HTML Link-Button

To create an HTML button which is actually a link rather than a form submit, put the following OUTSIDE of a form area. <input type="submit" value="Checkout Now" class="button" onClick="document.location=’http://whatever’"></input>

MySQL Freeing Space

When you delete records in MySQL, the table is not compressed - the space is left free for future inserts. In order to see how much “claimed by not used” space you have, use “Show Table Status” (e.g. “show table status from jssdatabase), and check the “Data_free” column. To “compress” the DB, use “Optimize Table” (e.g. “optimize table jss_carts").

XP Woes

I wasted beaucoup time over the last month with my XP Professional explorer “hanging” for minutes at a time. This happened in two main situations: when hitting the start menu key, and when right clicking on a folder. A google post finally tipped me off to the problem - the PGP service. Deinstalling PGP fixed the problem immediatly. Note sure if it was a free version I was using, but I saw on deinstall that the version number was 8.0.3.
NOTE: Upgrading to 8.1 fixed the problem. There are rumors (even though the source code for the 8.x version is published) that there are back doors in PGP for the government, but this appears to be only rumors. Phil Zimmerman (creator of PGP) says that all versions prior to 7.03 were free of back doors, but he does not know about later versions (he left the company).

What is my ip?

Not sure what IP you’re connecting to the internet with? Try WhatIsMyIp.

.NET decimal issues

so parsing would go like:
double dbl = double.Parse("1234.56″,
System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

And when you need to get your string from the double, you can do the
same thing in “reverse”:
string s =
dbl.ToString(System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

JShop Server - Referring URL Notes

Just did some research on Referring URLs, and thought I’d share what I found.

First, all the info below assumes that JSS is able to pick up the referring URL. This is not always the case, based on what browser is used, what other things the user has on their computer (e.g. Norton Internet Security http://www.symantec.com/sabu/nis/nis_pe/ can filter this out), and (I believe) how the server is set up. OK, the rest of the info assumes that JSS can pick up the referring URL.

To find what external links the customers are coming from…
- Go to Admin area / Log Section / General Options
- Set “Enable Visitor Logging” to “on”
- “Ignore Referrers From Reports” must include your site’s URL (see docs)
For visitors that arrive after this change, you can see what link they came from by going to admin / log section, check “Referring URL” in the “Select Reports” section, and then click on the “show reports” button. NOTE: “Direct/Unknown” are visitors that either type your URL directly, or cases where JSS is not able to pick up what the referring URL is.

To find out what orders come from a Referring URL, open admin / orders. Open up the details for an order (by clicking the order number in the column headed “Order"). At the bottom, you’ll find the “Referring Site” where the order came from.

NOTE: this info is only collected when creating a new shopping cart. To force a new shopping cart on your machine, clean out your existing cookies before clicking on the external link. I IE, you do this by going to the tools menu, Internet Options, general tab, and hitting the button “Delete cookies…”.

FileMaker - Opening Many DBs

My FM client has password protection on his DBs, and I’ve spent a LOT of time typing this password over and over (and over and over) again for each DB that I need to access. Yesterday, I finally got sick enough of it to do something about it. The following steps assume that you have the same password for all DBs, but it may be possible with different passwords, too.
- Create a new password protected DB, with the password being the same that you need in the other DBs.
- In this new DB, create a script which opens the DBs that you need
- Open “Edit / Preferences / Document” and check the “Try Default Passord” checkbox, but do NOT enter the password.
- In this dialog, you also want to check the “Perform Script” checkbox, and indicate the script that you created to open the DBs.

Voilá - you only have to enter the password once to open all the DBs.

FileMaker - Report by Month

I had the problem that I was trying to do a report by month, but the field that I was keying on had month, day, and year, so I was getting a breakdown by day. To breakdown by month, I introduced an unstored calculated field with a date result, using the formula

Date( Month(CalcDate), 1, Year(CalcDate))

…and keyed off that, instead.