WebMedley Hints and Tips #3
(Originally sent Monday, March 24th, 2003)
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Hints and Tips - Creating Pages For Confidential Resources:

There are all kinds of resources you can make available on a website such as calendar information, downloadable flyers, newsletters, permission forms, bible studies, sermons, etc... However, there may be times that you want to put resources online that you don't want just any old visitor to your website having access to. Examples of this might be a prayer request list that should only be seen by a certain group, or meeting minutes from the trustees or the finance committee, or top secret plans of the Pastor's new beach condo/parsonage. Having such resources available online could be very helpful, but how do you keep others from having access to them? The answer is actually very simple. Visit http://support.webmedley1.com/detachtip.html to learn more...

Question of the Week - The "Question Mark Syndrome"

Q.) Why are all these "?" appearing in my text after I save it?

A.) The question mark (?) is HTML's way of telling you it doesn't recognize something. These will typically appear when you cut and paste text into your Web page from a word processor. Microsoft Word (and other word processing programs) have unique formatting codes that do not transfer from one program to the next exactly. The ? marks appear when there is a discrepancy with the formatting codes.

A common example of this occurs with quotation marks. A raw quotation mark looks like this: " - simply two vertical lines. However, you may have noticed that in may word processors, when you put in two sets of quotation marks, they lean in towards each other. This make them more aesthetically pleasing on the page, but in order to do this, the word processor has replaced the original quotation mark with another character or symbol that gives the effect of the 'leaning quotations'. This character, when pasted into an html page - is not recognized by the HTML and therefore it puts in a "?". Other characters this commonly happens to are hyphens (-) and apostrophes ( ' ). You will not see these question marks throughout your page until after you save. When you save, the HTML on the page is applied to the page and that's when you may notice the incorrect question marks. You can use the FIND tool in your toolbar to check your document after saving it for any incorrect question marks and then just manually replace them and re-save your page.

To reduce the instances of "?" and formatting changes on your web page, cut and paste the text into Notepad (this can be found by going to your Start menu -> Programs -> Accessories) first, then cut and paste from Notepad onto the web page. Notepad will will reduce your content to plain text (no formatting) and will remove any unique formatting codes. By pasting out of Notepad onto your Web page, you greatly reduce your risk of formatting inconsistencies in HTML, such as the "question mark syndrome".

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