height:115px;
	z-index:1;
	left: 273px;
	top: 169px;
	background-color: #00CCFF;
	 filter:alpha(opacity=50);   /* Internet Explorer       */
   -moz-opacity:0.5;           /* Mozilla 1.6 and below   */
   opacity: 0.5;  
}
-->
</style>

<div id=\"Layer1\"></div>
<div id=\"Layer2\"></div>

Can't use 2 separate mail clients with Gmail account

I set up mail.app to get my gmail at home, and it worked great. Then used the same settings at work - no luck! I kept getting "connection timed out on port 110".

Thanks to this discussion, I found out that you cannot download Gmail to more than one email client. There is a workaround using 2 Gmail accounts, but I am too lazy to do it - but it's good to know about.