General

  • Created a new logo for the UrbanSpaceInitiative.com website

    A good friend of mine recently setup a new website, urbanspaceinitiative.com, that discusses the connection that exists between urban public space and the life of urbanites through the lens of  geographical imagination, urban design, art  and urban  culture. My friend was looking for a simple logo to help jazz up his site a little. I created the image above using Adobe Fireworks and, thankfully, he was pretty chuffed with how it turned out and it's now live on his website :)

    I'd encourage anyone interested in public space imagery to head on over to his site. He has some beautiful imagery on the site and his articles go into great depth on the subject of public spaces.

  • How to transfer a domain away from GoDaddy.com

    I've used GoDaddy.com for a number of years but recently noticed that their pricing was not as good as some of the competition. I also had my domains "protected" by DomainsByProxy.com which meant that I was locked into paying an extra $8.99 per domain for the privilege of having my whois details hidden.

  • Simple Resx Editor - A good alternative to using Visual Studio for Resx / Resource Files

    Simple Resx Editor

    I've noticed that some members of my team were having difficulties with Visual Studio when using resource files. Any time they would open a file it would crash Visual Studio. As you can imagine this was very frustrating for all involved.

    After a quick search I found a pretty neat alterative editor called 'Simple Resx Editor' by Matías. Currently this resource editor is at version 0.6.2 but it is being worked on at the time to improve the functions available.

    The main benefit I like about this editor is that you can open all your resource files, side by side and edit them all in one quick go. This is a perfect setup when dealing with multiple languages as it really speeds things up. If you just want to work on one resource file and you need to know what the Key Name values are simply click on the big Key icon on the top of the app. This little app is small, quick to use and really offers a benefit over the built in editor in Visual Studio in my opinion.

    The only snag I noticed while working with the editor is that if you had a very long Value field there are no scrollbars showing. I've left a message to Matías about this issue and I'm sure this will be fixed in the next version of this software.

  • How to fix the jQuery live event not firing for submit buttons in IE

    I was recently working on our new website for Dragnet Systems when I stumbled onto an issue with submit buttons not working as expected in Internet Explorer when I was using the .live event for jQuery. Everything works as intended in Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome but Internet Explorer was completely ignoring the form submit clicks.

    After doing some reading over on the jQuery forums it turns out that this is an issue quite a few people have run into. The solution I went with was to use a third party plugin called LiveQuery. This plugin ensures that after the DOM has loaded my elements are correctly registered to my events and will work as expected.

    Using the script couldn't be easier, simply download the file from the LiveQuery plugin page and in your code use .livequery instead of .live.

    There's a good chance that this will be fixed in later releases of jQuery but for now (1.4.2) this is a nice workaround.

  • How to 'Find All' in Visual Studio

    Before I moved over to Visual Studio I used to code in Dreamweaver. One feature within Dreamweaver that I always found handy was the Find All option for finding all occurrences of the search criteria I had entered.

    I always thought that this was a feature missing in Visual Studio as there was no option on the 'Quick Find' (ctrl + F) to find all. The only option on the quick find is to 'find and replace all' which usually isn't what I want to do.

    The good news is that Visual Studio has a Find All built into it. To find the option (excuse the pun!) all you need to do is hold Ctrl and Shift and press F or click on Edit -> Find and Replace -> Find In Files. This will open up a dialog box that will let you enter your search criteria. Simply hit the Find All button and you will see a list of results returned to you that match your criteria. You can then double click on any of the search results to go directly to that line of code.

    It's a small thing but it's handy to know where to go to use that option. Hopefully it will help someone else out.

  • How to stop Visual Studio renaming ID values when pasting content

    How to stop Visual Studio renaming ID values when pasting content

    I actually really like how Visual Studio renames my ID values when pasting content to ensure that all ID values are unique - as they should be. However, the designers on my team always give me a hard time over this as they say it slows them down and that they would prefer if the system would let them decide when to rename ID values. I can see their point if they are copying and pasting code from other project that this 'feature' would soon become very annoying.

    So to turn off this feature all you need to do is follow the steps below:

    Step1: Go to the menu bar and click on 'Tools' and then 'Options'.

    Step 2: On the popup screen than appears there is a little checkbox in the lower left corner that says 'Show All Settings'. Make sure that is selected.

    Step 3: Expand the 'TextEditor' option and expand the 'HTML' option.

    Step 4: Click on 'Miscellaneous' and untick the option 'Auto ID elements on paste in Source view'.

    Step 5: Click OK and now when you paste any html content or code with the same ID values as what is in your project Visual Studio will not rename the IDs.

  • How to add one day to the calendar date selected using jquery ui

    I recently has an email come into me asking about a previous post I did regarding the jQuery UI date picker. This person was looking for a way to add some extra functionality to the date picker example I had that would auto default to setting the drop off date textbox value to be one day ahead of the pickup date.

    To do this all that is required is to add an extra function within the document.ready() function that fires when the pickup date is changed, add one to the date entered and then put that value into the drop off box. The code to do this is:

    $('.pUpDate').change(function() {

    var nextDayDate = $('.pUpDate').datepicker('getDate', '+1d');

    nextDayDate.setDate(nextDayDate.getDate() + 1);

    $('.dOffDate').datepicker('setDate', nextDayDate);

    });

    Building on the previous examples demo, below is a link to download a working example that includes the above new code snippet.

    Download this demo

  • Top tips on how to be successful with your new website

    Over the last few months of this year we've seen a lot of new customers come to us who want their first website. The customers are always great to deal with as there is nothing more exciting that delivering a site to them and seeing their eyes light up when they see their vision become reality. However, one thing I see happen time and again with these customers is that they fail to realise that a website is something that requires constant love and attention. For this reason I'm putting together my list of top tips for people who might be in the same boat and who are looking for advice on how to keep their site relevant after 6 months of taking ownership of their new site.

  • Book a taxi online using GlobalTaxiNetworks.com

    GlobalTaxiNetworks.com has finally launched! Now any business can book a taxi, know how much it's going to cost in advance, save favourite journeys, re-book previous journey's, add via routes and even print off invoices all in the click of a button....ok it's a few clicks but it's still a slick system if I say so myself :D

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