Thursday, March 28, 2024

Goodies to Go! Newsletter #312


Goodies to Go ™
November 22, 2004 — Newsletter # 312

This newsletter is part of the internet.com network.
http://www.internet.com
 


Featured this week:

* Goodies Thoughts Thanksgiving
* Q & A Goodies
* News Goodies
* Feedback Goodies  
* Windows Tech Goodies  
* And Remember This

 


 

Goodies Announcement

The new Beyond HTML Goodies book
is now available!

 

Go beyond the basics
and learn how the pros add and use dynamic HTML features and advanced
JavaScript techniques. Beyond HTML Goodies demonstrates dozens of new and
different features readers can add to their existing Web pages using HTML and
JavaScript. The book starts with simple text and image tips, such as adding a
clock to a Web page or causing text to appear when the mouse moves over an
image. It gradually builds to more complex tricks, including manipulating forms
or working with cookies behind the scenes. Throughout the book, readers enjoy
Joe’s snappy style and “to the point” discussion of each “goody” in the book.

 

http://books.internet.com/books/0789727803

 

 


Goodies Thoughts – Thanksgiving


Around this time of year, there is a holiday celebrated in the
US known as Thanksgiving. It’s a harvest festival celebration, the origin of
which goes back to some of the earliest European settlers in the Americas.

A group of English Separatist Puritans sailed from Plymouth, England aboard the
Mayflower on September 16, 1620. They dropped anchor near where Provincetown is
today on November 21, 1620, and on December 26, 1620 finally landed where
Plymouth, Massachusetts now is. They founded Plymouth Colony, signing the
"Mayflower Compact" agreement to create "just and equal laws for the general
good of the colony." These settlers are now known as the "Pilgrim Fathers", and
included leader William Brewster, John Carver, Edward Winslow, and William
Bradford, , governors of Plymouth Colony; John Alden, assistant governor; and
Myles Standish, a professional soldier and military advisor.

The settlers came upon the Samoset Indians who, surprisingly, could speak
English (they had learned it from English traders on the Maine coast) who
introduced them to the Wampanoag Indian chief Massasoit and his interpreter
Squanto. Signing a peace treaty with the Pilgrims, the Indians taught them to
fish, grow corn and gather fruit. The Pilgrim’s celebrated their first harvest
in 1621, and invited the Indians to join them in an event now known as
Thanksgiving Day.

Today, the holiday is celebrated on the last Thursday in November. These day’s
it involves eating turkey and "fixin’s" in unduly large quantities, and taking
the next day off work to go shopping (it’s usually the busiest shopping day of
the year.) It’s a good holiday because it doesn’t apply to any particular
religion and is very much a family day.

In keeping with its early tradition, we take time to consider those things we
are thankful for, and I’m going to do a little of that today.

Obviously, I am thankful for the Internet. It is the most remarkable of modern
inventions. It has created an entirely new way for me, and for many of you, to
earn a livelihood. It has shrunk the world by creating new ways for us to
communicate with each other, and helps us achieve much higher levels of
understanding which is, in my view, the path to global peace (though we still
have a long way to go!)

I’m thankful also for all those programmers out there who toil to create the
fantastic software tools and toys that I use everyday. I have been programming
since the early 70’s and I recognize the tremendous advances that have been
made.

I’m thankful to Jupitermedia for providing a home for HTML Goodies and this
newsletter.

And most of all, I’m thankful for you, Goodies to Go readers and HTML Goodies
visitors for your support and continued loyalty. You are the reason we can keep
going, and the reason we can continue to provide a free resource and free
newsletter to our community. Each week I close this piece with the same words,
this week I want to highlight those words:

Thanks for Reading!
 


 



– Vince Barnes


 

Top

Q & A Goodies


Questions are taken from submissions to our Community Mentors. You can ask a Mentor a question by going to

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/mentors
.



Q. (Question was posed as a
JavaScript question) How do I (or can I at all) use a button in frame A to send
the page in frame B to a specific E-mail address?

A. Unfortunatly JavaScript cannot send HTML emails. You will need to use
a Server Side language such as Perl, PHP or ASP. The best you could do with
JavaScript would be to send a link to a Page, but in your case that would not
work as you want them to build the document and then send it.

Q. I have volunteered to create a web site for a science fair at our
local elementary school. I have just begun to write html, and find it really
easy. I would like to know if you could recommend any good html editor, that at
least had syntax checking and , I guess style sheet support. I want to keep it
simple, so others who follow me in coming years will be able to maintain the
site without having to learn something complicated.

A. Ease of use, inexpensive, style sheet support and the new version,
2003 has syntax checking, I would suggest FrontPage 2003, about $170. Some would
argue that FrontPage is for amateurs. I have used it since FrontPage 98 and have
been very happy with it. It gets better with every version and FP 2003 has it
all. It is a WYSIWYG editor as well as an HTML editor. You can choose either or
both at the same time with the new version. I have used Dreamweaver, about $400
and it is a great editor but the price is far greater than FrontPage and the
learning curve is greater, in my humble opinion. If you are looking for a very
nice editor that has everything you are looking for (no WYSIWYG) you can try
CoffeeCup HTML Editor – http://www.coffeecup.com – about $50 and lifetime
upgrades. I own it and use it also. very nice editor but not all of the bells
and whistles as the others. For a free HTML editor with no WYSIWYG you can try
1st Page Editor – http://www.evrsoft.com/ I have never tried it but have heard
good things about it.

Q. My website uses frames and I was wondering if there was a code (which
I was gussing uses Javascript) that refreshes a page/frame automatically every X
minutes?

A. If you want to reload a document in one frame frome another you could
do this:
<script language="javascript">
function doReload()
{
parent.framea.location.reload()
setTimeout(‘doReload()’,60000)
}
</script>
Then start it by using the onLoad event in the body tag:
<body onload="setTimeout(‘doReload()’,60000)">
This would reload the document in the frame named "framea" every 60,000
miliseconds (1 minute).

Q. I’m trying to design a personal portfolio site and need to have people
click on my thumbnails to see larger images in a new window… easy. However I
found a site that makes it hard for people to save/steal copyright materials- it
makes the new window close when it is clicked on… I can’t figure out how to do
this.

A. You could use the onClick event in the body tag. Of course they can
still steal your images because the images have to be downloaded to your PC for
your browser to display them. The body tag would look like this:
<body onClick="window.close()">
This will only work if the window was opened using the JavaScript window.open
command.

Q. This is a question based around HTML and Java. Firstly, how do you
specify a constant width for a drop down menu, and secondly, how to you change
its colours?

A. This is more of a HTML/CSS question, but you could use a style tag in
the select tag to specify that. Here is an example:
<select name="sel" style="width:80;color:red;background-color:yellow">
<option value="yes">Yes</option
<option value="no">No</option
</select>
This example would limit the select (dropdown) to 80 pixels, the text will be
red and the background color of the select will be yellow.

Q. I’m trying to create a sort of mouseover-driven context-sensitive help
system for my website. The basic idea is that you mouse over a set of services
(system checkup, basic service, advanced service, etc) and a window pops up
telling you what it is you’re going to be paying for. I can get windows to pop
up quite neatly…it’s getting them to go away again that’s having me in fits.
Is there any way to do something like:
onMouseOut="window.diediedie(‘popup’);return true"
and have it actually work?

A. You might want to take a look at this script. It is very flexible and
looks great.

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex5/popinfo.htm

 

 

 

 

Top

News Goodies


Banner Ads Serving Up MyDoom
[November 22, 2004] New move in virus battle renders banner
ads susceptible to MyDoom variant.

Click
here to read the article

 

 

 


IBM Flies Into Aerospace Electronics

[November 22, 2004] Big Blue wins a longterm engineering and
services contract from Honeywell worth up to $250M.

Click here to read the article

 

PeopleSoft Soap Opera Still Alive
[November 21, 2004] UPDATED: PeopleSoft’s board remains defiant even though
more than 60 percent of shareholders favor Oracle.

Click
here to read the article

 

 

 


ICQ Launches Improved E-Mail Service

[November 22, 2004] The instant messaging company also announces
premium plan.

Click here to read the article

 

 

 

QLogic, McDATA Combine on Blades
[November 22, 2004] The storage vendors will boost
connectivity over networks by co-creating a switch for blade
servers.

Click here to read the article
 

 

 

House Approves Internet Access Tax Ban
[November 19, 2004] President Bush promised to sign four-year prohibition on
connection taxes.

Click here to read the article

 

 

 

Unix Still (Kind of) Holding Its Own
[November 19, 2004] FEATURE: Despite rumors of its demise, Unix is very much
alive and kicking. But analysts are still concerned about its ability to do
battle with Windows and Linux.

Click here to read the article

 

 



Clash of the .Net, J2EE Clans?
[November 19, 2004] Microsoft’s development platform has made huge
strides since its debut, but Java proponents say they’re just picking up
steam.

Click here to read the article

 

 

 

The Risk of at-Work Surfers
[November 19, 2004] Employees unaware of security risks associated with
surfing the Internet on the job, NetApp says.

Click here to read the article


 

 

Kmart/Sears Success Is in the IT
[November 19, 2004] UPDATED: Forget product mix and store layout. Melding IT
systems key to the success of this merger.

Click here to read the article

 

 

 

 

Top


Goodies Peer Reviews


 

Every week a site is selected for review. Each week,
reviews of the previous week’s selected site are chosen for
publication on the HTML Goodies website.

 

The current week’s selected site is published in Goodies To
Go and in the Peer Reviews section of the website. 
Current contact email addresses for submitting your site and
for submitting reviews are published in Goodies To Go.

If you would like to have your site reviewed, sign up for
the Goodies To Go newsletter in the Navigation Bar on the
left side of this page. 

For full details about this program, see

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/peerreviews

 

 

 

Top

Feedback
Goodies


Did you ever wish your newsletter was an easy two way communications medium?
Ploof! It now is!
If you would like to comment on the newsletter or expand/improve on something
you have seen in here, you can now send your input to:

mailto:nlfeedback@htmlgoodies.com

We already receive a lot of email every day. This address will help us sort out
those relating specifically to this newsletter from all the rest. When you send
email to this address it may wind up being included in this section of the
newsletter, to be shared with your fellow readers.
Please don’t send your questions to this address.
They should be sent to our mentors: see
http://www.htmlgoodies.com/mentors/

Thanks again for all your feedback!
 

 

Top


 


Windows Tech Goodie of the Week:
 

Database Edit ASP.NET Sample


http://www.asp101.com/samples/db_edit_aspx.asp

This sample shows you how to use the ASP.NET DataGrid’s
built in editing capabilities to edit records in a database.
It also includes some basic Try…Catch…Finally style
error handling to prevent people from entering text into the
integer fields and vice versa.

 

 


 

Top


 

 

 

 
And Remember This . . .

On this day in…
 

1963 John F. Kennedy Assassinated

In one of the most infamous and subsequently controversial
assassinations of the twentieth century, the thirty-fifth President
of the United States, John F. Kennedy, was fatally shot on this day
in 1963 while riding in a Lincoln convertible through the streets of
Dallas, Texas. At 12:30 p.m., as the car passed the Texas School
Book Depository Building, Lee Harvey Oswald fired three shots from
the sixth floor, fatally wounding President Kennedy and seriously
injuring Texas Governor Connally. Half an hour later, Kennedy was
pronounced dead at Dallas Parkland Hospital. On November 24, Oswald,
who had ties to the USSR and to Cuba, was being moved from the
Dallas police HQ to a more secure county jail, when he was shot dead
with a single shot fired by Jack Ruby, FKA Jacob Rubenstein. Ruby,
who plead innocent by reason of insanity (he supposedly suffered
from "psychomotor epilepsy" caused by grief at Kennedy’s
assassination, and so shot Ruby "unconsciously") was found guilty of
"murder with malice" and sentenced to death. Ruby was alleged to
have ties to organized crime. Circumstances led to many conspiracy
theories surrounding the assassination. In 1964 the Warren
Commission report concluded that "neither Oswald nor Ruby were part
of a larger conspiracy, either domestic or international, to
assassinate President Kennedy", but in 1978 the House Select
Committee on Assassinations reported that Kennedy was "probably
assassinated as a result of a conspiracy", and that multiple
shooters and organized crime might have been involved. The
controversy continues still today, as there are firm believers on
both sides of the discussion.

Today was also the day that in: 1718 English pirate Edward :Blackbeard"
Teach died off the coast of Virginia; 1842 Mount St. Helens
erupted; 1886 The Victoria Street Cable Tram began operation
in Melbourne Australia; 1910 Arthur Knight received a paten
for steel shafted golf clubs; 1916 author Jack London died of
kidney disease; 1928 Maurice Ravel’s "Bolero" was first
publicly performed (Paris); 1932 a pump capable of
calculating the quantity and price of fluid it delivered was
patented; 1935 the flying boat "China Clipper" took off from
California with 100,000 pieces of mail on the first trans-pacific
airmail flight; 1963 the Beatles released their second album,
"With The Beatles", in the UK; 1963 English author Aldous
Huxley died; 1963 English author C.S. Lewis died; 1967
the BBC (unofficially) banned the Beatles’ song "I am The Walrus";
1968 the Beatles released their only double album, nameless,
but dubbed the "White Album" for its plain white cover; 1975
Juan Carlos was proclaimed King of Spain (following the Nov. 20
death of dictator Francisco Franco, who had no idea that Juan Carlos
would reinstitute democracy); 1977 regular Concorde flights
between Europe and NY began; 1989 Conjunction of Venus, Mars,
Uranus, Neptune, Saturn & the Moon, and Eastern Airlines pilots and
flight attendants ended their strike, but most of them were not
rehired; 1990 US President George Bush (Sr.) visited troops
in Saudi Arabia for the Thanksgiving Holiday; 1990 Margaret
Thatcher announced her resignation as British Prime Minister;

Born today were: in 1819 English author George Elliot;
1888
Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fictional character Tarzan of the
Apes; 1899 actor and songwriter Hoagie Carmichael; 1904
actor Roland Winters; 1906 actress Lee Patrick; 1910
actress Mary Jackson; 1913 English composer Benjamin
Britten; 1921 comedian Rodney Dangerfield; 1932 actor
Robert Vaughn; 1935 actor Michael Callan; 1939 actor
Allen Gerfield; 1940 actor, comedian, animator (the American
in Monty Python) Terry Gilliam; 1943 tennis star Billie Jean
King; 1958 actress Jamie Lee Curtis; 1961 actress
Mariel Hemmingway; 1966 English Nicholas Rowe; 1967
Tennis star Boris Becker;

 




Thanks for reading Goodies to Go!


 



Archive Home Page.


Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to Developer Insider for top news, trends & analysis

Popular Articles

Featured