DNSTCWSMS Major Version 2.601 Roles Out

With this new update, there were a lot of changes made to the photo management and photo pages.   This was done to make things much easier to update your website.  Some of these changes include a new drag/drop interface that is not reliant on Java, but uses JQuery to upload a massive amount of photos and resize them as they are being uploaded.  Also, you can now rotate pictures through the photo editing page.

Configuring Word for Blog Posts

Microsoft Word 2003 and higher will allow you to place a blog post to Word Press if the blog server is configured to receive the blog post and if you have a valid username and password in order to make those posts.

In order to make this connection happen, you will need the following:

1. Username:
2. Password:
3. URL to blog site:

Once you have these items, perform the following to establish your blog posting account.

Note: You will only have to establish your account the first time you make a connection. From that point on, Word will store your username and password for you; however, it is a good idea to keep this information someplace in case your computer has to be reloaded.

1. Open Word and select File/New
2. Select New Blog Post
3. Click on Manage Accounts
4. Click on New
5. Select Word Press as your provider
6. Click Next
7. Enter the URL to the blog site (make sure you leave the xmlrpc.php on the end of the document)
8. Enter your username
9. Enter your password
10. Check Remember Password
11. Click OK
12. You should get a message that your account has been established.

From this point on, anytime you wish to publish a new blog post, your account will be configured and you can just type your message, select a category, and click publish when you are done.

We always recommend that you should have at least 1 photograph with each blog post and that you should always choose a category to place your blog post into.

Adding a Windows Server 2012 Domain Controller to an Existing Windows Server 2003 network

When looking for information on migrating server 2003 to 2012 I found this artical and I feel that it will be useful in the future. Here is the url to the page I found.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/canitpro/archive/2013/05/05/step-by-step-adding-a-windows-server-2012-domain-controller-to-an-existing-windows-2003-network.aspx

Encoding and Decoding for Ajax

One of the original issues with WSMS is that some special characters where not able to pass through the Ajax requests correctly due to special characters.  For example, if you used the "&" within your text boxes or within a link, everything after the "&" and include the "&" was removed when it would save the information to the database.

To fix this issue, the data must be URL (or URI) encoded before it is passed through the GET request, then it must be decoded before it is saved in the database; however, the problem is that it must be decoded within java script, then decoded within PHP.  This took a little bit of research and testing, but it does work.

Here is how to encode the data:

If you are receiving the data as variable v in java script:

var vout = encodeURIComponent(v);

Then pass the variable v=vout to the request.

On the PHP site, use the following:

$value = rawurldecode($_GET['v']);

This will then decode the data and you can store the variable $value within the database.

To see an example of this in action:

Within the dba section of panicd.com, look at the files

Encoding in Java Script:  dnstc_ajax.js under the function: saveFieldValue()

Decoding in PHP: location-sae-main-inforamtion-ajax-process.php

Slider Images

I needed some code to use as a standard sliding image rotator.  After testing out several downloads, I came to the conclusion that the following fits the needs for almost any web design project.  I have used it on several design projects already and wanted to document where I got the code from.
The link to the Basic jQuery Slider can be found here:

http://www.basic-slider.com/

It is very easy to setup and use.  It also has several options that you can customize.

Fixing Buffer Issues

When I started working on SEO for pages, I noticed something strange occurring with errors stating that redirection or sessions could not be started.  Warnings would show up on the top of pages stating that you cannot perform these functions since the headers already started.

Trying to Be Good, although not easy.

Through several years of researching how to achieve first page placement I have discovered that for every article that explains how to do it one way, there are three others that can contradict the findings of the first article.  Which means 1) Nobody really has a clue or 2) People just like to write catchy titles to catch other’s attention.

I gave up the quest of research the beginning of the year and decided to just try things on my own.  Those tips and tricks I have read about that make sense, why not just weed out the garbage and fall back to the old adage of “keeping it simple stupid”.

With that being said, one of the 3 major things that I have found (and counter found) that is important in having your web pages indexed correctly, is that they meet W3C validation rules.  Makes sense.  You site should be clean of errors and easily read by the search engine bots.

So I embarked on a great campaign - that if nothing else, each website I design is W3C valid.  This should just be something that my clients should be able to count on when they commission me to be their webmaster.

Well this week, I am working on a project where I am going through each page of a website and cleaning up the code.  If you have done this, you know that it can be tricky going back and forth fixing one thing and breaking something else.  Took me a little bit of time, but once I got on a roll it was pretty simple.

In a mater of an hour or so, the entire website was 100% W3C validated and compliant.  I gave myself a pat on the back, and got another cup of coffee. 

When I came back to my desk, I noticed that one of the other simple things on my task list was to add Google Analytic tracking to the website.  Forgot to do this a while back, so hey, another checkmark off the list.

Hopped over to my Google Analytics, grabbed the code and put it in the website template.  Gave a quick upload and done.  Check.  Done this so many times in the past, I didn’t even take an extra second to look at the code.

I had to add a new page to the site, so once I got everything on-line I decided to run another quick validation on the site just to make sure we were still in compliance… at least with the new page.

EACH PAGE GOT A VALIDATION ERROR!!!!!

When I look at the error, it was the code that I had copied from Google.  Are you kidding me?  Google cannot even post code that is compliant…. arrrg!  Well, that’s ok Google, at least I fixed it on my site.

Sorry, just needed to rant a bit.