Placing reciprocal codes or code for web rings and other such things can be a chore. You put the dang things on there and they don't work. And you swear up and down it's all there. Well here a few reasons why this can happen.

Most code based banners and such like, like most computers, are very very literal.

For example:

This is the code for one of my web rings.

This one would work, with a few bits I had to remove to make it print here, but enough to make the point.

script language=javascript
src="http://ss.webring.com/navbar?f=j;y=starwind;u=10099245"></script>
<noscript><center><table bgcolor=gray cellspacing=0 border=2
bordercolor=red><tr><td><table cellpadding=2 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr><td
align=center><font face=arial size=-1>This site is a member of WebRing.
To browse visit <a href="http://ss.webring.com/navbar?
f=l;y=starwind;u=10099245">
here</a>.</font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></center></noscript

This one would not, can you see why ?

script language=javascript
src="http://ss.webring.com/navbar?f= j;y=starwind;u=10099245"></script>
<noscript><center><table bgcolor=gray cellspacing=0 border=2
bordercolor=red><tr><td><table cellpadding=2 cellspacing=0 border=0><tr><td
align=center><font face=arial size=-1>This site is a member of WebRing.
To browse visit <a href="http://ss.webring.com/navbar?
f=l;y=starwind;u=10099245">
here</a>.</font></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></center></noscript

Compare the second line on both of them and what do you see ? The
answer is right here := j;y=starwind. Do you see the space between the = and the j;y ?

This alone is enough to break the code to were it's non functional. Such a little thing, unless you realize how these codes work. To your eyes it's the same thing. If they where words they would be, but they are not words, they are codes that tell the machine what to do, in this case what navigation bar to display on the site.

That's all it takes to break most any line of code, a java script code like this one in particular. The same goes for most lines of code on your site. Which is why trying to write it all in notepad or some other on line editor is very very difficult.

Even for an off-line editor like front page, and others like it, the same thing can happen. To your eyes it's all there and should work. To the machine however it stops right where the break occurs and it does nothing with it. It cannot. The grammar if you will, must be correct.

So how to avoid this ? First off get a good WYSIWYG composer that will let you work with colors and images instead of codes. Let it write the codes in the background. These are not infallible, a topic I will cover later on, of the major oops such things can create for you that you have to go fix.

OK so if you have a composer, why learn codes? Because, as I just mentioned, they can make mistakes. And you have to be able to figure out where the mistake happened. Like the above example you can see how a tiny change can make all the difference in the world.

You need both a composer and some kind of editor to make a good site. You can't even place this kind of code on most composers. This page was created on just such a web page
composer, and you see the way the codes look.. however behind the page, where you cannot see it looks like this.

body text="#FF99FF" bgcolor="#000000" link="#FF6666" vlink="#551A8B"
alink="#FF0000">
<b><font face="Book Antiqua"><font color="#FFFFFF">Placeing
reciprocal codes or code for web rings and other such things can be a
chore. You put the dang things on there and they don't work. And you swear up
and down it's all there. Well here a few reasons why this can
happen.</font></font></b><b><font
face="Book Antiqua"><font color="#FFFFFF"></font></font></b

This tells it that I want X color for the page, the letters in this font, at this size, etc. Which it reads and
translates it out to you the viewer. If any part of this is missing before the words or section. It will default to whatever font and color the viewer has as " their " defaults for their browser, which can have some very weird results.

I'm sure you have seen this on some web pages where you wonder what they were thinking when they wrote it. Because they wrote it without telling it what font, color etc. to use. The same thing can happen if you don't Have the font they used installed on your machine, but you cant cover everything.

Back to what makes codes work.. take a wild guess as to what's missing on the first set of codes to make them non functional ? This " < > " at the beginning and end of the code. This sign just means start code, if you see it with this </ it means end of code. If those are not there.. the code does not work, or worse is unending.

I had this happen once where I had two separate java codes for web rings right next to each
other. And the system persisted that there was only one. The reason, no tag that said </. Somehow when I copied the codes I missed that tiny bit and it was not told stop, so it kept going to the next set of code as if they where one long code. It was very frustrating to say the least.

Needless to say if you are copying codes down for banner exchanges and the like make sure you get " all " the code.

May this information save you some frustration.

yours
Esta Weiss