Recently I had the dreaded “but it doesn’t work in IE6” conversation with a client.

Usually all it takes to make a simple site work with IE6 is altering the widths of divs (as IE6 seems to treat divs as wider than they are) but this one was a real head scratcher

For a start – nothing was appearing inside the grey box – a div I had created to hold all the field information from the system.

Some tweaking with showing and hiding stylesheets lead me to believe it was definitely a CSS problem.

Eventually I discovered that if I made the div background-color:transparent everything showed up okay. Hmmm

I finally discovered that if I gave the containing div a z-index of -1 it would display the background colour behind the rest of the text as intended.

But where were my image buttons? The site had image buttons that were positioned absolutely to appear at the bottom righ of each of these divs. They were nowhere to be seen in IE6! Even if I gave them a really high z-index.

The only way to make them appear was turn off their absolute postioning and make them postion:static.

Ok so now they appeared – but I couldn’t click on them! Grrr!

Hmm – much tawling through the Net proved fruitless – it was only with much experimenting that I discovered if I took OFF the postion:relative I had put on the containing div it mean that the image buttons were magically clickable again!

Taking off the position:relative also meant that I could lose the z-index:-1 I had added earlier.

The site now works in IE6 but doesn’t look exactly the same in IE6 as a normal browsers as the image buttons are aligned left and not right

Well tbh I can live with that – and if any IE6 user complains – they know where they can stick their useless old non-complaint browser don’t they!

I have been puzzling how to retrieve an RSS feed into a page of another webiste using classic ASP (in PHP I can heartily recommend the use of SimplePie)

I found some code which allowed me to get the list of items and links using XSLT to transform the retrieved XML – but had to do a bit more delving to find a way of dispalying the image thumbnails that you get in the more advanced RSS feeds.

Below is my solution:

This is the XSL stylesheet – call rssStyle.xslt:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ ?>
<xsl:stylesheet version=”1.0″ xmlns:xsl=”http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform” xmlns:media=”http://search.yahoo.com/mrss“>
<xsl:output method=”html” omit-xml-declaration=”yes” />
<xsl:template match=”/”>
<xsl:for-each select=”rss/channel/item[position()&lt;=3]“>
<div class=”newsItem”>
<a>
<xsl:attribute name=”href”>
<xsl:value-of select=”link” />
</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:attribute name=”target”>_blank</xsl:attribute>
<img>
<xsl:attribute name=”src”>
<xsl:value-of select=”media:thumbnail/@url” disable-output-escaping=”yes” />
</xsl:attribute>
</img>
</a>

<h3 class=”highlight”><a>
<xsl:attribute name=”href”>
<xsl:value-of select=”link” />
</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:attribute name=”target”>_blank</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:value-of select=”title” disable-output-escaping=”yes” />
</a>
</h3>

<p>
<xsl:value-of select=”description” disable-output-escaping=”yes” />
</p>

</div>

</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

This bits Darmed ar det ju inte sagt att en Casino http://s4gambling.com/se/ bonus vid registrering ar en dalig ide. in bold are respectively

1) The neamespace decalration to allow you to read teh media:thumbnail element

2) The test that allows you to show only the first 3 stories from feed

3) The code that actually shows the thumbnail image

Here is the code for the ASP page that shows the news feed – I”m using it as an include in another ASP page – but you can just get it to create the whole html page by uncommneting out the lines that write the header and footer of teh HTML page:

<%
response.ContentType=”text/html”
dim objXML, objXSL
set objXML=server.CreateObject(“MSXML2.DOMDocument”)
set objXSL=server.CreateObject(“MSXML2.DOMDocument”)
objXML.async=False
objXSL.async=False
objXML.setProperty “ServerHTTPRequest”,true
objXML.load “http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsplayer_uk_edition/business/rss.xml“
objXSL.load Server.MapPath(“rssStyle.xslt”)
“response.write “<html><head><title>RSS Feed Reader</title></head><body>”
response.write “<h2 id=””busNewsHead””>Latest Business News</h2>”
response.write “<p class=””small””>&copy; BBC News 2009</p>”
response.write “<div id=””businessNews””>”
response.write objXML.transformNode(objXSL)
response.write “</div>”
“response.write “</body></html>”
set objXML=nothing
set objXSL=nothing
%>

Really useful bit of SQL that allows you to find and replace any bit of text within a WordPress post or page. Very useful for whenn migrating a WordPress database.

UPDATE `wp_posts` SET post_content = replace(post_content,'http://www.kineticpulse.co.uk/wordpress25/'
,'http://www.101datasolutions.co.uk/');

Also the follow SQL statement can be used if the guids of all  the posts are still pointing to the old domain:

 

UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, 'http://www.old-domain.com','http://www.new-domain.com');