So, embarrassingly I have been putting up with this for years and just never could quite put a finger on how to handle it.  The situation is this: You have some sort of content management system (CMS) setup for your client that you have made homebrew (or not maybe).  You’ve painstakingly put time into security, format, ease of use, etc and you hand them the rains. Two hours later you get a call that they have some ‘weird code’ on their about page. You look and you realize they have copied and pasted some special chars from Word.  What to do?

Maybe this is the jerk way of handling it but I always had users copy and paste from word into a flat text file, then copy and paste into the form.  Or, I would use TinyMCE in the CMS and have their Cleaner plugin handle it. Most of the time that seems to work but not always. Today, I hit the wall on this problem with CakePHP and had to figure it out. Essentially, it all comes down to page and database encoding.

The short explanation: Set everything to UTF-8 at the beginning of your project. The long explanation (which is just a rehash of this awesome post at missingfeatures.com):

1. Set your mySQL database up with UTF-8 encoding.  This includes:
   1. The database itself
   2. The tables
   3. Every field (watch out for this one in phpmyadmin because if you have already created your table you’ll need to specifically change the collation for all text, varchar, and char fields)
2. In your layouts:
   1. Put this at the top:<?php header(’Content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8′); ?>
      
   2. Put this in the head: <?php echo $html->charset(’utf-8′); ?>
3. In your database configuration file (app/config/database.php):
   1. Add this to your default database array: ‘encoding’ => ‘utf8′

This puts everything on the same encoding plane and allows for characters like: ü ß ☠ ☮ ☯ ♠ Ω ♤ ♣ ♧ ♥ ♡ ♦ ♢ ♔ ♕ ♚ ♛ ⚜ ★ ☆ ✮ ✯ ☄ ☾ ☽ ☼ ☀ ☁ ☂ ☃ ☻ ☺ ☹ ۞ ۩

example

265/70R17

(2*({sidewall (ex: 265)}/25.4)*({ratio (ex: 70)/100))+{wheel size (ex: 17)}

This is a great comparison table for lightboxs that get you just what you need. Personally, I’m currently a prototype guy and go with lightbox++ 90% of the time. Next site I do I’m forcing myself to use some jquery to get more of a taste.

http://planetozh.com/projects/lightbox-clones/

For some reason I had a really tough time finding a quick and easy tutorial on how to add a .mp3 to to an AS3 project and lower the volume.

First, import your .mp3 to the library and set a linkage classname.

Right click on the .mp3 you have imported to your library and select 'Linkage'. Essentially, this allows you to address the .mp3 as a class.

You can then address it with the following code:

If you ever need to use curly braces in a Smarty template use the following code:

… or …

Ever need to block everyone but you from seeing a site you’re working on.

Just remember to change the IP above with your IP so you can see what you’re doing!

Found this uber-useful table for CSS -> Javascript conversions over at hardwar.org.  I copied it here because it was kinda buried and just in case it disappears.

Usage

Internet Explorer

document.all.div_id.style.JS_property_reference = “new_CSS_property_value”;

Older Netscape’s (4.7 and earlier)

document.div_id.JS_property_reference = “new_CSS_property_value”;

Netscape 6.0+ and Opera (and other Mozilla)

document.getElementById(div_id).style.JS_property_reference = “new_CSS_property_value”;

Note the use of parentheses instead of square brackets in newer Mozilla’s “getElementById()” reference.

If you have more than a couple thousand records you want to geocode all at once we found a great service from USC’s GIS department that allows you to geocode records in an Access database.  It’s not terribly fast but we were able to geocode nearly 200,000 records in a couple of days. Just make sure your computer isn’t set to go to sleep an hour after you step away from the computer…. :/

https://webgis.usc.edu/Default.aspx