DBH Creative: Blog

Adobe Spry Menus

Dan — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:17:43 +0000

When I first started designing website around 1996 or so, I did not have fancy programs like Dreamweaver to guide me through the process. A typical session involved the Windows notepad, lots of “Save As” and refreshing in the browser. Here I am 14 years later and I love using Dreamweaver. It’s not my sole tool for designing websites. I still use free options when I feel the need. However, Dreamweaver makes certain things much easier. One of them is CSS/Spry menus.

The Spry menu is a very quick and handy way to add a fancy CSS menu to your site design and it works very well with one caveat. That would be Internet Explorer. IE manages to screw up an otherwise beautiful horizontal CSS menu by displaying the submenu items incorrectly. In a typical scenario the submenu would be displayed as a vertical list of items. IE would rather display this as a horizontal block of items. Now ideally the best solution would be to have the user view your site in Firefox or Chrome but that’s not going to happen. The easiest solution is to add the following line of code to your CSS page that links to the menu.

ul.MenuBarHorizontal li ul li{ clear: left; }

That’s it. Your menu should now appear correctly in all versions of IE.

Asus DR-900

Dan — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:22:49 +0000

Really this post has nothing to do with web design but I still like to bring some technology updates to the site when I can. I like e-readers but have yet to purchase one. For any news feeds or email on-the-go I use my Android phone but the new devices from ASUS may change my mind a bit as long as the price is decent.

ASUS has announced the upcoming release of the DR-900 e-reader. So far the specs look promising.

1024×768 screen resolution
WiFi (optional 3G as well)
2GB internal storage (plus an SD expansion slot)
USB port
3.5mm headphone jack
PDF, ePub, HTML and other formats
Support for the Kindle Store

I just hope the price is a bit more manageable than the other e-readers. I just do not travel enough to warrant spending nearly $300 on one of these. ASUS is know for making some good quality products at great prices, so I hope that they keep the trend with the DR series.

MySQL Backup in Windows

Dan — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:03:07 +0000

So you’ve spent the past few hours creating your new website and are ready to upload your files from your localhost to your web server. You upload your site files and everything seems fine but how do you get that pesky MySQL database over to the new server? If you are running a Windows machine, then this guide will help. The following steps are assuming that you already have a MySQL database and know its name the username and password.

Open the Windows Command Prompt.
Type cd\program files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.1\bin (keep in mind that you may be using a different version of MySQl and as such you should change the version number accordingly.
Press Enter
Type mysqldump -u -p db_name > db_name output file type (mysqldump -u root -p12345 db_name > db_name.txt)
Keep in mind that db_name=your db’s name and db_name output file type = the name and file extension you wish to use. You can also choose to backup the database with the SQL extension.
Press Enter
Depending on the database’s size, this action could take a few seconds or a minute.
Once completed, browse to C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.1\bin and locate the file.

It’s really as simple as that. You can now upload this TXT or SQL file to your server using the PHP import function.

C Town Bikes

Dan — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:04:44 +0000

Our latest site, www.ctownbikes.com, is now live. Drop by and give them some business. Spring is upon us and you could use a new bike or a bell.

Slow Android Phone

Dan — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:40:35 +0000

We here at DBH Creative love our Android phones. They just make organizing our clients and their projects so much easier. Like all electronics, they are not impervious to the dreaded lag. In this world of instant access, no one likes to push a button and wait even 3 seconds for a reaction. If you have a rooted, Android OS based phone, then there is a way to bring back the original zip of your device. You can delete a file called dalvik-cache from the system. Dalvik-cache is like a storage bin for application data in the AndroidOS and information is just piled up, new on top of old. By deleting the file, the OS can start fresh by rebuilding the file and in turn it removes those precious seconds lost. We know how frustrating that is.

Deleting Dalvik-Cache

This can only be completed on a rooted phone.

Go to the Terminal Emulator and enter the following
$ su
# cd /system/sd/dalvik-cache
# rm *
$ exit
# exit
Reboot your phone (this will take a bit longer than usual as the OS rebuilds the dalvik-cache file)

Enjoy your speedy Android phone again.

New Sites

Dan — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:00:43 +0000

Good morning everyone. We have been very busy here at DBH Creative since our launch and still have much more to work on. Here is a quick glance at what we have coming up on our website design dock:

C Town Bikes to go live in the next week
Drilling and Blasting to go live by mid-February
C4 Cycling to go live by mid-February
Washington Street Community Center to go live by the end of February

That is quite a list and we are very happy to work with these wonderful clients. We will also have a few tutorials coming up soon that will be posted on this blog. Mostly these are tricks that we have created and would like to pass along. Here is what we have in mind:

Setting up Drupal
Adding a Google Calendar and list of upcoming events to your site
Properly using PHP includes

We are also happy to announce that we have a Ruby on Rails developer in the house and will be implementing this is many new sites. Thanks for stopping by and check back soon as we will post our first tutorial within a few days.

Thanks,

Dan

We are live!

Dan — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 14:24:34 +0000

Greetings and welcome to the new site for DBH Creative. On the site you will find all the information that you need regarding our services. We are a full-service website design company that offers, in-house design, hosting and customer service. Have a look around the site and feel free to ask questions.

The blog will be updated at least once a week with news related to the company as well as website design tricks that we think you might find interesting. Make sure to check back regularly to see if we have answers to any of your questions.

Thanks for looking and we hope to work with you very soon.

-Dan