12th July 2002

Who has no trouble with controling his codes? Lockergnomie Wayne Smith: "Here is a bit of information specifically for Hotmail users who may have trouble opening your links, due to the service wanting to place the referred URL in a separate frame. I receive my Lockergnome newsletters via Hotmail and find it really useful when you folks include the link as text. However, sometimes this isn't practical - or it stops the flow of the article. The trouble here is that the link sometimes returns the message: 'There was an error displaying this link' in the frame. No problem! Right-click, copy shortcut, paste to metapad (freeware from LIQUIDNINJA.COM), then do a global search and replace. The trick is to replace the control codes with the correct characters: %26 is an ampersand; %3a is a colon; %2e is a period; %20 is a blank space; %2f is a forward slash; %3d is an equals symbol; %3f is a question mark. The Windows character map can help with any others. Select a character, look at the status bar, replace 'U+[code]' with the percent sign. In other words, the ampersand (U+0026) is %26 which translastes into a '&' symbol. Maybe a more clever Gnomie can come up with some script which we can place in the 'Web' folder, correctly register, and use in IE's right-click / context menu?"