Food for thought
No matter what your job, skills or position in life, critical thinking is a useful and arguably necessary trait that everyone should develop. However, much like common sense or kindness, few people believe they need more of it or need to practice having it. For those of you who enjoy moving forward in your goals, learning to think for yourself and come to your own conclusions will help you when it comes to making tough decisions…because seriously, why let others dictate your career path, friends or passions? Why let advertisers define who and what you are, when you are more than capable?
Funny: wrong website blocked
We have the horrible Barracuda Filter in place on our network here at work. This isn’t the first time it has blocked one of our very own websites, but this is the first time I have remembered to take a screen capture to mark the event. Schaffs Angus Valley can’t be visited by anyone in this building, because “The Web site you are trying to access has been blocked by the Barracuda Web Filter because it is in the Spam category, access to which has been blocked by your system administrator.”
Seriously? They built the contact forms we use on these sites. Perhaps if we were granted access to Coldfusion or the ASP.net framework, we could create a better contact form. So, for the moment, it isn’t our fault that the spammers can crawl the page and auto-fill the contact us form. We’re blocking the very sites we’re responsible for allowing to send spam in the first place. Hmm…is this considered irony or just sad?
Hit the image for a close-up. Enjoy! I know I did.
New site designs created
For the past few weeks I have been designing some new looks to add to our style library. I managed to design, get approved and post several new ones. Some of my recent designs:
I still firmly believe I am a web developer, not a web designer, but my job responsibilities include creating designs. In an attempt to stretch my skills, I focused more on typography and color palettes than I have in the past. With the next few sets in the future I’m going to try to put more movement into my work as well. I can tell that my design work has matured, but I harbor no false illusions: I am far removed from the skill set of actual designers.
Contribute CS3 Line Break Bug Fix
I’ve been working on a project for the Editorial department for a few weeks now. They wanted the ability to edit content and since Contribute came with our Creative Suite 3 packages, I tried it. Despite all of the testing I did beforehand, someone caught a bug I didn’t notice before: the keyboard shortcut for Line Breaks doesn’t work. Like Dreamweaver, it should just be the default 
(Shift+Return). For some reason the key bindings are wrong (or missing) for Mac OS X, Contribute CS3.
An easy fix explained in this newsgroup took care of my problem. It isn’t a permanent solution, but I don’t have time to delve into multitude of files to find the piece of code that has the logic error.
Quick and Dirty Fix
If you don’t want to read the newsgroup messages and you aren’t picky about the keyboard shortcut configuration, just follow these instructions.
- Quit Contribute.
- Open a finder window. Go to Applications -> Adobe Contribute CS3 -> Configuration -> Menus.
- Duplicate or back up ccmenus.xml.
- Add the new ccmenus.xml file. (Hit OK to replace the file.)
- Start Contribute and open a page to test the new keyboard shortcut.
- Hit
(Cmd+Shift+Return) to insert a Line Break.
