TheWayOfCoding.com

I've made a few half hearted attempts over the years to to fix Blogger's Notable theme's rendering of the pop-up header that shows up when you scroll down the page a decent amount and then pull back to reveal that secondary header. On Chrome mobile I noticed a gray box that forms next to the magnifying glass icon. I never looked in detail on  Chrome desktop, but it had an issue as well which I'll detail below.  If you are looking for a solution and don't want all of the extra talk about how I was able to find it, here it is:  .centered-top-container .sticky .main_header_elements { overflow : hidden !important ; } I decided to try using Gemini Pro 2.5 to see if it was capable of finding the issue and giving me a fix. Turns out that it was able, but it took a bit of collaboration back and forth to find the actual problem.  Here is a modified article I asked it to give me based on our debugging chat (it was very colorful in the article which I scaled back a lot, ...

I’ve been working on a program that needs to parse a html file for form data.  So when I was deciding what method to use, a few popped right into my mind. The first being a character by character search through the string.  Parsing through the data and flagging sections that fit the signature of what was being searched for. The second would be automating that by using the built-in string functions to split up the string and drill down until the needed data was extracted. The third, and one I chose to use, was with regular expressions.  This in my mind is the most “poetic” method of the three, which would allow me to make the a robust and reliable function. While I’ve used regular expressions a lot throughout the years. I never seem to remember enough to construct a decent statement. I had recently bought a pocket reference (link below), so I used that to get a statement constructed. It had a total of about 6 pages for C#, but I pretty much got what I needed from it. An...

Here is a screen shot of the old site.  It served me well for the two years or so that I had it running on blogger.com.  The great thing about blogging is that I can save bits of important information in one place that I can later come back and utilize. The secondary benefit is that other people can also gain something from my writings as well. Now that I’ve taken the plunge to into the world of incorporation, I have had a strong desire to improve my web presence.  My first project being this website revamp. Here is a list of the steps necessary to get from blogger to a custom wordpress blog: – Install wordpress on my computer’s local server ( WAMP ).  This is quite easy if you have messed around with developing websites before.  The major steps to that are 1. create a database (wamp has phpMyAdmin preinstalled, so doing SQL stuff is easy) 2. create a new SQL user that has permissions on the new database.  Once the database is setup, extract the wordpress ...

Thanks to the new functionality I am able to use the free blogger.com blogs as a website. It’s all thinks to functionally they added after Google acquired them. For example I created a custom template for my sister’s graphic/fashion/photography design website. In this post I’ll go over the basics that allow this to work. Google allows custom domain names. This means the whole website can have a professional look and feel because all links connected to the site will look like www.nameofsite.com/revrefvrv/dfvdfvd… etc. The use of labels, conditional statements, and the database data that blogger allows to be accessed through the template system. To make a standard website I started with the simplest of the pre-created templates modifying it to suit my needs. I removed a lot of the functionality like comments, backlinks, and whatever else. For a basic website you first need some links to blocks of site content. I generally hard code them into the template. Now if you’ve used the ne...

While researching about displaying video in web pages I came upon a good [free] solution. It uses: Free and open source flash based video player called FlowPlayer. Their website: http://flowplayer.sourceforge.net/ To encode the videos into the flv video format I used a free tool called Riva FLV Encoder. Their website: http://rivavx.de/?encoder Why a flash player as apposed to quicktime/windows media player/real player? A lot more people have Adobe Flash installed and it’s just a generally more foolproof method of serving videos on the web (aka. the extremely popular youtube.com is flash based). Here is an example of the html required: <object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="videos/FlowPlayer.swf" width="320" height="263" id="FlowPlayer"> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" /> <param name="movie" value="videos/FlowPlayer.swf" /> <param name=...

As I mentioned in the previous post, I made a static website in html, css, javascript, and json. It works pretty good and that’s great. The problem is my sister is the one who should be adding/editing content because it is her site. So the question is, how can I make an easily update-able site that is on a server without any server-side coding functionality? I had figured out pretty much how I wanted it to work even before I finished coding the first version of the site. Sure, I could just write a client application that spits out html\css code and uploads it to the server, but no, that isn’t cool enough. I wanted to break up the site data and formatting. That way the client application would only need to create json files and upload them along with any new content. That means the json data needs to be removed from the html files and the html page now needs to allow fetching of the data whenever the person using the site needs it. What does this mean? It means that I now have a site th...