Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

A full page ad in the newspaper today for Wizetrade, a stock market analysis program designed for the average person. Stock Market analysis has always been a hobby of mine, so I couldn’t help following up on this. The website for wizetrade shows marketing at its highest potential (the marketing here is to sell the wizetrade program). It is really a site to behold (no pun intended). They even have their 64 page tutorial available online, which is so well done and full of labelled screenshots, and beautifully laid out. I will definitely try to incorporate some of the styling ideas from their tutorial into Behold’s help file. As far as the software goes, I’m sorry but there’s no magic formula to consistently beating the market. Wizetrade’s motto: “Your success guarantees our success”. We’ll see how long they last.

If you were wondering where I “advertised” this newsfeed: I submitted my feed to Feedster, Syndic8, and Bloglines. Bloglines is very interesting as they offer a free service that includes an online feedreader, ability to easily create your own blog, and a full community for sharing your feeds. For example, look at my page at Bloglines. What I can’t figure out is how they make any money.

Overall, there are three ways you can get a feedreader, and all three ways are available free: (1) Online, e.g. with Bloglines, (2) On your desktop as a standalone program, e.g. with SharpReader, or (3) Integrated into your mailreader, e.g. with nntp//rss. I’ve also seen other possibilities, e.g. RSS to e-mail, but I think that’s enough choices already!

As I was testing my Behold Blog (i.e. this page), I found that the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) used to lay out the page caused much of the text to overlap if the browser window was made too small. This was not good, and seems to have been there since I implemented it. I took a look at the CSS and javascript on the page, did some research, and found I couldn’t get around the problem, because the “min-width” variable does not work correctly in all versions of Internet Explorer.

I worked out one solution by setting the columns to a fixed width, but it looked bad with a wide window since the right side will be empty.

So I decided to take it apart and implement it with an html table instead. After about an hour of work, I finally got something that should be more stable, and looks almost the same as what I had before - without the glitch.

Netscape didn’t support the XHTML that it used, but now with these changes under Netscape, the appearance of this Blog is at least in table form, whereas it wasn’t before.