Sixty Two Design - Web and Print Design in Newquay Cornwall » Web Stuff

Forcing IE7 mode in IE8 – peace on earth.

admin — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 15:14:21 +0000

I was just asked to fix a few problems on a site I made pre IE8, and was expecting a few hours of hitting F5 and chaning padding values, when I noticed the little broken page icon in IE8, I’d never noticed it before, so clicked it. Bam. The pages all looked fine!
Turns out this helpful little button forces IE8 to render the page in IE7 mode. After a quick Google I found you could turn this on automatically with a simple meta tag in the head of you HTML page;

Make sure it’s the first thing in the or it may not work, it certainly has to be before all you CSS stuff.
I assume this isn’t the most “correct” way of doing things, and all sites I start nowadays are IE8 happy out of the box, but this certainly saves a helluvalot of time, and save me wearing out my F5 key.

File Conversion Website for opening WPS Files on a Mac

admin — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:21:25 +0000

I’d been given some WPS files full of content for a new site I was working on, but couldn’t get them to open at all on my Mac for love nor money (well, that’s not true, I could have coughed up for MacLink Plus). All the Google searching resulted in “it’s impossible” or convert it on a PC and email it back to yourself.
After a while I stumbled across Zamzar, which lets you upload a file, it then does all the converting for you and emails you back the results. It’s like having a friend with an old PC, but you don’t have to talk to them. They do loads of file types, documents, images, video, CAD and audio. The service is free, but they also offer a paid version, which is a bit faster. I’ve just uploaded a file, so will see how long it takes…

Working with Video

admin — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 15:45:26 +0000

I’ve been wanting to get into some video stuff for a while, but since a bit of Premiere and After Effects at Uni, I haven’t really done much. I got my hands on a trial of After Effects, and started making some intro bits for some videos I have for a surfboard shapers site. I followed a couple of tutorials, and this is where I am;

I think it looks good, and to be honest, was a lot easier than I expected!

On another note, I used the Wordtube Plugin to get this video on my blog, which uses the AMAZING JW Media Player.

EasyBook & EasyCaptcha problems…

admin — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 15:18:50 +0000

I’ve been using the fantastic EasyBook on a few sites for while now, and apart from a great guestbook solution, it also provided my sites with a bucket load of spam. At the request of one of my larger clients, I looked into stopping, or at least minimizing the amount of junk emails and guestbook entries they were receiving.

I’d always know there was a way to add a captcha to the form, but never looked into it. It turns out the same people that develop the EasyBook component, also make the EasyCaptcha component, so I figured installing software from the same publisher should be a walk in the park.

After downloading and installing the EasyCaptcha component I ticked the option in the EasyBook configuration to show the captcha (the warning that told me to install EasyCaptcha had gone, so I assumed they were talking to each other…) and went back to my guestbook page, expecting everything to be hunky dory. But it wasn’t there.

I turns out there’s two places you need to change the settings, in your menu settings, where you have a link to the EasyBook menu item, click on the component settings, and there you have it, all the config settings are reproduced, but it seems that the captcha settings do not link to the Global settings defined in the component configuration.

I couldn’t find much on Google about this (not in English anyway…) so hopefully this will help a few people out.

Tiny Art Director

admin — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:48:51 +0000

Briefs and criticism from a four year old Art Director. Reminds me of some projects I’ve worked on…

http://tinyartdirector.blogspot.com/

Dynamic Image Resizing with PHP

admin — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 12:13:30 +0000

I’ve used this script in loads of projects over the last few years, when I Google for PHP image resizing I always end up back in the same place! Very good for quick and easy live resizing, with some more advanced features like constraining widths and heights. You’ll need GD2 running on your server, but pretty much all hosting with PHP will have this.

Wordpress Scissors Plugin, handy.

admin — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:32:46 +0000

I just installed this, perfect for cropping and resizing photos in the Wordpress admin upload bit, just like that one down there. No need to start up Photoshop etc. Download it from the Wordpress plugin site.