scriptygoddess

Ran into a problem today that I really should have forseen: as usual I coded a site so it all lines up perfectly in IE, flip over to Mozilla and it's all out of whack. I realized the reason right away: in terms of calculating widths, IE measures from border to border; Mozilla uses content. This apparently is only a problem in Windows IE less than version 6.0.

I did a search and to my surprize found that you can tell the broswer how to calculate it. I am used to IE's way, so I like border-to-border widths. Stick this in your stylesheet to force Mozilla to do it that way:

div {
-moz-box-sizing:border-box;
box-sizing:border-box;
}

(Found on this board)

This of course makes all div tags calculate this way, but you can stick it in any specific div tag if you want.

For a better explanation of the box-sizing property, I found an article on WebFX.

Stop comments and Take down blog plugins
Will let you temporarily take down comments on all posts by activating the plugin (I'm guessing you deactivate the plugin when you want to bring commenting back online). Good for battling a comment flood. Take down blog plugin will display a simple page asking readers to come back again soon.

[saw this yesterday on wordlog.com but reading it just now on Weblog Tools Collection gave a little more insight]

It's a good thing I have no shame in admitting when I was doing something stupid. 😉 Otherwise I'd have no posts for this category.

Just to explain a little about what I was working with – it was essentially an email form (emailform.php) – but before sending the email, it brought you to a page where you could preview your email. From the preview page (preview.php) you needed to have the option to go back and edit your message (back to the first form: emailform.php), or to send the email (sendemail.php). (Obviously when you go back to emailform.php – I needed to have it "remember" what you originally wrote there)

I won't even tell you how I was handling this before – because it was stupid, I know it stupid, but it worked, almost. But I knew there was a better way. Today with some time on my hands I found this page with EXACTLY what I needed.

So now the form tag on my preview.php just calls itself and looks something like this:

<form action="preview.php" method="post">

And my submit buttons simply look like:

<input type="submit" name="Goback" value="Go back and edit">
<input type="submit" name="Sendemail" value="Send Email">

Then, at the very beginning of preview.php (before the first HTML tag) I have:

if (isset($_POST["Goback"])) {
header("Location: emailform.php");
} else if (isset($_POST["Sendemail"])) {
header("Location: sendemail.php");
}
/*
I'm setting the session variables AFTER the above because otherwise those "submit" buttons become persistent when preview.php submits the current page to itself. This way – only the data being sent to this page from the ORIGINAL form (emailform.php) become persistent in session cookies.
*/
foreach($_POST as $k=>$v) {
$_SESSION[$k]=$v;
}

On the both the emailform.php page, and the sendemail.php page, wherever I looked for values in $_POST – I change to now look for the same in $_SESSION.

This way – if you click the back button from the preview page, the data is not forgotten.

(I know this probably won't make a whole lot of sense to many people – and those it does make sense will just wonder why/how I just figured this out NOW.)

This isn't really script related, but I searched everywhere online and while I saw the question asked many times, I never saw an answer posted.

The problem is that I wanted to extract a list of email addresses from a distribution list that I had created in Outlook. In the 2003 version, you can apparently just click a little button to expand the list (and then you could just copy out the list of email addresses, I would assume)

This doesn't help me, because I don't have the 2003 version.

However, I WAS able to get the addresses into an excel file by doing the following:

1) Click on contacts
2) double click on the distribution list to "edit/view" it.
3) Go to File -> Save As
4) Save it as a .txt file

Then open that .txt file in Excel, (default import text file settings should work fine) and you're all set!

So easy – and yet so bizarre that I couldn't find that ANYWHERE!

IP to Nation WordPress Plugin
Will guess country based on IP. I think this might be fun to implement here when I have some time!
[link via Blogging Pro]

Some freeware/shareware font collections not already listed here:
Wanted Fonts
Kids Fonts
Da Font
Font Identifier (identify a font by answering questions about it)

[links from code novice]

Mandarin Design has some neat CSS tricks:
Polaroid-style photos
Inline and magazine style pull quotes

[links to Mandarin Design, and pull quote tutorials via code novice as well]

Customizable Post Listings plugin by coffee2code
As described on his site: Display Recent Posts, Recently Commented Posts, Recently Modified Posts, and other post listings using the post information of your choosing in an easily customizable manner (so no need to tweak plugin code). You can narrow post searches by specifying categories and/or authors, among other things.

[link via Weblog Tools Collection]

This little tutorial saved my butt today.

List Style Bullet Images
An alternative way of styling list bullets.

Arvind's WP Tabs
"WP Tabs are a quick easy refrence to WP Tags. The bookmark will pop open a sidebar in your browser with links to all WP Tags."

[link via Matt]

I've been moving towards CSS-based layouts at my work. And I hadn't thought we were required to support IE 5.5, but I was mistaken. A few of the layouts I did required a minor change to work with IE 5.5, but since the sites had already been released I needed to defend my logic for not supporting that browser. So for my future reference, here is what I (actually my husband) dug up (in case I ever need to use it again)

You can see a quick summary here. And you’ll see the note that says security updates and support for IE 5.5 ended on December 31, 2003.

As well, you can see on this page that all "flavors" of IE 5.5 support (including security updates) from Microsoft have all ended with the exception of windows ME – but even that particular version has this note associated with it:

Microsoft strongly recommends customers install the latest released version of Internet Explorer, which provides improved security protection.

These links and notes from Microsoft all indicate to me that support for all OS except Windows ME is dead, and even then Microsoft says to upgrade to latest version to make sure that you are protected and have current security updates.

IE 5.5 users *really* should upgrade their browser. They are vulnerable to security risks otherwise. (my blog-only added note: Better yet – switch to Firefox!!!)

[HUGE thanks to my better-half Sam for finding all that for me]