mysiteonline™

When the Saratoga Springs Public Library website was redesigned, although I used a static width (set to something like 720px wide) for the content area, I intended for it to be easily resized with supporting browsers. I made sure to set everything (else) to size with EMs in CSS (similar to percentage).

...an issue with the top navigation cropped up on some computers that I could not identify, nor could I figure out how to solve. For 95% of browsers I tested, and 100% with a vanilla install of Windows, everything worked fine. For those others, the navigation links at the top of our site just didn't seem to align. I thought it might have something to do with DPI or visual settings, but I had no idea how to accommodate for that.

Well I completely accidentally ran in to William Kolean's solution of fixing this issue with Microsoft's CSS expression engine. As the issue was only seen in Internet Explorer (and I already had an IE-specific stylesheet to fix tiny issues), this was a perfect solution, and I put it in to use (just now, actually). I can verify that it worked (on my first and only test) so I'm quite happy. I thought I'd post this for my own records, and to help others too.

http://www.williamkolean.com/williamblog/?p=18
Thanks, William!

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

Jack Slocum, someone who intends to make money off his knowledge and expertise (and why shouldn't he?) over the jQuery "framework" (is it a framework or a library?), has updated his 15DaysOfJQuery website. If anyone's looking for a good place to start learning jQuery and hasn't yet delved in to this very helpful codebase, I found this website's introductions helpful. They're very basic and get you going, "Oh cool!" right away.

AAAAAAAAAnyways...like I said, Jack's updated his site and is now selling a DVD with 2+ hours of video tutorials showing off jQuery. He's also promised some new and updated tutorials to show off interesting techniques with jQuery, as well as some of the popular plugins. He may even be so kind as to create and release a plugin of his own creation! Yay...

Check out his post on the topic for more info and possible updates.

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

Libraries, and many other institutions, have a difficult time leveraging the ability to allow customers access to communicate with them easily, using one of the most popular online communication tools available: Instant Messaging.

There are many problems, such as:

• Multiple Protocols (AIM, ICQ, YIM, GIM, Jabber, IRC, MSN, etc...)
• Inability to transfer conversations to another staff member more capable of handling a question or issue
• Software compatibility
• Operating System compatibility
• Web-based communication tools for these protocols

So what's left out there?

Continue reading "LibraryH3lp - A communication gateway for Instant Messaging"

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski

An online friend asked me for some help in hiding all empty columns for every sheet within an Excel workbook. I figured I'd share the code:

(also on pastebin)
Sub HideEmptyCols() ' Deletes all empty columns on the active worksheet Dim iCol As Integer Dim wsSheet As Worksheet For Each wsSheet In Worksheets wsSheet.Select With wsSheet.UsedRange For iCol = .Column + .Columns.Count - 1 To 1 Step -1 If IsEmpty(Cells(65536, iCol)) And IsEmpty(Cells(1, iCol)) Then If Cells(65536, iCol).End(xlUp).Row = 1 Then Columns(iCol).Hidden = True End If Next iCol End With Next wsSheet End Sub

Perhaps someone else will find it useful for some odd reason.

Posted by Brendon Kozlowski