Stumble Upon toolbar problems

*I wrote this post back in October of 2007, since then the resolution to this problem does not work anymore. I recently had this problem again and the only way I was able to fix it was to not only uninstall the toolbar, but I also had to uninstall firefox and reinstall it, then add the toolbar.

Ever since the last update from StumbleUpon, every so often the tool bar disappears for no reason. If this is happening to you, uninstall the plug-in and then reinstall it. It will bring the bar back, and you do not have to set everything up again since your login information does not get deleted by uninstalling the bar.

Talkr: More than Blog Reading

Most people know of Talkr by the flag ship blog reader. Add talker to your blog site and have all of your text converted to an mp3 podcast. What many people don’t know about are the other FREE services liveonthe.net offers in addition to the blog reader:

Record.Talkr:A helpful little tool that you can use to record all incoming and outgoing audio on your machine.

Mail.Talkr: Don’t feel like typing. With this handy little download that plugs into Outlook or Outlook Express, you can record your message and send it in audio format!

Gamer.Talkr: Does your favorite MMO not offer integrated voice chat? Need a way to communicate outside of the game with guild members? Not only does this awesome tool let you talk instantly with up to 4o of your friends, you can embed it directly on your guild page. Keep the competition out with optional password protection!

Pushto.Talkr: Annoying phone calls or background conversations can ruin a voice chat quickly. This small tool lets you instantly turn your microphone settings all the way down before you let loose into a telemarketer or whine to your mom about taking out the trash.

Radio.Talkr: Your entire blog instantly in mp3 format. Step one: Paste your Feedburner feed url into the first box. Step two: Click the Generate Code button. Step Three: Copy and paste the new code onto any html page.

Media: Not only can you choose what radio station to listen to, you can take it with you to what ever site you build. Copy the code available below the player and BANG! Instant Radio on your website.

HELP! I can’t get into a website anymore!

Do you have a vender website at work that you have been using for years, and then all of a sudden last week you are left scratching your head as to why you cannot access it anymore?

Most websites involving companies that your business may be purchasing from have a default web page that you type your username and password into. After that a window pops up with all the information you need to make purchases and direct business.

Think back to last week (or insert your time period here). Did this problem start happening after you installed a fancy new toolbar from Google, or maybe Yahoo?

Both of these add ons for Internet Explorer and Firefox come with pop up blockers that are by default set to on. Remember that if you have the native IE or FireFox pop up blockers set to off, that little pop up window that use to come up on that familiar site is still going to get blocked by Yahoo or Google if you do not add that address to the safe list, or if you do not turn the block features off for that toolbar.

I have had many calls from people about this problem, and 95% of the time, Yahoo or Google tool bar is the culprit.

Air Native N7 Nike Shoe

After an independent study of 224 individuals, Nike found that on average the foot of a Native American is 3 times as wide and tall as a normal foot. Their answer: Air Native N7 – The first shoe designed specifically for the Native American. The shoe was reportedly “designed from the inside out for the comfort and health of the Native American foot.” It makes me wonder why ALL popular brand shoes can’t be designed that way and still sell for $42…

Auto Select Text Within a Text Box

***** Updated 9/24/2007 *****Thanks to Marko for pointing out an IE/Firefox issue. For those of you who already used this code, you may find out that the auto select is only working in Internet Explorer. To get it to work in both IE and Firefox, simply change < textarea name to read < textarea id. Those of you new to this post, please just follow the instructions below! Thank You.*****

Anyone who has changed their Myspace layout (prior to the built in layout editor) or copied code from a tutorial/code repository has run across a Html text box that auto selects all the text it is holding when ever the mouse is clicked inside it. It is a nice feature to have for any of your users and eliminates the mistake of not selecting all the code that needs to be copied.

One of my co-workers came to me yesterday and asked if I new how to get that feature to work, since getting our product Talkr onto your own website is done through copying and pasting code that we have available on an html page. It took a lot of searching, but after finding the right combination of words, I finally found out how to do it using some simple Java script.

I am going to assume that you have your Html page set up, and that you a text area/box placed and ready for the code. For the purpose of this example, I have named my text area/box “aa”.

First, copy this code and paste it in-between the and tags at the top of your Html page using your editor of choice:

< script type=”text/javascript”>
function SelectAll(id)
{
document.getElementById(id).focus();
document.getElementById(id).select();
}
</script >

Then find this information where you have your text area/box. It will look similar but not the same:

< textarea id=”aa” rows=7 cols=32 >

and paste this after the =”aa”

onClick=”SelectAll(‘aa’);”

so it should look like this after you are finished:

< textarea id=”aa” onClick=”SelectAll(‘aa’);” rows=7 cols=32 >

And thats it!

Since I have very little to no experience coding Java by hand, this solution took me much longer to find than it did to actually implement. Hope it helps!

Invoking root access under Ubuntu Server 7.04

To activate the root account, you have to set up the root password by typing:

sudo passwd root

and then you can type in the new password and get access to the root account. There are some other ways to do this, but for beginners who are learning as they go (like me!) this seems like the easiest.

Displaying Sample Code in a Web Browser.

One of the hardest things for beginner or casual web developers is figuring out how to tell a browser not to translate code and to display the code “as is” in the browser window. A quick work around for this is to encode the < and > symbols at the beginning and end of the block of code you want to display.

So if I want to display the code for this:

This is a Heading

I would need to replace all “<” tag with “&lt;” and the closing “>” with “&gt;”. So, in the code view of whatever editor you prefer to use, it would look like this.

&lt; h1&gt;This is a Heading&lt; /h1 &gt;
And the web browser will display it as this:

< h1>This is a Heading< /h1 >

I hope this first post has been helpful. For any questions, please feel free to contact me.