Sprayfly

Clear up your Task Bar

At work I leave Outlook running all day long so that I can get my emails as soon as they arrive. The problem is, having only one CRT monitor, I often need to free up some task bar space to use other programs. Outlook has a handy option that allows you to run it minimised in the system tray. You can do this by opening Outlook and right clicking on the icon in the system tray. Tick the minimise to tray option.

Whenever new emails arrive, the little popup box will still appear as usual but you have more space on your desktop!

Run Outlook Minimised on Startup

You can also run outlook minimised on startup. This is handy as checking my emails is normally the first thing I do. Simply copy the shortcut you use to open outlook to:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

Now right click on the shortcut and select “Properties”. Now select the “shortcut” tab. Under the Run: section, select minimized from the dropdown menu.

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Situation

I am currently working for a web design company, redesigning some websites for a large chain of UK Hotels. Each site is built on a templating system which draws in include files. One of these include files, _submenu.inc, is used to define items for a submenu on the page.

Originally, the items were specified in the format below:

<a href="conferences/index.htm"><img src="interface/darkarrow.gif" width="15" height="5" alt="" />Conferences - Home</a>

Bug!

However, it was soon noticed that in firefox, the text underline for the link specified was not just underlining the text but also the small image (a small pointer). This looked rather messy.
Simple enough? All that needed doing was to put the image tag before the anchor tag.

The Problem

Yes, there was more to it than this. You see, the submenu files had been following this incorrect format for quite some time- to the point that there were almost 100 of them. How on earth could you edit all of these to change the format without extreme pain and boredom? Initially, Dreamweaver Global Search and Replace seemed like a solution. However, each link is unique, even if you can use a regular expression to find all the links in the _submenu.inc files, there is no possible text string in the replace field that could be entered to preserve the link. What I needed was not only a regular expression to find a string but also a regular expression replace function aswell. After googling around, I found a great free tool called ReplaceEM.

The Regex

Here are our two problematics:

1. We need a regular expression to find any anchor tag in a document
2. We need a regular expression to replace the expression that was found so that the image tag is placed before the anchor tag.

The first regular expression took me about 5 minutes to work out (I’m new to this!!). Here it is:

(<a href="[^>]*">)<img src="interface/darkarrow.gif" width="15" height="5" alt="" />

For Reference, a string to match any URL is (<a href="[^>]*">).

Explanation

The second part of the expression is just the image tag which is the same for each link. However, the bit in parentheses () defines any anchor tag. The parentheses allow anything matched within them to be reinserted later in the replace string. The <a href="" is self explanatory. It is the [^>]* that is important. Square brackets are used to define accepted characters. [abc] allows the characters abc. However, the use of the circonflex ^ inverts this. Therefore any character but the > is allowed within the brackets. The asterisk * tells the program to match the accepted range of characters an infinite number of times. This means that anything between the quote marks of the href will be accepted. When the expression meets the > tag, it knows this is an unaccepted character. However, it does match the > character we defined after [^>]*. The expression then goes on to match the image tag, no special syntax is needed here!

The Replace

The replace is simple, the first part puts the image tag where the anchor used to be, this is just a normal string of text (<img src="interface/darkarrow.gif" width="15" height="5" alt="" />). The second part (\1) inserts whatever was found in the brackets in the find string after the image. This successfully swaps the two tags around whilst preserving the URL.

Handy Features

However, we want to be careful which files we run this on. For all I know, this expression could match other files than the _submenu.inc file and modify them. This is highly undesired. ReplaceEm has built in options that include an "Include File " filter and an "Exclude File " filter. I specified to include only _submenu.inc. I then pointed the program to the public html folder for the local testing server and left it to find and replace. A few minutes later, the log file tells me that it has performed the replace in a large number of files. Great!!

A great Program

ReplaceEm is a great tool that would be useful for any Software or Web developer. It is incredibly powerful with many options I have not yet (and may never) touch. It can backup your files for you in case of an error in your expressions and it can even place the replaced files in a different directory. Finally- and lets not forget, you can use it as a plain text find and replace utility! Just think how much time this saved me! Download This!

Hope This Post was useful to someone

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I recently wanted to install Shockwave Player on Flock- a new generation Mozilla-based web browser. However, the automatic ‘install plugin’ setup does not seem to function and a manual install must instead be performed. This is how you go about it…

Initial Situation

1. Attempt to install the Plugin.
2. Agree to the License.
3. On the Flock dialogue box where Flock tells you that the installation failed, there should also be a button with the text ‘Manual Install’ as in the screenshot below:
   You need to click this and you will be directed to a download site. Download the setup file (Shockwave_Installer_slim.exe) and run this. It should automatically detect Firefox and Internet Explorer along with any Netscape browsers. However, it will not find Flock on its own. To point the installer to Flock, click Browse.
4. Now browse to:

C:\Program Files\Flock\flock\plugins

5. Click OK and click ‘Select’. The installer should now complete and open a new webpage or tab in your browser. Wait for a few moments and ‘Installation Complete’ should be displayed via the shockwave object on the page.

Hope this is useful to somebody.

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I am lucky enough to have recently discovered ‘Flock’, a new, Mozilla-based web browser that can better Firefox!
Whilst very similar to Firefox in functionality (it is in fact based on a lot of the same code), the looks, features and functionality of this browser take it to another level.

Features Galore

The key features of Flock apart from the regular features that a web browser supports are a fully features RSS reader, Instant access to Flickr or Photobucket photos, Web Snippets and integrated posting to Blogs. Flock also supports the popular ’social bookmarking’ site that is, del.icio.us.

RSS Reader

The RSS reader is a huge advance on the live bookmarks that were available in Firefox (these are still available in Flock). Whenever you are on a page that offers syndication, the orange feed icon will appear in the address bar. Click on this and you can view the feed within the news reader. You can also subscribe at the click of a mouse button. The new reader offers different views (excerpt, headlines, full) as well as single or double column layouts. There are also some useful organisational features that allow you to sort your feeds into their relevant categories.

Flickr

The Flickr integration is a highly innovative feature. If you click on the photo button on the toolbar, a drop down frame appears on the page showing your latest Flickr additions (as well as those of any friends you might add). There is also an easy to use photo uploader tool which provides drag and drop functionality and allows easy tagging.

Web Snippets

Ever seen something on the web that you would like to post on your Blog later. Or do you simply need the time to read over a few paragraphs of text or glance at a photo again? Right click on anything in Flock and you can add it to your web snippets. These are accessible at the bottom of the browser in a pop-out frame. Even better, you can drag and drop any items you have saved straight into posts on your blog using the in-built blog tool. No HTML skills required!

Blogging

The blogging tool supports all the major Blog API’s. Whilst the interface is fairly simple, Flock allows you to drag photos from the Flickr toolbar, from any web page or from your Web Snippets straight into your Blog posts. Neither do you have to enter any HTML code. Very easy to use, although currently lacking in some features.

Bookmarking

Apart from saving bookmarks onto your computers hard drive, you can also choose to add tags to them and post them up to your del.icio.us account. This is great if you wish to share your bookmarks with other users or if you want to access them from multiple computers. No more exporting your favourites list!

And many extensions

Modelled on Firefox, flock supports practically all the same extensions that are available with other Mozilla-based browsers (including Firefox). This means that the features do not stop there. There are loads of other tools available for use, click here for an extensive list.

Beautiful

This browser can make Windows XP feel like Mac OSX with its attractive user interface. Everything is highly accessible and whats more, Flock is compatible with Linux and Mac aswell which means that you can use the same tools on all three major platforms. Whilst still in ‘Beta’ stage of development, this browser is beginning to get noticed. Hopefully, we will see some more exciting developments in the near future as interest grows.
I’ll keep you posted!

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