I screwed up links.

December 16, 2004 7:26 PM

I screwed up. Links I posted here are all screwy somehow. Instead of telling me what I did wrong, can someone tell me how to fix it?
posted by mudpuppie to MetaFilter-Related at 7:26 PM (20 comments total)

e-mailing matt is the best (only) thing to do. he's the only one who can edit a post. someone (me, in a second) will look at the source and repost them in the thread.
posted by quonsar at 7:28 PM on December 16, 2004

ALongDecember already has. :-)
posted by quonsar at 7:29 PM on December 16, 2004

thanks. i was quivering in my boots, waiting for the fallout.

really, it was a cut-and-paste error. seems this window doesn't recognize curly quotes.
posted by mudpuppie at 7:31 PM on December 16, 2004

looks like you used some weird quote marks in there. composed this in Word, eh? Notepad works better for that.
posted by quonsar at 7:32 PM on December 16, 2004

Relax, no fallout- this isn't a faux pas, it's an honest mistake. No quivering necessary. (although, both times I posted a link, I had to take deep breaths for fear of how people were going to react- it can get volatile in here, as I'm sure you've noticed.)
posted by exlotuseater at 7:36 PM on December 16, 2004

I know. Really, I know.

I was doing this instead of doing work (in Word). It was open. I was tempted. End of story.
posted by mudpuppie at 7:36 PM on December 16, 2004

Relax, no fallout

Why are y'all so nice all of a sudden? I'm getting suspicious....
posted by mudpuppie at 7:37 PM on December 16, 2004

(hand reaches up out of the grave)
posted by Hildago at 7:38 PM on December 16, 2004

Did I miss the lynching? I brought fruit salad!
posted by eyeballkid at 7:39 PM on December 16, 2004

Why are y'all so nice all of a sudden? I'm getting suspicious....

Because you made an honest mistake. It wasn't a quadruple post and it wasn't another tedious "Hay guys I have metafilter! A/S/L LOL" thread.
posted by cmonkey at 7:41 PM on December 16, 2004

Fruit salad goes well with dorkflakes, I hear!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:42 PM on December 16, 2004

The entire web, for at least for internationalization reasons if nothing more but actually for many more reasons as well, should be unicode (and implicitly, extended character) compatible. That we use those double-ticks as both open and close double quotes is an artifact of former technological limitations and should not be accepted as the typological standard. I think condemning Word for its "smart quotes", which is really just converting double-ticks to what they should have been to begin with, is wrong-headed.

However, the reality is that, being of US origin, much of the net infrastructure is built around the basic ASCII character set and one must be aware of this. What looks like a "double-quote" in an URL really should be seen as the use of a specialized marker completely independent of what we think of as "quotes" in English usage. One might expect MS to have tried to have Word recognize this specialized usage, but, really, such a tiny minority of Word users will actually write out HTML that there's almost certainly much more productive use of the programming teams' time.

Notepad isn't really safe for this use, either, because although it doesn't do the "helpful" conversion, it's still unicode and extended character compatible and thus it's easy to have things slip into it that you don't want when you're writing something that needs to be in simple ASCII.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 7:43 PM on December 16, 2004

Because you made an honest mistake

Whew.

By the way, I have two really cool sites to tell you about. One collects weird news stories. On the other, you can buy all sorts of cool things!

Please get me one of these for christmas.
posted by mudpuppie at 7:45 PM on December 16, 2004

:-)
posted by c13 at 8:07 PM on December 16, 2004

Simple mistake. Instant, honest request for help. What's not to like?

If you're not comfortable with basic two-penny html, here's a primer that will help you formulate links.
posted by scarabic at 8:12 PM on December 16, 2004

Actually, basic two-penny html is all i'm comfortable with. It just doesn't paste from Word very well. Thanks, though!
posted by mudpuppie at 8:15 PM on December 16, 2004

I'm just glad you didn't post this to metatalk in a WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO MY THREAD? THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT kind of way, like what's been going on around here lately.

And, it's a good post. Or, it will be.
posted by interrobang at 8:15 PM on December 16, 2004

Then look on this as a fortuitous event. You are comfortable with two-penny html, and, we should hope, less comfortable with Word. This is very much as it should be. We might even declare the truth be found. Sweet.
posted by scarabic at 9:04 PM on December 16, 2004

Au contraire, scarabic babe.

I am comfortable with 2-penny html AND Word. I am not comfortable with making mistakes on "fpp"s. Sweet!
posted by mudpuppie at 9:08 PM on December 16, 2004

Here was my 2-penny contribution!
posted by jabo at 10:23 PM on December 16, 2004