If you’re any sort of respectable web designer, you’ve obviously come across many situations when you’ve had to use divs as a sort of inline block and only wished that you could use display: inline-block to quite simply solve all your layout problems. Instead though, we’ve had to resort to using float: left and then inserting a float clearing div/br after all those floated divs. Sure, it works but it’s not what we really want to end up doing (especially having to throw in extra html markup just for visual correctness).
Well, I’ve since run in to a situation that using float: left wasn’t working for me (try centering a set of divs that have float: left – it’s a pain!), so I had to find some kind of way to use inline-block. Thankfully, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3 support inline-block now, but we still have to deal with those hard-headed users that take forever (or never) to upgrade their browsers. To accomodate Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 we have to use some CSS hacks (what else is new!); thankfully they’re not that bad (but it still invalidates your CSS… bummer).
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How would you like to join the Microsoft Web Solution Partner community and get your company name out there to clients you never thought of before? What if I told you you could get a free copy of Microsoft Expression Web 2, three 1hr training sessions on Microsoft Web Development tools (including Silverlight, Visual Studio, .NET and more!) and specially tailored hosting packages from the Microsoft Hosting Partner community? Not too shabby eh!
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Unfortunately, the WordPress online documentation is a mess of old, outdated API information and when I tried to make a little plugin today and have it put a little meta box in the sidebar of the edit/new post admin pages, I had one hell of a hard time getting things to work the way it was documented.
Everywhere I looked, it told me to hook on to the “admin_menu” event when I wanted to queue up my meta box using add_meta_box(). After a bit of messing around, it seemed as though I had it working for the edit post page, but then it wasn’t showing up on the add new post page. I did a bit of debugging and ensured that it was the fact that the add_meta_box() call wasn’t being queued properly – I assume it had something to do with when it was being added to the meta box queue… ultimately meaning that the “admin_menu” event was too early of an event for me to hook on to.
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If you have the Java Runtime Environment installed on your Windows (Vista) system – and chances are you do – you may have tried disabling that Java system tray icon without much luck. The problem lies in registry permissions, and the solution lies right here!
As the Administrator user in Windows, you can easily go in to the Java control panel and disable the “Place Java icon in system tray” setting and it will stick (meaning the setting actually gets saved in the registry). Problem is though, the setting seems to be per-user, so you’ve only disabled it for your Administrator account – not much use for your normal user account(s) in Windows now is it.
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Like most of you, I have a USB key that I store some of my portable stuff on (quite useful if you move computers – say from home to work). I’ve found it extremely invaluable, especially when combined with PStart and RoboForm2Go. To make my life even easier, I whipped up an autorun.inf file for my USB key that would load up PStart for me when I plugged it in to the computer (well, close to it – it initiates Windows Vista’s AutoPlay feature which shows me a “Load Start Menu” action which I click to run PStart).
However, there was one very big problem that I encountered early on – the “shellexecute” and “shell\verb\command” actions did not work very well when there were spaces in the path names. Now, most of you would say, “well, did you quote the path names in double quotes?” – the answer is yes, I tried that. In fact, I tried all sorts of things and found that the only way I could get it to work was by using double quotes and having to specify the drive letter. That sucked – that meant that my portable USB key was no longer really portable, since if the drive letter wasn’t what was in my autorun.inf file, it wouldn’t run (or worse, run the wrong program). So that solution wasn’t acceptable – I had to find a solution.
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