Thursday, November 17, 2011

Problems with Cufon fonts and mega menu

Thanks to this bit of code

#primary_menu { position: relative !important; z-index: 9999 !important; }

provided by Problems with Cufon fonts and menues in IE8 I got this mega menu working with my cufon heading.

Friday, October 14, 2011

Business Catalyst: How to connect an email address to a form

Not straight-forward:
- Create the User (email only to not pay as another user)
- Create a Role
- Create a Workflow
- Create a Form
- In the form, click on the form title to get to the "Use Workflow? (?)" details dialog. (This should be available from the Action Box, but it's not.)

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Floated items and side li tag margin collapse

Lots of discussion about top and bottom margin collapsing.  But I'm most often disoriented when I encounter a li near a floated image.  Typically the image is floated left, but I don't want or need to float what's surrounding it.  Most of the other elements look fine jammed up against the image margin.  Not the LI's.  I want them tucked in a bit more, but their margin starts at the beginning of the floated image, so usually there's no margin at all.

Here's a little fiddle to illuminate.

This fellow has the answer:

.entry-content li {
left: 50px;
position: relative;
}

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Business Catalyst: How to stop sections from being editable

Business Catalyst arbitrarily decides to make sections editable with their "Site Editor" (was "In-Context-Editor").  They pick odd portions: banner headings, logos, etc.  They give a rather lame mechanism to remove these, but it doesn't always work, e.g. if the editable-section happens to be just an image.

To remove the in-context-editing, create a "content module" from the section of the template that is wrongly editable, load the piece of code to that and "Add modules to the Template".
Specifically in the Admin dashboard, top menu Admin, Manage Site-Wide Templates...
Manage Content Holders is in the same general area.

Update 10/18/2011:  Also try removing "permission" to manipulate the template in the Role for the User level.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Adwords conversion amount

Google Adwords conversion tracking widget either added or allowed me to add a dollar sign ($) to the conversion amount.   (I don't think I would have thought to put it in myself, but I might have.)  Anyway, Dreamweaver gave a syntax error on an if and assignment statement using the $.  

I first just removed the symbol from the javascript (which as it turns out would probably have been fine), but I had a thought that it  might not work correctly with whatever's going on back at Google.)  All I needed to do was to go back into the widget and remove the $ from the little input box.  But before I thought to do that, I wasted some time Googling for answers.

If someone is using a plain editor that doesn't catch syntax errors, I imagine they might have a problem with their conversions running properly.  

Friday, July 29, 2011

Where is my new Windows 7 Library?

If you created a new Windows 7 library, but can't see it in the Library list, it may be hidden.

Try this:
from Windows Explorer Menu, click Tools, Folder Options, View Tab, check "Show hidden files, folders, and drives".

Why would Windows 7 provide the ability to add a new library folder, then hide it by default?  Even if I choose to hide system folders and files, I certainly don't want to hide a library I just created.

To add insult to injury, use a comma before the "and" in a list. Although this video suggests that depends on if you are following the Chicago Manual of Style or the Associated Press Guide. But I'm firmly in the "no comma" school.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Image corrupt or truncated: , Firefox 4

Image corrupt or truncated: <unknown>, Firefox 4

This fellow got it right. It's the favicon, need to get the link in the heading and the .ico file in the right spot.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Performance: HP Desktop Disk and Memory Usage

Still difficulties with Windows 7, HP Pavilion Desktop--timeouts on all browsers, Windows file renames often send the darn thing into paralysis.

What's up with that?  Some lines of investigation:

From Start, Control Panel, Review your computer's status, View performance information. Got a lowest score of 3.6 for graphics memory.  Maybe the two huge screens are hindering performance?

Also from the Chrome Wench, Tools, Task Manger (shows active pages and Plugins), click "Stats for Nerds" to see memory usage for the other browsers too. How does it know what's outside of itself? Hmmm...

....so of course, need to download more utilities
WinDirStat (why do I keep thinking ManBearPig?) is a great filesize visualizer.


Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Adobe Business Catalyst Notes and Tips

In context editing not working for a section?  Could be a few things; this last one is that it does not like "float" on a "p" tag.

Can't get rid of an editable section? This page Identifying the default editable regions in InContext Editing describes the process of BC walking through the site on import looking for editable regions.  Not good:  it took silly examples, like the site's logo (which was clearly defined as "logo".)  Only way I could see to remove the incontext editing sections was to redefine their container from a div to a p or remove the div container althogether.
Update: Doesn't always work..... Inexplicably spans and p tags still insist on being editable although the page above says these tags are never directly editable.

Can't "Put" a template in Dreamweaver? Must activate the Business Catalyst module.  This would be an obvious point, except that the site's CSS files can be updated without having this live.  Can also seem to get all files. But the DreamWeaver Put for a site Template doesn't work without Window -> Business Catalyst.

Downloading the file set via FTP brings down the Templates folder files as .html while on the remote server the Templates folder holds dwt files.  Why? Dunno.  But don't take files down w/FileZilla--use DW Get for the whole shabang.

Adobe Business Catalyst

I Got the Google Plusone Button Blues

Just wasted a couple of hours on this. Doesn't show on the two serious pages I tried it on (perhaps because they already contain complex javascript), viewed from my local drive on any browser or on a non-local server.

But a super simple test file with only the script and the button, shows up on Safari when viewed directly from my local drive, but not in Chrome, Firefox, or IE9. When viewed from a test server, it shows up fine.

Apparently, I'm not the only one. Not quite ready for prime time I think.

plusone-button

Dreamweaver adds blank lines to code esp. JS

Always bugged me that after opening a file in another editor, for me typically Notepad++, sections of the code were double and triple spaced.

Sometimes just opening in Design mode would cause the problem next time. Since I don't often use Design Mode, I changed Preferences -> File Types / Editors -> "Open in code view:" to include .html as the first line. Seemed to help with a quick open and close of DW test.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Links in a floated div not clickable in Firefox or Safari?

Check that the adjacent div has a width and is also floated.  Otherwise it seems to "overlay" the div disabling the anchor tags.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Pointy edges at the tips of lines in Photoshop

How to get the elegant, faded, pointy tips on your Photoshop lines?
  • Draw a path with the Pen Tool;
  • Right click on it in the Paths window;
  • Choose "Stroke Path" and (this is important) click "Simulate Pressure".
If you don't like the way it looks, fool around with the brush currently selected.

Monday, February 14, 2011

Dreamweaver Site Manager

The message "The root folder you have chosen contains the folder for [arbitrary other site] ...",  probably indicates the "Local Site Folder" of the site noted was filled in with just the Drive C:\ (for example).

If you say OK, every other site you manipulate will give this message:   "The root folder you have chosen us inside the site [the first one].

Perfectly understandable, but not too bright.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Problem with multiple paragraphs floating around large image

Ran into a situation again where my p tags do not wrap around a large floated left (or right) image.  I've seen a few questions asked online, but no satisfactory answers.  Planting the image within the first p tag or keeping it out doesn't help; specifying clear:none on the image, on the paragraphs doesn't help.  Specifying display:inline helps a bit too much; the paragraphs stops being paragraphs.  Enough with css solutions.

Using a br tag(s) (single or multiple) looks different under various browsers.

Oddly, what works is defining a class of divs that act like the p tags.  These wrap fine.  Weird.