arcster.com Blog » Web Design

Open Letter to Yahoo Web Hosting

arcster — Wed, 06 May 2009 01:35:09 +0000

Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
ATTN: Web hosting customer service
Dear Yahoo:
I am writing about the failure of Yahoo Web Hosting to upgrade from PHP 4. I feel it indicates a lack of interest in customers who are actually paying for service. Yahoo offers all kinds of great services for free, like email and the YUI library – and don’t get me wrong, I’m very pleased with them. But I pay $12 a month for my web site and I have to work with seriously outdated technology.
I chose Yahoo because it’s a brand that I trust. I would rather pay Yahoo than some of the questionable web hosting services out there. But I am disappointed. I have repeatedly used your existing customer feedback mechanisms to request that you upgrade your PHP support, but nothing has happened. So I am now writing a formal letter.
I realize the upgrade is not trivial, and some web sites may break, causing customer service complaints. But I think people who are sophisticated enough to code PHP will be able to manage. I would be willing to be a beta tester.
Thank you for your consideration.

Serving .ics files from a webserver

arcster — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 19:57:40 +0000

If you store static ical files with a .ics extension on a webserver and would like to give users the ability to click a link and add the events to their calendars, you may need to jump a couple hurdles.

If the server hosting the files doesn’t recognize the vcal format, it will simply display the .ics files as plain text. To prevent this, you can try one of the following:

Have your server admin add the vcal MIME type to the server settings.
Use a scripting language like PHP that will allow you to set the header of the ics files to download. There are plenty of tutorials on how to do this.
On Apache, put the ics files in a dedicated folder with an .htaccess file. Your htaccess file should have the following:

#ForceType text/x-vCalendar AddType text/x-vCalendar .ics #Header set Content-Disposition "attachment; filename=mycal.ics"

And that’ll do it!

Google Finance

arcster — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:12:51 +0000

Complaining about Google reminds me of the characters in Life of Brian complaining about the Romans: (apart from free unlimited email, mapping the world, and making it possible to find everything on the Internet instantly, what has Google ever done for us?)

Still, I have a small complaint about Google Finance. You can batch import transaction information, but it will not accept dates. No how, no way. Without dates, you really have no idea how well your investments are performing.
I (naturally) Googled the issue and found very few complaints. Maybe that’s because Google Finance reportedly isn’t very widely used, at least compared to Yahoo!

Another day in the life of a ColdFusion drone

arcster — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:55:18 +0000

This may be of use to the handful of people in the universe who: 1. use ColdFusion; 2. have no direct access to their Coldfusion server; 3. need to manipulate PowerPoint on the server; and 4. aren’t using .NET

OK, the three of you who are still reading may continue.

So I’m trying to do this via COM and ColdFusion’s cfobject tag.

First, I waited a couple months for the people who run the server to get PowerPoint installed on the server. Then I dusted off some old code from CF Comet.

My code looked like this:




presentationsCollection = objPPT.Presentations;

myPresentation = presentationsCollection.Open("D:xxxmaingetppt.ppt", False, False, False);

newpresentation = objPresentation.SaveAS("D:xxxmainnew.ppt",11, True);
// Close a presentation

objPresentation.Close();

// Quit PowerPoint

objPPT.Quit();

Here was my error the first time I ran the script. (Note: path and file names have been altered)
An exception occurred when executing a Com method. The cause of this exception was that: AutomationException: 0x80004005 - PowerPoint could not open the file. in 'Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003'.
Updated April 2009

Thank you Todd for noticing that somehow my posting got completely botched in the copy and paste process. Here is a working example of a ColdFusion file that uses COM to open a powerpoint pre-loaded onto the server, add data, and then save the new file into a location on the server where the user can download it

Also available as a text file

some query to populate chart

PowerPoint Creator

TYPE=”com”

NAME=”objPPT”

CLASS=”PowerPoint.Application”

ACTION=”connect”>

TYPE=”com”

NAME=”objPPT”

CLASS=”PowerPoint.Application”

ACTION=”create”>

kudos to

http://www.cfregex.com/cfcomet/forum/ViewThread.cfm?ThreadID=F09104FE-1802-684D-687BF5A8897E7E1F

—>

//open as readonly

myPresentation = presentationsCollection.Open(VARIABLES.basefilepath, True, False, False);

//The presentation object has a slides collection

if (isDebugMode()) writeOutput(“Creating collection”);

CollSlides = myPresentation.Slides;

//The first param defines the number of slides.

//The second parameter defines the slide layout

//Figured out blank by trial and error

//blank = 12

//blank with title = 11

ObjSlide = CollSlides.Add(1, 11);

// This chunk of code creates a title. I know it’s a lot just to create a title, but Powerpoint has a lot of classes.

slideShape = ObjSlide.Shapes;

newShape = slideShape.Title;

myTextFrame = newShape.TextFrame;

myTextRange = myTextFrame.TextRange;

myTextRange.Text = “This is the Title”;

// This is how to add more text to the slide.

bodyShape = SlideShape.AddTextBox(1, 200, 300, 700, 100);

bodyShapeTextFrame = bodyShape.TextFrame;

bodyShapeTextRange = bodyShapeTextFrame.TextRange;

bodyShapeTextRange.Text = “This is some additional text”;

//add table

//http://skp.mvps.org/ppttable.htm

//AddTable(NumRows, NumColumns, Left, Top, Width, Height)

//Somewhere I read you couldn’t stack your arguments (this.that.theother) more than two deep

//This doesn’t seem to be true.

//Define the most rows that can display on a page

imaxrows = 10;

//How many rows returned by query?

irowct = Query.RecordCount;

//have to account for record count of 0, or we’ll have issues

//note the nify use of integer division and mod

if (irowct GT imaxrows)

inumslides = funcnumslides(irowct, imaxrows);

function funcnumslides(i1, i2){

inumint = i1 \ i2;

inummod = i1 mod i2;

if (inummod GT 0)

return inumint + 1;

else

return inumint;

}

ObjSlide = CollSlides.Add(inumslides, 11);

bodyShape = SlideShape.AddTable(imaxrows,1,30,110,660,320);

oTable = bodyShape.Table;

oCell = oTable.Cell(1,1);

try {

otext = oCell.Shape.TextFrame.TextRange;

rsltText = Query.RecordCount;

otext.Text = rsltText;

}

catch(Any excpt)

{

WriteOutput(“#excpt.Message#”);

}

newpresentation = myPresentation.SaveAS(VARIABLES.newfilepath, 11, True);

// Close a presentation

myPresentation.Close();

//Quit PowerPoint

objPPT.Quit();

Your file is ready for #VARIABLES.newurl#”>download.
On opening you will be asked to allow macros. Click OK.

What’s up with webmaster-showcase?

arcster — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 02:13:27 +0000

I’m happy with my Yahoo web hosting, but how did webmaster-showcase come to be sanctioned by Yahoo as a reference tool for newbie webmasters?

My site is no beauty, so I’ll leave you to form your own opinion on the aesthetics of the thing. But I love the way she blithely accepts user input with no validation.

And Yahoo thinks this site has something to teach us about running a web site?