New Circle Blog

iFrame, captcha, IE7

Lin — Tue, 12 May 2009 05:31:01 +0000

What does this title mean? iFrame+captcha+IE7 …. means …. trouble! We have a small php application, pulled into a .NET site through iFrame. Everything was great until we added a captcha image verification. No Cache At first, the captcha didn’t always work. So we put in code to tell the browser not to cache our php page: <META http-equiv=”Cache-Control” [...]

Switch to gmail from POP3 (Outlook)

Lin — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 06:29:48 +0000

A few months after I switched from POP3 mail to gmail, I wrote an article “Gmail - what, why and how“. Two years has passe since then, I’d like to share more thoughts of this switch. Is gmail good at organizing email? My answer to this question is “yes”. Similar to many other business owners, I receive several hundreads of [...]

Track PDF file downloads

Lin — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 05:54:37 +0000

A common way of tracking how website pages being used is through Google Analytics. You just need to bury a piece of javascript code towards the end of your web pages. What if you have PDF files or other MP3, or video files for people to download and you like to know how many downloads each [...]

Converting MySQL Data from Latin1 to GB2312 (or other encoding)

Lin — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 03:32:29 +0000

I was moving our GoSeeUS.cn website from one hosting to another and need to transfer the database over as well. Database export and import both went smoothly but the Chinese characters were all scrambled on the new hosting server. After some research I found that the old hosting used MySql 5.0 and had the encoding set [...]

Launch a “custom-built” website within 15 hours

Lin — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 20:06:53 +0000

We had a business idea of aggregating all musumes free days information and displayed in a calendar, can be filtered or searched on by city. Input information - free date, time, name and location of museum display information - filter by city, in an calendar, easy navigation Grabbing the domain name is the easy part but as simple [...]

Joomla! 1.5 Installation Notes

Lin — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 05:03:10 +0000

After much debating (with myself), I decided to install Joomla!1.5 (instead of 1.0.15) for Diveheart new website. Joomla! 1.5 has been out for a while now. I liked the new UI but have been concerned with not enough extensions are on 1.5 yet. Checked on Joomla! site and made sure VirtueMart, Events Calendar etc. are [...]

Website Grader

Lin — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 03:54:03 +0000

Inspired by the Internet Marketing Kit by Hubspot, I spent last two days tuning newcircleconsulting.com, and moved up it’s grade at www.websitegrader.com from 81 to 90 within 48 hours. Woo hoo! (www.newcircleconsulting.com gets 88 only, 2 points lower than newcircleconsulting.com, not sure why these two are different.) Here is what I did: Reduced title tag to less than [...]

CSS Drop Shadows

Lin — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 05:05:01 +0000

Per request from a client, we need to create some text with CSS based drop shadows that works across all major browsers. After some research and comparison, we implemented the technique by Scott Jehl. http://www.scottjehl.com/v7/index.php/process/html_text_drop_shadows The CSS is very simple … no filters and hacks. Yes this solution works beautifully across IE, FF on PC, as well as [...]

robots.txt validator (checker)

Lin — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 03:24:50 +0000

I created a robots.txt but was not sure whether the syntax was correct or not. I searched and found this nice online tool that checks the validity of robots.txt file: http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml Very easy to use.

phpBB3 login problem (and solution)

Lin — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 04:30:22 +0000

I recently encountered a problem with a phpBB3 site. After the site was moved around (from one domain to another), all the sudden nobody can log in to the site any more. To be accurate, log in itself actually worked, and I could see my user name displayed on the top right after I logged [...]