Blue Square Thing

It's called marquee text. There are a whole pile of reasons why you probably shouldn't use it - from a web design perspective it's generally seen as a really bad idea these days and has been depreciated for ever. Different browsers might well fail to display it and I have no idea what on earth the GC app would make of it. Seriously: put a nice message up instead if you really want to. Maybe centre it and make it a little bigger. If you really feel the urge, change the colour. But please don't scroll text.

What a "good" cache page needs does depend on a) what the cache needs (is it simple or complex) and b) what you like to see In terms of "how", I think an understanding of how the HTML code (and related CSS) works is the most useful thing if you want to make something consistent, well laid out and readable on a computer or in web view (like the one Jeff shared). Others might well argue that they want a basic cache page because they use a device that doesn't use the fancy formatting that's possible. The way you go on this depends, I guess. I *think* copying and pasting from Word can be complex as it might bring across some formatting. I've certainly seen a number of cache pages where the formatting is all over the place.. I'm not quite sure why - I suspect a combination of that and using the visual editor. But you do have to dig in to the HTML and CSS if you don't want to use that. The most influential cache page for me was the now archived One O'Clock Gun cache in Edinburgh. I've used this an inspiration for a number of my more complex multi style cache pages - you can find these via my profile. That cache tells a story of course, which is something I often try to do with mine as well. And read your cache pages lots of times. You won't pick up all of the typos, but you'll get most of them (I found one this morning on a cache that was published this time last year...)

Thanks for doing that Jeff. I particularly like the formatting of the caution notice at the top.

Any chance you could post the text here for those of us who don't have premium accounts? Thanks

Fwiw, part of the problem is that it's complicated, dependent on purpose, and lots of the divisions keep on changing, splitting, combining and other things. Honestly, it's not really worth worrying too much about. If it helps, I suspect that the Irish ones are based on the four traditional provinces of Ireland with Dublin split off out of Leinster, presumably because of the population dynamic going on there.

Oh dear. That's really not great. No need for the green and some of the cols are far too wide. I shouldn't need to horizontally scroll on an even vaguely wide window *ever*, let alone for something like this.

> scan QR code > directed to website > oh, I have to enter my login details. That's easy, I reuse my password on every site... Pharming makes this a really, really bad idea. It's what makes that other game a liability.

OK, so this is a set of four <div> tags - divisions - with three of them placed inside the others. The code which sets up each div tag (using CSS) is quite complex - probably more complex than it needs to be - the user must have used a combination of tools looking at the way some of the CSS is formed. Essentially what you have is: div to set up the big black box, inside of which is: div with the image of the cache owner inside it div with the Italian flag inside it div with the main bit of the description, including the main image inside it (these three could easily have been combined inside one div) div with the La Cache bit inside it - this needs a div due to the border a horizontal rule tag (<hr>, although <hr /> would be better...) div for the flag counter and then the original div is closed - this makes sure everything inside it takes the same style and is inside the big black box The code for the big black box div is: Much of the harder parts of this could be stripped out straight away to leave: padding is the space around the side of the div - it means the text doesn't go too close to the edge of the box. 1em is the width of the letter m in the font chosen and is a standard sort of way to space things (it comes from the way printers worked). You can vary this: 2em is more, 0.25em is less. font-size, color and font-family all relate to the font. I think the font family code is redundant - GS makes good choices with regard to fonts - and bear in mind that many devices won't necessarily have the font you specify (the sans-serif part is a fall back font if I don't have Trebuchet MS installed). In this case we're setting the size to 14 pixels (I'd have used 1.2em here as it's more flexible) and the color (note American spelling) to #cccccc - which is a nearly but not quite white sort of grey. I changed text-align: justify - which is a bad idea in cache descriptions - to text-align: center because the cache description then goes on and uses text-align: center in each paragraph underneath. You could just set it once here (I would rarely center text anyway, let alone a large block like this); the border bit sets a solid, 2 pixel wide border of color #333333 (dark grey) around the black box. If you squint you can sort of see it. This is pretty much unnecessary border-radius: 2em then sets the curved borders. To my eye this is too much - I tend to use between 2 and 15 pixels for border radius background-color is then set to #000000 - black You could simplify this code again to: That would work just as well I think. The only other div which does anything interesting - other than centre stuff - is the box at the bottom. The code there is: This does similar things - the margin adds a gap before and after the div - the 1.5em adds at the top and bottom and the 0 doesn't add anything on the left/right (this is now getting slightly complex so it might be better to read up on the CSS documentation if you intend to do this sort of thing). This time we have a smaller font (why?), padding again, and a white, thinner border (#fff - which means the same as #ffffff). The border-color tag overwrites the #000000 which is setting the border color to be black. The paragraphs are then a bit of a mess and do all sorts of unnecessary stuff. I'd re-write this whole section with: This assume you set text-align to center in the big black box div. The margin at the bottom is needed because there's no content before the <hr /> tag which sets a line across the page. Is it eye-catching? Maybe. Personally I prefer black text on a white background and then using colour and bold to highlight specific sections, (along with boxes like the last one) but that's my preference.

I can't see that one because it's Premium Member Only. Is there a basic one that you could share that looks like the sort of thing you might want. It's an interesting idea to have a side-by-side example set. In time I might be able to do something like that I suppose. Part of the issue is that GS could easily change what HTML/CSS elements are accepted - they seem to be allowing gaps in code just now (a good thing), which seemed to get stripped out in the past, for example.

It depends on what you mean by "eye catching" or "nice". My favourite cache page is https://coord.info/GC5KKAH (now archived). The HTML is simple enough and the layout works for me - to the extent that I've used it as a way to create other cache pages. You could easily figure out what the HTML does there and then use that knowledge to create your own pages. Of course, you might want something fancier than that. I'm not sure why you would, but you might.

Otoh, there are also enough cache owners who can't handle the placed date field on virtual rewards... As for the app, I used it for the first time in ages (years) today - I have a cache (of mine) that I can rarely find at the best of times - but, yeah, I understand the issue there.

I post a note saying that I've seen X's photos. I've seen that done a couple of times by other people and, for me, it works just to demonstrate I'm keeping an eye on things.

Pre-fabricated, sort of temporary type of bridge - here's the wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey_bridge I happened to very nearly walk across one yesterday. No idea how common they are.

I get 2,963 as of now - which includes five that have been archived (!!) and 11 that are disabled. 8 with hidden dates of February 2022 - all published in Feb 2023 because people made an error with the year... (none from January afaict) Iirc last time there was a big old rush at the end. It's difficult to tell because people seem to have not changed the hidden date at all in a number of cases, but there are 252 virtuals with a hidden date of December 2022 (the last month of VR 2.0), but at least one of the ones I found from VR 2 has its original hidden date (2019-06-04) but was published on 30 December 2022...

Lubeck's nice if you've not been btw. Excellent walls and old stuff - and fabulous marzipan.

There are some excellent caches in Montreal. Amtrak goes there (although at the moment I guess it might be tricky to get there).

A map compare using Project GC might also be effective - especially if you want to look for caches more than one person found.

Which version of Safari? And on what platform? I'm OK right now with 12.1.2 on a fairly old OS X. You could try clearing all the browser caches and so on associated with the site - I've had issues with specific sites before with Safari that that's fixed.

Although I understand your pain, it's even worse when you're in the middle of a forest in Norfolk and all that some people hide is micros... There are some really good bigger caches in central London fwiw. The ratio of small/reg/large to other sized caches isn't that much different between London and Norfolk - we are a little better off, but only a little. You just have to choose to ignore most of the micros and play the game your own way. It is possible and it can work.

Did anyone ever query the copyright implications of uploading images first to Groundspeak servers btw? Say that one of my copyrighted images was used on a cache page without attribution, for example. Is that now Groundspeak's responsibility?

I use a foldable printed sheet - A4 (standard printer size) which folds down to a booklet that fits inside most of my small containers - if they're very small then you might have to think a little more about how to do it. There are a tonne of places you can get instructions to do this - https://www.instructables.com/An-8-Page-Book-From-a-Piece-of-Paper/ for example. My standard template has words in the section that sits on the front that I can just change easily. I should really put Word and PDF versions of this online at some point. Am I right in thinking that in the US Letter size paper is still standard for home printers (as opposed to A4)?

Another consequence of the refusal to allow basic members to see list of the caches other people have found. I have an earthcache. It's pretty remote and barely gets any visits. So when I get a log that might look a little, well, dodgy, it's helpful to be able to take a look and get an idea whether the cacher was in the vague area on that day. As opposed to getting answers from photos while they're sat in Dusseldorf, Hamburg or Leipzig, say. Now of course it's impossible for me to tell. So I guess that's any benefit of the doubt out of the window then...

Thank you for pointing that out: it's really helpful and much appreciated. I'll admit to not understanding that the other method was a search, but I can see there is a distinction. Much appreciated that this method exists.

Well, in these parts travel away from home was very much discouraged during the early part of this year. That would have made checking caches further than a walk away from home difficult to manage for many people - certainly, of the 26 I have hidden only 3 are easily walkable (i.e within 15 km) of my home. I have several a good hour away and three which are a three hour drive from here - there's no way I could have justified that journey in order to check on a geocache.

Even better, it allows you to decide, to an extent, how many caches to show on the page as well. That would be an excellent enhancement and the base of the code is already written.