For the past few days, I’ve been unable to dump anything from phpMyAdmin. The host told me it was because my DB was large (wasn’t) and another suggested I try another browser.

I use FF for everything, but I tried it in IE7 and voila, it worked.

Doing a bit more investigating I found a forum where someone was having a similar issue and the suggestion was ‘toss your cookies.’

I tossed mine, and suddenly FF is exporting again in phpMyAdmin. Lesson learned (and recorded here for future reference).

REVISED 3/20/08

Actually this turned out to be a FF profile issue. Here’s what Mozilla told me:

Occasionally a Firefox profile will get gummed up in a way that is very difficult to track down.

As a diagnostic, you could try using a “clean” Firefox profile: Creating a new Firefox profile on Windows @ MozillaZine Knowledge Base. If that works, then one of your extensions may be at fault, or a bad setting, or a corrupted file. If the cure isn’t obvious, you can move your bookmarks and (selectively) your other settings to the new profile: Migrating settings to a new profile @ MozillaZine Knowledge Base.

I’d been using Marketleap’s link checking tool for a while, but today began using Yahoo’s query terms because they allow the user to remove internal links from the results.

Here’s what you do:

1. To check the full number of links to a domain use this:

linkdomain:www.mysite.com

2. To do the same but without including backlinks:

linkdomain:www.mysite.com –site:mysite.com

3. To check backlinks to a specific page:

link:http://www.mysite.com/subpage.html

4. And to do the same without including those internal links:

link:http://www.mysite.com/subpage.html -site.mysite.com

Nifty to know for a quick check.

It came to my attention over the weekend that the page referred to in this previous post is no longer available. So I’ll just post the script here.

< ?
srand((double)microtime()*1000000);
$arry_txt = preg_split("/--NEXT--/", join('',
file("featured_flower.txt")));
echo $arry_txt[rand(0, sizeof($arry_txt) -1)];
?>

Put this wherever you want the rotation to play, and link to a text file with your quotes, links to images on your server, etc. (mine is linking to a quote file ‘featured_flower.txt’ that also includes images). You can see a bit of the text file here.

I hope this makes sense. It’s a great little script and you can style it by putting it in a CSS div.

I wrote earlier about purchasing WHMCS for my hosting reseller site. Well, I finished my integration, my hosting site launched on Sunday and I thought I would share my final thoughts about this first experience with WHMCS.

Nothing’s changed - I still love it. I learned that there about 30 template files that have to be edited for CSS to make it fit in nicely with the rest of the site, but the edits are easy and in most cases it’s very obvious what needs to be done.

I’m pretty happy with the way the whole thing turned out except for the icons that came with the package - I think they look a little cartoonish for my site and I plan to replace them at some point when I find something I like better. My WHMCS section is under Support on the top menu bar.

The control panel for running this thing is easy to understand. We ran about six test orders through the system looking for bugs and errors and I think we found most of them. I still won’t be too surprised if someone runs across something when they try to sign up, but for the most part it’s done.

I’m really happy with WHMCS and will purchase it in a few days when the trial license runs out. On second thought maybe I should go do that right now in case I forget…

sitemapping with post-its

Okay, maybe my method does take a little extra work to translate, but this is how I do it.

Post-it notes on the wall make a flexible sitemapping system that multiple people can stop by, contemplate, and make changes to as they wish as long as you leave it up.

I work on PC’s, so I don’t have access to some of the cool sitemapping tools that Mac users can try. Adobe GoLive does have sitemapping built in; I’ve taken a brief look but have not yet used it. Generally I wind up translating my post-it sitemap into InDesign using a template that I’ve developed over time.

But the post-it note way is so easy and is a good way to nail it all down before you have to start moving all those little flowchart symbols and lines all over the place.

When I started my web design business and was looking for a host, I first learned about reseller accounts. The host I’m with now has a great one, but not everyone may be familiar with what this entails…

What is a reseller hosting account? Generally, that means that you purchase web server space with a host, then you’re free to sell that space in whatever increments you choose and at the price you set. And typically you’ll have some kind of hosting control panel where you can set up hosting packages and prices and manage your hosting clients - up to the point of monitoring the bandwidth they’re using each month, and upgrading/downgrading or suspending if necessary.

For example, if I purchase a reseller account with 20 gb of space, I can sell 20 1gb accounts or 40 500 mb accounts and so on to my web design clients. I pay for the original account, but my clients all pay me for their accounts too. It definitely pays for itself very quickly, and the ability to oversee my clients’ hosting accounts all from one control panel is a big time saving benefit.

This is so much easier than just setting up a client with their own hosting account and of course keeps me in the loop when they need to upgrade and renew!

Dumb me. I spent 15 minutes looking around online today for a way to do this and didn’t find much - a few macros that scared me and not much else.

In Excel (2003) there are three formulas that let you change the case of a piece of text - PROPER that capitalizes the first letter of every word; UPPER that capitalizes every letter; and LOWER that (surprise!) makes every letter lowercase.

Note that Microsoft helpfully did not include an option for sentence case in Excel 2003.

But they did include it in Word… hmmm. SENTENCE capitalizes only the first letter of every string. I had a whole column I needed to change, so I copied it to Word, applied sentence case text formatting to it, and copied it back to Excel.

I can’t believe I didn’t think of that first. Hopefully this will save someone else some time surfing for an answer.

Want to be able to drop images into your HTML with a minimum of effort? Set up two little classes in your CSS file to do just that.

1. Open your CSS file.

2. Add in a new class like so: img-left {float: left; padding: 8px 8px 8px 0;}

3. Add in another new class: img-right {float: right; padding: 8px 0 8px 8px;}

(Note: Change the padding as you see fit, this is just a suggestion!)

4. Within your markup, add in your image just in front of the text and then put a div with a class of “img-left” or “img-right” around it depending on whether you want your image to the left or right of your flowed text.

mountains at sunset

Here’s an example of this in action using “img-left.”