James Smith • loopj.com

CSS veterans will probably already know this, but here’s a fix to a problem which has been bugging me for ages.

Problem:

If you have something like:

<div>
    <img src=... />
</div>

You may see a gap below the image on some browsers, a gap which cannot be removed by setting the padding/margins to 0:

Solution:

<img> tags are rendered using display: inline by default, which means they act and flow like text does on a page. In order to stop spaces being added (caused by spaces next to the img tag in your html), you should set your img to use display: block.

<img style="display: block" src="..." alt="" />

This means your image will no longer act like flowing text and will no longer have a gap below it!

Caveats:

Changing from display: inline means your img tag will ignore things like text-align: center, and other alignments specific to displaying elements inline.

Image credit: buhsnarf on flickr

I’ve just been reading an article about the diarist Robert Shields, who sadly passed away last year, describing his amazing “condition”.

Robert was thought to have hypergraphia, an overwhelming urge to write, and detailed every action of his life meticulously in a collection of diaries. The entries chronicled every 5 minutes of his life.

Every mundane, boring detail, such as the following gem:

July 25, 1993

7 am: I cleaned out the tub and scraped my feet with my fingernails to remove layers of dead skin.

7.05 am: Passed a large, firm stool, and a pint of urine. Used five sheets of paper.

It struck me how similar this was to the actions of heavy twitter users (I will refrain from mentioning specific names!), tweeting every insignificant detail of their lives.

Twitter’s growth problems aren’t a new phenomenon either, Robert too suffered from service scaling issues as his diaries piled up to fill 94 cartons.

These diaries are now in the safe hands of Washington State University, but won’t be released to read for another 49 years. I can barely contain myself.

Robert Shields was a true pioneer. I salute you!

At the end of March, Jude and I bumped into Vincent and Eugene from intruders.tv at Minibar London where I mentioned that it was a shame we couldn’t really get to any of the cool web conferences going on in Europe, at which point Vincent mentioned they were looking for someone to do some interviews at The Next Web 2008 conference in Amsterdam the following week. Go to Amsterdam, the party capital of Europe, and interview some of the hottest people in the tech world. Hell yes.

So following in the illustrious footsteps of Immad, we grabbed the camera, flew over to Amsterdam and tried to interview the best people we could find. Who knew it would be so easy!

The first major interview we got was with Kevin Rose of digg.com fame and talked to many more people throughout both days, it seems that if you have a camera and you ask politely for an interview, people are more than happy to oblige.

It was great fun, an awesome way to meet people and make great friends and contacts.

So check out intruders.tv if you haven’t been there before, and especially check out the interviews we did

Kevin Rose (digg.com, diggnation, revision3, pownce)

Jessica Mah (Entrepreneur, blogger)

Werner Vogels (Amazon.com)

Adeo Ressi (thefunded.com)

Stefan Fountain (soocial.com)

Khris Loux (js-kit.com)

David Prager (revision3.com)

Gary Cige (zilok.com)

Online privacy is not something that has overly concerned me on my internet travels, but there are many people who are vocal about protecting information online. I have been of the opinion that there shouldn’t be a problem with this information being available unless people have something to hide. More recently though, there have been a large number of articles about information being used in new and interesting ways which have led me to think differently about what I say and do online.

I read an interesting article today about the CEO of a company called Plazes being caught out by his own location tracking product after skipping a conference. Just a few hours later, Mashable covered a story about interesting pictures captured by Google’s Street View cameras, including sunbathing girls, strip club patrons and a guy picking his nose on a bench. These articles got me thinking about all the information being constantly fed onto the web, and how things which are seemingly innocent, such as street photography and letting people know what you are up to could get you in trouble.

Mashable’s article raised an interesting point:

It won’t be long until people start identifying protected witnesses or spotting domestic violence and who knows what else.

I’m sure there are many more examples, and it isn’t just Street View and Plazes which are collating this sort of information.

As a fan of social networking and microblogging I’m feeding more and more information to services like Facebook and Twitter, meaning that more people have access to details of what I’m doing than ever before. At this time we make this sort of information available it might seem like a trivial thing to do, but often this information is archived and stored for the future, meaning, in theory, someone could build a profile of your habits and activities.

When a user chooses to release this information to friends and contacts, there are normally clear controls on who can see what. When it comes to information outside of the user’s control, such as the public domain images captured by Google’s Street View, there isn’t much that a user can do about it, and this capturing and hoarding of public domain information is surely to increase.

A couple of years ago when Facebook and MySpace were starting to make it big in my area, I began hearing stories about job interviewers who would mention to interviewees that they had read the interviewee’s Facebook profiles, there were even rumours of this being used as the basis for refusing employment. If you ask around I’m sure you will find similar stories. Again, the user can choose who to make this information available to, and what to release, but there are often ways to get around these protections. For example, it is simple enough to use a friend’s account on a social networking site, such as Facebook, to view users’ profiles on a network other than your own.

It is now commonplace to Google people to get an idea of their reputation and links (although with a name like James Smith you get a certain level of automatic anonymity!) and the idea of doing this wouldn’t really sound too shocking to most people. Are people adjusting their ideas of acceptable privacy due to the changing volumes of available information?

Another possibility which could arise from this growing information craze, is that of social misinformation. It would be quite easy to set up accounts with social networking and microblogging sites and feed them with whatever information you choose to, meaning you could present yourself online as a different person to offline. Of course, this idea has been around for a long time, with stories of men posing as women on chat rooms etc since the dawn of the internet, but would it be now credible to create a persona and backstory online to manipulate people, such as in the job interview situation mentioned above? Imagine a situation where someone’s Twitter or Facebook status was used as an “alibi” to show where someone was. Clearly this could never be used in a legal situation, but maybe it would convince the boss that you were ill rather than at that party.

What do you think about this? Does anyone have any other examples of where information such as this has been used in an interesting way? Let me know by leaving a comment.