Height/Width problems??

Hi everyone,
Firstly just like to wish you guys a Merry Christmas and all the best in the New year
Just a problem thats been bugging me for ages now, my host 'optusnet' gives me a counter to put on my site however it has not got a 'height' defined. Therefore the rest of my page can not load till the counter has.
Every time I try to put a 'height' in the code, the counter wont show! I have tried it in a few differnt places in the code but just cant seem to nail it. Below is the code they gave me.

<img src="/cgi-bin/counter?width=6&font=BLUEBLK&name=xx
xxxxxx">

Any suggestions would be great and thank-you.
'Take Care' ...Blue...

Hi Blue,

I feel that the delay in your page load time may not necessarily be due to the counter.

The image is too small to have such a huge effect, rather the embedded music and big picture on your index page may be at fault here.

You may consider removing the music to see if the page load time improves.

The counter is a bit old-hat nowadays, you might consider implementing a hidden version of the counter instead!

Goodluck
Kronenberg ~:-)
www.cnodesigns.co.uk

Hi Kronengerg (and Blue!!)

We were discussing this about a month or so ago. It's an interesting technical problem. The music clip is causing a couple of different problems, depending on platform, but Blue considers that the music clip is important to the site.

It'd be interesting to get a little discussion going of how it could be presented, optimized, loaded, etc. so as to cause the least problems and make the best presentation.

My problem is that I have a small bag of tricks for images, nothing at all for sounds or other objects.

Can this be effectively done without streaming media support, etc. on the server??

Anne

In this case I think Flash is probably the best way to handle long sounds such as music clips. Flash can stream stuff like sound I think (Not totally sure on this!) so that the rest of the page can load before the whole sound is loaded.

Matt
ELATED

--
Matt Doyle
ELATED - Helping people make websites since 1997!
http://www.elated.com/

Yeah, it can. And you can control (kind of...sort of) how it loads by using a stylesheet. I never tried making a Flash movie with no pictures. Wonder how that would be.

Blue, if you don't have Flash, send it to me--preferably as an MP3. If you can't send an MP3, send a WAV. Just be sure you put I AM SENDING YOU THE MUSIC FROM MY HOMEPAGE in the subject. There is yet another really ugly virus going around.

Might take me a while, but I will see what I can come up with.

Anne

Flash to the Rescue!

Great idea Matt about using flash, I think that is the best method so far excluding Beatniks "Sonify".

Anne - what's the name of the virus? I have a feeling some reprobate tried to send me one.

Kronenberg ~:-)
www.cnodesigns.co.uk

[Edited by Kronenberg on 05-Dec-01 21:34]

Ahh.

This week's virus du jour is called "Goner."

You can get all the gory details at nai.com, but basically it's similar to last weeks--gets into your Outlook and mails itself to everyone. It'll attempt to delete anti-virus files from your system. It also has the ability to become an IRC bot, and if you use mIRC it'll go out and seek victims that way. Does something with ICQ, too, but I forget exactly what.

Lovely.

Anne

hi again,
Thank-you so much everyone for taking the time and your suggestions. Flash seems to be the go to make the music load quicker. Anne, I will see if I can get the midi in either a wav or a mp3 to send to you but please dont spend to much time on it. I know how busy all you guys are at this time of the year
Getting back to the main question.
Can I put a 'Height' definiton in the counter
code? See I ran my page through 'Net Mechanic' and it said all my images need a height and a width. My counter has not got a 'height' defined and 'Net Mechanic' seems to rate this as a big problem. I know this shouldnt slow my page to much, but I am trying to elimate the obvious things first.
Once again thank-you for your time and patience with us novices.
'Take Care' ...Blue...

Anne,

I've been getting a lot of emails with this virus. Luckily I'm running on Linux so my mailer (Evolution) cheerfully ignores the payload. But it's still annoying to receive them!


Blue,

I'd have thought you could just put:

<img src="/cgi-bin/counter?width=6&font=BLUEBLK&name=xx

xxxxxx" width="xxx" height="yyy">

(Although I guess the width might be variable if it's a counter?)

I wouldn't have thought a missing height tag on its own would make much different to page loading time.

Cheers!
Matt
ELATED


--
Matt Doyle
ELATED - Helping people make websites since 1997!
http://www.elated.com/

Blue,

We're not out of the woods yet on it. The Flash movie will be easy to create, but there's got to be some browser checking built in as well. Not entirely sure how to build that into the actual page, but I'll give it a try. Regrettably I don't have the software to convert midi's, which Flash can't use. But I can convert a .WAV to an MP3, which makes for faster loading, smaller size, and better sound quality. As for the "height" issue, I'm like Matt--can't see where it would matter.

Matt,

This one really caught a lot of people flat-footed. No idea why, either, except bad timing. I've been lucky so far.

Anne