I have been working with some javascripts lately, mostly jQuery stuff, and everything seems to be a challenge to fix in Internet Explorer 7, then I test it in Internet Explorer 6 and it’s even worse. I’m getting pretty used to it, but I feel tired of battling, it’s hard to create great functionality without spending hours on fixes. I have taken some steps though.

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The tool I’m speaking of is SyntaxHighlighter. This must be one of the greatest tools I’ve seen in a long time, it’s easy to use, well designed and useful. As most people will know including code in your blog/webpage can be a challenge because of all the different characters that disturb original code or get interpreted wrongly by the content publishing system. This tool displays it all in a nice code view and allows the user to click “View source” to get clean code without line breaks.Example below.

body{
background-color: #FFF;
}
a{
color: #999;
}

I love it. You must get it, go to Alex Gorbatchev’s site and download.

I had to try and find a way to show the second level of the pages in the sidebar, but also keep the second level (child) when you click on a third level (grandchild) page, and that proved to be quite a challenge. Did a lot of searching and testing on my site before I found a way.

Example of how I wanted it (selected page in bold):

-Subpage
–Subsubpage
–Subsubpage 2
-Subpage 2

After a LOT of searching Wordpress forums and stuff I finally found the solution. The Flexi pages widget with the default option “List sub-pages only in parent and related pages in hierarchy”, and just excluding pages on the first level (parent) did it for me. Excellent widget. Get it here.

I’ve been having a bit of a journey lately, implementing sites with Wordpress, CMSMS and Joomla. All very different from our Content Manager at work. The latest I’m working with is Joomla. I’m testing it to see if it does the job as a CMS for my gamesites. I’m redoing PayneReactor, WakeReactor and adding a new site or two to my list.

The install went reasonably well, needed to contact host a few times, but in the end got it installed. I was looking at extensions and found a nice plugin, JCE. Installing that though I ran into two errors.

JFTP::store: Bad response Warning! - Failed to move file and some related errors later. I stumbled over many tips, make sure the FTP settings in Global config / Server was correct was one of them. Disable the FTP. Nothing helped.

What solved it in the end was a tip from a user in the Joomla forums. Look at the path in the Media manager, and make sure the config path for log and tmp directories is the same one. Sweet, but so far the first CMS which uses full paths that I’ve encountered.

So far Joomla in my opinion lacks serious support for rich article content and images. That’s what I’m hoping the extensions can solve for me. Many extensions seem to cost money, but not that much. It may be that I end up using it for my sites, we’ll see.

The program IETester has turned into a quite usable product. Highly recommended for testing purposes as you can test in IE6 and below, as well as IE7 and IE8 in the same program. Really valuable for anyone that needs to test pages for the mainstream visitors, which are most of us.

Go to download page of IETester

I’ll admit it. I dislike flexible width designs. I like the fact that everything is scaled how it was intended when it was designed in fixed width designs. But sometimes you need to have a flexible width, and credit where credit is due, this guy has made some great examples of how to do it without hacks, trickery, javascript or anything else that will slow down your page.

Check out the link for flexible width layouts, for 2 column, 3 column, pixel-based, em-based, percentage-based, everything you need.

Thought I’d spread some love. Cheat sheets are an amazing tool for us forgetful people. I code all my webstuff in Dreamweaver codeview, so I get codehints for HTML and CSS, but for javascript, jquery and other things it’s so easy to forget stuff and constantly having to look up exact names and possible attributes. That’s why cheat sheets are great, print a simple A4 paper that contains all attributes, names, functions and so on. Hang it on the wall and get everything right in the first attempt.

Instead of posting my own favourites I’ll just guide you to my favourite collections of cheat sheets. These cover HTML, XHTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery, AJAX and more. What more do you need, read on and check them out.

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I have just got a new PC at work, so I thought I’d update on the luck of actually solving a problem without spending hours to find out what’s wrong. As you may or may not know, there seems to be a common problem that Acers’ security solution makes Adobe Dreamweaver crash on startup. So after installing my Dreamweaver CS4 which I have had a lot of pains with on the previous PC it was no shock that something was wrong. Luckily I stumbled quickly over the solution, a patch for the Acer program, and that worked. Get it at Egistec.

The blog has been a bit quiet lately, and obviously I’ll only update when I have something useful to put here. The plan is to update soon with the quickest and most painless way to make your site IE6 compatible, especially if you implement your pages using floats. What’s delaying it is the fact that I gave a total toss about IE6 when I made this page, so I have to replace some PNG’s with GIF’s so that it isn’t slowed down by the png fixes you need for IE6. So after I’ve fixed my page, which is the exception of the rule, I’ll post the solution.

When you work with web development you’ll need to have a lot of debugging tools, code verification tools and other things, kind of like programming, just less advanced. You may also want to have tools that let you change CSS on the fly, check widths and sizes and so on. This is a list of what I use, I’ll keep this post updated with all tools I use, or find useful at times. Read on…

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Over the last years I’ve been making a lot of XTHML/CSS site implementations. Every design is different, but I’ve learned that over time I have a good starting point for the css styles and html. This goes especially for designs with a content box with shadows, and a body background, with the content box positioned in the center of the page. Take a look in my portfolio, many of the designs are like that.

So I want to share this “pleasant” start, with some explanations.

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As I’ve implemented this site I’ve realized Wordpress is a bit limited compared to what I’m used to, but I hope there’s some better solutions than I’m already using. I’ve basically figured out that it’s better to get it how I want it with some crappy hacks than nothing at all, so until I learn better ways, that’s the way I do it. These are hacks for left sidebar menu and top menu.

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When I started working in the company I currently work for, they used Macromedia Fireworks for setting up webpage designs. I thought it looked like a hassle, and had always used Adobe Photoshop for it. As I learned more and more of Fireworks, there was no way back to Photoshop. Photoshop has been for photos after this.

Fireworks (obviously Adobe Fireworks now) is quite simply a breeze to work with. Currently in version CS4 I thought I’d share the reasons as to why it’s so simple to set up something to work with, and change it later. Maybe someone still using Photoshop for setting up designs will see the light.

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I’ve been scratching my head for some time about the image upload problem. The error message I got was “Unable to create directory /wp-content/uploads/ Is its parent directory writable by the server?” I read a lot of solutions, everything from disabling PHP safemode (which was disabled) to setting .htaccess rights. What finally solved it for me was to set uploads and containing folders as CHMOD 777. Hope someone finds it useful.

As I was trying to change an option in “Settings | Reading” I got a 403 error. I was searching all over the Wordpress docs and forums until I finally found a link to the solution. Go to Hackosis to read it.

I’m writing this as a sort of reminder to myself. These are some handy Wordpress bits to solve things I need as I develop this site how I want it.

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As you read this I’ve just opened my site after many years of trying to define what it should be. Well, what it ended up being is a sort of worklog of everything I do.

I work as a webdesigner, so I will try to put solutions and interesting things here, sort of a log for myself when I forget how I solve things, and a place for discussion if someone stumbles over my site and see a solution, or have got a better one