Neil Merton

Force IE To Go Dottie

If you’re a seasoned web designer / developer you will most probably have noticed that Internet Explorer treats dotted borders the same as dashed ones. Here’s a quick CSS work around for this:

style_general.css

abbr, acronym {
  border-bottom: 1px dotted #bbb;
  cursor: help;
  text-decoration: none;
}

and then use the following to include a specific stylesheet just for Internet Explorer, versions 6 and lower:

<!--[if LTE IE 6]>
<style media="all" type="text/css">@import url("style_ie.css");</style>
<![endif]-->

style_ie.css

abbr, acronym {
  background: url(../images/dotted.gif) repeat-x bottom left;
  border-bottom: 0 solid;
  padding: 0 0 1px 0;
}

Simple?

ColdFusion and MySQL

Have you ever had the following error when trying to connect to a MySQL database via the ColdFusion admin area?

Connection verification failed for data source: mysql_bad
java.sql.SQLException: Communication failure during handshake.
Is there a server running on localhost:3306?
The root cause was that: java.sql.SQLException: Communication
failure during handshake. Is there a server running on localhost:3306?

If so, then read the following TechNote to solve the problem.

CSS in Web-based Emails

Just come across this interesting article on CSS support in HTML emails sent to Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail.

This came, literally, a few days late as I have just finished sending 4 email campaigns on behalf of four different dealerships, and this article would have helped just that little more. Atleast I’ve got it for next time.

Read Outlook Messages As Plain Text

I’ve been tasks with creating quite a few email campaigns recently (all above board, honest guv’). One issue that I came across was to have the ability to read the emails I’ve been sending myself as tests as plain text. Why do you ask?

Well, ColdFusion’s cfmail function allows you to send both HTML and plain text versions of emails, which is great. I needed to find out whether I actually needed two different versions or whether Outlook (and hopefully other email clients) will automatically convert HTML emails into something readable as plain text. In true Microsoft fashion, you actually have to add a DWORD to the registry settings for Outlook in order to do this. Close Outlook (if it’s open) and here what to add to the registry, via Regedit:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\1X.0\Outlook\Options\Mail

Add a new DWORD of READASPLAIN with a value of 1.

Now when you view emails in Outlook they will be displayed as plain text by default, with the option of viewing emails as HTML if required.

Building an Editable Grid

I have recently been looking into the whole AJAX thing with ColdFusion and came across this tutorial on EasyCFM.com. It provides a good example of how to create an editable grid / table, complete with the source code and an example.

Move Now Complete

Over the weekend we moved house. Everything went quite well. But then again I wasn’t really expecting any major problems as we have now taken up residence 3 doors down from where we were before.

Yesterday the nice BT engineer got the phone working, but after a call to UK Online (my broadband provider) I found out that it would be atleast 20-30 days before it will be connected at the new house. This will be a very testing time.