A Practical Guide To Windows and AP Facts

This column is the work of the author. Methods, statements and opinions expressed are not to be construed
as the official policy of or of any person appointed in a position of authority at AP. All actions are at the reader’s risk.
 All names shown in images are imaginary and bear no intentional resemblance (at the time of writing) to any AP name

AP Hints and Tips

There are two places where you may get 'extended' arrows, 'Background Manager' and 'Search Groups'.
If you want to navigate page by page Press the 'Previous Bgs/Groups' or 'Next Bgs/Groups'.
If you want to move more than a page at a time use the hyphens that precede the arrow head.
Each hyphen represents a page and will 'highlight' if you hover your mouse over it.
Press on the hyphen to change pages. The Bgs arrows are from my personal background manager.
Counting the hyphens means I have 6 pages of background graphics, other than the one I was on. 




About Background Graphics



As you can see 'Background Manager' defines the maximum size graphic as 120K and 700 x 700 pixels.
However the modern screen starts at 800 x 600 as a default so your background image would 'tile'
making a mess of the screen. 
Default screen sizes (width) are 800, 1024, 1280, 1600 etc.
The largest width I have managed to load into background manager is 1500, which will look great with
80% of screen definitions and have only a little overlap on 1600. Keep the height of the background to
less than 200 pixels and it should load



This animated background is 29472bytes and 1500 x 210. Does it tile on your screen?
NB The slider bar at the bottom of your browser window is normal, this graphic shows as starting about
100 pixels in from the left because is it IN a page as oppossed to being a background.
As a rule of thumb keep your graphics within 700 x 700 (ie 490,000 pixels) and below 120K, but be prepared
for the larger ones to fail.


Time Lapse Errors

90% of the time, time lapse is not a problem on the net. However there are two areas where the sheer number of people
participating and contributing sometimes cause time lapse errors. These are

The Chatterbox
and
Featured Poems

Time lapse is due to events 'on the net' outpacing the refresh rate of your browser.
To address this in the Chatterbox you will have noticed a (refresh) link under the Chatterbox.
There is no such facility for Featured Poems. Once on a page, if no other actions occur,
your browser will retain the information given to it without updating.

Let us suppose that you are on your Author's page and you spot
a Featured poem with a likely looking title and decide to comment
on it to get points and to enjoy it's obvious charm. The phone rings,
you go for a quick comfort break or get distracted for a minute or two.
In the meantime the poem has only one or two click points left and a
member (or two) clicks on it, sneers and waltzes off into the sunset.
(This does happen, some people have no manners)
The poem will then disappear (on AP) from the featured list, but still show
on your browser as featured. The link is still 'live' and you will get taken to the
relevant poem, but it will no longer give you bonus points and there is no
mechanism available to tell you of its changed status.

The only remedy is either to press F5 on your keyboard or to press  before
selecting a Featured poem.

This guide assumes you are using  and Internet Explorer version 5 or later,
although most of the knowledge will be applicable to earlier versions of Windows.  

You are reading this Guide by using a browser window. Many people open a browser window to full size
and never stray from that either from preference or from lack of knowledge.

This is a typical browser window that has been altered in size:



In the top-right corner are three buttons

The close  button closes the browser window.

The minimise  button puts the window onto the Taskbar (bottom of the screen) as an oblong button.

The middle button can either be the 'restore down'  button or the 'maximise'  button.

If your browser displays the  button, it means you are working full screen and you cannot resize the window.

If your browser shows the  button, you are working with a sizeable window. Clicking on either button will change
to the opposite mode.