MainelyDesign.com Blog

Best Way To Get Transparent PNGs Without Any Hacks

Posted on 10/21/2012 at 10:27 am | Viewed 14,100 times | 0 comments

I avoided PNG images for quite a while, mainly because I could accomplish almost every task with transparent GIFs (if not, I could change the design ever so slightly).  Fast forward a few years and web designs are far too complex and textured to only use transparent GIFs, plus it's so much cooler to say "ping" than "gif".  Another reason I avoided using transparent PNGs was due to the ability to make IE (Internet Explorer) crash (suprise!).  Finally, I avoided using PNG images on my website because their filesize was ridiculous (what I could do in 10kb using a Gif, would take 71kb as a PNG).

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Best PaginateCount for CakePHP - with Group By Support

Posted on 08/07/2011 at 05:03 pm | Viewed 20,122 times | 0 comments

I'm been muddling my way through pagination with multiple joins, and complex filtering.  I finally got it all working (more on that later, maybe....) when I noticed that I couldn't paginate my results.  Everything was working fine until I added a "group" parameter to the find call.  Instead of getting the right count, I got a count of 1!  A quick look at my sql log tables (at the bottom of the page) and I saw that I had actually returned all the mysql records that were needed!  If only there was a way to use them...

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Best CSS Method for Using Image as Submit Button

Posted on 02/03/2010 at 12:17 pm | Viewed 21,623 times | 2 comments

I came across an interesting issue with web forms and CSS.  Surprisingly, the end result is much better than I expected.  I knew that using an image instead of a traditional form submit button (<input type="submit">; instead of <input type="image"> or <input type="button">) would be a little challenging.  I like a challenge, plus I wanted to use the submit button because it's the standard approach to forms and I remember reading somewhere that input's of type image or button do not submit when you press enter...a usability faux paus in my opionion.

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Using Jquery for target="_blank" and strict xHTML

Posted on 12/28/2009 at 03:27 pm | Viewed 15,377 times | 0 comments

If you like to see the little green check mark that HTML Validator shows when your HTML is 100% valid, you'll love this little trick. Thanks to badlydrawntoy.com. 

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CSS Min-Height Hack in Internet Explorer

Posted on 12/15/2009 at 10:18 am | Viewed 14,455 times | 0 comments

Another day of web developing with CSS and another day of needing a hack for IE6 and IE7.  This isn't really a hack so much as it's a method of ordering statements in your CSS declaration that yields a working min-height declaration in Internet Explorer.  Well, I guess it's a hack (but I hate using them).

CSS min-height will be used in browsers that support it

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Faking Symlinks on Windows 2003

Posted on 09/17/2009 at 04:25 pm | Viewed 17,525 times | 0 comments

My production server is a LAMP server.  I love it.  I have one cental location for my CakePHP application and symlink the folders I need to each individual hosting account.  It's pretty easy to do and very powerful.  I work on another server that is Windows 2003.  Everytime I sit down to do work, I bemoan not having the ability to create symlinks.  Turns out there is a way...

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Using Exif in PHP on Windows

Posted on 08/28/2009 at 09:40 am | Viewed 12,800 times | 0 comments

I'm trying to use the exif functions in PHP on my Windows XP computer.  I want to read the meta data that is recorded by my digital camera (exif - exchangeable image file format).  I like the idea of storing that exif data in the database, so it's searchable. I wasn't having any luck with exif_read_data(), but finally found this posting.

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TinyMCE Doesn't Work in IE8

Posted on 07/24/2009 at 11:54 am | Viewed 26,787 times | 4 comments

I was training a client how to update their web site using Site Avenger when the strangest thing happened- no copy was showing in TinyMCE.  No matter what I pasted the tiny editor would remain a nice, plain white.  I didn't think to try typing directly into TinyMCE.  No matter, a click on the HTML button to view the source revealed the content was in fact there, just not being shown within the TinyMCE editor.

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Phantom Whitespace Below Img in Firefox

Posted on 07/22/2009 at 10:24 am | Viewed 12,870 times | 0 comments

I've come across this thing a few times before- there's a strange space below images in Firefox, but not in IE.  I finally found a nice explanation as to why it happens, which I wanted to post here.

Images are displayed inline by default.  When you are using an image as a block (like when you want an image to take up the entire top half of a page) you'll get some mysterious white space below the image, but only in Firefox.  For once, IE actually seems to render the CSS appropriately.

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Faking min-width CSS style in IE6 and IE7

Posted on 07/16/2009 at 01:50 pm | Viewed 13,076 times | 0 comments

It's a hack... but it's needed to make a truly cross-browser fluid layout.  It's simple, if you want to implement min-width in IE6 and IE7, use the following CSS code: (I didn't create this originally, sorry, lost the source)

/*********************
**	IE 6.0 min-width hack
********************/
* html div#contentWrap {
	width:expression(((document.compatMode && document.compatMode=='CSS1Compat') ? document.documentElement.clientWidth : document.body.clientWidth) < 1000 ? "840px" : "85%");
}

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