Let's Put Everything on the Table

Of all the insults I received for popesquatting, the ones that stung the most were about my web skills, such as this comment on MetaFilter:

Eh, his website needs work. The text overflows the white box and he must've used the nowrap attribute as there is a hideous amount of rightwards scrolling. pls fix ur website b4 u sho it to teh whirled, pls ok tks.

Ouch. F U 2.

I like three-column designs, so I lay out my sites with HTML tables, often putting ads in the rightmost column. This lends itself to a creative trick some cranks like to employ -- putting a really long word in a comment to hose my layout and push ads way off the page, depriving me of money I need to put food on my family.

I'm currently moving the 14,000 weblog entries and 232,000 comments on the Drudge Retort from Movable Type to my Wordzilla PHP/MySQL software, so I wanted to solve this long-word problem.

I can't use PHP's wordwrap() function, which breaks long words that exceed a set maximum, because my weblog comments include hyperlinks. Any URL longer than the maximum would be broken.

I found a nice open source PHP script by Brian Huisman, htmlwrap, that solves this problem:

htmlwrap() is a function which wraps HTML by breaking long words and preventing them from damaging your layout. This function will NOT insert br tags every "width" characters as in the PHP wordwrap() function. HTML wraps automatically, so this function only ensures wrapping at "width" characters is possible. Use in places where a page will accept user input in order to create HTML output like in forums or blog comments.

Wordzilla · Php · Mysql · Movable Type · Html · 2005/05/19 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

depriving me of money I need to put food on my family.

9 1/2 Weeks?

#1 · Scotty · 2005/05/19

If it's any consolation, it looks just dandy, now.

P.S., Love the Comment Preview feature, dahlink.

#2 · Eideteker · 2005/05/19

I'm know I'm a complete n00b, but I don't understand why you use HTML tables to achieve a 3-column layout. I thought that was the whole point of CSS, so people could avoid using wonky tables in HTML.

#3 · monkeysan · 2005/09/07

From James Dean

The Mutant King:

German correspondent Edmund Redschneider said about the Dean cults:

"After the war everything was broken down, rotten. It was a time of consolidation among the young- a time when old people were just glad to live.

They didn't want any more responsibility.Dean showed the clash between the older and the younger generation. James Dean believed
in himself.

In Germany, before the war, America had always been a dream country
and Hollywood had a lot to do with
the creation of that image.

It was rich and beautiful and who didn't like that?
His biggest success in Germany
was Giant
because he represented a person who had nothing
and becomes something
and this was the dream of everyone at the time."

#4 · Vince Williams · 2005/09/18

attemptingtobreakyoursitetoseeifyou'vefixedtheproblemi'mtryingtofix,terriblysorryforthis.

#5 · evilunistudent · 2005/10/05

Victory is mine!

#6 · Rogers Cadenhead · 2005/10/06