Real Dimensions

So it looks like all things went well with my hosting move. I have had some problems with my old hosting company for a long time but nothing big enough to get me to actually move to a new host. That all changed last week when I found out that none of my forms were working. Anything that used the php mail() function just stopped working. So anyone that tried to contact me or signed up for Comment notices never got any email. I get a good amount of people that contact me so it was a big deal. This along with some other issues I was having for a long time made me realize I really needed to do something.

I looked around a lot and checked out a lot of other people’s blogs and found TextDrive a company by Joyent. These are some smart guys  and they offer some really great stuff (PHP, RoR, SVN, WebDev SFTP, to name some) at a great price, so I signed up for one year. It’s only been about a week so far but I’m impressed. And now I can start playing more with Ruby on Rails. Does anyone know of a good Ruby on Rails Blogging Software?

I had dinner with a few friends the other night and my Blog came up during the conversation. One friend in particular, Jeff, mentioned how he really did not understand a lot of the post topics on here. My other friend Dan chimed in and asked my why I don’t have anything that the average person (non web head) can understand.

That got me thinking, I realized I was forgetting about a lot of people out that that are just Getting Started in the web field, weather it be as developers or designers, as well as the hobby Webmasters out there.

So, here we are, I’ve decided to start a section for all of you that are just Getting Started. I will try to cover the basics here. Things most seasoned Web Developers take for granted. Anything from HTML and CSS to JavaScript, PHP and maybe some Ruby. But I will try to keep the PHP and Ruby stuff as simple as possible.

If there are any specifics you would like me to cover or and questions you would like me to answer, use my contact form and under contact reason just choose “Request a Post”.

Hope to hear from you soon!!!

I have to apologize for any problems anyone may be having in the last few days, I recently discovered some problems with my current hosting provider so I’m in the process of switching over to a new host.

I will give more details when the switch is complete, I just wanted to give a fair warning to anyone that may be reading this and is having problems with anything, it “should” all be fixed tonight some time.

thanks!!

A coworker of mine today was having trouble dynamically loading a Flash movie using the SWFObject. Actually he was having problems loading a new one once the first one was loaded.

Here is the situation, the web page loads, the user clicks a link (any trigger will work just fine) to load the first movie. Then the user clicks a different link to load a different movie, but nothing changes. The SWFObject will not let go of the div that it was loaded into. Heres how you get around this.

You first remove the child div from the DOM then recreate the div before the SWFObject tries to load the flash movie in it.

The only problem with this is that when it recreates the div it does so at the bottom of the page. I will work on how to place the div where you need it.

Here are is some basic HTML code that can be used to jazz up a web page. I will cover how to bold, italicize and underline text, as well as change the color of text.

There are better ways of accomplishing these task such as using CSS, but I will cover that another time.

Lets start with centering some text.

If you'd like your text to be centered, you can use the <center> tag. Like all HTML tags, it will need to be closed, you do this with the </center> tag. Although this tag is no longer considered to be in active use by the W3C, it is still usable today.

EXAMPLE;

<center>Follow the white rabbit</center>  

You also have the option of using the <p> tag to center a paragraph of text.  At the start of the paragraph, you would enter the tag <p style="text-align: center;"> and close the tag with </p>.  This is the correct way to center text, using CSS (cascading style sheets).

EXAMPLE;

 <p style="text-align: center;"> A paragraph about the white rabbit </p>

First let me start by apologizing for this personal and political post, I usually try to keep personal beliefs of this nature out of the public eye but this was to much not to comment on.

At a campaign stop this past Monday in California John Kerry made a speech, during which he made a statement which I find completely insulting a down right frightening because it came from a man that has run (might run again) for President of the United States and is currently a State Senator.

He was speaking to an audience of college students about the importance of education and said the following;

you know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't you get stuck in Iraq

So is he trying to say that anyone in our military is stupid! Regardless of your political stand or which party you are with, this is the wrong message you want to send out to the American public.

(you can read more here if you like)

I read an article last week about how Microsoft is positioning it's self to make more money from anyone that wants to purchase a copy of Vista to be used in a virtual environment, such as Parallels on a Mac.

As quoted from the licensing terms for Vista as published by Microsoft, users of their Vista Home Premium and Vista Home Basic Operating systems

may not use the software installed on the licensed device within a virtual (or otherwise emulated) hardware system.

Now thats not the end of the story, Microsoft will let you use Vista on a virtual environlent if you pay up.

Instead, Microsoft will require that users purchase a Vista Business or Vista Ultimate license, which will retail for $299 and $399, respectively, in order to emulate the Windows environment.

This is a knee jerk reaction to a growing number of people that are buying Macs and running windows on them. The more people are exposed to Macs the more people seem to want to drop windows so Microsoft is throwing dollar signs in front of people who are considering buying a Mac and running Windows virtually in something like Parallels.

One way around this is with Apple's Boot Camp. With Boot Camp your not running Windows in a virtual environment so your not violating any licensing terms. The draw back is that you will still need to reboot to the OS you want to work in.

(i first read about this in an article on AppleInsider) 

Sorry for the semi regular theme changes, I am trying to find one I really like so I can stick with it and just do modification rather than full changes.

I think I have one now that I really like, it's simple and I think I can do a lot of little changes to really make it an awesome theme.

Let me know if you have any ideas or suggestions.

Thanks!!! 

Right after the release of IE7 is Firefox 2.

For the most part all the updates are things that you can already do with extensions in Firefox 1.5.  All the changes and upgrades to CSS handling and DOM support are slated for the 3.0 release, which they have already been working on for a little while now.

The new look is nice, a slight glassiness to the buttons and tabs give it that "Web 2.0" look. But the new in-line spell checker is pretty slick.

IE7 has some amazing new features and looks like a great step in the right direction for Microsoft but I'm sticking with my tried and true Firefox if for no other reason then for the ability to add and create your own extensions so easily.

If your interested (which you should be) go download Firefox 2, if you haven't already!

I thought I would share a few keyboard shortcuts I recently found out about.

Windows key + D - toggles Show Desktop

Windows key + L - locks computer, this one only works on Windows XP

Windows key + E - starts Windows Explorer

Hope you find them useful!