22 October (Part 1) - The Contact form and Internet Explorer 6
The Contact form presented considerable technical difficulties; it shouldn’t
have done but it did. Because the Bonkers server refuses to send messages back
to itself, the ISP’s decision, not mine, the messages are being sent to a
Hotmail account. Hotmail unfortunately sees them as spam and dumps them. To
overcome this the Contact form sends its messages with a fake From address
(mine) and Hotmail has been set to accept it as a safe sender. As always there
is a snag. If when sending a message the Reply email address is omitted it will
not be rejected because the secondary (fake) email address takes its place. Such
messages cannot receive a reply. No effort will be made to correct that failing because it
unintentionally allows messages to be sent totally anonymously.
I had an opportunity to check out the site on Internet Explorer 6 yesterday. The
‘Pickle jar’ wasn’t positioned precisely as I expected but to my alarm the drop
down menu wasn't appearing at all. This has prompted dusting off a ten year old
computer and installing the original version of Windows XP which includes
Internet Explorer 6. That has allowed the following problems to be fixed…
• The flipping book pages in the
June 2011 and
July 2011 blogs are now correctly positioned.
• The dates of blog entries now appear in the correct colour green. IE6
was allowing the link colour of red to take precedence over the font colour.
• The menus have been restored. (Navigation is possible without the menu
drop down but is cumbersome.)