This photo says how Andre the tiger is feeling after his root canals

Bailey the bobcat has been barely clinging to life

but this video shows that she has finally turned the corner back to good health.  She had to get fluids daily for 9 days and was force fed to keep her alive, but this camera trap shows her digging into her second full meal.  She eventually polished it all off.

Cookie the tiger still isn’t keen on eating.  I was impressed to see Operations Manager Gale out at her cage, in her PJ’s, after dark, trying to coax the 18 year old tiger to eat a little more.

Kringle the silver lap tiger is looking for a new lap

http://www.tampacatcrusaders.org/animals/detail?AnimalID=4346648

Leaping into Leap Year

There is always so much going on that I never know where to start.  Back in January our WordPress website appeared to be just a blank page when people using IE 9 tried to visit.  Despite the fact that Internet Explorer has always been the very worst browser on the market, it is still in use by a lot of people because it comes pre installed on their Windows PCs.  They are losing market share to Chrome and Firefox because of the IE’s inability to properly display websites, but they still account for a lot of the traffic to our site.  Ysabel spent weeks trying to figure out why the new IE 9 would not render our WordPress site.  Yesterday, she spoke to an old college friend at MicroSoft and he said the problem is a font…a freaking font!

I did some searching and this is what I found:

Internet Explorer 9, Helvetica Type 1, and You

Says one web developer, After installing IE 9, “I was no longer able to visit a whole slew of websites — they’d just render as a blank white page, render only partially, or lock up the browser altogether. One of those sites was Twitter.com.”

Usual troubleshooting steps failed to help. We uninstalled and reinstalled IE9 several times. We tried disabling every IE add-on. Nothing helped.

So we tried other computers. Both Macs and PCs of varying ages exhibited the exact same problem.  We scoured the Internet forums and chat groups, but found nothing.

I never would have guessed and don’t know if Ysabel would have either, but thankfully an insider at MicroSoft knew that the problem with IE 9 not rendering websites was a freaking Type 1 font.

Our website is crafted with Arial font, but has a fall back argument that says, if a person’s preferences are set to Helvetica, then display it that way to them. Apparently, Internet Explorer 9 hates Helvetica Type 1. If you have this font installed, and try to use IE9 to browse to a site whose CSS style sheet specifies “Helvetica” as the family name in a font directive, rendering of the site will fail.

We deleted Helvetica from our CSS, but if you have it installed on your computer, you may find that a lot of sites will not display for you in IE 9.  Here is what you will need to do:  Delete Helvetica from your Font folder — a procedure which will require you to boot Windows 7 in Safe Mode. Once that is done your IE9 rendering problems should be gone.

Others suggest that you should install a replacement copy of Helvetica in the OpenType (.otf) format because the problem is not Helvetica itself, but the Type 1 font format.  It’s possible that any Type 1 font which IE9 tries to use may cause the same renderer failure. It’s just that most other fonts used on the web are not the kinds of fonts that you’d have a Type 1 copy of installed on your Windows machine.

So if your website has been down for months and you are at your wits end to figure out why, I hope this helps.  I posted this here in hopes of helping you get your site back up and running.  You can help keep Big Cat Rescue running by donating here:  http://bigcatrescue.org/donate  Thanks!