mysiteonline™

Okay, so I dropped the bomb on this host transfer. There were problems initially with me having to wait to actually test my transferred files because of subdomain settings (and me simply copying the backup files from one host and transferring them to the other, completely forgetting about permissions). However, there seemed to be problems in the blog software's update with my site's configuration settings in this blog. That's all I can figure... I was unable to find the error(s) and so I simply uploaded a new, fresh install and pointed it to the old database data. I was surprised and happy to see that it would still work and just take control of the old data. I still need to compare which mods and configuration settings I had on the old blog and are now on this one...for instance: BBCode may not be enabled in comments yet.

Someone's asked me to explain how to setup and get xDebug working on Windows step-by-step, and then how to use it. I had wanted to do that today, but...I slacked off. Hopefully I can do that sometime this week - unless anyone else would like to take a stab at it (or find a link from somewhere else?). Note: I used Apache on Windows, so hopefully they're not using IIS.

What the heck else have you been up to if this only really took you like...3 hours of fiddling at most?

Continue reading "I think I got it all working again..."

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

Over at Mike's blog awhile back, he posted about HeatMaps and I incorrectly assumed it was trying to map clicks from the site - something like what CrazyEgg does with their heat map imagery for visualizing statistics. As stated, I was incorrect in my assumption, however...today I just (just now) came across something that's OpenSource which will attempt to do a similar mapping for you. Rather than color heat generation, it is currently just placing little 'x's on the image, but even so...do you really need an oil-slick looking page, or just to see where people are focusing on your links?

ClickHeat: what's hot on your webpage?
(Navigate to clickheat -- direct linking sends you to the wrong place for some reason.)

Continue reading "Heat Mapping"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

I spent about 6 hours today trying to apply the well-known PNG transparency filter to work with IE on a 1x1px background image. I had never tried it before, I always had the ability in my designs before to use other methods as a solution. This time I really didn't, and it was a poor place to spend 6 hours figuring it out (it was simply for aesthetics), but I also knew this was something I needed to add to my experience or else I'd have stumbling blocks later on in my more advanced designs.

So, after visiting over 80+ pages that covered Microsoft's proprietary CSS filter style for IE5.5+ and still not understanding (what-so-ever) why my implementation, which was exactly the same, wasn't working...I accidentally added a property to the wrong style definition and caused the problematic selection to give IE its hasLayout property. THAT FIXED IT. It's amazing that in all of the examples I had looked at, none of them stated that I needed hasLaout. QuirksMode said that IE's opacity filter required hasLayout, but I didn't read that until afterward (so I would assume any IE specific filter requires hasLayout). So, adding height or width (or any other property that forces hasLayout) will allow for the AlphaImageLoader filter to work. But, what else did I do (and other neat stuff did I find about PNGs)?

Continue reading "PNGs, Internet Explorer, CSS, and AlphaImageLoader"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

Crimson Editor is my favorite text editor for more than a few reasons, which I'll spare you with the details for; we all have our own preferences. Anyhow...

I was looking for a screenshot or documentation on how to integrate a compiler or external executable with CrimsonEditor as an example to clarify something, and I noticed that Emerald Editor was linked to from the main page of CrimsonEditor's website...that meant that Ingyu Kang was still around... It also made me wonder why EE was linked, so I went to the link.

On the main news page of Emerald Editor, the team leader announced that Ingyu Kang gave the EE team the source code to Crimson Editor to work from. The EE team decided to release it publically through Subversion. I know there's more than a few tweaks I've wanted to make to this editor (such as better regex support)!

It's written in C++ for those who wanted to know. It's also a Win32 application (sorry *nix guys). It could probably get ported though.

http://www.emeraldeditor.com/

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

Since others were having fun with it, I decided to show off a quick, poorly chosen framerate flash demonstration of Intype creating an XHTML/PHP file to do the all-famous Hello World script. Obviously, the point is not to demonstrate my coding knowledge (or mis-knowledge), but to show off the text editor's snippet control features, and how it can speed up development. In case you're curious how it interacts, for the first step I typed out the text xml and then pressed the TAB key, everything was automatically filled in for the XML header. I then typed in doctype and then TAB, but since there are multiple doctypes, it gave me a choice of which one I wanted to use, so I used the arrow keys to highlight the desired choice and pressed the ENTER key. To move through the parameter list within each snippet (fillable properties), you would also use the TAB key and enter whatever it is you want, or press the DELETE or BACKSPACE (I think) key to remove the entire property.

Please note the system clock window to know how long this actually took me -- you can clock it, heck you can even clock my hesitation since I'm not used to the tool yet.

Continue reading "An XHTML Strict, PHP Hello World from Scratch in Under 60 Seconds with Intype"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski