To get the flash to display behind the css drop down menu you just have to set the wmode property to transparent. This setting must be made both in the AC_FL_RunContent call and in the Flash Object or by choosing Transparent Window in the Publish Settings menu in flash.

[tags]flash,css[\tags]

<link id="gallery" rel="alternate" href="photos.rss" type="application/rss+xml">

I double checked the format of my photos.rss page but I still could not get PicLens to recognize it, and instead kept getting the error:

“This site does not yet support PicLens.”

The Cause: I discovered was that my web host (GoDaddy Shared Hosting Plan) was not correctly serving the rss file.

The Solution: Rename the photos.rss feed to photos.xml. Since the rss file is an XML file I knew it would be correctly served and would be hopefully be discovered by PicLens. For me changing the rss file to an xml file extension solved my “This site does not yet support PicLens” Error.

The second issue I discovered was that the webmaster guide does not list the guid field in the spec yet it is seems to be necessary for PicLens to match images on your site to the declarations in the rss feed. The guid field is included in the example photos.rss fied that comes with the downloadable webmaster guide which seemed to work unlike mine was so it was my clue the rss guid field was necessary. The rss spec clasifies the guid field as a unique identifier. I chose to use the filename as the guid for my photos.rss (photos.xml field as is the case for my setup) since it is unique and change the isPermaLink field to be true since it is. I could have also used the ID field of that row in my Database but I figured the PermaLink provided me with more information.

<guid isPermaLink="true">picture_214_2_1211225557.jpg</guid>

Let me know if this solves your PicLens error or if you have any others I may be able to help with.

Technorati Tags: PicLens, photos.rss, rss

TO ENCRYPT:
INSERT INTO users (user, pass) VALUES (’$username’, AES_ENCRYPT(’$pass’, ’secret encryption key’));

TO DECRYPT:
SELECT user, AES_DECRYPT(pass, ’secret encryption key’) FROM users

After much debugging and hair pulling I found the solution. Since the website is set up on a GoDaddy Shared Hosting plan, the curl call to the UPS XML api was failing. GoDaddy Shared Hosting uses a curl proxy and you must configure any CURL requests to go through that proxy.

Below is the solution, which I am sad to say I found at the very end of the readme.txt document included with the UPS XML package AFTER I figured it out the HARD WAY! DOH and DOH. I am embarrassed to say I stopped reading the instructions when I thought I got to the end but the last last step is how to make it work with GoDaddy Hosting. Hopefully this post will save someone similar frustrations by being able to quickly find the solution with a google search!

From the readme.txt file …

----------------------------

// EOF GODADDY STUFF

Technorati Tags: osCommerce, GoDaddy, curl

The SQL:

INSERT INTO my_table(
 field1, field2, field3, field4, field5
)
SELECT (
 fieldA, fieldB, 1234, NOW(), fieldC
)
FROM my_table_two
WHERE my_table_two.PK =1

The error:

MySQL said: Error#1241 – Operand should contain 1 column(s)

The resolution: Remove the Parentheses () around the second embedded SELECT statement so the statement is as follows.

INSERT INTO my_table(
 field1, field2, field3, field4, field5
)
SELECT
 fieldA, fieldB, 1234, NOW(), fieldC
FROM my_table_two
WHERE my_table_two.PK =1

The reason the error occurs: When you ad parentheses () around the SELECT columns you create an ordered list of values or a tuple. The SELECT statement expects a list of individual values. Or in simpler terms you are giving it the array[1][2] when it expects the values 1 and 2. You can recreate this error by running this sql statement SELECT 1,2 which will return 1 2 amazingly. Then run SELECT (1,2) which will return ERROR #1241 – Operand should contain 1 column(s). For me it occurred because I copied and pasted code from an insert statement to not have to retype all the fields and grabbed a little too much in my copy.

The Cliff Notes Version If you get a mySQL ERROR 1241 then look for some unnecessary parentheses surrounding your SELECT statement and remove them!

Technorati Tags: mySQL, 1241, Error

The Solution: Change lightbox.css to make the navigation graphics always visible
My solution was to change the stylesheet (lightbox.css) to fix the display of the prev and next links to always be visible. I am OK with the prevLabel.gif and nextLabel.gif always showing on top of the image because it makes the navigation so much more obvious.

I know this fix is pretty obvious to the coder types but since many people who use the LightBox Library on their website are not so savvy I hope to take the mystery out of this fix. Simply:
1) Download the new Lightbox CSS File.
2) Remove the .txt from the end of the filename.
3) Make sure the nextLabel.gif and prevLabel.gif and blank.gif are pointed to in the right directory (if they are not in the ./img/ directory you need to change anywhere it says img/ to your directory name, for example images/)
4) Upload the new lightbox.css file to replace the old one

After a quick google search I stumbled upon the MPOV blog and a post on Lightbox with iframes. I downloaded his script and plugged it in instead of my current lightbox.js file. It worked great to display the movies but wouldn’t display the images because of a bug. To display my Flash movies in the new iFrame LightBox JS v2.0 I just edited the existing link to the Flash created simple HTML file to include the rel=”lightbox” property. The HTML file is simply a file with an embedded Flash movie (.flv) playing file (.swf).

My issue with the new hacked LightBox was that although it now allowed me to define a height for the iFrame and Lightbox, it didn’t support setting the width of the iFrame and the LightBox and it would no longer display the images. So, when my Flash movie would load in LightBox it, depending on its size, would have a scroll bar. You can set the width at the top of the lightbox.js as the iFrameWidth variable but my videos are a variety of sizes so I needed to be able to dynamically set the width for the LightBox/iFrame.

No biggie, though, with the addition of a few lines of code the new Lightbox with iFrames now supports setting the height and width of the iFrame and therefore LightBox and it also now displays images . To pass in the width and height use: rel=”lightbox|WIDTH|HEIGHT”. For instance if you want to display a 640px X 480px movie you would use rel=”lightbox|660|500″ The script automatically adds the defined LightBox border (var = borderSize) x 2 to the width and height.

Download the new LightBox with iFrames Reloaded
Install by changing the extension to .js from .txt and replace your existing lightbox.js file with the new one.
Note: You will need the full LightBox v2.0 installed already which you can download from here.

For an example of using LightBox to open embedded Flash movies and standard JPG images check out our Picture Gallery. Click on one of the movies links from the first page to see an iFrame + LightBox being used to display the Flash Video or one of the thousand pictures for the standard LightBox image usage.

Thanks to Lokesh Dhakar for the LightBox script and Tim Morgan cool iFrame hack.

So how do you get your own icon for your website? You need to create a file named favicon.ico and upload it to the main directory of your websierver. Sounds easy enough, right? Well almost, the only thing that makes this tricky is this very tiny image file is in a format most image editors can not save as a default. This little devious file is a Windows Icon Format file (.ico) which should spread dread into the hearts of MAC users everywhere. No fear, though, with a little plugin you can use good old Adobe Photoshop to create your very own favicon.ico file.

First, go to: this website and download the ICO format plugin for your version of Photoshop (MAC and PC are different). Next, follow the included instructions to drop the ICO plugin into your Photoshop plugins folder. Now the fun part, get your self a 16×16 pixel canvas and design your favicon.ico. A little hint is to use a canvas of 32×32 and then change the image size right before you save so you can actually see what you are doing! Now, choose save as and select Windows Icon Format (ico) from the format dropdown box. Last upload your file to the home directory of your webserver.

The first thing I know you are going to do is go to your website to see your nifty new website icon! Sadly, though, there is a good chance you will not see it Browsers are iffy on when they check for the new versions of favicon.ico. Some check when you refresh, some you have to clear the cache, some you have to bookmark the page, others you have to jump on one foot while left clicking! Anyways, just give it some time and sometime your new image will pop up on your address bar.

Macromedia Dreamweaver file_save.js error on line 45 when changing and saving a template.

When It occurs:

Sometimes when changing a template Dreamweaver MX will issue an error on file_save.js on line 45. This error will not change any pages in your site with the new template and will also freeze Dreamweaver MX. You have to close and then restart Dreamweaver to continue working. Once you get this file saving error on line 45 once Dreamweaver will issue this error every time you attempt to change the template.

Resolution:

1) Close Dreamweaver MX
2) Rename your site directory to [Old Site DirectoryName]_somethingNew
3) Open Dreamweaver MX
3a) You will get an error because the site no longer exists. Ignore this.
4) Delete Old Site from Dreamweaver’s site manager
5) Close Dreamweaver
6) Create a new directory named [Old Site DirectoryName]
7) Using Windows Explorer Copy and Paste all the files from [Old Site DirectoryName]_somethingNew into [Old Site DirectoryName]
Start Dreamweaver MX
9) Using the site manager create a new site to replace the one you deleted in step 4
10) Dreamweaver will now rebuild the cache and your problem should be fixed

Why:

It seems to be a bug that occurs in the cache file. I have had problems when adding large values to tag fields so this could cause a buffer overrun or similar problem perhaps. I have found this solution combining a couple I have found on-line into one procedure which has worked now three times when I have had this file_save.js on line 45 error while using Macromedia Dreamweaver MX.

To remove the duplicates in mySQL 3.23 and above we will move the non duplicates into a temporary table, then delete the old table, and rename the temporary table to the old table to finish the circle.

First Create the temporary table and populate it with the values from the old table.

NOTE: As of mySQL 3.23, you can create one table from another by adding a SELECT statement at the end of the CREATE TABLE statement :: CREATE TABLE new_tbl SELECT * FROM orig_tbl;

CREATE TABLE newtable
SELECT * FROM oldtable WHERE 1 GROUP BY [column to remove duplicates from];

Now we have a newtable with all of the duplicates removed. So next we drop the old table (the one with all the duplicates still remaining)

DROP TABLE oldtable;

Now we just rename the newtable to the name of the oldtable so we don’t break our whole code base!

RENAME TABLE newtable TO oldtable;

Thats it, duplicates removed. With newer versions of mySQL and with other database engines such as Oracle 9 you can remove duplicates in a single statement and step but this method will still work (using any changes in the SQL commands necessary for your engine).