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What I've Learned Recently

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With every project and every day, you should learn something.
Here's what I've learned.

  • How To Disable ‘will not be installed because it does not provide secure updates’ Warning in Firefox 3

    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:

    1. Enter ‘about:config’ into address bar, hit go
    2. Right click somewhere in the list of keys below.  Select New->Boolean
    3. Enter ‘  extensions.checkUpdateSecurity ‘ as the name
    4. Select false as the value
    5. Reattempt installation of your plugin.

    Ran into this problem when installing Extension Developer’s Extension while working on Read It Later.

    Found the solution at MozillaZine (via Google)


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  • Flash Sees Text Inside <b> Tag as Seperate Font and Must Be Embedded

    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 with Arial. If you add a bold tag (<b>) around text inside the field, you will need to additionally embed Arial with bold turned on into your flash document.

    I ran into this while working on flash graphs for Tail Report.

    I found the answer in the Los Angeles Flash Users Group (via Google)


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  • When Dynamically Generating CSV, Don’t Forget the Quotes

    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 X.

    To solve the problem, simply make sure all data is enclosed with quotes.

    Ex: ‘ID’,'First Name’, ‘Last Name’

    Found this on Microsoft’s website: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/323626


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  • Get Rid of Those Dotted Lines Around Links in Firefox

    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 the dotted lines shoot off into infinity on the left side of your screen.

    Found an easy solution from Nathan Smith via Google:

    a:active {

 outline: none;

}

    Check out his article for more information on how best to remove Firefox dotted links.


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  • Cleaner Print Command in PHP

    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 know if this works in previous versions.


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  • Images in RSS Feeds Should Have an Absolute URL

    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 images weren’t showing up in people’s readers. Yikes!


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  • You can find plug diagrams by Googling the word ‘Pinouts’

    A non-computer savvy friend needed to know the name of the port on a projector. He described it and it sounded like either a Serial Cable or a VGA Cable. I searched to find diagrams of both to send him and had a little trouble till I noticed on the Serial Cable’s Wikipedia page the diagram was labeled ‘Pinout’. Searched for ‘VGA Pinout‘ and bam, had a diagram.


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  • IE6 Background Image Flicker

    Apparently, previously unknown to me, IE6 checks for a newer version of the background-image CSS property on links every time you move the mouse over a link. You can disable this behavior by running a short line of javascript:

    try {
  document.execCommand("BackgroundImageCache", false, true);
} catch(err) {}

    I learned about this from:
    http://www.mister-pixel.com/#Content__state=


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