2BlueSolutions Developer Blog

So, this is a little silly and I'm a little embarrassed to say that I've spent far too much of my time on this issue. I had a multi-page site that wasn't displaying correctly on my iPad.  One page would look great, but the next would have the top menu cut off on the right and everything would be slightly zoomed in. I realized that it was a scaling issue, but for all the experimenting I did with the meta viewport tag , I couldn't get it to work. Then I thought of something...some pages didn't have as much content as the others.  The longer pages were displaying great, it was the pages short on content that weren't.  So, I went ahead and set a min-height for each page of 1050px (I figured it had to be a little larger than the 1024px portrait height of an iOS device) and voila, it worked. All the pages showed correctly.  Now, I fully admit that this is most likely a hack that isn't considered the "proper way", but I am absolutely open to sugge...

If you're using the Yoast SEO Wordpress plugin and experiencing an issue with your site's title appearing twice (ie.  2Bluesolutions Tech Blog - What Is Kickstarter - 2Bluesolutions Tech Blog), then there is a simple fix that seems to work for many people. You need to edit the header.php file for your Wordpress theme. My particular Wordpress theme had this for the title meta tag: <title><?php wp_title('&laquo;', true, 'right'); ?> <?php bloginfo('name'); ?></title> You need to change it to something much more simplistic.  What you should replace it with is this: <title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title> That seems to fix the issue, at least for my sites.

I've created a few Wordpress sites now that I know there are a few tips to do right off the bat that will save you grief later. First tip: Time - I always seem to forget to set the time zone settings found under Settings - General .  Without this properly set, you get the annoyance of having your post times be set to UTC-0 which is fine if you live on London. Second tip: Remote Publishing - Within Settings - Writing , be sure to check the box for XML-RPC so that you can use Wordpress apps to post from your mobile device. Third tip: Media Settings - be sure to go into Settings -> Media and change the default sizing for thumbnails, medium, and large images so they better match the dimensions of your site.  I prefer to make large the largest size, medium exactly half and then keep thumbnails the same. Fouth Tip: Permalinks - Under Settings - Permalinks you'll find the settings for how your URL will be displayed.  The default sett...

Took me a while to realize that my @font-face fonts weren't being imported on my Windows Phone.  I thought I was doing something wrong and then just sort of gave up after a while. Well, today, I thought I would take another stab at it thinking that maybe I packaged/converted/imported the fonts incorrectly for the WP7 OS.  Then I stumbled across this article which clearly explains the limitation of IE9 on WP7 -  http://www.ubelly.com/2011/11/the-differences-between-ie9-on-the-desktop-and-ie9-on-wp7/ Now, I was really excited to see IE9 coming to WP7 and that excitement was mainly around HTML5 support AND @font-face support.  Silly me, thinking that IE9 on the mobile device would act like the desktop version. Anyways, I suppose I could just implement image swaps for the items I want displayed as a certain font. Here is the list of supported fonts for WP7: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff806365%28v=VS.95%29.aspx

I'm not sure why I only just stumbled across this now, but I used to create triangles in Gimp by creating a square, rotating it, and cutting away half of it, then importing it into Adobe Fireworks. I have no idea why I made life so difficult for myself when there is a brutally easy way to accomplish the exact same task within Fireworks itself. Draw a square (yah, I know how to do that) Select the Skew Tool (hotkey Q) Grab one corner of the square that you want to be the arrow point and pull it towards the middle.  The opposite corner will automatically pull into the middle at the same time. Done. Stupid easy and I feel just a tad smarter.

I recently came upon a need for a way to take some screen shots of some of the sites I have created. There are plenty of tools available to serve this purpose, but I wanted something relatively quick and easy. Initially, I looked into a utility called webscreencapture . While it worked really well for most sites and you can make a nice batch file to run it all at once, it failed to capture some Joomla sites and Flash sites. So, next I figured I should try a browser solution. There is Fireshot for Firefox, but since Chrome is my browser of choice, I decided to find an extension for Chrome instead. What I found right off the bat was Awesome Screenshot and Annotation . It installs a button in the upper right of your browser which you can press to take a screenshot of whatever is on the page of your browser.  You can annotate the image, or like me, you can just click done and save it locally. Now that I had a screenshot tool, I realized that there is one more issue to re...

As a follow up to my previous post about installing the DIBS module in Virtuemart , there is a poorly documented error you will run into when trying to use the payment module on a live site. Basically, it will complain about a missing "paytype" which is actually not what is missing.  What is missing is the "test parameter" as the error will tell you.  After spending too much time trying to fix the "missing" paytype, I tried a different method and deduced that it really was missing a test parameter. With the default setup, the DIBS payment processor will only send a "test" variable to DIBS when it is actually in testing mode.  Makes sense, right? if(DIBS_TESTMODE == "YES") { $oid = 'test-' . $db->f("order_id") . '-' . time(); $post_variables["test"] = "YES"; $post_variables["orderid"] = $oid; } else { $oid = $db->f("order_id") . '-' . time(); ...