Category: Web Building

Beginning Eclipse CVS – Basics 1: Getting Started

Posted on July 28, 2009 by ellen

Eclipse is an open-source software development platform or IDE that has CVS (version control) functions built-in. Although Eclipse was originally built for Java development, it is very useful for working in other languages as well because of it’s open plugin-based architecture. It is often used as the foundation for new applications because it is so easily extended. This series will focus on the basics of using Eclipse for for version control, for web designers or beginning developers.

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Drupal: Use Taxonomy Access Control Lite to protect content areas for each course

Posted on July 26, 2009 by ellen

Drupal is often used in education these days, and a common requirement for course sites is to create protected areas for each course. You could simply have a separate Drupal site for each course, but sometimes that is not an option, or not efficient, particularly if you want to have some common areas, and other areas which are restricted by course.

There are many approaches you could take to do this using various Drupal modules, but one relatively simple method is to use the Taxonomy Access Control Lite module. This tutorial will help you get started with managing rights in Drupal course sites. In a later tutorial, I’ll cover forums, wikis and and blogs.

ASP contact form for use on GoDaddy sites

Posted on July 15, 2009 by ellen

UPDATE

The form described below works, but if the user’s email address is from hotmail, yahoo or gmail, GoDaddy will still block submission of the form. So here is the solution:

Make the following changes.

You will no longer need “formproc.asp”. GoDaddy will not release the code for their working form but you can use theirs.

In contact.htm, replace everything within the FORM tags with the following HTML code. This sends the user’s data to GoDaddy’s ASP form processor, _gdForm/webformmailer.asp

<form action="_gdForm/webformmailer.asp" method="post" id="form">
<input type="hidden" name="subject" value=&quot;Submission" />
<input type="hidden" name="redirect" value=&quot;thankyou.htm" />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="Contact form">
<tr>
<th><label for="name">*  Full Name: </label></th>
<td><input type="text" name="name" id="name" size="25" maxlength="255" /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th><label for="email">*  Email Address: </label></th>
<td><input type="text" name="email" id="email" size="25" maxlength="255" /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th><label for="subject">Subject: </label></th>
<td><input type="text" name="subject" id="subject" size="38" maxlength="75" /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<th><label for="message">Message: </label></th>
<td><textarea cols="30" rows="6" name="message" id="message"></textarea></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2" id="button"><input type="submit" value="Send Email" /></td>
</tr>
</table>
</form>

Next, create a “thankyou.htm” page, which can contain any message you want. This is going to be the page they get redirected to after the form has been processed.

GoDaddy made some changes to their smtp email server settings such that old ASP mail forms no longer work.

IE8: Navigation to the webpage was cancelled

Posted on June 16, 2009 by ellen

With the advent of IE 8, I started getting calls about a new error when accessing our learning management system.

“Navigation to the webpage was cancelled.”

This error can be caused by many things, but in this case, I believe it has to do with the fact that the LMS has both secure and insecure assets in the frameset. Unfortunately, many times messages will come up asking people whether they want to view both types, and they will click “no” without knowing that the page requires them to function.

Since I can’t ever really know what is going on with a user’s home computer’s security setup, I simply tell them to reset their Internet Explorer to its default settings.

Drupal not recognizing update

Posted on March 4, 2009 by ellen

As if the current crop of virus warnings and financial data-stealing Trojans weren’t enough, mandatory security updates just came out for both Movable Type and Drupal. The Movable Type upgrade went without incident but Drupal

Escape double quotes in strings in Visual Basic

Posted on February 25, 2009 by ellen

I use Javascript much more than visual basic, so I’ve always been puzzled by how to escape nested quotes in strings in VB. In Javascript, you either nest single quotes (apostrophe’s) and double quotes or

Make your own custom code for a WordPress-style Flickr badge

Posted on February 24, 2009 by ellen

NOTE: This post has been superceded by a better method to create a custom badge posted here

To create a nicer looking Flickr badge, use Flickr’s badge creation tool to get the right user code and content codes for your badge.

Go to:
Create your own Flickr badge and make the selections as specified:

Drupal: cannot redeclare date_api_views_data() error after installing Views 2.3

Posted on February 18, 2009 by ellen

I had a lot of trouble trying to update the Views module. When I would attempt to run update.php, I got the White Screen of Death. I removed several modules and tried to view the

Execute an asp function within an HTML page using #exec

Posted on February 16, 2009 by ellen

While looking for more information on how Server Side Includes are implemented on IIS servers, I ran across the #exec directive. <!– #exec CommandType=CommandDescription–> #exec allows an HTML page to run an application (ASP application,