Archive for September, 2004
28th September 2004
It’s been a fairly good day.
Sherman Park is the building where our company rents its space. Chris and I know the owner, and by a strange chain of events about a month back in talking to the owner, he found out that I needed a full sized filing cabinet. He offered to get one to me for free, next week in fact, and I thought that was a great deal.
A lot of time has passed, and I have now gotten a feel for how hectic his life is. But today, I finally got to go and pick one out. Now picture this old factory and then picture the seven layer of hell, and that is kind of where we had to go to find one. It is like that place in the shop that no one ever goes and the only reason it’s there is because it would be too expensive to knock down.
So I have a free filing cabinet setting at work. Now all I have to do is get it home.
I got some good feedback already on my site, and am pumped about the slight changes I made to Rothecreations to coincide with the launch.
I added the first of a series of blogs, as was the premise of this site, on how I built my first CSS site, so go and check that out in the CSS section.
It’s movie night, and that will up tomorrow. 
Sections Updated: CSS, Interchange, Movies C-D, Baseball
New version of Maxathon released!
Everyone’s favorite alternative to regular IE, Maxthon, with it’s tabbed browser windows and fun plugins for one click flash downloads and view source has released an update. On version 1.1.035, you can try this browser out at Maxthon’s homepage..
For those of you who have already upgraded from what was MyIE2 originally, now named Maxthon, you may ask why get this latest update. The new version fixes some bugs you may have it you have installed Windows SP2 with Active X controls. So check it out, super fast and fun this is the browser that makes all of those who want something more than IE, but feel too comfortable to change to something like Mozilla.
Response to my question about character limits in Flash URL link field.
Well, when I had this problem three days ago I posted on the Macromedia Flash forums. I did get one reply that said that there is a character limit for the URL address in Internet Explorer upwards of 2000 characters. But he didn’t think there was any managing of that in Flash.
I think he may have misunderstood me though, and said I should use a quotes in my getURL calls. Well, I am just using a plain text link, but to fix the problem until a later date, I added an invisible button.
Shortcomings of using Images in place of HTML buttons.
I was working on EVS Minder, the one stop shop for advanced online (pre) registration and on-site registration for conventions, at Esystems today. The online interface is very form intensive, and has a lot of submit buttons. My original designs had called for image replacement of the standard HTML button.
In order to use an image for a submit button, set this attribute in the input field;
<input type=”image” src=”something.jpg”>
However, the problem with using images for submit buttons is we found when a user submits information, the values returned were two numbers instead of the value set in the “value” attribute. The two numbers returned are coordinates, the value name plus an x and y coordinate. These numbers signify the place where the user clicked the button in relation to the upper left of the button.
So for Chris our programmer, it was screwing up his php code because he was testing for a value of “submit” and instead it was giving him something like this;
submit_y = 4
submit_x = 12
The other downfalls are that the buttons can be problematic in browsers. For browsers like Mozilla and Opera where a user can set whether they want to turn off all image downloading, the form will be useless as the image button wont’ show up at all. Since HTML 4.0 you can add an alt tag to the input field, so at the very least, if you insist on aesthetic over function, it will show the text in place of the image and the user can get an inclination of what was supposed to be there.
All in all, I decided to use a background image for all my submit buttons to spruce them up a little, but to keep them most accessible across the board.
Small HTML Tidbits
I came across some HTML I had never seen today. <big> and <small>which basically scale the text size in your webpage. It seems highly useless as it isn’t very specific.
<> These characters are known as chevrons.
September 26th, 2004
When I was upgrading my computer a couple of weeks back to a dual processer machine at work, I had to reinstall all of my programs.
As a result, I needed to reinstall Dreamweaver, and needed a way to get all of the existing client sites I had set up out of the old computer. Now, if you open your files palette in DW, and go to your file menus > site > manage sites you have the option of exporting each site individually as native site file information “.ste”
That really sounded like a lot of work, so we looked, and found a plug in that solved all of our problems. To export all of your sites at once into one neat nice file, as well as other things such as shortcuts and even serial numbers, use MM Exporter.
This third party plugin is easy to use. Make sure if you are installing a newer version of DW on a computer, that you only have one installed at once. And before you uninstall anything, that you export your sites using this program. It will only recognize one version of DW to import your site definitions into, and won’t give you an option to find the program you want to import into, instead finding the programs itself.
Linux Commands Defined
Here are some very useful shortcuts I have learned when moving around and working in a Linux environment.
To type changes in a file once you navigate to it and pull it up, hit I. Then, when finished making changes, hit ESC.
To see all of the files in a directory you can do a couple of different commands.
LL = Long List
LS = List (In columns). I find this to not be as nice looking as ll, but if you don’t want the listings to go off screen, you can type this in.
If there are hidden files in the folder you are looking and you need to see them, type in ll -la
Another way to prevent listings from going off screen is to type in ll | more. This will list whatever is in a directory as tall as your terminal screen is, then stop. To advance entry by entry, hit the enter key, and to advance the list by page hit the spacebar.
A basic one is if you are trying to navigate to a different directory, you do a cd or “change directory”. So, the format looks like this cd documents/home.html
To see the processes for the server and all of CPU usage and other information, similar to a Windows processes list, type in top.
To get rid off all of the commands and all of the other stuff you have done on the screen, and start with a fresh terminal at the top of the screen, type clear.
And of course, if at any time you want to look up what a command actually does, type in man, (manual) and then the name of the command. This is the format man clear.
To save changes to a file, or “write” to it, type in :w.
To exit without changing a file type, or “quit”, type in :q.
To exit your connection to the server, type in exit.
26th September 2004
Putting the finishing touches on the website, and trying to get a banner set up to link from Rothecreations.com
Colts beat Green Bay today, 45-31, Woo-Woo. Peyton Manning vs. Brett Favre and the best man won. On to Jacksonville next week.
Sections Updated: Comics, Photo Diary
Movie at Castleton Arts on the Northside
My friend Christine Mulligan, who I met on the Public Relations board for church, and I went up to Castleton Arts Movie theater on the northside today. I had never been, it was a cool little three screen theater with a nice little lobby. We saw “Shaun of the Dead” which was a hilarious movie. Go and see what else I had to say about the movie in the movies section.
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