Tag Archives: Browser

Print (or save) that photo!

It’s come to my attention that printing from the new Gallery tool on the Offspring page is not as easy as it could be. Paying for Shutterfly prints is an option, of course, but you can also print the images right from the site or save them to your hard drive. Here are some instructions…

1. Click on the picture you want to print, so it appears by itself on the page in the larger size.

picture-1.png2. In the gray area above the picture, on the right side, you’ll see the date, owner, and size information. There’s a menu that allows you to pick other sizes to view, and the “full size” appears below that as an orange link (see picture). Click the orange link next to “full size.”

3. The page will reload displaying the full-size picture, which will most likely be too big to fit in your browser window.

4. To print the picture, you’ll want to open it up in a window by itself. Do this by right-clicking (on a Mac, hold the Ctrl key down and then click) on the picture, and in the menu that appears, choose “View image” or “Open image in new window” something similar. (The exact wording varies depending on your web browser.)

5. Now you can print the photo by choosing “Print” from the browser’s “File” menu (or by clicking the print button, if your browser has one).

6. If you want to save the picture, do everything up through step 4, but instead of choosing “View image” from the menu, choose “Save target as…” or “Save image to disk” or something to that effect.

Forget what I said before; we have a winner!

It’s a given that anything I post here is going to be brain-deflatingly stupid. But this one goes beyond even what I would have expected of Microsoft. Fortunately, thanks to a highly effective Google search, I was able to solve the problem in minutes.

The problem was this: For a site I’m working on, we are manipulating the 404 error feature to allow users to set up customized URLs. If the URL entered doesn’t match a real page, it gets fed into this 404 error script, which looks up the path in a database and redirects the user to their customized page. A bit of a hack, but it’s pretty slick.

As usual, I am developing the site using Firefox as my test browser. But… UH-OH! Surprise! When giving a demo of this feature today using Internet Explorer, we discovered it didn’t work! Internet Explorer was not returning the server’s 404 error page, instead using its own internal version (which we’ve all seen and most generally ignore).

Drat! What to do? Well, as it turns out (thanks to the aforementioned Google search), the problem is quite simple. To quote the unbelievable but, as I verified, 100% accurate description I found on this page:

Internet Explorer has a lightly-documented “feature” that stops it from serving any custom 404 error page that is less than 512 bytes long. Your visitors will instead be sent to IE’s own 404 page, which is generic and suggests they use an MSN search to “look for information on the Internet.” That’s one way to lose visitors! Make sure your custom 404 error page is over this limit — about 10 full lines of text and HTML should be enough.

Yep, that’s it. I did my best Bart Simpson-at-the-blackboard impersonation, filling my 404.html file with a large comment block wherein I repeated (about 130 times, for good measure) the phrase “This block exists solely to force Internet Explorer to load this page.”

Sure enough, it worked. D’oh!

Thinking a bit more about this, I at least think I understand why Microsoft chose to do this. “If the server’s default 404 error page is so short,” I imagine them musing, “then it probably doesn’t offer users much helpful information. And since our wonderful web browser is much more important to our users than the web pages themselves, let’s just butt in and do things our way. (Is there really any other way anyway?)”