Dropbox: free online backup and file sharing tool

Posted by Heidi | Posted on 05-08-2010

Category : Technical

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

A while ago I came across a free online backup and file sharing tool, called Dropbox.

Dropbox

Dropbox is available for every OS out there: OS X, Windows, Iphone, Blackberry, Android, … and they have an online interface. When you install their software on your device of choice, it creates a simple folder which you can use like any other folder on your device, with the benefit that it automatically syncs with the data online and any other device on which the software is installed. When you add/remove or alter any content, it will automatically update the content online and on other devices too. This way, you always have the same, up-to-date data anywhere you need it.

Not only can you keep your own documents in sync and have an automatic backup of your data, you can also create a shared folder where you can drop files that you want others to be able to access.

With its 2GB you get a decent amount of online space where you can work with. You can increase this volume by taking their tour, adding a second computer, inviting other people, … or of course, by buying more space.

Download dropbox here and give it a try. I’m sure you’ll love it!

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Changing master page for Sharepoint 2007

2

Posted by Heidi | Posted on 31-10-2007

Category : Technical

Tags: , ,

I’ve had the honor and priveledge of working with Sharepoint 2007 over the last few weeks. Whether this sentence is complete irony or not, I’ll leave in the middle for now :) .

Applying our company’s logo and design to the overall layout of the site turned out to be not as easy as I thought it would be.
Of course, the most basic part was making a new masterpage with Sharepoint Designer 2007. This I did by making a copy of the default.master and adapt it to my own liking. I created a new css style for it so everything would stay a bit clean. This worked great for the public site parts. Our logo was shining all over the place … except … not “all” over the place …

The Sharepoint administration pages don’t seem to like to blend in very much. Turns out that these pages use a different master page: application.master. Whenever you google it everyone seems to scream about how dangerous it is to alter this page and you really shouldn’t mess with it. So you can imagine I wasn’t really jumping on the idea.
So I tried to find workarounds. The homepage administration pages seemed to use the same core.css file as the user pages, so I copy/pasted the css styles in my custom made css into the core.css at the bottom. So this fixed that problem.
But other administration pages seemed to use a totally different core.css file, one located at “…\Program files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\template\layouts\1033\styles”. So I did the same for that file.

Et voila … my site looks like it should w/o modifying the application.master page itself.Â
Some things you should hold into account:

  • make sure your image paths are correct
  • my master page didn’t differ that much from an original one. The parts I didn’t want visible I just put the position on absolute and the left tag on -10000px so it wouldn’t show up on my screen. On my own master page I could just delete these parts, but this is another way not to show them w/o editing the master page. This of course is only possible if the application.master page isn’t that different from the one you want to accomplish.
  • make sure you check in, publish and approve the master page you created, otherwise other people won’t be able to see it

Some useful links:

Good luck I’d say!Â

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ASP/Ajax extensions – Sys.Debug is null or not an object

Posted by Heidi | Posted on 15-06-2007

Category : Technical

Tags: , ,

Today I got faced with the impossible error of “Sys.Debug is null or not an object” while using the Ajax Extensions for an ASP website, meaning I couldn’t get my CalendarExtension to work … Googling it, it seemed like a well known error, but if you think that means that it’s fixed in no time, you can think again.

I spent hours reading the question over and over again, and trying out answers ppl gave, but nothing seemed to work for me .. until finally finally finally … I found a website actually handing me the solution to it all :D

You can find the link here

After doing what he so very well explains in his article, I restarted my IIS (issreset in start->run) en cleared the cache of my browser (ctrl + F5 for IE) and I haven’t seen the error since!!

Thnx again to Ross Hawkins!

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Website categories

Posted by Heidi | Posted on 05-03-2007

Category : Technical

Tags: ,

Before you can really begin your SEO quest, you have to figure out for yourself to which category or categories your website will belong.

The main website categories are:

  1. generating web-based sales
  2. generating offline sales
  3. leaving contact information so you can get in touch with the person
  4. creating market awareness
  5. generating informative or entertaining content
  6. influencing people’s thinking

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SEO vs SEM

Posted by Heidi | Posted on 24-02-2007

Category : Technical

Tags: , ,

First off … what’s what, right …

SEO = Search Engine Optimization
SEM = Search Engine Marketing

SEO is the organic listing of the results you get when you search for a certain phrase. Some 80% of the people using the internet tend to prefer to click on these listings in stead of the sponsored links above or at the right hand page of the website.
SEO is pretty cheap, but of course there is a downside … it takes a lot of patience to get to the top!!

SEM on the other hand can be fast!! This is the sponsored or paid listing of the results you get when you search for a certain phrase. Tools like Google Adwords for example can be up and running in like 5 minutes, but they do tend to need constant attention and could turn out to be pretty expensive.
You could argue that the marketing research could take up quit some time, but it’ll still be faster than SEO, and a lot more expensive!

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Organic listings vs Paid listings

Posted by Heidi | Posted on 23-02-2007

Category : Technical

Tags: , , ,

In Search Engine Marketing there is this thing called Organic listings and Paid listings. For those who are new to this jargon, let me explain it in a simple way …

When you look up a phrase in a search engine like Google, you can distinguish 3 kinds of listings from the result you get:

  1. The results on top of the page
  2. The results on the right hand side of the page
  3. The rest of the results

The first 2 are called Paid or Sponsored listings. More accurately, they are pay-per-click listings, or in short PPC. Every time you, me or anyone clicks on these links, the owner of the website pays for it.

The 3rd one are called the organic listing. Everyone’s website can be included in it and to get a high ranking, knowing some SEO could come in handy :)

I’ll discuss that one later.

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IE double click to activate flash

2

Posted by Heidi | Posted on 16-12-2006

Category : Technical

Tags: ,

Microsoft released an update for Internet Explorer that changed the way the browser
displays and runs ActiveX components, flash movies and Java applets.
Because of security issues the browser asks you to activate these controls by clicking on them. Meaning that to actually “browse” through the flash site, you need to double click it the first time.
Read more about it here: Flash Player Technote: Internet Explorer displays a box around flash content

A way to prevent this is by including your swf file with an external javascript file. More information on how to do this you find here: Active content update article

And for the lazy ones among us, this should be a free program that solves it for you (didn’t try it myself): Flash Release.

A nice video on it, you can find here: YouTube Video

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Flash embed font bold

7

Posted by Heidi | Posted on 16-12-2006

Category : Technical

Tags: , ,

I use a lot of font types that people don’t normally have installed, so I embed the fonts in Flash. Only, now I tried with actionscript and CSS to make part of a dynamic text field bold. Only, the bold part of the text field wouldn’t show, the text would just not be there.

So, then I found out that when you embed a font in Flash, flash doesn’t include the whole font family automatically. Meaning, that by embedding a regular font, the bold and italic aren’t included.

A workaround for this, is to just add another text field to your stage, somewhere out of sight (or not), and embed the same font type but with bold activated. Run your flash file again and you’ll see that the bold in your other text field is now visible too.

See also: Flash Technote: HTML text fields do not display formatted text

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Image resize online

Posted by Heidi | Posted on 19-11-2006

Category : Technical

Tags: ,

If you don’t always have a photo editing program on the computer you’re working on and need an image resized, you can also do it online here:

http://resizr.lord-lance.com/default.asp

and … they have a firefox extension … what more could you want ;)

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Reserved space for vertical scrollbar in IE

4

Posted by Heidi | Posted on 17-11-2006

Category : Technical

Tags: ,

IE reserves space for their vertical scrollbar. This, isn’t always very desirable … Of course, there’s no problem if you actually need the scrollbar, but when you don’t …

When you use a bgcolor1 in the body and place a div tag in it over the full width of your page with another bgcolor2, you’ll see that in the space reserved for the vertical scrollbar bgcolor1 will appear and not the desired bgcolor2.
This is b/c IE reserves that space for the scrollbar, whether you need it or not … FF on the other hand never reserves the space … the downside of this could be that when the scrollbar is needed you’ll see your page content move. But … in this example, it still is the lesser of the 2 evils ;) …

So, the workaround for IE, so that it doesn’t reserve that space, is:

body {
overflow: auto;
}

HTML {
overflow: auto;
}

you need both!!

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