Posted by Rob on Mon, June 21st, 2010I just thought I would tell you about a useful XML element that helped me resolve an RSS feed issue I had.
Essentially my RSS feed was generating errors relating to special characters. I didn't know this but It turns out that XML readers hate characters such as & and >.
I tried lots of things to fix the problem including php's html_entities() function. But none seemed to work.
Eventually though I stumbled across w3schools' tutorial on CDATA. And this fixed my problem straight away. And all it does is tell XML readers not to parse the data contained within the CDATA tags. That is, force the reader to display the text content as is.... Read More
Posted by Rob on Wed, June 09th, 2010If you're an email marketer or graphic designer and you haven't read this post on no-image email design by Dan Silvestri you should...
Are you tired of hearing about the limitations of HTML email design - specifically, how email browsers display (or don't display) images? What's a designer to do if you can't rely on images to provide that hook to grab people's attention?
How do you create visual interest or a branded look and feel?
Of course, images can be used, but the majority of email clients need to actively turn these... Read More
Posted by Rob on Mon, May 10th, 2010Well, I haven't posted anything in ages -- over 3 months. Life has been a little too hectic. A combination of helping a family friend with their internet needs and learning all about .Net with my job.
But one really positive thing to come out of this was my promotion at work -- yay me... I'm now officially a Support Analyst Programmer -- which in real terms means I work in the Development team instead of the Production team.
Anyway, the reason for this post, I came across a couple of videos on working with Visual Basic and SQL Server that I found very useful. So I thought I would share them.
They provide an excellent introduction on how to... Read More
Posted by Rob on Tue, January 26th, 2010
It's not often I have something good to say about Internet Explorer. In fact I'm not sure it's ever happened.
But IE8 actually has one very useful application. It seems that Balmer and Gates in their infinite wisdom have decided to add some developer tools to IE. And one of these is very useful when writing JavaScript.
If you press f12 in IE8 and then go to the Script tab you can execute JavaScript functions to... Read More
Posted by Rob on Sun, December 20th, 2009I'm currently learning .NET -- boo hiss -- for work so I can become a developer. One of the things I've been struggling with is checkbox validation.
Anyway, I found this excellent video which helped me get my head around the concept. Hope it helps...... Read More
