Tips 'n Tricks

Boost productivity with Isolator

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It doesn't launch as another app in your dock, instead it sits in your (albeit overcrowded) menu bar, and provides only a few sparse settings - the background color to use, whether to make the backdrop opaque (so you can see the desktop underneath it), whether it should start when you log in or activate automatically, and what key shortcut should activate/deactivate it.

...Having only used it for a short while I can't proclaim how it has saved me x hours per week or saved the lives of thirty-three cats, but even after my limited use it looks to be an app well worth using.

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Access queries as structs in ColdFusion

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Did you know that in ColdFusion you don't have to loop through a query to access specific elements of the query?... Instead of having to go through the hassle of looping an array just to find one field, if you know the field and row number you can just do this: <cfset variable = query[column_name][row_number] /> e.g.: <cfset variables.product_name = variables.q_products[name][5] /> Thanks to Ben Nadel for that.

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IE6 and the min-height CSS attribute

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There's a really useful attribute in CSS called min-height that lets you set the minimum height an element should be displayed as; this is often used to make two boxes appear the same height even if one has less content than the other. Well, Firefox, Opera and Safari support it but Internet Explorer 6 and older don't. Luckily there's a really simple work-around for it, you simply add a defintion to your CSS that browsers other than IE will ignore and set the height to the same as the min-height, e.g.:
[source:css]

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Tip: Passing a shopping cart to Paypal Website Payments Standard

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Here's a little tip for anyone using Paypal's Website Payments Standard system for electronic payments on their shopping cart. Their API allows you to pass in a complete shopping cart using a series of form fields listing the items, quantities, etc, as you'd expect. There's one tiny little detail that isn't explicitly stated - the button that you use to submit to the API must not have a name attribute otherwise it will fail. Here's a fully working example to better explain:

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