Website Design in a Flash

Mac Support Pulls a Stupid

2008-12-27T09:37:00.003-07:00

To preface this rant, I thought I would tell you a little bit about myself:

1) I've only ever had PC's. My father had a 286 and a 486 while I was growing up, and I've always been very into computers. My brother and I built our own computers for under $300 each while we were in high school. We were never presented with the opportunity to build a Mac.

2) Growing up, my friends and I played a lot of computer games, and I've tried to connect a Mac with a PC over a network... If you want to play a computer game at a LAN party, don't bring a Mac.

3) I'm also very thrifty (stingy even) and never spend more than $1000 for a computer.

Those are three reasons whey I've never owned a mac. Please notice that there isn't a "Mac's are for idiots" reason. I don't have any problems learning how to use a Mac, but I'm not going to drop a couple grand on a computer just to re-learn how to do things. (I use iTunes as my only music playing program.)

Now that you understand that I am pretty neutral on the Mac vs PC issue, here's my rant:

Ordering a Simple Mac Product

I needed to purchase QuickTime 7 Pro to edit some videos for a client, and I needed to get it done in a couple days. No problem, right? On December 21st, I log into the Mac store, and purchase the registration key for $30. Immediately I get an email saying:

Hello Ashton Sanders,

Thank you for shopping the Apple Online Store. Your order is complete and your purchase information is located below.

Be sure to keep a copy of this email for your records. It may contain your software key(s), which you can retrieve at any time by visiting Downloadable software purchases in Your Account.

Visit Order Status to view your order details.

Best regards,
The Apple Store Team

Even though this introduction email refers to possibly containing a software key (like the one I need to activate QuickTime 7 Pro), the order details only says:

Product Name: QT 7 PRO WIN ACCESS KEY-INT
Product Number: D3381Z/A
Price: $29.99
Quantity: 1

Registered to: Ashton Sanders

And then it has instructions for how to use the registration code.

Problem: No Registration Code

Solution 1: Okay, maybe I just need to wait a while. So I waited until lunch time the next day before contacting their live chat support in the Apple Store. I explain my problem a couple times before she said, "We can't help you with that. Go to the support website for QuickTime." Which obviously shows that she still didn't understand the problem I was having.... since my problem is that the Apple Store didn't give me the Registration Key.

FAILURE.

Solution 2: I called the Apple Store Support and they told me, "It usually takes up to 24 hours for the registration key to get mailed to you." Okay, fine. I'll wait till 9:00 at night. I waited till 9:00 that night and still did not receive a registration key. The best part was that the support line closed.

FAILURE.

Solution 3: I called the Apple Store Support the next morning and they told me, "It usually takes up to 48 hours for the registration key to get mailed to you." And you guessed it... still no registration key.

FAILURE.

Finally after 4 days of waiting and 3 calls, someone told me, "It usually sends you the registration key immediately, but sometimes it just breaks. I'll credit your account (it takes 5 days) and you can purchase it again."

Thanks Apple Store for being crappy.
-Ashton Sanders

Dell Synergistic Give Away

2008-11-06T18:58:00.004-07:00

Ah ha! I have finally won something! Last month, Dell had a silly crossword-type game where once a day you can get entered into a drawing for some large prizes, and every time you enter, you also get a chance to win instant prizes. I've never won anything and didn't think I would win something, but there's always a small chance.

And Voila! I won a computer mouse! Yea, I know, it's just a mouse, and I thought it was going to end up being one of those crappy, corded dell mouses (mice?) that you get when you buy a desktop from them.

Then today, I got a suspiciously marked package...

It took me a couple seconds to find the "Dell" and then figure out it was my long awaited prize!

Logitech has always been a big favorite of mine, ever since my Logitech mouse died after 2 years, and they replaced it for free. And this mouse is just as awesome as I'd expect from Logitech!

Here's a picture of the mouse:

This is a compact wireless laser mouse. As you can see it's red, but the coolest part about it is that small little black/silver thing in the plastic. That is a USB wireless adapter to connect a computer to the mouse wirelessly. The reason that is so cool is because the USB plug is 3 times as large as the actual adapter.

I gave this sweet mouse to my wife as a late Valentines Day Present, she plugged the USB adapter into her computer, turned on her mouse and it worked perfectly. Plug-n-Play for the win!

If only Logitech had an affiliate program, I'd never stop raving about them ;)
-Ashton Sanders

Jensen HD Radio

2008-10-24T19:42:00.003-06:00

I'm a big music buff, and I almost always have music playing on my computer. I really need an iPod... I know, I'm kind of ashamed for not having one yet, but I'm always on my computer so I haven't really needed an iPod.

I've recently run across a number of advertisements for iPod Docking stations that have an HD Radio. This brought me to this Jensen JiMS 525i HD Radio iPod Docking Port. It's a little expensive for my tastes, but it looks cool. The image they have on that page has a iPhone in the iPod port, so I'm assuming that the docking station will accept either iPods or iPhones. I didn't realize there were so many HD digital radio stations out there, but you can find all of the digital radio stations in your area by going to new music stations.

Probably the coolest thing I've seen is the iTunes Tagging. It looks like what happens is while you're listening to music on a HD radio station (on this receiver) if you happen upon a song you want to download, keep or get the info for, you can click the "tag" button on the receiver and it will save the song's information in a play list on your iPod. The next time you connect your iPod to your computer (iTunes), you'll be able to download all of the songs you tagged.

Of course you'll have to pay for them.
-Ashton

mssql_connect(): unable to connect to server:

2008-08-31T13:33:00.004-06:00

I have a PHP script that I run locally (on my Windows XP Machine) that accesses a MSSQL server using the mssql_connect() function. I used xampp to get PHP on my machine.

Today I finished getting this to work on my second computer. The first time I did this, I also ran into a million problem - but didn't note any of them. So here I am rectifying my previous mistakes in the hope of not having to search for the same solution next time.

The error I was getting was:

mssql_connect(): unable to connect to server: 'www.ashtonsanders.com'

(Domain changed for security purposes.)

I handled it by replacing ntwdblib.dll with this ntwdblib.dll.zip in these two folders:

xampp/php
xampp/apache/bin

Enjoy!
-Ashton Sanders
(Note: algorytmy.pl was the final website that helped my handle my problem.)

Internet Arguments

2008-06-25T20:47:00.001-06:00

Here's a great comic about Internet Arguments.

A little more humanity guys,
Ashton Sanders

Dreamweaver 8 Deleting Usernames and Passwords

2008-06-18T12:31:00.002-06:00

I had a problem a long time ago, and again recently, and figured I'm not the only one to have this problem:

Every time I close and open my Dreamweaver 8 (weather I restarted my computer in between or not) I would not be able to connect to the website I had been using last. The username and password for that website was gone. I would have to manage that site in Dreamweaver, and add in the username and password again.

The guys over at Phoenix Development wrote a great blog post with a link to the Dreamweaver 8 update you need to install to get it to work.

Apparently the bug is created when you have Internet Explorer 7.0 and Dreamweaver 8 on the same machine. I have no idea why this would delete your usernames and passwords, but it does.

Enjoy,
Ashton Sanders

Open Source PHP Gallery - Plogger3 Review

2008-06-05T13:59:00.004-06:00

I have been doing some research into Open Source PHP Image/Photo Galleries for a couple clients. The first Gallery I have created is using Plogger 3, and I'm pretty happy with the results.

You can see the Gallery I created on Delphi Troop 555 Website.

Plogger Gallery Installation:
Plogger is as simple to install as Wordpress is. All you do is upload it to your server, create a Database on your server, and give the coordinates to the program when you go to the install file. I had one problem with installing Plogger, and that was that for some reason the program couldn't create new folders, so I had to create a couple folders (including "/upload/").

Plogger Gallery Organization:
Plogger has a lot of things going for it. It is easy to create "Collections" and "Albums."

Plogger Photo Uploading:
You have two choices when uploading images to the Gallery. You can either upload one image at a from your computer, or you can use FTP to upload the images to the "upload" folder. Unfortunately uploading one image at a time can be quite tiresome if you have 400 images to upload. The "upload" folder works perfectly, and I highly recommend it, but most of my clients don't understand how FTP works (and don't want to). It would be nice if you could browse your computer for multiple images at a time.

Plogger Interaction:
There are a good number of settings that help you to customize your gallery to do exactly what you want. Some settings include "Send E-mail Notification for Comments" and ability to choose thumbnail and display sizes.

Plogger Problems:
The biggest problem I've had with Plogger is that there is no functionality for multiple users. Someone on their forum says that he is almost done programming the install package for an add-on that will allow multiple users. I will keep you posted on how this goes.

I'm also not extremely happy that the entire Gallery (Collections, Albums, Images, Comments, etc) is displayed on the same page; using the Query string to change pages. From my experience this takes a little while longer for Search Engines to Index.

Enjoy,
-Ashton Sanders

Good News

2008-05-02T12:41:00.003-06:00

It's not very often that you see the News reporting on uplifting or good news. It's really a shame that the general public is so attracted to "bad news"; creating a television system where only "bad news" gets good ratings.

I did happen upon a couple great stories of good people doing things that only good people would do. There's this story of Unbelievable Sportsmanship as well a Boy Scout Doing his good turn.

Enjoy a little piece of goodness, and do the world a favor: turn off the "bad news."
-Ashton Sanders

CSS Scroll Box instead of iFrames

2008-05-01T14:15:00.003-06:00

You've probably heard "iframes are horrible with search engines." Well, they are.

I recently had a client want me to create scroll boxes for their website so they could fit 1000+ words into a 300x457 pixel scroll box. How can I create this scroll box without the iframe? Well, you are about to find out.

Here is how you use CSS to create a scroll box instead of an iframe:

We're going to use a css attribute called "overflow," and by setting it to auto, it turns a normal div into a scroll box!

#scrollbox {
width:300px;
height:457px;
overflow:auto;
}
<div id="scrollbox"> *enter endless amounts of words*</div>

That's it!
Enjoy

Simple PHP Blog

2008-03-16T10:58:00.003-06:00

I have already done a lot of ranting and raving about Blogger and Wordpress.

Although I consider these two to be the leaders of the blogging pack (by a large margin), I did run across a blog using Simple PHP Blog, and was impressed. It doesn't have all the crazy features like the other two, but it does have a feature which really attracted my attention. On the bottom of every post there are five dots, and you can rate the post 1 to 5. This way, people can interact with your posts and website without actually having to write a comment.

Don't get me wrong, the comment function is still intact, but the percent of comments compared to visitors is tiny, while the percent of "ratings" to visitors is much higher.

Another note: Simple PHP Blog isn't database driven. You can run it on a server without needing a database!

If anyone ends up using this system, please let me know how it goes.
-Ashton Sanders

1 year and 100+ posts!

2008-03-15T11:45:00.002-06:00

Well it has been a year since my first post here on Website Design in a Flash, and this will be my 104th post!

This was my first blog that really got me started in the world of blogging, and I have learned a lot. I hope that I can continue to provide useful information for people working to tame the Internet. My posting frequency has slowed down over the last couple months, but I will try to pick it up again.

Here's to another year of Website Design Tips and Tricks!
-Ashton Sanders

Flash Random Scene ActionScript

2008-03-09T17:35:00.005-06:00

I recently created a Flash Animation that would randomly play one of three different Flash scenes. Then after each scene, it would go back to the beginning and randomly choose another scene to play. This was all programmed in ActionScript in Flash.

I have a feeling that even though this code is very simple, it will save a little bit of time if I have it stored here for the future.

// First Choose a random number
//from 0 to the number of scenes
num = random(3);

//Depending on which random number
//was chosen, go to a flash scene
switch (num)
{
case 0:
gotoAndPlay("scenename", 1);
break;
case 1:
gotoAndPlay("scenename1", 1);
break;
case 2:
gotoAndPlay("scenename2", 1);
break;
default:
trace ( " no case tested true " )
}

That's it!
-Ashton Sanders

Website Up Time Checker

2008-02-19T12:43:00.002-07:00

I have a couple websites that I need to make sure is always up and running. And I've found that using Site Up Time.com is a great way to do it.

For absolutely free, Site Up Time will check your website every 30 minutes, and email you if it is down!

Sounds like a deal to me,
-Ashton Sanders

CenturyTel - Reliable Bad Customer Service

2008-01-18T16:25:00.000-07:00

I have already written a number of posts on the few times I have had to contact the CenturyTel Customer Service. I am constantly amazed at how reliable the Century Customer Service is as being HORRIBLE!

I thought I may have just gotten very lucky the first two times I had to call CenturyTel when I got the biggest idiots possible, but No! It was more than luck. Every time I have had to contact Century Tel Customer Service, I get very stupid people who do very stupid things.

Take today for example:

Last month I ordered a Static IP Address so my IP wouldn't change. Before I ordered the Static IP, my IP changed about 2-3 times a month.

During the 1 month since I ordered the Static IP, my IP changed twice. (Three times if you include the Static IP order "going into effect.")

So I call them up to get this fixed and get a credit on my month of not having the Static IP that I ordered.

I called the Customer Service, and told the lady my problem. She said, "I don't get what you're talking about, and you will need to speak with technical support to get it credited."

So she transferred me over there. After another 3 minutes on hold, I'm told that they don't have access to credit the account and I would need to talk to Customer Service... which just happens to be the same people who sent me here in the first place.

To make a long story short, he started asking me about what kind of routers I use even though my external IP address has nothing to do with my internal network.

After 26 minutes (17 of which were on hold and writing this post), I have been credited for not having a static IP, and I have been assured that I will have a static IP from now on.

I'm sure you'll hear more from the endlessly epic, "Reliable Bad Customer Service!"
-Ashton Sanders

Liberty Names of America

2008-01-12T12:36:00.001-07:00

Liberty Names of America

is yet another great example of Jerks trying to get a lot of money for nothing.

My wife has a website for her horse business called TopPriorityTrakehners.com. (Trakehner is a breed of horse.) We have this domain registered with 1&1 for $7/year.

Today, I got a letter in the mail from Liberty Names of America saying that my domain was coming up for renewal, and by filling out this form and paying $29/year, I could renew my domain name with Liberty Names of America! what a great deal! I can also get the .org and .net variants of my domain for the same unbelievable price of $29/year!

ARE YOU SERIOUS?

What jerk thought this up? Emailing people and telling them to renew for ridiculous amounts of money. The worst part is that they make the letter look like just a friendly reminder to renew your domain... when actually they are trying to get you to transfer your domain to Liberty Names of America and pay four times the price of 1and1.

And of course they have to have the patriotic name "Liberty Names of America" because they are trying to fulfill the American dream by taking everyone else's money. It just makes me sick: all of the low-life jerks who try to come up with these schemes to trick people into giving them lots of money for literally nothing in exchange.

"Everybody's trying to get filthy rich off of someone else's money." -Big and Rich (Filthy Rich)

I hope this page comes up in Google for "Liberty Names of America" and no one every pays them a dime.
-Ashton Sanders

Mordheim Blog - Update

2007-12-29T01:00:00.000-07:00

It has been under two months since I have started my Mordheim Blog, and we are seeing lots of good progress in the Search Engine Rankings.

For almost the entirety of the last 7 weeks, my blog has been ranked on the second page for the keyword "Mordheim" at Google. Just this last week, I've arrived on the first page! My blog has been sitting in the #10 rank for about 3 or 4 days now.

My blog is very content heavy on the word "Mordheim" and is included in the title of my website and in almost every post title and keywords. Many of my categories also begin with the word Mordheim. I currently have 42 posts in my Mordheim blog. That is almost .9 posts a day!

Merry Christmas,
Ashton Sanders

Let it Snow, Let it Snow

2007-12-24T22:57:00.000-07:00

On a separate hobby of mine, I came across Tom's Boring Mordheim Blog. Tom is a very skilled miniature painter and modeler. After joining his online community, I helped him to make his home page "Snow."

Check out the link to the blog above to check out (EDIT: see what his header image usually looks like. Now that he has taken down the snowing animation, click here to see the same image Christmas Style. It used to be just a plain .JPG. I replaced it with a Flash Animation, and amazingly, it is a smaller file than the .JPG!

Enjoy,
Ashton Sanders

PHP - Finding the Width or Height of an Image

2007-12-22T13:22:00.001-07:00

Knowing the width, height, Image type or attributes of an image can be extremely useful.

I've used this once to make a line of images all line up on the bottom. I found out the height of the image and then added a margin to the top of the image to make the bottom of the image always be 300 px from the to. So if the height of the image was 140, I would make the margin on top of the image = 300-140.

Here's the code to find the height or width of an Image:

<?php

list($width, $height, $type, $attr) = getimagesize("image_name.jpg");

echo "Image width " .$width;
echo "
";
echo "Image height " .$height;
echo "
";
echo "Image type " .$type;
echo "
";
echo "Attribute " .$attr;

?>

Enjoy,
Ashton Sanders

Google Index Spasm (Google Dance)

2007-12-05T15:32:00.000-07:00

I call this the Google index Spasm (other's call it the Google Dance):

After a couple weeks in existence, my new blog found itself on the second page for it's main keyword. After fluctuating between rank 12 and 18 for another two weeks, it fell to rank 80+... If I didn't know better, this would have caused me to be very disgruntled.

I don't know the purpose is of the Google Spasm, but it's kind of funny and annoying at the same time.

Today my blog is back up to rank 19 for its keyword. I think some call this the "sandbox" but my site wasn't in it for very long. Although that could be because it is a blog.

-Ashton Sanders

Google's Indexing Delay: Update

2007-11-28T10:08:00.000-07:00

As of today, Google knows about 35 pages of my Mordheim blog. The last time the Googlebot hit this blog was on the 22nd, and my post on the 21st of November is up second when I check to see how many of my pages Google has added to it's search index.

It looks like Google has a fondness for blogs, as I've never had a page on my website get into the Google index that fast. Usually it takes at least a couple weeks.

Another thing to note: this blog is a subdomain of www.ashtonsanders.com, and Google already knows about this site. Even thought it is only a one page site, I'm sure it helped the speed into Google's index because it already knew that that domain existed.

-Ashton Sanders

Google's Indexing Delay

2007-11-22T11:31:00.000-07:00

I created a new blog about Mordheim on the 10th of November. I worked on the design of the blog for about a day, and then linked to it for the first time on the 11th. I linked to it from a couple different sites: Websites in a Flash on the 11th, my Website Design Blog on the 17th, and Board Game Geek on the 17th.

By adding this new blog to my Google Webmaster Tools account, I could tell that Google Accessed my new blog on the 11th of November, 11 days ago. I have checked my site in Google's Index everyday for the last week, and yesterday, the 21st, I got my first click through from organic search results. Today, I have 5 pages in the Google index; the same five pages that were my only pages on the 12th of November (Home Page, About the Author and the entries for the 10th, 11th and 12th).

From this, it seems that it takes 10 days from the time that the Google-bot sees your page/site till the time that it gets entered into Google's search index.

I'll keep my eye on how Google reacts to my blog, and will keep you posted.
-Ashton Sanders

Update: This blog shows up at #23 for the keyword term "Mordheim"

Blogger vs Wordpress - Remote Site

2007-11-17T08:58:00.000-07:00

When I first started this blog, I did a little bit of research about blogs, and chose Blogger. Now that I've been using Blogger for almost a year, I've started another blog, about Mordheim, with Wordpress, and here are my thoughts:

Blogger

Overview

Blogger is very simple and user-friendly. There is a reason they are the most popular: it's extremely easy to set up a blog and write posts. They also have a lot of functionality.

Wordpress

Overview

Wordpress is a little more complicated, and it seems like you can do more with the additional complication. They also have a very user-friendly interface and simple layout. Wordpress has a larger base of fans who have created many blog layouts that are free to download. Because of this, Wordpress's Free Layouts are much nicer, stylish, better.

Blogger

Remote Blog

Unfortunately, if you want to put your website on a remote server (any other website besides "*.blogspot.com"), you lose almost all of your functionality. You don't even get a Category Roll. The Categories listed on the right side of this blog is done manually. (The post count is also done manually).

Wordpress

Remote Blog

Fortunately, Wordpress.org supplies you with a free download of Wordpress, and easy installation instructions. In 5 minutes, you have a new, stylish and functional blog hosted on your PHP website. They have a lot of functionality, and each free blog layout has different amount of functionality. You could probably spend the rest of your life trying out different blog layouts. If you are a PHP programmer, it is very easy to sink into the code and make lots of changes to the functionality. From making the categories display alphabetically, by ID, etc.

I would definitely recommend Wordpress over Blogger for advanced users who are looking to host their blog on their website.

Blogging For Life,
-Ashton Sanders

SEO - Where to Host Your Blog?

2007-11-13T08:39:00.000-07:00

I know that a blog can really help to increase your website content. A blog shows the Search Engines that there is actually someone behind this website, and they actually care about their website.

When I started this blog at the beginning of this year, I was trying to research whether it was better to have two medium-content heavy sites that link to each other, or one site with all of the content.

The Setup

My main Website Design Website is Websites in a Flash. This site has 20-30 pages of content, and got approximately 400 unique visitors a month. (This is primarily from Search Engines.)

I knew that this blog would have many pages of website-terms, so I decided to host it on my Ashton Sanders website as a subdomain. The purpose of this was to see if two medium sized sites linking to each other would create an increase in unique visitors for both my Main Website and my Blog.

Results

Obviously, my Blog had an increase in visitors (because it didn't have any before). Surprisingly, it has totally surpassed my normal website, although I guess it shouldn't be surprising.

My Websites in a Flash website increased to about 650 Unique visitors. It also finally got back to PR4, but I'm not satisfied with that product. So, I've moved my blog to my Websites in a Flash Site, 301 redirects and all. I will now be testing my statistics/results on this new server, and will give you another update after 4 or 5 more months.

My findings, so far, from this test lead me to believe that it is best to have your blog on the same domain as your main website, but a final verdict will come in early 2008.

Note: After this Search Engine Optimization test, the only thing I have to test for myself if whether a blog on your website is better as a subfolder or subdomain.

-Testing the Bounds of the Internet
-Ashton Sanders

Content Management System for Websites

2007-11-12T10:10:00.000-07:00

From my years of working on the internet, I have come to realize that the one thing that almost all of my clients desire, is the ability to manage their own website. This way, they never have to wait on their web guy to change a phone number on their website. If they have a new product, they have the ability to add it to their own website.

Because of this huge demand for a CMS for websites, we have developed one that I call "Database in a Flash." This Content Management System is a very user-friendly program that uses MySQL and PHP. It allows anyone who knows a little bit about the internet to communicate with their MySQL database to update their website.

It really is an amazing program. For more information, feel free to contact us.

-Let me know if you have any questions,
-Ashton Sanders

Firefox Prevents Phishing Attempts

2007-11-09T21:50:00.000-07:00

What is a phishing attempt?

Phishing is where someone creates a page to look exactly like a normal page that requests for you to enter your username and password, but it isn't on the same website, so when you enter your username and password, you end up sending your username and password to someone else.

Then that person can access you account and do whatever they want.

This can be very horrible for your finances if you end up giving your online banking or paypal password to someone.

Here is the Dictionary.com definition:

Phishing: the practice of luring unsuspecting Internet users to a fake Web site by using authentic-looking email with the real organization's logo, in an attempt to steal passwords, financial or personal information, or introduce a virus attack; the creation of a Web site replica for fooling unsuspecting Internet users into submitting personal or financial information or passwords

But you don't have to worry about that if you have Firefox! I accidentally happened upon a Myspace Phishing site (a site that pretends to be myspace), and I got a warning from Firefox 2.0 saying "Whoa! This site looks like it's pretending to be another site to steal your password." (or something like that) Then I clicked the button that said "Let's get out of here!"

Firefox makes the world a better place. Period.
-Ashton Sanders