• Profile Views - Logon to MySpace and head to your profile's home page. Once there, look at the right-hand side of the page. It will be listed below "Your Network" and above "Last Login".
• Signup Date - Logon to MySpace and head to your profile's home page. Once there, look at the left-hand side of the page. Right under your Profile's default image will be a link to view your blog. Click on this link to view your blog and once there, scan the left-hand side for your Signup Date. It should be right under where you country of origin is listed.

Technorati: MySpace, Profile, Popular, Bulletin, Visits

  

DUDE!!!! On August 2nd at the X-Games in Los Angeles Jake Brown took his turn in the Big-Air contest and completely busted his ass. He pulled off a mean 720 before hitting the quarter pipe only to fall about 45 feet STRAIGHT DOWN. Jake totally gets up and walks off. Holy sheep shit batman!!!

Technorati: X-Games, Jake Brown, Big Air, Slam

  

A friend recently linked me to this video which is pretty much a compilation of some of the more popular videos that have circulated across the web over the past few years. Some will make you laugh, while others might make you cry.

This movie is free of gore and porn. It does feature some pretty harsh accidents though.

Technorati: Internet, Popular, Compilation, Videos, Movies, Crashes, Accidents, Stunts, Bloopers, Pain

  

As I have developed a good number of Joomla based sites here over the last few years, one of the things I often utilized was my Base Joomla Component Template. I’ve had this laying around for a while and figured it was time to release them to the world. I should have done this a long time ago. I just never really had the time or the platform to do so.

In all honesty, I’m a little behind the curve as the next iteration of Joomla is about to be released. By this I mean Joomla 1.5. I believe this install file will still work with this version but as of this posting, I am not certain. I imagine I will take a look at this fairly soon. So without further ado, grab the files here.

To use this, simply extract the archive and perform the following:

• Rename the files to your liking. I have placed a "xxx" everywhere in the file names where you would want to do this. A great tool for renaming files can be found at http://www.den4b.com/downloads.php?project=ReNamer.
• Open up every *.php file and replace "xxx" with the lower-case version of your component’s nomenclature.
• Open up every *.php file and replace "XXX" with the upper-case version of your component’s nomenclature. This is only utilized by the language functionality of the component.
• Open up the .xml file and edit it to your liking. More specifically, you will want to alter the following fields:
  • name
  • creationDate
  • author
  • authorEmail
  • authorUrl
  • description

Once you’ve edited the files, rearchive them and install via the back-end of your Joomla web-site.

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome!

Technorati: Joomla, Component, Template, Web Development, PHP, MySQL

  

When I set out to build my WordPress blog I knew that I would need a way to neatly display code. So I made my way to the plugins directory over at www.wordpress.org. After looking at a few plugins, I settled on Ryan McGeary’s WP-Syntax.

WP-Syntax provides clean syntax highlighting using GeSHi — supporting a wide range of popular languages. It supports highlighting with or without line numbers and maintains formatting while copying snippets of code from the browser.

I was pleasantly surprised with how well this plugin worked and with how good it made my code snippets look. Granted, this was until I tried to view the output in Internet Explorer. Big shocker there huh?

What was happening was the Pre tag wasn’t scrolling like I had configured it to. It would completely wreck my template’s formatting in that the Pre tags I was using would simply grow far too wide and end up displacing pieces of my template. Man this fired me up!

So I looked about on the internet for other possible solutions to the problem I was having. I didn’t really come up with much. A few people had some proprietary CSS settings that sort of worked but I really don’t like doing things this way. I’ll go ahead and quote this method in case you’d like to try it:

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pre {
	white-space: pre-wrap; 
	white-space: -moz-pre-wrap !important; 
	white-space: -pre-wrap; 
	white-space: -o-pre-wrap; 
	word-wrap: break-word;   
	width: 99%;
}

I found this in several different places so I can’t honestly say who it was that is ultimately responsible for this hack. Kudos to this man or woman I say! Apparently, this has helped a few people along the way.

Moving on… So all of a sudden I remembered that there is BBCODE - [CODE][/CODE] - that exists to handle this. So I figured why not take a look under the hood and see how it was they accomplished this. What I came up with was the following:

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pre {
	margin: 0px;
	padding: 0px;
	width: 465px;
	overflow: auto;
}

Basically, all that really took place was setting the overflow and the width attribute. Duh right? The problem was that I was trying to integrate this into the suggested configuration that WP-Syntax came with. I didn’t have much luck at first. Ryan’s suggested settings are as follows:

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.wp_syntax { 
      color: #100;
      background-color: #f9f9f9;
      border: 1px solid silver;
      margin: 0 0 1.5em 0;
      overflow: auto;
    }
 
    /* IE FIX */
    .wp_syntax { 
      overflow-x: auto;
      overflow-y: hidden;
      padding-bottom: expression(this.scrollWidth > this.offsetWidth ? 15 : 0);
    }
 
    .wp_syntax table {
      border-collapse: collapse;
    }
 
    .wp_syntax div, .wp_syntax td { 
      vertical-align: top;
      padding: 2px 4px;
    }
 
    .wp_syntax .line_numbers {
      text-align: right;
      background-color: #def;
      color: gray;
      overflow: visible;
    }
 
    /* potential overrides for other styles */
    .wp_syntax pre {
      margin: 0;
      width: auto;
      float: none;
      clear: none;
      overflow: visible;
    }

So after a while of tweaking and poking I came up with a happy middle ground that is ultimately what you are currently viewing on my blog. My configuration is as such:

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.wp_syntax {
	padding-bottom: expression(this.scrollWidth > this.offsetWidth ? 15 : 0);
	color: #100;
	margin: 0px;
	margin-bottom: 10px;
	padding: 0px;
}
 
.wp_syntax table {
	border-collapse: collapse;
}
 
.wp_syntax div, .wp_syntax td {
	vertical-align: top;
}
 
.wp_syntax .line_numbers {
	text-align: right;
	background-color: #def;
	color: gray;
}
 
pre {
	margin: 0px;
	padding: 0px;
	width: 465px;
	overflow: auto;
}
 
.code pre {
	background-color: #f9f9f9;
	border: 1px solid silver;
	padding: 0px;
	padding-left: 2px;
	padding-right: 2px;
	margin: 0px;
}
 
.line_numbers pre {
	padding: 0px;
	padding-left: 2px;
	padding-right: 2px;
	margin: 0px;
	width: auto;
}

This allows me to freely use the Pre tag on its own or through the use of the installed WP-Syntax Plugin. You may want to look at how Ryan’s Plugin outputs the resulting HTML to understand what’s going on here.

Is good? You like? I hope so… Let me know your thoughts on this if you have any.

Technorati: CSS, XHTML, Pre Tag, Pre, Tag, Code Formatting, Code Format, Code Display, Format, Display, WordPress, WP-Syntax, Template, Ryan McGreary

  

I had come up with a way to add drop shadows to images using CSS and a background image. I’d run across several methods on the internet and sort of frankensteined them together to form my own.

For a better an idea of what I am getting at, note the following 2 images:

Without Treatment	With Treatment

Pretty spiffy eh? Let me give you the code that creates this effect…

The CSS

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.img_wrap_outer {
	float: left;
	background: url( ../images/shadow.gif ) no-repeat bottom right;
	margin: 5px;
}
.img_wrap_inner {
	float: left;
	background-color: #FFFFFF;
	border: 1px solid #a9a9a9;
	padding: 12px;
	position: relative;
	left: -5px;
	top: -5px;
}

The HTML

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<div class="img_wrap_outer">
         <div class="img_wrap_inner">
                  <img src="http://www.nothingproductive.com/wp-content/images/kitty_schlurp.jpg" border="0"  />
          </div>
</div>

The background image: shadow.gif

You may have issues caused by the float property of the outer & inner divs but nothing a “clear: both” can’t handle.

So I hope this will help you in your graphic-design endeavors. It took me a while to come up with this and have it work across all of the more popular browsers (IE 5.5/6/7, Firefox, and Opera).

By all means leave me some comments if you have them, I’d love to hear from ya!

Technorati: HTML, CSS, CSS Picture Frame, CSS Drop Shadow, Picture Frame, Drop Shadow, Shadow

  

Well, this is the first post of my new blog. Over the years I’ve posted random stuff here, there, and everywhere with regards to the internet. Along the way, I think some of it has been useful (maybe even amusing to some). So for many reasons other than my ego, I’ve decided to go ahead and start amassing all of my random thoughts here at nothingproductive.com.

By trade I’m a Linux/Unix Systems Administrator but have also worked as PHP/MySQL Web Developer. This blog will most likely focus on technology related issues but I’ll most likely wander about in the blogoshere topic-wise and will end up posting about a whole slew of incredibly interesting stuff. haha… We’ll see right?

So anyway, if ANYONE is reading this know that I appreciate it and hope to see more of you. Let me know if you ever find anything here useful or even amusing. Hell, even if you just wanna sound off with something ignorant, by all means go ahead.

Thanks for dropping in, enjoy!

Technorati: Intro to Blogging, Introduction, Blogging, Hello Word