Paul A. Boivin – Web Developer

Problem:

Want to back up all Blogger (blogspot.com) posts *and images* and be able to view locally and import to other solution..

Solution:

1. http://blogname.blogspot.com/search?max-results=n (set n = 1,000)
2. Firefox or IE or Chrome: select “File” , then “save page as.”

The solution above will give you a search.htm and a search_files folder.  Although some of hyperlinks will point to the  Blogspot server, the important files will all be pulled and accessible from your local search_files folder.  Meaning, this will provide a good way to either view the entire blog from your local machine and/or import the downloaded posts and accompanying images to another blog application such as WordPress.

Note that are other ways to export and those are extensively documented and found searching for “how to backup blogger posts.”

Go to THIS PAGE if you have a sec.

Narrative:

This is the reduction of a larger application I am working on, but the affect is identical.  As it states at the link above, when running this code in IE (with or without the debugger) or with Firefox through Firebug  (you must put breakpoint at the ‘getAmi()’ function), it works fine.  But just run it straight in Firefox, or Safari,  then  the execution goes right through without  any JavaScript errors in the console.  If you put responseText in an alert you will see it empty.

An XMLHTTP bug?

If you find something I missed, let me know.  Cheers!

Problem:

You plug in your new eSata (as in insanely fast) external hard drive but although the Device Manager ‘initially’ shows the device as operating normally  the volume does not mount. Disappointment.

Solution:

Upgrade to Windows 7.  Really. If you have enough power to run Vista, Windows 7 will run fine. Plus you will solve this issue and many others.  I recommend a lateral upgrade which most manufacturers offers.

That’s it!

Self Explanatory:

PO Box Validation

And so it is!

Unless you carefully read through PHP 5.3 Migration Guide, and snift through all the deprecated functions, you might miss this gotcha: ” Note: As of PHP 5.3.0 the regex extension is deprecated in favor of the PCRE extension. Calling this function will issue an E_DEPRECATED notice.
“, and run the risk of leaving function inner-workings unchanged, or worse, go undetected up to PHP 6  when those functions will be removed!

That’s it!

#box {
background-color: #487690;
color: #fff;
padding: 20px;
font-size: 16px;
}

#box {
background-color: #487690;
color: #fff;
padding: 20px;
font-size: 16px;
border-radius: 13px;
-moz-border-radius: 13px;
-webkit-border-radius: 13px;
}

That’s it!

The code below should be self explanatory but here its summary: give it a directory, a list of desired resource type (if you look at it you will see that depending on the context you could feed this a array of video players randomize video feed), the size of the array and not worry about other files being in the directory like an .htaccess or else and it will provide a unique array of images.

Function:

Usage:

Demo:
Click Here to view an example. All the images on the home page: header, square mosaic, and left frame bottom are all using the random function.

That’s it!

You have to work with these “spécial” characters on sites you develop?  Shortcut: find the character on the chart than use &#xXXXX; for HTML and \uXXXX for JavaScript where XXXX is the hexidecimal value of the Unicode code sans the ‘U+’ bit.

You can read more on this subject by searching this error on the web, but because I found one of the solution a little buried in the posts,  I thought I would share this with you all quick and dirty.

Problem:

While doing some load testing of an application,  we came across this error:

PHP Warning:  PHP Startup: It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected ‘America/New_York’ for ‘EDT/-4.0/DST’ instead in Unknown on line 0

It was messing up our testing until we fixed the problem. Canceling or adjusting default error output in php.ini was not an option.  This problem and solution pertains to a *nix install, not Windows, for which this issue may or may not apply.

Solution:

After making a copy of /etc/profile, edit this one by adding this: export TZ=GMT. If you are doing PHP CLI, logon/off to see the changes but regardless restart Apache.

That’s it.