http://www.ideashower.com A launchpad for new ideas for the web Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:55:23 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en If you're logged into your server and trying to pin down what folders are taking up the most space on your hard drive, there are simple commands to compile an organized list. First, to see the disk space usage of your drives and partition, run: df This will output a list of all ... http://www.ideashower.com/learned/find-the-filesfolders-taking-up-the-most-space-in-unix/ The Analyse procedure built into MySql can give you a wealth of information about your database tables, making it easy to find tables that can be tightened up. If you query: SELECT * FROM table_name PROCEDURE ANALYSE() You'll get a result back with the minimum/maximum value, minimum/maximum length, number of empty or zero ... http://www.ideashower.com/learned/quick-way-to-help-optimize-mysql-databases/ While working on the Read It Later Firefox Extension, I wanted a way to layer multiple background images on a toolbar button so I could create a nice looking notification indicator like on the iPhone. (Note I opt-ed later to use a simpler look, but this method might still be ... http://www.ideashower.com/learned/layer-xul-elementsimagesbackgrounds-in-firefox-3-extensions-using-stack/ I came across a time I needed to open a different element then a standard popup menu when clicking the dropdown selector on a toolbar button. I wanted to open a panel instead. To open a different element and hide the popup you can do something similar to ... http://www.ideashower.com/learned/replace-standard-menupop-in-xul/ By default, Firefox 3 prevents users from installing any extensions that do not offer a secure connection for automatic updates.  This prevents users from being victims of hijacked update URLs. But for developers or people installing extensions they know they can trust, it is a pain. Luckily it is easily disabled by: Enter ... http://www.ideashower.com/learned/how-to-disable-will-not-be-installed-because-it-does-not-provide-secure-updates-warning-in-firefox-3/ In flash, if text inside html tags like <b> or <i> is not appearing in your dynamic textfields, you need to embed the stylized font. Flash/Actionscript sees the text inside as a seperate font and therefore it also needs to be embedded. For example, if you have a dynamic textfield ... http://www.ideashower.com/learned/flash-sees-text-inside-tag-as-seperate-font-and-must-be-embedded/ I was generating CSV files with PHP so that a client could easily export their mailing list from the database when I hit a snag with loading the generated files on a Mac. I received the error message: "SYLK: file format is not valid." when opening the file in Excel on OS ... http://www.ideashower.com/learned/when-dynamically-generating-csv-dont-forget-the-quotes/ I just always assumed that these were a fact of life with Firefox. They are meant to give an idea to the user where their focus is if they are using the keyboard to get around the page. But when you use text-indent to do image swaps for navigation elements ... http://www.ideashower.com/learned/get-rid-of-those-dotted-lines-around-links-in-firefox/ Stumbled upon this by accident and I haven't been able to find anything in the PHP documentation because you can't search for non-alpha characters, but this find has cleaned up my code a ton. <?php print 'Hello World'; ?> Works the same as: <?= 'Hello World' ?> I'm using PHP 5, so I don't ... http://www.ideashower.com/learned/cleaner-print-command-in-php/ If you have images in your blog posts. When you enter them in, be sure to use an absolute URL or they may not show up correctly in RSS feed readers. So instead of a relative URL like: /images/myimage.jpg Use an absolute URL like: http://www.ideashower.com/images/myimage.jpg Found out the hard way when I realized my ... http://www.ideashower.com/learned/images-in-rss-feeds-should-have-absolute-url/