Recently I set up a blog which has a bunch of users who will be posting articles, and I wanted the page which lists the author’s posts to have the author’s name in the link. The solution is to Add User Profile Fields and substitute user_nicename for twitter in the code. Thanks to Change the WordPress Author Archive Permalink by Kyle Eslick for the idea of getting it fixed up!

Today I learned how to embed a Flash video on a web page. It was pretty easy after we converted the WMV file to a Flash video (.flv). The key was to get a Flash player for the web site, which we found here:

Flowplayer.org

It’s a free, open-source package which makes it simple to embed Flash movies on your web site. I was impressed with how quickly we got the video up and going. It involved adding a javascript file and then a call to the player:


<script type="text/javascript" src="flowplayer-3.1.4.min.js"></script>
<a href="Galapagos-3m-30-full.flv" style="display:block;width:450px;height:330px" id="player">
</a>
<script>
flowplayer("player", "flowplayer-3.1.5.swf");
</script>

That was it! Nice and easy. Thanks to Boutell.com for pointing me in the right direction.

Warning: Hardcore geek stuff ahead! Ok, it’s not that bad, but it is very technical and of interest mainly to programmers.

One of the most powerful tools a programmer has is regular expressions… small bits of code that can examine a string and pull out all sorts of information. Here’s a tutorial on eight of the expressions every programmer should know:

8 Regular Expressions You Should Know – from nettuts+

I like how they color code the expression and explain what each part does. It really makes it easy to understand.

I’ve always had a problem with getting tables to center properly while creating valid code. The Site Wizard has come to the rescue! Here he shares an article on how to do it, with a workaround for Internet Explorer:

How To Centre a Table – from The Site Wizard

The title refers to Nvu and Komposer (two popular web page editing tools) but you should be able to follow along no matter what editor you’re using.

For all of you database nuts out there…

Exploits of a Mom

Thanks goes out to Bleys for this little tidbit.

Here’s a really neat site where you can load an image and get a color scheme from the colors in the image. Way cool!

colr.org

One of our clients has several Microsoft Access databases which we developed, and when I need to work on them, we email the files back and forth. Recently, his email program has started renaming the attached files!! For some reason, it comes through named as database.zlh instead of database.mdb. So I did a little digging and it looks like some program along the way is doing that for protection, to prevent viruses, trojans and such. Here’s an article which details the different extensions given to files when they’re being automatically renamed. I’m still not sure which program is doing this, but it’s good to know why it’s happening and to be assured that the contents are not being changed, just the name. The solution is to give the file the proper extension when saving the attachment.

One way to personalize your web site is to provide a favicon – the little icon that shows in the address bar of the browser when a visitor is on your page. You may have noticed ours… the blue diamond with a magnifying glass in it (a sign of our site to come!!). I made this by taking an image and running it through an online program which creates the required favicon.ico file. Then I uploaded it to our web site and presto! The favorite icon image appears. It’s one of those small details which can help make your site stand out from the crowd.

Here’s a great site which does a fantastic job of creating an icon from an image:

favicon.ico Generator

You can also draw one from scratch, if that’s your thing. Just make sure to click the “Download” link when you have something you like. Then upload it to your website (make sure it’s named favicon.ico) and you should be all set!

Recently I found this great article about easily selecting just a piece of an image, using the wonderful, free image editor called GIMP. Sometimes you want to use just part of a picture, so here’s a way to easily select an irregularly-shaped object:

Removing Backgrounds Quickly In The GIMP

Nice!

Recently I made a form for a client, and on her computer, one field in the form was showing up with a yellow background. I checked it on 4 different browsers on two different computers in our office, and could not duplicate the problem. Argh! So today, I finally hit upon the correct Google query and found the answer!!

Google toolbar highlights autofill fields

The link above will tell you how to turn that feature off. Personally, I don't use the Google toolbar because it seems an invasion of privacy and I don't think it's available for Linux, anyway. But it's a good thing to keep in mind how other internet programs can affect your browser.