Where's the "Any" key? New Tech Support Thread

[mixed cats]

I just got Adobe CS3. I am going to teach myself Dreamweaver to redo my "real" website, because a) I killed most of it two years ago with the intention of fixing and relaunching, but never did, and b) somebody called me Saturday and offered me the amazing sum of FIFTY DOLLARS for my domain because he clearly thinks I'm not doing anything with it.

I searched the boards a bit but I'm too lazy to read alllll the posts: should I bother learning Dreamweaver, or should I use something else? What are some good resources?

[coldforge]

dreamweaver is pretty painful and generally teaches bad practices.

[mixed cats]

Does bad practice really matter if I'm only doing it for myself? Web design is not an arena in which I aspire to perfection

[diesel_powered]

I dunno, I learned Dreamweaver a number of years ago and it felt like a pretty big waste of time. At least back then, Dreamweaver wasn't very user friendly and it took way too long to learn for the few benefits you got from it. Plus, Dreamweaver's file management system is overkill for a site as small as you're probably interested in building and if you were interested in building something large (i.e. Amazon), it would be better to switch to a content management system.

[mixed cats]

I learned it in like 1999 or 2000 or something, but then didn't re-pirate it when I got a new computer after that, so it's been a lonnnng time.

The last incarnation of my website was cobbled together by an unfinished bit of php my friend wrote that was meant to generate pages of galleries through a certain file naming convention (but as it was unfinished, everything ended up on one page with no thumbnailing), plus quite a bit of awful html I'd banged out in Notepad. The php gallery thing is now finished but it would require me to copy or rename all my files, which is shitty.

Basically I have hundreds of images of my work that I'd like to have in galleries by date
wah wah wah. I'll figure something out. Or let it sit for another two years. WHATEVER

[coldforge]

you can try indexhibit

[diesel_powered]

Yeah, indexhibit is great. Wordpress has all manner of functionality like that as well.

I'd manage your images through the PHP route. If you take a second to figure out Bridge in CS3, you can use it to adjust all your organization to fit your friend's PHP system. There are also a million different little renaming utilities that you can use to adjust your filenames once you have your images organized. Hell, if you're on OSX, you Automator is a pretty easy way of renaming things en masse. If you're pirating, Lightroom has some brilliant organizational tools and can fart out image galleries really easily. I'll tell you this, reorganizing your files is easier and a more productive use of your time than learning Dreamweaver.

[mixed cats]

my problem with renaming is that i've got these files posted ALL OVER THE PLACE and would have to either settle for broken links on other sites, go back and edit all of the hotlinks, orrrr make duplicate copies of the old files. and so on.

[diesel_powered]

Bleh. Make copies. Use it as an excuse to get yourself organized. It'll save you even more work later. I mean, I'm assuming you're hosting your own site. Just get everything on your own server. That way you don't have to worry about somebody else's site crapping out and breaking a bunch of links on your site.

I just had to get all my images in some kind of order, too. It was a drag, but it didn't take nearly as long as I thought it would and now it's super easy to find things. I even found some stuff I thought I was missing.

[mixed cats]

Everything is already on my webspace; I don't use flickr or anything for hosting. The files are organized by the date I made the object the photo is of - for the past two years it's by month, so like, anything I make this month gets put under squishythings.com/september2009/ But prior to that I was putting things up by the semester I was in school, so there's /fall2006/ and /spring2007/ etc.

What I mean is that since I haven't really been using my space for anything except as an imagehost/blog for the past couple of years, *other* sites where I've posted my images (livejournal, messageboards, etc) will become dead links. And everything on the blog portion.

The naming convention for the php thing was using numbered prefixes in the filename to determine which page the image would go on, like 01_imagename.jpg is on page 1, 02_imagename.jpg is on page 2, etc, which I guess would be easy to automate but blah

[diesel_powered]

Ah. Well, that's a pain in the ass then. Just duplicate them.

[davy]

So D's Vaio got water damaged on Friday. It was dead as Dillinger Friday night, but two days of drying out and it's good as new. Vaios are apparently a lot more resilient than Macbooks.

Certainly more resilient than they look, anyway. I've had mine not quite a year and it's done well. Of course, there haven't been any physical catastrophes either.

[alex]

So the headphone jack of my iPod Touch is broken - you have to hold it in a very, very particular (and very, very still) position in order to be able to hear proper stereo sound. Thing is still under warranty, and the times I had it fall to the ground while cycling left no visible marks, so there's a bit of a chance that it'd get fixed/replaced for free (though I'm not sure of it). I guess what I'm wondering now - and yeah, this is silly, but still - is whether I need to purge the thing before bringing it in for fixing? If they just replace the jack, it'd be much easier if I didn't have to refill it again afterwards, but I'm not legally entitled to some of the music on there, does that make it advisable to just clean it all up or will nobody give a damn?

[diesel_powered]

Nobody cares, that's not their job. And they'll probably wipe it anyway.

[alex]

Yeah, that's what I figured, on both counts. Thanks.

[diesel_powered]

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they just recycle it and give you a new one.

[alex]

If they just took my old iPod, check it on the spot, say "yup, that's broken" and hand me a new one, I'd love them forever and ever. I've had this problem since late July (though it is progressively getting worse), and haven't gotten it resolved yet because the amount of time spent on trains (and country roads while cycling) makes the prospect of having no music to listen to kind of daunting. So I keep thinking, "oh, I'll still keep it for this one trip and get it repaired next week", and then the same thing next week, and so on. Current plan: next Tuesday (so that I still have it on tonight's trip to Eindhoven for a concert, this weekend's travels to visit the boy and Monday's bicycle trip to my piano lessons).

[diesel_powered]

I'll be interested to see what happens. From the teardowns on iFixit, they don't look like they're particularly fixable.

[auto-da-fey]

Last week, I tried to install Adobe Flash Player on my office computer (to see some blog's shots from the naked bike ride, an important work-related undertaking), but it wouldn't let me because apparently I lack the administrative capacity to install things on the computer. So I shrugged and abandoned the effort, saving it for home.

Since then, though, sometimes when I click on things I get a "Run As" window that comes up, with a box to check for "current user" that says "Protect my computer and data from unauthorized program activity" and leaves me no choice but to click; it seems to follow a brief flash of Adobe Download Manager.

I'm not sure that's enough detail--I'll be away from my computer for a few hours now--but anyone know how I can make it stop? is there something I can uninstall? As far as I can tell, I never actually installed anything new to begin with, but I might be wrong.

[YojimboMonkey]

What is your OS?  there might just be a shortcut in the Startup menu you can delete, click the Start button, go to Programs | Startup, find the Adobe Download Manager icon, right-click it and choose Delete

[auto-da-fey]

thanks Jim--but no dice, unfortunately. it's Windows XP, if that matters. I tried both Run and Search for Adobe Download Manager too, but the thing shows up nowhere--except when it attempts to run when I click on certain things and then gives me that box I mentioned.

really it's a minor nuisance at most, but if you've got any further ideas, I'll try them.

[YojimboMonkey]

Start | Run | type in "msconfig" and hit the Enter key, see if it'll let you run that utility, look for the adobe updater in the Startup tab

[auto-da-fey]

dammit, I can't run that without administrator privileges, which I apparently lack.

so basically I'm stuck with some half-downloaded program that I neither have authority to fully install nor authority to terminate, is kind of my take on the issue.

[YojimboMonkey]

stick with me.  what browser were you using when you tried to download it?

Also will it let you run the Task Manager?  (either Ctrl-Alt-Del then click Start Task Manager, or you can right-click the taskbar and click Start Task Manager)

[ieatrats]

Not that technical, but can anyone tell me where to get clear double cd cases?  The ones that are as thick as a normal cd case, not the old school ones.  My Burma reissue cases are ruined and they've been sitting in a neat pile for more than year and somehow Vs is scratched already.

Never seen 'em at best buy, the dollar store, record stores, etc.