Solving technology problems, one at a time
A rare but irritating problem I’ve had with Safari for a couple of years now is its habit of suddenly no longer responding to mouse clicks. It simply stops dead: you can’t click links, type
Continue readingAmazon “aStores” are very easy to set up, but you will probably find you want to customize the navigation, particularly if you want to integrate the store into your own site. I’m in the process of doing just that, and decided to construct my own navigation system for the DesignSpace book shop.. The php script that creates the tabs for the store is based on the YUI (Yahoo UI) “Tab View Control” and can be easily adapted to your own site.
This is just a down and dirty approach but it is a good start for you to build from.
The “Shop” page of this site is a php page which displays an amazon a-store category and the second level tabs appropriate to that category, using a “node id”.
The html for the tabs is defined in an included page like this:
<?php //-------------// $tabs6= '<ul class="yui-navset bd">'; $tabs6.='<li class="first selected" id="tab6"><a href="shop.php?tab=6" >Web Development</a></li>'; $tabs6.='<li class="" id="tab180"><a href="shop.php?tab=180" >CSS</a></li>'; $tabs6.='<li class=" " id="tab183"><a href="shop.php?tab=183">Javascript</a></li>'; $tabs6.='<li class="last" id="tab181"><a href="shop.php?tab=181">DHTML</a></li>'; $tabs6.='</ul>'; $tabs180= '<ul class="yui-navset bd">'; $tabs180.='<li class="first " id="tab6"><a href="shop.php?tab=6" >Web Development</a></li>'; $tabs180.='<li class="selected" id="tab180"><a href="shop.php?tab=180" >CSS</a></li>'; $tabs180.='<li class=" " id="tab183"><a href="shop.php?tab=183">Javascript</a></li>'; $tabs183.='<li class="last" id="tab181"><a href="shop.php?tab=181">DHTML</a></li>'; $tabs180.='</ul>'; $tabs183= '<ul class="yui-navset bd">'; $tabs183.='<li class="first " id="tab6"><a href="shop.php?tab=6" >Web Development</a></li>'; $tabs183.='<li class="" id="tab180"><a href="shop.php?tab=180" >CSS</a></li>'; $tabs183.='<li class=" selected" id="tab183"><a href="shop.php?tab=183">Javascript</a></li>'; $tabs183.='<li class="last" id="tab181"><a href="shop.php?tab=181">DHTML</a></li>'; $tabs183.='</ul>'; ?>Continue reading
Google Suggest and Google Trends are easy-to-use tools you might not have thought of using for search engine optimization (SEO).
Google Suggest suggests terms related to whatever keywords you type in, and lists the number of results for each one. According to the FAQ, it uses data about the overall popularity of various searches to help rank the refinements it offers.
After a trip to the new Borders in Ann Arbor yesterday, and another disgruntled look at their Sony ebook reader, I’ve come up with a wishlist for the perfect ebook reader. It folds up, into
Continue readingOn an underpowered G5 iMac running OS X 10.4, I spent a lot of time troubleshooting performance issues. One of them was the “spinning beachball” effect, where some process would take over for a moment, resulting in everything else hanging until it released some CPU.
On at least one of these instances, launching Activity Monitor showed that Sync Server was taking up 100% of the CPU every few minutes.
Apparently this is a common problem on both 10.4 and 10.5:
SyncServer Problem Post on Mac Forums
Continue readingNow you can record your voice with the iPhone (or any other phone), and get speech to text functionality as well!
Continue readingSometimes, when you use javascript to make a change to some element on a page, you will get a Javascript error along the lines of: “element ‘n’ has no properties.” You check your page, and yes, the element is definitely there, and it is definitely named correctly, and your syntax is definitely correct. So where is the problem?
Well, it may be a timing issue. If your script executes before the element targeted by the script has been rendered, it will not find the element. This can particularly be a problem with frames or iframes. The solution is to move the function call to the bottom of the page, after the element has loaded.
Continue reading