Asking Spammer to Stop Emailing: What’s the Point
Given how long email spam has plagued our inboxes, it surprises me that people still get up in arms over it. If someone needs you to sneak their fortune out of the country or attempts to sell you "Viagra", what do you expect to happen when you ask to be removed from their mailing list. Do you really think they care. In some cases all you're doing is confirming that your email account is active. Then they'll send more spam and/or sell your email address to other spammers. [Continue reading]
Maintaining Line Breaks When Copying Code from PHPFreaks.com
While helping people on PHPFreaks.com, I tend to have issues copying code from their forum and pasting it into Dreamweaver. For some reason all the line breaks are removed from the code. As much as I love manually adding dozens of line breaks back into the code, there has to be a quicker solution. [Continue reading]
Auto-closing the Files Panel in Dreamweaver
A few months back the Files panel in Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 began acting up for me. Normally it would minimize after clicking outside of the panel, but for some reason it decided to stop working. I've spent more time than I care to admit digging through preferences and searching for answers online. Of course, once I stopped looking, the solution presented itself. [Continue reading]
What the .filepart Extension Means When Downloading Files with WinSCP
One thing about downloading files with WinSCP using Secure FTP (SFTP) is that sometimes it adds ".filepart" to the end of file names. The extra file extension tends to be added when I'm downloading several PDFs at the same time. So instead of having files named "MyFile.pdf", they would be changed to "MyFile.pdf.filepart". [Continue reading]
How to Turn Off Curly Quotes in WordPress so They Don’t Break Your PHP Tutorials
Have you ever copied PHP code from a website tutorial, but no matter what you did you couldn't get it to work? Or maybe you're posting code on a WordPress blog and can't figure out why people are saying the code doesn't work? Well you're not alone. You may have been bitten by the curly quote bug in WordPress. [Continue reading]
Getting Older Stats for Your Libsyn.com Hosted Podcast
Gathering first quarter statistics for our Libsyn.com hosted podcast was a little more complicated than expected. Everything I needed was available under the admin panel except the number of downloads per episode for January 2011. After trying quite a few things, it turns out the data is available; I just needed to work for it. [Continue reading]
Searching Source Code vs. Text in Adobe Dreamweaver
Have you ever searched for something using Dreamweaver that you know exists but nothing comes up? You may even try something so blatantly obvious like the <p> tag and it still doesn't find any matches! For the longest time I've ignored this type of issue since it doesn't happen often, but it's been in the back of my mind. Well I finally broke down and figured out the cause of the issue; it all comes down to searching the Source Code versus Text. [Continue reading]
Adobe Dreamweaver Bug Causes the Find in Folder Feature to Select the Wrong Folder
For some reason I've had problems with Dreamweaver's Find in Folder feature. When browsing for a folder, Dreamweaver often selects the wrong one. I don't know if the issue is caused my computer, Dreamweaver, or both. But I wanted talk about how I get around the bug in case you're experiencing the same issue. [Continue reading]
Setting up a Makeshift Test Environment for Experimenting with PHP Code
There are times I need to experiment with new code or re-familiarizing myself with code already in use. But there are times when other project code (sending out emails, updating databases, etc.) gets in the way of the tests. The code could be commented out to prevent it from executing, but that may be more work than it's worth. Plus I may forget to uncomment something when the tests are over. Instead, it can be easier to create a new file and focus on the code at hand. [Continue reading]
How to Overcome the Skepticism of Announcing Products on April Fools Day
Every year on this day, organizations announce new products, developments, events, etc. But by and large the announcements tend to be ignored because they coincide with April Fools Day. So I wanted to take this opportunity to offer some tips & tricks for letting your audience know that you're serious. It may be too late to utilize the techniques this year, but as you know there's always next year. [Continue reading]
