I discovered today that my bullet lists on my website digitallard.com were not displaying correctly in Internet Explorer 7. I should have checked it before but it’s one of those things that I keep meaning to do and never actually get around too. Anyway the bullet list in question uses a custom image as the bullet and although it looked fine in firefox, the display was all over the place in IE.
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Archive for February, 2007
CSS Custom Bullet Lists and Browser Compatibility
Taking a heavy handed approach to error handling
Yesterday I spent a really exciting day coming up with error trapping routines on one of my sites. I find this part of programming very dull and I know if I did it while I was writing the pages then it would save a lot of time. However for my faults I always seem to end up leaving these things until a later date.
The reason I was suddenly very interested in getting it sorted was that the site in question has some 4000 plus pages and it’s very hard to make sure all those pages are doing as they should. From some of the results I’d seen in the Google webmasters tools I suspected at lease some of my pages were throwing up errors but it was very difficult to track down what and where exactly.
I decided that the best thing I could do is to take the sledgehammer approach and get notification myself for every single error as it comes up. So with this in mind I created a generic error routine in my sites Business Logic Layer as such: (more…)
How to be an idiot, an experts guide
Today I am kicking myself for being so completely and utterly stupid. Somehow I have managed to loose a very important folder out of my Outlook email. This folder contained some very very important email and somehow it is gone, I tried various pst repair methods but alas I cannot get it back.
The reason I am an idiot though is not for losing the folder, I don’t even know how it went so I can’t exactly blame myself for it. No the reason is that after 19 years in the IT industry and countless lectures to people on the importance of backing up data, guess who didn’t have a backup of their email, yes that would be me.
I’m off now to beat my head against a wall for a while, if your interested in joining my new self help group ‘idiots anonymous’, just let me know.
Dealing with broken image links in a Data Bound Control (Asp.Net 2)
This is the first of what I hope will be an ongoing selection of little code snippets that I have either written or found online that I think might be of benefit to others. Generally these will be written in VB.Net and will aimed at .Net 2.0 websites. Although I am currently teaching myself C# so the code could change to that at some point.
Today I had a problem with populating images in a bound data list. I was populating the list from a dataset that was being populated from an XML web service. One of the fields in the source was a path to a hosted imaged. However on some rows in the source data it was possible that the image path could be blank.
Ideally what I wanted to do was replace the blank field with a path to an image on my site, however I had no idea how to do this. Here is a rough example of what my datalist looked like: (more…)
Google alerts and your own name
Whenever I set up a new site, one of the first things I do is set up Google Alerts for the site name, for those not familiar a google alert is an email google can send you when they discover a web page that mentions the subject you’ve specified. I use to find out who’s talking about or linking back to my sites.
So today I set up alerts for this site but the difference here is the site is in my name so I’m basically setting up alerts for my name. Within an hour of setting up the alert I’ve been inundated with alerts for completely off topic pages which are basically people with the same name as me. So far I’ve discovered a barrister, a photographer, an ex man united footballer and someone who worked on the sound editing of some big films including star wars, all of whom have the same name as me.
I’ve refined the alert now as I’m bored of hearing about other Steve Kinsey’s out there, but I guess the point of this post is to say that I’ve really learned a lesson today about being careful when setting up these things to make sure that I really focus on what data I actually want to see as it’s very easy to go totally off topic.
Can I please give you some money, Google
I’ve had a google adwords account for a while now and now and again I have run some PPC campaigns on various sites. About a month ago I decided to try and start using it again for some promotion. I had one particular valentine’s promotion I wanted to run and a few other general things as well. The problem was that there was no actual funds in my google adwords account.
No problem I thought I’ll just upload some money, it was a couple of weeks before valentines day so there as still plenty of time. Now I’m not sure if this is the same for all customers but for me, the only option I have for sending them money is to make a bank transfer, which they say can take 5 to 10 days to clear. So I duly uploaded the money directly from the bank account and waited, and waited.
Valentine’s day approached fast and no funds appeared. Valentine’s day passed and frustratingly no money appeared. Contacted google and they said they could see the funds but they hadn’t yet appeared. So I waited, time passed no funds appeared, I contacted Google again, they started investigation the missing funds and suggested I send another transfer while I wait for the investigation to finish.
Time passed, no funds appeared. So now here I am, two transfers to Google, me down in the bank account and no means to run any ppc campaigns to get some money back. As I’m sure you’ll understand I am pretty frustrated by the whole thing. The thing that annoys me though is not that the funds haven’t appeared, it’s the fact that a company as huge as Google with Adwords as it’s primary source of income by far has no other facilities for me to send them some money. Why can’t I just pay with a credit/debit card, or even send them a bloody cheque for Christ’s sake.
Actually I suspect that there are indeed other options for sending in money, but they’re just not available to small fry little spenders like me. So please, please Google, let me send you some money!!!
My blog is mainly about programming in .Net 2, website promotion and affiliate marketing although I do have the odd ramble on about anything that comes to mind.
