Dave’s Answer:

Unfortunately, I don’t have MS Internet Explorer 7 (aka “MSIE7″) on any of my computers any more, so I couldn’t duplicate the problem, but I did go through the process step-by-step with IE 8 to see if I could find a “test” feature. I couldn’t.

I hate to say “upgrade your version of Internet Explorer” but, well, I guess I just did. There might be some weirdness with the preferences or settings you have for your version of IE7 that is instantly remedied by the upgrade. If you want to, it’s a free download – and well worth it, in my opinion, muchly because of the significant improvements in online safety and virus-prevention — here: Upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer.

Once you’ve done so, here are the steps required to change your default search engine from the “hated” Bing to Google…

First off, in IE8, if you look on the top right, you’ll see it shows the name of your default search engine (Bing). Adjacent to the tiny magnifying glass notice the downward-pointing triangle (highlighted here):

Click on the triangle and you’ll get a little menu of options to appear:

Choose “Manage Search Providers” and it’ll pop up a window with your current search providers and a bunch of other customizable add-ons and settings:

It’s hard to see, but at the bottom there’s a link for “Find more search providers…”. That’s what you want. Click on it and it’ll take you to one of Microsoft’s lesser known sites: IE Add Ons.com (specifically for search helpers):

Scroll down or search the site to find Google. The entry is a bit curiously worded:

To me, this sounds like it’ll only offer search suggestions, not actually deliver the results from searches you do, but perhaps I’m reading it too literally? Anyway, click on the big “Add to Internet Explorer” button and as you would hope, a security confirmation window shows up:

Hopefully there’s no reason to be suspicious when it’s from Microsoft’s site. Click on “Add” to continue and badda-bing, badda-boom, it’s done!

There ya go. The hated Bing has been relegated to a hidden alternative search engine.

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Dave’s Answer:

You’re right, many of the articles on Ask Dave Taylor become obsolete because the user interfaces on the various sites update, tweak or dramatically revamp. Hotmail is definitely on that list and the site isn’t even really called “hotmail” any more, actually. Now it’s Live.com, though next month, who knows?

After the rise of Google’s Gmail and dramatic revamp of Yahoo Mail, the MSN Live Hotmail team clearly felt the pressure to add new features and capabilities, so Hotmail also got a facelift, one that makes the site more attractive and easier to use.

Unless you want to set up mail filters, that is.

I did finally figure out how to create mail filters in MSN Live Hotmail (what a mouthful, can I just call it “Hotmail” and you’ll know what I’m talking about?) but it’s pretty well hidden…

To start out, I want to create a new mail folder in Hotmail for the messages I receive from the Microsoft Xbox 360 team. On the left side of the screen is a list of your mailboxes along with the link we seek in blue:

Click on “New Folder” and a window pops up:

The folder I’ll create is “Xbox Mail”. I enter that and press Return (there’s no “submit” or “create” button, which I bet confuses plenty of Hotmail users). Done.

Now let’s create that filter. Here’s my inbox:

I want to filter the message from Xbox Customer Support, so I’ll click on it to have it displayed. Now — and here’s the hidden part — scroll down to the very bottom of the screen and you’ll notice the “Sweep” option. Click on it and:

We want “Move all from…” because we want to move all the messages from the Xbox Customer Support team into the Xbox Mail folder.

A new window pops up:

The most important part of this window is the checkbox: “Also move future messages?” By choosing that you create a permanent email filter that will sweep all the messages that match the rule you specify to the folder you specify.

You’ll also want to specify where it should be moved to, of course. When I specify both, the window now looks like this:

Looks good! To create it, I need to now click on “Move all”.

Now another feature is enabled, but it too is hidden unless you know where to look. It turns out that now there’s a secret gear button to the right of the Folders on the left and if you put the cursor over it, the button is revealed. Click on it and…

That’s darn useful! Click on “Manage Rules” and you can see what rules you have set up:

(eagle-eyed readers will note that the rule I’ve created is not related to the Xbox Customer Support messages after all. Why? Because MSN Live Hotmail spits out an error message that the email address is too long for a filter to be created. Uh, what? Hopefully you won’t see that when you try to do this, and hopefully the Hotmail team can fix this daft limitation)

Why on earth would MS disarm their Hotmail account users in this day and age in the battle against scams/spams/phishing and all other sorts of nefarious exploits!?!?

Dave’s Answer:

I love your question because I love that you use the phrase “nefarious exploits”. That by itself caused me to want to answer your query.

More importantly, you’re right, Microsoft’s Live.com team have indeed moved some things around in the new – vastly improved – Hotmail user interface, and while it’s mostly an improvement in my opinion, there are definitely some things that have shuffled around and found new homes, including the useful View Message Source capability.

Turns out it’s still there in Hotmail – which is good, especially if you’re checking to see if an email message is legit or bogus – but it’s just not accessible from the folder summary view.

Here’s an example: I sent myself a message from a different account to my Hotmail account and here’s how it looked in the inbox:

Let’s look at that second message. To do so, simply click on the subject shown, and it’ll show the message itself:

At this point, notice the “Action” menu button on the top right. Click on it and there are a bunch of different options you can do here in Windows Live Hotmail:

There’s what we want, almost at the bottom: View Message Source. Choose that one and *poof* you’re seeing a lot of crufty message routing and status information data, along with other message headers:

So the answer to your question of how to see message source is: use the Action menu. Your question of why they keep moving this sort of thing around? Not so sure about that one, but I’d guess it’s just to keep up with the Joneses (Yahoo Mail, Google’s Gmail).

Dave’s Answer:

Generally, I am of the opinion that Facebook has one of the worst email interfaces online, and that it would be a huge benefit to users worldwide if they allocated a half-dozen developers and a UI designer to revamp the interface. I’d love an “Archive” folder, for example, for email messages I don’t want to delete but also don’t want sitting in my inbox. Unfortunately it’s been years and the interface is just as weak as it’s always been.

Ah well, ours is not to question why, right?

What you’re asking about, however, is pretty easy to do in Facebook, believe it or not, and once I show you how to attach a photo you’ll likely whack your forehead and say “d’oh”. You’ve been warned!

In Facebook, the fastest way to send a new email message is to simply click on “Send a New Message”:

Now compose your message as you always have done, by entering the person’s name (and having Facebook match that with a known friend), a subject, and typing in some sort of message or other:

See the little icon on the lower left that I’ve highlighted with the red box? Click on it.

There we go! For this demonstration I’m going to choose “Upload a Photo” since the picture I want to send my friend Klaus is on my computer…

Click on “Choose File” and find the file you want to send…

In this case the file is called “handmade lamborghini countach 7″ and once I’ve selected it, I click on “Open” and…

Notice that now the file name has replaced the “No file chosen” of the earlier screen. That’s about it. Ready to send the message with the photo to be attached at the bottom? Click on “Send” and away it goes…

As you can see upon closer examination, you can send photos, videos, clickable links, and even youtube videos or music. Reasonably handy.

Now about that email archive folder…

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Dave’s Answer:

I agree with you that Bing is becoming quite a credible competitor to Google and that the results are show in a useful form, including info that Google just doesn’t have. I’m not sure that it’ll every overtake the Google behemoth, but then again, just because Ferrari doesn’t sell more cars than Ford that doesn’t mean it’s not a cool car!

As with the other search systems I have unwrapped and reverse engineered on the site (including Google, Google Images and YouTube), the first step with figuring out how Bing works with search is to go onto the site itself and run a search, then look at the resultant URL.

A Bing search for “cherries” (get it?) produces its results against the URL:

Now we can unwrap this by knowing a bit about how method=get Web forms work:

action=http://www.bing.com/search
q=pattern
go=
form=QBLH
qs=n
sk=

Based on my experience reverse-engineering other search forms, I am going to start with the most minimal possible search box:

Here’s how it looks when we actually include it here on the blog entry:

Try it. Type in a search query and click on “Go!” to see what happens.

Functional, but a bit boring. Let’s make it a tiny bit more attractive by adding a bit of CSS:

Again, when I actually implement it here on the blog entry, this is what we get:

So that’s your answer. You can tweak and fiddle from here…

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Dave’s Answer:

Ah, ain’t the amazing new world of social networking fun and interesting? I have also seen people who use Foursquare checkins as a form of word-of-mouth advertising and I think it’s a pretty ingenious idea if used properly. Unfortunately, it seems more likely that it’s going to be a bit spammy and annoying, particularly if you have checkins show up as alerts on your mobile device or cellphone!

There are two ways to deal with this. One is to set your relation with them such that their updates don’t show up as alerts on your iPhone (or whatever), but the other way, the way you’re asking about, is to just disconnect and jettison them.

Either way, you’ll need to start by going to the Foursquare web site — not using the mobile app — to better manage your friends.

Once you’re there, look for the “Friends” link:

Click on it and you’ll move to the Friends area of the site. Still one more link to click on:

Once you’ve actually clicked on the Friends link that includes a count (and as for me, I can’t believe I have 76 Foursquare friends!) you’ll see a long list of the people with whom you’re connected on Foursquare:

You can see in my little example here that the check box on the right side of the entry for my friend Laura Fitton isn’t checked, while the one for my friend Lori Ruff is: this means that Lori’s updates show up as alerts on my celphone, while Laura’s do not. Why? Because Laura lives in a different city and there’s essentially zero chance we’ll be able to spontaneously bump into each other.

If I wanted to turn off the alerts for Lori, I could simply click the checkbox and they’d stop, but let’s say that I wanted to disconnect / unfriend her entirely. To do that, click on “DELETE” and…

An “OK” click means that the relationship is severed (and I’m pretty sure that they aren’t notified you’ve done that and can only infer it when they realize that they haven’t seen any of your checkins for a while) and a “Cancel” click means you’re still friends.

Hope that helps you gain control of your friend lists on Foursquare!

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Dave’s Answer:

I’m not entirely convinced that the problem on your site is that your HTML isn’t validating – there are a number of other reasons why a page might not be promptly included in the Google index – but it’s a darn interesting question, the implied “how do I fix the HTML on my site to validate”, so that’s what we’ll run with here.

Why bother with valid HTML? Well, as Google explains in its own Webmaster Guidelines that a best practice is to always “Check for broken links and correct HTML”. Generally, though, the chances of your page rendering properly on a wide variety of different Web browsers goes up quite a bit if your HTML is as clean as possible.

Fortunately there are a number of different HTML validation services online that for free will scan your Web page and report any and all errors or warnings it encounters.

The questioner generously allowed us to pull his page, from the site Aquasana For Life, for purposes of illustrating how to fix HTML validation errors. To accomplish that, I saved their page as HTML and moved it to our own server, so we can tweak and modify the page to see what happens.

First off, the untouched source given to the W3C Validator reports:

171 Errors! That’s a TON!

Fortunately, I know a secret about the validator: there are a lot of cascading errors that can appear in HTML and fixing one can often remove a dozen or more reported errors. For example, the first error reported:

Is basically saying “if you have S&H in the source code, you need to escape the ampersand”. To escape an ampersand is to make it a character entity: as a first step i will replace all occurrences of & with &. I found 13 occurences.

The next error shown is a bit trickier:

The page uses XHTML, including unpaired tags in the form <foo /> but since the document itself is written in HTML 4.01 Transitional (it specifies in the first line, as all HTML documents should indicate what format they use) the ” />” is overkill and confusing the validator. Easily fixed: a global substitution of ” />” with “>”.

The next error is interesting:

Read the associated small print and you should have an “a ha!” moment:

“One common cause for this error is the use of XHTML syntax in HTML documents. Due to HTML’s rules of implicitly closed elements, this error can create cascading effects. For instance, using XHTML’s “self-closing” tags for “meta” and “link” in the “head” section of a HTML document may cause the parser to infer the end of the “head” section and the beginning of the “body” section (where “link” and “meta” are not allowed; hence the reported error).”

It might be that the XHTML closing tag sequences ” />” cause this, but looking at the source, there’s also a mess of meta tag, style, meta tag, style, in the head of the document. Since the first two meta tags weren’t flagged as being illegal or in the wrong place, we’ll reorganize the document so that every meta tag appears before the first style block too.

Let’s save this and rerun the validator just to see what it reports: 160 Errors, 7 warning(s). That’s a bit better. Time to look a bit more closely at the errors again:

Look closely and you’ll see that this is indeed an HTML error. The sequence here is <a><font><u>word</u></a></font> but that’s wrong. You need to close things in the reverse order to how you open them so the last two close tags are in reverse order and it should appear </u></font></a>. Easily fixed, but it’s a pervasive error so it’ll be tedious to find every occurrence…

The next error is pretty straightforward: if you’re going to write good HTML code, then every single IMG tag you have should include an ALT attribute. Since there are a ton of these, a fast solution is to add ‘ alt=”" to each and every img tag, then delete the dupes if we bump into them on the next validator wave. On the other hand, if there are more IMG tags that already do have an alt tag, well, then you’re making more work. Might be done by hand.

Here’s an interesting error: in HTML 4.01 Transitional there is no “<nobr>” tag. Solution? Delete them all. There’s no container in HTML I’m aware of that stops the browser using a white space as a line break as needed. The way you can do that is to replace each space with a &nbsp; (non-breaking space), but that’s more work than I’m going to get into for this particular task.

Look at that particular line and it is indeed wrong: <tr> </tr> is not valid HTML: there needs to be a <td> </td> container within. I add that and this error goes away.

There are a lot more sloppy HTML coding errors, including more than one occurrence of width= attributes in a tag, a border attribute in an hr tag (where none exists), and so on. They’re tedious, but fixable…

This is an interesting error and a common point of confusion with CSS. Here’s the key: you can only have one unique occurrence of an “id” in a given document, but you can have multiple occurrences of a “class” in the same doc. More likely than not, every time you use “id” you really mean to use “class”, so I’ll tweak this appropriately.

… much time passes, and finally …

Soooooo close! Let’s see what that final error actually is:

Ah, we can deal with that. It’s an illegal attribute value within a “td” tag. Instead of “center”, we need to use “middle” here. I do that, resubmit the newly fixed file, and:

Phew! That’s a lot of work, I have to say, but it’s worth it. Now we can add a “Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional” on the page, if desired, but, more importantly, we’re now matching what Google wants to see on our home page.

Moral of this story: don’t be sloppy, especially on nested open/close sequences. If you open a b c d then you need to close d c b a, not in some other random order.

Good luck with your own validation efforts. It’s a pain, no question, but it’s worth it.

Comments

Dave’s Answer:

With over 400 million users, you’re obviously not the first person to succumb to peer pressure — or curiosity — and sign up to join the busy Facebook community!

I’ve been plugged in for years, but it’s only in the last year or so that I started to find it interesting and fun. Prior to that, it was basically the same people who I interact with in other forums and mailing lists, so there wasn’t much news. Now I keep in touch with dozens of friends who otherwise are far beyond my usual circles.

It’s actually pretty easy to sign up, but if you want to do it right, allocate enough time to fill in at least some of the basics.

To start, go to http://www.facebook.com/ and you’ll see right on the home page:

Fill this in and click on “Sign Up”. You’ll be asked to verify that you’re not a robot (really! it’s a measure to prevent spammers infecting Facebook with bogus accounts):

Enter the two words you see — in this case “view” and “doorways” — and click on “Sign Up” again on this page.

You’re in! You have an account set up on Facebook. You’re not done, however. First up, it’ll suggest some friends you might connect with:

I have no idea who these two people are, so perhaps they’re special potential friends to everyone who joins Facebook, I dunno.

Since Facebook isn’t much fun without friends being online and connected with you, the system tries all sorts of ways for you to identify your potential friends. Next up is its ability to scan your address book:

If you’d rather not have Facebook scan your mailbox and figure out your correspondences, no worries, just click on “Skip this step”.

Next attempt to match you: enter your high school, place of work, or some other sort of identifying information:

Still want to stay relatively anonymous? Click on “Skip”!

Next step is to set up a profile picture for yourself, something I highly recommend:

Click “Save & Continue” and you’re set and will be dropped onto your new, relatively austere, Facebook newsfeed page. Along the top it’ll remind you that the system has sent an email to confirm your email address, entered in step one:

In your email inbox you should get a message that looks like this:

Click on the link and you’ll have confirmed that the email address you entered is legit. Now you’re good to go on Facebook and it’s time to start sending friend requests and filling in all your personal information so others can find you too.

Have fun! Oh, and don’t forget to become a fan of Ask Dave Taylor on Facebook too!

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Dave’s Answer:

Like every other service, Microsoft’s live.com team is constantly tweaking and modifying the user interface on Hotmail. The goal is to make it easier and easier, to add new features and capabilities and make it look more cool, but the end result is often that it just baffles us users, frustrating as heck that things aren’t where they’re supposed to be. Sometimes even the documentation on web sites ends up inconsistent with the site itself!

Hotmail has been constantly watching services like Google’s Gmail web-based email system and being “inspired by” (or “ripping off ideas from” them, which is another reason why they’re constantly tweaking. And one more wrench in the works: Microsoft Office 2010 is going to include an online document editing and sharing capability and I’m sure that’ll be managed by the live.com system.

Then again, you probably don’t care. You just want to change your password. Here’s how you do it:

When you’re logged in to Hotmail, look on the top right where you’ll see your name, your picture/icon, if specified, and the important little downward-pointing triangle. Click on your name and you’ll find a menu pop up:

Choose “View your Account” and you’ll move to a completely different area in the Hotmail site, actually more a part of live.com:

See about halfway through where it shows “*******” where your password would be and has a “Change” link next to it? I’ve highlighted it to make it easier to find. Click on that link and …

You can see what to do from here. The challenge isn’t changing your password, frankly, it’s finding where to change your password!

Comments

Dave’s Answer:

Sounds like you have put me into the role of superhero. Hmm… does that mean that I need to start wearing a cape? Actually, I kind of like that image… faster than a speeding hard drive, more powerful than a quad-core, able to squash pesky bugs with a single click, it’s Super Dave! What do you think?

Oh, you didn’t write to ask me about that, did you? You want to know how to delete an unused group from Meetup.com. Here’s the reality: as an organizer or co-organizer, you can’t remove or delete a group. Meetup.com even says so: “If you feel comfortable that you’re ready to go, please send an email to the Meetup Community Team, and we’ll take care of finishing the process from here.”

Let me step you through the entire process, however, because my friend Deb Frey generously let me help her delete a group she’d also moved to another event organizing platform…

Log in to your Meetup.com account, and on the right side of the main page you should see a list of groups for which you’re an organizer:

See the little gear icon? I highlighted it. Click on it and you’ll see a menu pop up:

Choose “Group Settings” and you’ll see a bunch of options, nicely organized:

We’ll need to do two things here. First off, it’s time to disallow anyone else joining the group, so click on “Your members” and scroll down to find this:

You need to choose the last of the options, “No one, the group is closed to all new members.” Save those changes and you’ll pop back to the main group settings page. This time, click on “Basic info” instead, and you’ll go here:

As you can see we did here, you need to change the description of the group to “closed” in some manner or other. Save that.

Now, if you haven’t yet sent a message to every group member, do so, letting them know that the group is being deleted and where to find its new home (if you’re indeed moving to Facebook) or suggest other places they can find a replacement group, whatever.

Done? Now you need to email the Meetup admin team asking them to delete the group. Here’s what we did:

I clicked on “Send” and…

That’s all there is to it. Now it’s up to Meetup.com’s admin team to perform the actual group deletion.

Comments