Entries Tagged 'Design' ↓

A few days ago I was fortunate enough to be a Beta tester of a Graphic Design application specifically aimed at creating website Header images. So what, you might say, there are a number of products like this.

Well two things stood out. One is that this application was from the creators of a favorite website builder software. The other is that this application, now it has launched, is FREE.

I found this very easy to use, thanks to some excellent templates, and within a few minutes I’d cooked up this header…

What do you think?

Now I’m a seasoned Photoshop user, so I’m not going to make this application the mainstay of my website graphic designs. But I will turn to it when I want to knock up a header quickly for, say, a minisite or blog.

If you think this would benefit your site designs just sign up for my newsletter, by entering your name and email in the boxes under my mugshot, and I’ll send you the application page where you can get this graphic design software free.

No catches. It just works.

Following on from my, and others’, experiences with failed downloads and ‘corrupt’ zip files in Internet Explorer 7 I manfully tried to download a 194Mb file yesterday with the usual abortive result!

IE7 started to download then raced to the end and stopped. This also happened later with a tiddly 380Kb file. I’d had enough! Yes, I know I could be using Firefox instead of IE7 but I particularly like the way IE7 handles tabs. So I went looking for a decent download manager.

What I found was a piece of software that is simple to use yet, if you access its backend functions, very sophisticated in the way it is able to download multiple files. It can also download files in multiple fragments which speeds the whole download process up in many cases.

In its simplest form it puts a small, blue icon on the bottom right of your screen which is always available for you to drop any download, video or music file link onto. Then it asks you where you want to save it and just gets on with the download in the background while you carry on working.

If you want to see what is going on or prefer to manage multiple downloads then double-click the icon and you get access to the full download manager interface.

You can download it from here as my gift in the hope it not only solves any download problems you may have but also makes your life easier, as it has mine!

Occasionally I’m emailed by someone who has downloaded one of my products complaining that the ‘zip file is corrupt’. Now this is always due to an incomplete download. I know that because I always check the zip files myself to make sure they’re intact and I have the same problem myself when downloading files that I have purchased!

So what’s happening with these incomplete downloads? I needed to find out because it causes buyers a little bit of annoyance and frustration that they can’t unzip their purchase straight away, as well as the fact that I’d rather spend my support time helping people in other ways!

The problem seems mainly centred around Internet Explorer. So my first suggestion is ‘try downloading a second time’ and, if that doesn’t work, ‘try using another browser’. One or the other always manages to perform the ‘cure’, but I still wanted to get to the root of the problem.

After some experimentation I found that clearing my Temporary Internet Files cache also appears to ’solve’ the problem. If you don’t know what that is then you ought to know that browsers keep a cache of all the website pages you have recently visited in a temporary space on your hard drive. This is so that, when you revisit those pages, the page and all the items on it, like images, appear quickly on your screen. Rather than waiting for them to download all over again the browser just retrieves the bits it needs from the cache.

Sometimes this can catch you out because, for example, you might be emailed that a new offer has been placed on a website you’ve been to the day before, but when you return to that site you can’t see it! That’s because your browser has probably loaded the cached page rather than the updated one. If that is the case hit the F5 key, or click the Refresh button in your browser, and it will download the new page.

But back to our download problem. When you are downloading large files, and the files in this week’s Monday Madness offer are around 16 - 18Mb because of all the information I’ve packed in, then your browser cache can fill up before the file has completed downloading. If you watch carefully you’ll see this as the download bar starts off moving across slowly and then suddenly rushes to the end. If you look at the file size using Windows Explorer you’ll see that it is much smaller than we say it should be!

The solution, then, is to clear your browser cache before downloading any large files. I’ve listed below the method of doing this for the most popular browsers. Hopefully you won’t have any more problems downloading after you do this!

If you are using Internet Explorer 6.0…

Launch Internet Explorer.
Go to Tools > Internet Options.
The ‘Internet Options’ dialog box is displayed.
Click the ‘Delete Files’ button.
The ‘Delete Files’ dialog box is displayed.
Check the ‘Delete all offline content’ box.
Click the ‘OK’ button to confirm the deletion of your temporary Internet files.
Click the ‘OK’ button again to close the ‘Internet Options’ dialog box.
Attempt to download again.

If you are using Internet Explorer 7.0…

Launch Internet Explorer.
Go to Tools > Internet Options.
The ‘Internet Options’ dialog box is displayed.
On the ‘General’ tab, click the ‘Delete…’ button under the heading ‘Browsing history’.
The ‘Delete Browsing History’ dialog box is displayed.
Click the ‘Delete files…’ button.
Click the ‘Yes’ button to confirm the deletion of your temporary Internet files.
Click the ‘Close’ button to close the ‘Delete Browsing History’ dialog box.
Click the ‘OK’ button to close the ‘Internet Options’ dialog box.
Attempt to download again.

If you are using Firefox 1.x…

Launch Firefox.
Go to Tools > Options.
The ‘Options’ dialog box is displayed.
Click the ‘Privacy’ button.
From the areas listed, locate ‘Cache’. Click the ‘Clear’ button to the right of ‘Cache’ to delete your temporary Internet files.
Click the ‘OK’ button again to close the ‘Options’ dialog box.
Attempt to download again.

If you are using Firefox 2.x…

Launch Firefox.
Go to Tools > Options.
The ‘Options’ dialog box is displayed.
Select the ‘Privacy’ option.
The ‘Privacy’ options are displayed.
Under the ‘Private Data’ heading, click the ‘Clear Now…’ button.
The ‘Clear Private Data’ dialog box is displayed.
Check option ‘Cache’ and ensure that the other checkboxes are not checked.
Click ‘Clear Private Data Now’ to delete your temporary Internet files.
Click ‘OK’ to close the ‘Options’ dialog box.
Attempt to download again.

If you are using Netscape…

Go to Edit > Preferences.
The ‘Preferences’ dialog box is displayed.
Under the ‘Advanced’ category, click on the ‘Cache’ section.
Click the ‘Clear Disk Cache’ button, then click the ‘OK’ button to confirm the deletion of your temporary Internet files.
Close the ‘Preferences’ dialog box.
Attempt to download again.

I’m a curious sort of guy; I like to delve into things; as a result when things don’t work the way they’re supposed to I don’t give up in disgust but look for a reason in the hope that I’ll find a ‘cure’.

Sometimes this leads to a lot of frustration, because we all naturally like to overcomplicating things. And, very often, the ‘cure’ is often much simpler than we would ever have believed.

If you’ll allow me I’ll just illustrate this with a couple of changes I’ve had to make to a sales page and, indeed, this blog.

First, as you’ll have seen, I’ve been helping Frank Haywood iron out the wrinkles in his Nickel Sale script prior to it being released for sale.

Now, in Frank’s usual way, this is all going well and no real hiccups so far. But I did come across a problem when I tried to combine both the Unlimited Exit Popup software that I’m selling AND the Nickel Sale script (if you’re curious you can see both in action here www.monday-madness.com/UEPNS ).

The ‘problem’ is caused by Frank’s script being helpful in coding the Buy Now button as a php tag. And the Unlimited Exit Popup employs a piece of Javascript code that has to be applied to the href link for the Buy Now button.

The upshot was that, because I didn’t have an href link for the Buy Now button, I couldn’t apply the Javascript code. No doubt much to the first few buyers’ amusement, and possibly annoyance, this meant that when you clicked the Buy Now button the Unlimited Exit Popup did it’s job and asked ‘Are you sure you really want to leave this page’!

Hah! I must admit I was panicking as the deadline for the Nickel Sale going live approached. And, when you panic, it impedes you even more from seeing the answer.

A simple answer

The answer, when it finally came to me five minutes after the sale went ‘live’, did prove ridiculously simple. After a good hour of messing around with Javascript coding and delving into the php code (plus following a lot of well meaning, but overcomplicated, stuff about using OnClick functions that I found on coder’s web pages) I just housed the php tag and Javascript in an html anchor so:

<a onClick=”javascript:PreventExitPop = true”>{PAYMENT_BUTTON2}</a>

Ridiculously simple, and I kicked myself for not thinking of it earlier!

If you’ve bought the the Unlimited Exit Popup you may well find this useful when applying UEP to your own sales pages. Just replace the {PAYMENT_BUTTON2} tag with whatever target link you want UEP to ignore. If you are planning on buying Frank’s Nickel Script, and I recommend you do when it’s finally available, and using it with UEP then again make a note of this too. It could save you hours of frustration!

Pretty Permalinks

Again I’m mentioning this simply because it cost me several hours of searching before I found it.

I received an email today from Jeff (thanks for your help, Jeff) who alerted me to the fact that my Pretty Permalinks weren’t working. Now I like to use Pretty Permalinks for my blogs because, not only are they SEO friendly, but they look better in your browser too.

I won’t bore you with the ins and outs of Wordpress Permalink structure but just to say that, again, the answer proved ridiculously simple. All I had to do was add one line to the wp-includes/vars.php file as outlined in this extract from the Wordpress Codex:

Server Blockage: Your host might have blocked the SERVER_SOFTWARE variable and this will cause WordPress’ .htaccess generation to fail. If you are sure that your server is running Apache, you can force WordPress to believe that your server is running Apache by changing your wp-includes/vars.php file. Follow the steps below to implement these changes.
1. Open the wp-includes/vars.php file using the built in file editor in your WordPress Admin panel. To navigate to this panel, login to WordPress, click on “Manage”, then on “Files”, scroll to the bottom and type in wp-includes/vars.php into the text box under the “Other Files” title.
2. Look for $is_apache = strstr($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], ‘Apache’) ? 1 : 0;, once you find it replace it with

// $is_apache = strstr($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], ‘Apache’) ? 1 : 0;

3. Add a new line under // $is_apache = strstr($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], ‘Apache’) ? 1 : 0; and type in

$is_apache = 1;

I downloaded and modified the vars.php file as described above to force WP to believe that Apache was there, then uploaded it again (you’ll have to do this if your server permissions don’t allow WP to modify the file in the Admin panel). Then I reset my permalink options to my custom style and WP successfully created the new .htaccess with the proper mod_rewrite rules.

Again I’m including it in the hope of saving someone else hours of frustration when the answer is disturbingly simple (once you know)!