Toying with invisibles

Anyone who reads this here blog, if there are any at all, knows I do a calendar-report each month.
Usually I illustrate the art in each of my calendars, and then yammer about each one.
I pick what I consider the best calendar-picture to run first, and then do the rest, good-to-bad.
I have seven calendars, which may seem extreme, but they’re not really calendars to me.
What they are is wall-art, which since they’re calendars, change every month.
The calendars reflect my interests. Four are trains, two are cars, and one is classic WWII airplanes. The cars are hot-rods and musclecars.
One calendar is my own; pictures taken by me around Altoona (“al-TUNE-uh;” as in the name”Al”), PA, of Norfolk Southern Railroad’s Allegheny Crossing.
I usually run that calendar first, partly because I feel it has the best pictures.
But not always.
Quite often each calendar merits more than just the calendar illustration.
My calendar-reports may have more than seven pictures.
November 2010 had 15 pictures.
So I had a problem: visual weirdness.
One calendar needed four pictures; the illustration itself, then three additional pictures.
But there wasn’t much yammering.
So each additional picture got added throughout the copy.
But I only had room for two.
The last of the three had to be added at the end of the copy.
It stood alone, flush with the illustration of the next calendar.
This looked weird; no space between the final picture of one calendar, and the illustration of the next calendar.
Usually I have space between calendars; that is, space after the completed yammering.
But in this case the previous calendar wasn’t ending with yammering; it was ending with a picture.
All my BlogSpot blogs — e.g. this one — are HTML documents.
That’s HyperText Markup Language, an old system of paginating text.
With HTML I can bold text, italicize it, and install pictures and web-links.
That’s all I’m doing, really. My HTML is very basic.
My pictures (illustrations, etc.) aren’t at BlogSpot.
Actually they’re at PhotoBucket.
I have an HTML picture-tag I use to install a picture; its image-source is a PhotoBucket http address.
But I don’t use it to install the column-width calendar illustration.
For that I have an HTML-tag I made up on-my-own.
It counteracts Internet-Explorer’s (“IE”) penchant for shoving snippets of my text up along the right side of a column-width picture into my blurb (at right).
“So what!” I could say, except my guess is most readers of this blog are using Internet Explorer.
For pictures smaller than column-width IE doesn’t do that.
I use FireFox to fiddle this blog, but my guess is most are using Internet Explorer to read it.
Gates and his lackeys.
I can’t even drive this here blog with IE. It won’t work. I can’t add pictures, and BlogSpot asked me to switch to FireFox.
So here I am with the illustration for my next calendar flush with the final picture of my previous calendar.
Looks weird!
What to do to put space between the two pictures?
I tried paragraph-returns. Works sometimes, but still flush.
I replaced my paragraph-returns with the HTML break-tag (“<br>”); still nothing.
I dragged out my HTML book.
I added a spacer-tag; again nothing.
BlogSpot is doing things on its own.
All I have to do is “view-source” to see what they did to my HTML document.
They’re adding HTML tags here-and-there, replacing my paragraph-returns with break-tags, and most importantly stripping out stuff I added.
Like my paragraph-returns, break tags, or spacer tags I added between pictures.
Seems they’re not touching my picture-tags, so how do I fool BlogSpot to add space?
My wife suggests I try adding a table with only my HTML caption-tag; with a blank caption.
Idea-light flashes on.
Whatever is within carets (< and >) is undisplayed and therefore invisible — if BlogSpot doesn’t strip out that caption-tag, I’ve added space between the two pictures.
I try it, but -a) it has to be a table (add that), and -b) that table displays with a frame.
My caption-tag had a frame-tag in it, so delete that.
Try again.
VIOLA! It worked. It added space between the two pictures.
BlogSpot is not stripping that caption-tag.
My original HTML file has a mountain of gibberish in it that doesn’t display because of those silly carets.
All that gibberish goes undisplayed, and appears as space.
“There has to be a simpler way,” my wife says.
There probably is, but so what? I got what I wanted.

• “Norfolk Southern Railroad’s Allegheny Crossing” (of the front range of the Allegheny mountains in PA) is by far the BEST train-watching spot I have ever been to. It includes a hill and Horseshoe Curve, the BEST railfan spot I have ever been to. Horseshoe Curve is now a national historic site. It was a trick by the Pennsylvania Railroad to get over the Allegheny mountains without steep grades — the railroad was looped around a valley to stretch out the climb. Horseshoe Curve was opened in 1854, and is still in use. I am a railfan, and have been since I was a child. —I’ve been to Allegheny Crossing hundreds of times, since it’s only about five hours away.
• “My wife” of almost 43 years is “Linda.” She retired as a computer programmer.