scriptygoddess

Usually when I’m discussing computers with my parents, it’s always me telling them about one thing or another. But since I don’t use Macs that often, my mother showed ME something I didn’t know about Mac IE (I was pleading with her to use another browser). The one feature she was reluctant to give up was something called “scrapbook” - which I had never heard of. Not exactly like a bookmark - in that it saves a copy of the page to your local machine. Good for if you have a “reciept” for a purchase online, and you want to “save it.” I was SURE there had to be an extension like it for Firefox - sure enough, there is:

ScrapBook :: Mozilla Firefox Extension

(And now, thankfully, the world has one less IE user on the Mac)

Feedback to users about what is happening on the site is always a good thing. Especially if it’s to tell them why a comment they just submitted is not appearing on the site.

WordPress Hack: Notify Users of Moderation
Mark has a hack that will pop up a javascript alert to let users know when their comment is going into moderation. (This way they don’t think the comment just got “lost” and submit it again)

[found via Blogging Pro]

Ever want to have the comment link text be customized per post. For example, one post has “Leave a comment”. The next post has “What do you think?”. etc. Here’s the plugin that will let you do it.

Weblog Tools Collection - Comment Link Plugin

Just spotted this on the del.icio.us news blog:

Foxylicious
Import your del.icio.us bookmarks into firefox.

Need I say it? Ok.. so freakin’ cool.

This is another one I’ve found and linked to on del.icio.us.

Quick Reference Guides
There’s one for CSS and mySQL among a few others. A two sided cheat-sheat. VERY cool.

(note to self type post)
Using “continue” in the middle of a while loop will skip the current iteration and go back to the beginning of the loop (checking the while value again).

Using “break” in the middle of a while loop will break the loop entirely. (no more looping)

So this code

<?php
$i = 0;
while ($i < 5) {
$i++;
if ($i%2) {
echo “value = ” .$i . ” - inside if<br>”;
continue;
}
echo “value = ” .$i . ” - outside if<br>”;
}
?>

Will produce this:
value = 1 - inside if
value = 2 - outside if
value = 3 - inside if
value = 4 - outside if
value = 5 - inside if

Where as this

<?php
$i = 0;
while ($i < 5) {
$i++;
if ($i%2) {
echo “value = ” .$i . ” - inside if<br>”;
break;
}
echo “value = ” .$i . ” - outside if<br>”;
}
?>

Will produce this:
value = 1 - inside if

See more about while loops here.

Hello, I’d like to take HTML 101.

So I was working on a form. Used this method to create the form. Minimal HTML. Simple CSS. Started playing around with the :focus pseudo-class… and that’s when I noticed my submit button started looking crummy. (From a usability perspective, I think there are some things that SHOULDN’T be over-styled. Scrollbars, Buttons. People are used to seeing these have the default look of their OS or Browser. Mess with them, and while you may think YOUR design of them looks pretty, they’re probably not as usable anymore.)

So I went searching for a way to revert an element back to it’s default, and basically discovered that it’s not possible. But the search led me to this page where the suggestion was to simply use the <button></button> tag instead of <input type=”button” /> W3C says you can even (however, the validate local html through the web developer extension in Firefox is giving me errors on all the attributes, even though they are within spec of the DTD.)

Button element?? Ok, add that to the list of things I probably should have known about but didn’t! :-/

Another one I’m linking to on my del.icio.us page, but too cool I had to blog too:

ColorZilla Extension for Firefox and Mozilla
Gives you a little color picker in firefox so if you hit a page and you just have to know what that color is on the site, you can use the picker right in firefox to find out.

Usually, I use colorpic for that, but this is handy if you don’t want to start up another program.

Since buying my pocket pc phone, I have struggled with the version of IE that’s on it. It’s AWFUL. COMPLETELY awful! This morning I started searching for an alternative and found Access Net Front (v 3.1). Downloaded the trial. OMG. This thing ROCKS! Tabbed browsing. Better support for pages that used to force IE to scroll horizontally.

I’ll use the demo for awhile, just to make sure there’s nothing I’m missing, but I love this thing so much at the moment, I literally can not WAIT to buy the full version!

(P.S. If you use this - what is the difference between the regular version and the “jv-lite” version? I’m guessing because of the jv-lite, maybe it’s java based? But why is it better? I can’t find anything that says what the real difference is)

Mark has come up with an innovative way to handle those nasty spam comments that sometimes make it past the spam words list:

Snowball Effect Plugin

As described on Mark’s blog:

The plugin works by checking to see if there are any comments in moderation or that have been posted in the last 24 hours that have the same IP address, e-mail address, comment body, or URI as the current comment being submitted. If there are more than 5 (default) comments that match any of those fields, the comment is sent to moderation, and all similar comments within the past 24 hours are retroactively sent to moderation. This check only occurs if the comment gets past WP’s built-in moderation.