Some textads are too wide

September 12, 2002 5:01 PM

Some TextAds are too wide (on standards-compliant browsers). "www.ArtSwag.com" and
"STICKERS*PINS*SHIRTS For angry ranters and the people who love them" are two examples. It increases the width of the in which it and the sideblog are nested, thereby reducing the width of the main content column, not to mention leaving a large gap between the right-hand page margin and the sideblog.
    The culprit seems to be the title field. A multiworld title with spaces will wrap in the ad-box; the above two examples are long (but within 20-char limit) one-word titles. Can something be done?
posted by rschram to Feature Requests at 5:01 PM (15 comments total)

I know I'm not the only one seeing this. Thinking about it, I can't see a solution, short of hand-editing long single word titles with permission from the person placing the ad. Such is the way of user-contributed data, as every double and multi-paragraph post attests.

This has been bugging me on a purely aesthetic level for a while.
posted by rschram at 5:04 PM on September 12, 2002

Maybe it could just be pulled out of the sidebar and placed lengthwise above the most recent post in a narrow strip? Except of course for the ad I just placed for my wife's wine shop. That really needs to be 96 freakin' points high with flashing text.
posted by machaus at 5:21 PM on September 12, 2002

I only had to refresh the front page eleventy-bazillion times before I actually got the STICKERS* etc. textad, but I definitely agree with you that it's aesthetically unpleasant. A pimp-slap is certainly in order, at a minimum.

And, on preview, I agree with machaus. Anything alcohol-related requires use of the "giant-ass font" tag.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 5:32 PM on September 12, 2002

it's easily fixed. just refresh the page.
posted by crunchland at 5:35 PM on September 12, 2002

Thinking about it, I can't see a solution, short of hand-editing long single word titles with permission from the person placing the ad.

...which is exactly what I used to do, until I realized it took far too much time for something minimal. I should simply report an error if no spaces are found when one submits an ad, but I have a pretty long list of things I should do.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 5:46 PM on September 12, 2002

As mentioned here yesterday - I thought it too unimportant to warrant a new thread.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:00 PM on September 12, 2002

How about simply adding "overflow: hidden" to the CSS? This would clip titles that overflow the ad-boxes.
posted by livingdots at 6:09 PM on September 12, 2002

Is now not the time to ask why everyone doesn't run on 1280x1024?
posted by insomnyuk at 10:58 PM on September 12, 2002

Is now not the time to ask why everyone doesn't run on 1280x1024?

My parents complain that "everything is too small" and they pay the bills ;)
posted by The God Complex at 12:09 AM on September 13, 2002

I am at 1280x1024, insomnyuk, and sometimes 1600x1200 when I'm feeling whimsical. Doesn't matter, for this particular layout mini-issue.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:12 AM on September 13, 2002

See, picking at the nits is really what makes this site elegant, yet beautiful, delightfully tacky, yet unrefined.... (whoops, slipped into Hooters mode there for a sec..)

it's an evolving work of art, in progress... kind of... we'll see in another year, eh?
posted by insomnyuk at 1:33 AM on September 13, 2002

There is the &sbsp; character, a soft breaking space, which allows a line break at that point if necessary, but does not display a space. I don't know how good the browser support for this is, but it should work. Just add it in after fifteen characters or so. The titles that are not too long will not be affected, and those that are will break at character 15. I think that would be something like the following in CFML (I don't know CFML):

REReplace("AD HEADING","(*{15,15}","\1 &sbsp;","ALL")

That's one possible solution, anyway. I can't think of a way to do it without parsing the title text--or rather, not that would still display the whole title.

Of course if someone wanted to go really overboard, they could write a bit of javascript that took the entered title (on focus change perhaps), set it in a div the width of the sidebar, then read the width from the div and checked to see if it had to expand, and if it did, display a "please shorten title" message. If it was written well (and Matt liked the idea), Matt could basically drag and drop it into the page with very little work. But that would only work for people with modern browsers and javascript turned on.

posted by Nothing at 2:12 AM on September 13, 2002

But that would only work for people with modern browsers and javascript turned on.

So basically, if you really care about joining (or doing whatever), you'll go the extra mile and download that little patch or update, right?

If it was written well (and Matt liked the idea)

Just keep it JavaScript and it should be kosher. Anything pre 4.0 is stoneage. Stoneage, DAMMIT! Do you think maybe there is a reason we don't communicate via cuneiform anymore?
posted by insomnyuk at 2:42 AM on September 13, 2002

posted by Nothing at 3:49 AM on September 13, 2002

Nothing: that is the coolest thing ever. Holy shit. I thought Christmas was only once a year, this is almost to good to be true. (i need to pour my drink back into my cup through my nose now)
posted by insomnyuk at 4:02 AM on September 13, 2002