Frobie

Just managed to upgrade from WordPress 2.5.1 to WordPress 2.6 via the 3-step Upgrade Process. The new features are awesome. I especially like the Image Captions which will save me time for having to do it myself through HTML and CSS.

A week or two ago, I lost internet access. I checked the router and the settings were not changed. The other computer had internet access. I checked my ethernet cable, my ethernet card, and fiddled around with the Windows network settings with equally negative results.

Turned out my problem was following the Windows Automatic Updates' recommendation to update to XP SP3. A whole bunch of people had the same problem as me after installing SP3. They would receive the "limited or no connectivity" message on their network icon and pull their hair out trying to find the cause.

A simple uninstall of SP3 through the Add or Remove Programs tool under the Control Panel fixed the connectivity issue.

Forward three weeks later, the automatic update from Windows struck again, installing a security fix which seemed to fix my internet connection to not allow me to connect. Again, the only workaround was to uninstall the fix. And turn off the automatic update so this does not occur again.

This may have been a ploy by Windows to push everyone towards Vista!

I usually use the Opera browser for administrative purposes as part of my work. Firefox and Internet Explorer are relugated to their status as test browsers.

Anyhow, while madly clicking away on the Opera window, I noticed the pages would jump back and forth. Turns out that holding down the right button while clicking the left button will go back one page and vice versa for holding down the left button while clicking the right button.

Improvements upon the user interface continue to make large strides forward!

From the official site, CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart. If you drop the "to" and "and", shouldn't it read CAPTTTCHA instead?

CAPTCHAs are those images you see with a phrase in them. The user has to type in the phrase they see in the image and the script upon submission will compare the user phrase with the saved phrase. If the two match then the submission goes through; if not, the user is booted back to the form usually with an error message.

The reason for the use of CAPTCHA images is to tell computers and humans apart as the meaning says. Computers have a hard time determining the phrase because of the other lines criss-crossing over the letters, so scripts can't be run on the comment form.
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The Frobie Shop is now online.

I signed up for an Amazon affiliate a long, long time ago when Frobie.com was originally a listing of free after rebate products. When I lost my direction in terms of improving and marketing the website, the Amazon account drifted away into limbo. I didn't have any use for the account and the hassle involved in closing down the account took much too long.

But now, the account has been resurrected.

It's alive, ALIVE!!
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In an earlier entry, Missing Data After AJAX Call, I threw a hack together to return multiple values which required parsing based on a separator on the client side.

After testing, I realized using a character as a separator is a bad idea. The data returned could have the character as part of its value and screw up the parsing later on the client side. Storing the data as XML and returning the data as such makes for a more elegant solution.

I also wanted to send a large amount of text through AJAX and the GET request was not getting the job done. Using POST instead of GET works well; the reason behind it is similar to why it works for forms or forum postings.

Talking about the what's and why's does not make it very clear. That is why I brought an example with me including the corresponding code. w00t!
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The other day, I was looking for a decent tutorial on creating pagination using PHP. I did a couple Google searches, but the results did not fit my criteria. I was looking for a caterpillar pagination where there is a head, a tail, and a middle section that moves along as you click through the pages.

Previously, the site I was working on had used a previous/next deal where the user would just keep clicking next to get further through the records. But, this type of navigation takes too long to get to the end and is not very search engine friendly.
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I was working through the night last night, burning the midnight oil as they say, trying to get this AJAX deal to work. I had to fill a select field with options once the user selects an option from a second select field. But, every time I made the AJAX call to retrieve the data, the target select field remained empty... in IE. Argh! IE! Why do you haunt me so?!
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In an earlier blog entry where I spoke about moving hosts, I mentioned using Chris Heilmann's Canvas Pie Chart in some way. Unfortunately, I never got around to digging into the code to create something for Frobie.

However, while browsing through SourceForge for cool scripts, I found another option for my graph creations. The option turned out to be an open-source flash script created by John Glazebrook called Open Flash Chart.
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I was working on a sitemap for a website today and this error popped up when I tried to view the xml file in the browser: Access is Denied. Error Processing Resource.

I am not a big expert on XML and its errors. I was using the same Sitemap generator plugin for WordPress on that site as I do on Frobie.

It turns out the error was pretty simple. The other site did not have the leading "www" part in its URL. The XML file was looking for the XSLT file using the full URL path, but the domains did not match so it threw up the access is denied error.

Example:

With "www": http://www.frobie.com/sitemap.xml
Without "www": http://frobie.com/sitemap.xml

Weird.