Website Developer Research & Development
by Progress Technologies, Inc.

Z22FQ5PK5AV5

Everything You Need to Know About Eggnog – Food & Drink – FOXNews.com

Posted using ShareThis

I had and issue with Wordpress removing my line breaks no matter what I did in a post for a Wordpress installation.  I ultimately upgraded the Rich Text Editor that comes with Wordpress to the advanced version found here:  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tinymce-advanced/

This did not fix the issue with pages that are formatted outside the editor, for example custom imports of outside RSS feeds.

NOTE: This page edit WILL get overwritten when you upgrade Wordpress, so keep it handy as I suggest you upgrade frequently and you will need to edit this back in after the upgrade.

Fix:

I modified the function called the_content(), that echoes out the posts content. This function can be found in wp-includes/post-template.php on line 165. Then I simple added two lines, that replaces the line-break with a br-tag. So here how my the_content() looks now.

function the_content($more_link_text = '(more...)', $stripteaser = 0, $more_file = '') {
	$content = get_the_content($more_link_text, $stripteaser, $more_file);
	$content = apply_filters('the_content', $content);
	$content = str_replace(']]>', ']]>', $content);
	$content = str_replace("\n", "<br />", $content);
	$content = str_replace("\r", "", $content);
	echo $content;
}

I had this problem and it killed an hour of time.  Everytime I tried to create a dynamic list menu from a recordset it closed Dreamweaver.  It appears the best solution is to delete the DW cache file.

1) Close DW
2) Go to c:\documents and settings\USERNAME\application Data\adobe\Dreamweaver 9\configuration
3) Delete WinFileCache-ADXXXXXX.dat
4) Reopen DW

I was also having trouble locating this .dat file so I found this article in Adobe Support.  Given that alot of their links disappear without warning, I am posting the whole thing here:

Original Link:  http://forums.adobe.com/thread/494811

I am looking for a sailboat. Nothing fancy, just a safe, solid, little sailboat I can take the family out on for the weekend and learn the time honored tradition of capturing the wind. Through a few weeks of research, I identified and exact criteria of what I am looking for: Catalina 25′ under $10,000 with a trailer. Naturally my first choice for locating a sailboat brought me to Craigslist. What a nightmare, despite the fact that the site looks like a piece of poo aesthetically, there really is no way to search and locate this specific criteria easily across an entire state. You actually have to navigate to each location and then issue your search criteria…there are tons of locations in Florida…a daunting task to say the least.

Through some testing I was able to tweak the Craigslist query and figured out I can switch the location if I know it and re-use it.

http://daytona.craigslist.org/search/boa?query=sailboat&;catAbbreviation=boa&;minAsk=min&;maxAsk=10000&;hasPic=1&;format=rss

Now this little ditty will locate sailboats under $10,000 with a photo, insert a different city and I am good to go. Since I am not ruling out buying a trailer separately and I am not opposed to purchasing something besides a Catalina this produced the best results for what I was looking for.

The root problem still exists, namely that I have to manually do this EVERY day for EVERY location in Florida if I want to stay on top of what is for sale. These Catalina’s in this price range go fast, super fast so checking Craigslist twice a day would be a good thing (if not a bit obsessive, but hey it’s how I attack a problem).

Being a bit lazy (Lazy = Automation), I figured there had to be a way to automate this search across the entire state and then run a CRON job to check it twice daily (okay, I have it checking it every two hours but our server could care less, I assure you).

About this time, I noticed the little  graphic at the bottom of each successful sailboat search. NICE!!! Since I do a poor job of explaining what things are, this is the definition of RSS according to Wikipedia: “RSS (most commonly translated as “Really Simple Syndication”) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works…” works for me. In human speak basically it’s a way to publish your frequently updated content (such as classifieds) so that people can see the most recent additions.

In short, problem solved…seriously. Each location in Florida has its own RSS feed that displays sailboats for sale. Now all I have to do is suck in these feeds to a database (MySQL) and I can pool my results in a format where I can search specifically as well as order the data to show me latest sailboat listings across the entire state of Florida!

My solution is a blog that updates every two hours:

http://www.ptdev.com/wordpress/

Although I still have not located my “perfect” little sailboat, I know I am seeing the entire State’s inventory for sailboats on Craigslist without lifting a finger (err…mouse click).

Since Craigslist is not the only site selling sailboats online, I then went to Sailboat Trader to find their RSS feed and to my dismay they do not offer one. I took the time to email the webmaster asking for its location just in case it’s something tucked away (and not used). They had no clue what I was talking about, but were very interested once I showed them what I was doing with Craiglist. I tried a few other Boats for Sale in Florida websites and all had the same reaction.

In short, I don’t think anyone has realized the convenience and power of RSS when serving their content to the masses.  I predict a trend (if us web folks grab onto this) that sites offering products for sale will treat their content as a dynamic feed and thus open their content to new methods of getting it to the masses.  Take my PT Dev site, this is nothing more than a filter I can point to every location on the net I can find.  Since I point the user (me) back to Craigslist it behooves Craigslist when similar minded people access my site looking for similar items.

I have been experimenting with Blogs for clients for quite sometime and am amazed at how quickly Google treats these feeds and inserts them into their search results (In some cases, a matter of hours).  Recently a manufacturing client placed their technical documents online in a blog style RSS feed and by the end of the day had received a dozen calls for more information from interested parties.  Google is now indexing their content and subsequently they are the top result for their product.  Yummm!  I love RSS at this point for sure!

Sailboat Trader said they will get back to me….I hope they do or it looks like I will be finding this boat on Craigslist.

Happy Sailing!!

Tony Nestor
CEO, Progress Technologies, Inc.
(239) 985-0335 ext. 623
tn@progresstechnologies.com
http://www.progresstechnologies.com
http://twitter.com/progresstech

Tony Nestor is CEO for Fort Myers, Florida based Progress Technologies, Inc.  Progress Technologies, Inc. is a leader in the development of website and database applications for city government, real estate, financial and manufacturing companies nationwide since 1998.  The company has continued to steadily grow  while weathering the tech boom and crash of the late 1990’s and today’s market by providing unmatched customer service and top of the line programming techniques.

Gotta love the Internet…for those of us grammatically challenged:

http://spellcheckplus.com/

Do you print a TON and always seems to be running to your local Office Supply store for a new laser cartridge?  Being that Progress Technologies is a digital company and we try our best to keep it all digital, we are still required to hand deliver quotes and other infoamtion and sometimes it seems burn through a laser cartridge like we are a printer.  Talking with clients on a daily basis I know we are not alone as most businesses today ranging from REALTOR Associations to financial companies all get into a “printing” mode that seem to burn the ink and paper so to speak.

I came across a random article that claims the following font features circles that allow for up to 20% in savings.

Here is the .zip of the font (true type font):  Font Download — According to their website, the font is based on the Vera Sans, an Open Source letter, and is available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux and is itself freely available.  We are going to change over, it will be interesting to see how many cartridges we blow through in six months.  Hopefully this is a winner!

Eco Font Sample Word Document

Here is the creator website as I want to make sure they get credit:  http://www.ecofont.eu/downloads_en.html

We recently decommissioned a client’s old server as we had developed a new intranet application to handle their sales order system that required a total upgrade of hardware and software.  As was expected, we were given the task of destroying the old server or at least the data on the hard drive.  Considering that this hard disk had customer information including credit cards and that we folks here at Progress Technologies posses a healthy share of paranoia the simple format and putting to the curb will just not do.

Our solution?  Killdisk.

Here is a excerpt from their website explaining better than I can how it works and why you need it:

Active@ KillDisk – Hard Drive Eraser is powerful and compact software that allows you to destroy all data on hard and floppy drives completely, excluding any possibility of future recovery of deleted files and folders. It’s a hard drive and partition eraser utility.

If you use FDISK, FORMAT utilities, or DELETE standard operating system command for data removal, there is always a chance to recover deleted files (using undelete utility or some data recovery software) and use against the owner’s will. We highly recommend you to run this FREE utility for the hard and floppy drives you want to dispose of, recycle, re-use, sell or donate to somebody.

Active@ KillDisk conforms to US Department of Defense clearing and sanitizing standard DoD 5220.22-M. The most secure Gutmann’s data destruction method is also implemented.
Both WIPE and KILL functions support 17 security standards from various countries such as USA, Canada, Germany and others. You can be sure that once you clean up with Active@ KillDisk, sensitive information is purged out forever.

Basically, using this little diddy of a program makes sure its gone, long gone.  DO NOT assume tossing that computer to the curb (hopefully you at least format the disk) will guarantee your in the clear.  If your business or personal life is being targeted by some freak or a computer “hacker” happens to be poking around, a system being tossed is excellent at least for parts salvage.  The fact that all information is still available on the disk is a super bonus to the wrong type of people.

Here is the website:  http://www.killdisk.com/

Oh and by the way, another fun thing we like to do is take a hammer to the disk to make sure its totally crashed.  While this step is entirely optional I highly recommend it as it places a warm fuzzy feeling in your heart that you have done all you could do as well as get out that pent up aggression that occurs after 8 hours of staring at a computer screen.