dbrimlow

>>Templates are for people that really just can't create their own site from scratch.<< Oh come on, guys, don't be snobs. How many of you ALWAYS start every single page, tag, code from scratch and don't recycle even one snippet? There are some good, free, validated css-xhtml templates out there for you start from to either reverse engineer or modify - for the layouts, not the design and style. If I use a pre-made template, I do it because the layout is stable, the code is clean and it looks like the author used some good techniques (like floating cross-browser/IE layout without any hacks or rounded corners using css and no graphics). Any that have some background graphics, I will be changing in photoshop to suit my own project as well as the actual styles, anyway. If you look at some of the xhtml-css (only) templates here, you will find submissions by quite a few amazing css gurus. http://www.ex-designz.net/template/ But stay away from the other templates (like Dreamweaver, flash, etc.) there, because they are indeed graphic heavy tag bloated table based stuff. In particular, look for the template "a bit liquid". It is a brilliant design that is completely fluid and stable in all IEs and doesn't use a single hack.

[quote]If you use the strict doctype it forces ie render in a compliant manner  (or so far as I have experienced).[/quote] Only in IE 6.0/7.0 and ONLY specifically for the "box-model" hack alone. And more <div>s are not the answer. That's commonly known as "divitus" to the css guru community. It is so much more, in so many ways. IE 6.0 has quite a few buggy ways (other than the box model) of mangling proper standards compliant css. Most of the issues are with floats, and flexible layouts (fixed layouts and fonts - using set px sizing -  fare slightly better in IE). Here is a great site that explains ALL of them from the author of the "holly hack" . These CSS bugs are all found only in Internet Explorer, versions 5 and higher (and they have a section on IE 6.0 bugs, as well): [url=http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html]http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html[/url] But! The best way to check if you need a hack or not is to view your site on the various IE broswer versions. At my office we have a Mac with IE 5.23 for Mac. One PC with 5.1x and one with 5.5. And of course our workstations/laptops all have 6.0. You only need to worry about IE. Nearly all of the other modern browsers are standards compliant. Chances of a user with an old Opera or Netscape are slim since most of the people who use them know what they are doing and actually use the most current version - if not they fall back on their computers IE. And Mac's Safari, even the older versions, handle standards just fine. Incidentally, I would be happy to check anybody's finished VALIDATED standards compliant websites (that also first work as expected in IE 6.0!) and render a screenshot for you. Just send me an IM request. Dave

Does anyone know of a current, complete list of known bad spider bots? I'm going nuts trying to Google it. All results show HOW to trap bots, I want to exclude those that are known , so I can then start trapping then blocking any new ones. My stats show me that I'm being crawled all over like ants on a donut. I'm also pretty sure my forms have been raped by Chinese character scripts. All I want is a good comprehensive list of bad bots to start from.

[quote author=redarrow link=topic=109468.msg441418#msg441418 date=1159233702] If you dont use css all your problams will go away. unless you use the w3school manual and start agin. [/quote] redarrow, I can only assume that you are not being facetious and are actually empathizing with me (you can never tell in a forum). Considering that your site is in quirks mode and has over 140 validation errors. AND, like you, I have a MAJOR overhaul of a huge, poorly designed website (some pages are all graphics and no text) ... unfortunately, I have to admit that I coded the site 4 years ago - before "learning" CSS and standards. The biggest bitch is going into my major 1500 lines + php pages and rewriting all the echoed font and table tags. I suppose I will have to use tables again for those pages that are giving me particular trouble in IE 5.x. I've actually been able to use standards and validate most of the old table based layouts. I just wanted to convert them to clean tableless, tag only code - using all external jscript and css files, and use strict doctypes instead of transitional. I will work on my side jobs and personal web sie projects using clean standards coding. But to convert my existing hundreds of static pages site to look similar in css layout as it does in tables is a lost cause. I have to get them to agree to a new site wide design overhaul ... and I work in a corporate environment with dept heads! So, yeah, sure, that's gonna happen.

It wasn't the browser I was having trouble with. The page's purpose is to submit a dynamicly generated html file of an apartment listing that is submitted to subscribers as an html file viewable in the body of the email (using "$message = <<<EOF /* generated php listing html */"). The issue was that outlook was automatically, and indescriminantly, creating a line break for long paragraghs in the description field. It only happened in a certain type of apt listing where the descriptions were written by the agent - which, in effect, at least doubled the size of the paragraghs compared with those written by our listings data entry staff. When the email appeared, it had a random question mark ("?") proceeding a random word (from listing to listing) in the description - usually somewhere within a 3 sentence range. When looking at the html, we saw that it was also randomly inserting a line return after the question mark. This only happened in Outlook and not in any online email like yahoo or gmail. We checked the description field data in the DB and there were not line returns embedded within by the data entry person (agent). So we realized it was an MS specific thing. When studying how Outlook interpruts html, we found that the text portion of the html sent, within the email's body, is editable, while the container fields (divs or tables/cells) are fixed on the page but flexible when editing - sort of like an absolute positioned "layer" Div. Since other listings, with shorter description paragraphs, didn't have this problem - AS WELL AS when we shortened the paragragh within the effected listings - we realized that Outlook was causing the random line break. So, we finally realized that all we had to do was modify the $description variable to word wrap and start a new line every 50 characters. Worked like a charm

I GIVE UP!!!!! Effin' IE garbage!!! Someone should make MS pay for all the wasted hours and effort to web coders trying for trying to get their piece of junk browser to work with clean code and standards instead of mangled quirks mode garbage!!! I just checked my stats. I'm depressed. I am wasting my time trying to fight the various IE version hordes. I feel like just buying FrontPage to auto-write the junk code that will make the crowd happy (which is most likely why all our competitors - BILLION DOLLAR R.E. COMPANIES! - all use quirks mode). Why, I would be able to punch web pages out like nobody's business ... and without worrying about why that one stupid line was not validating, too! 78% of my large NYC Real Estate website's 23,000 "visits" (16,350) used a version of IE (Idiot Enhanced) - with way too many of them using from 4.01 through 5.5 ... yes ... I said 4.01!: Users: 4.01 (7 visits - I would like to find that guy and smack him on the back of the head!); 5.0 visits (18 - another cluesless bozo); 5.01 (19 visits - I give them credit for coming back on the site through 18 & 19 visits); 5.14 (6 - ditto clueless maROON); 5.16 (8 - and yet another); 5.22 (????!! Wha?); 5.23 (I know that was our snobby, as well as cluesless, Art Director who claims how a Mac is the be all and end all for graphics, yet hasn't upgraded his OS X since 2003 and actually uses the garbage IE 5.23 instead of the clean, web standards Safari ... take off the bell-bottoms and platform shoes buddy! It's the 21st Century ... the Mac myth is tired); 5.5 (@ 300 - and I need to pay attention to those binks!) 6.0 (@15,000 - at least SOME people out there are starting to actually "get it"); 7.0 (@ 250 brave souls who still think MS makes a browser they actually want!) Meanwhile, I've been attempting to make my clean, css tableless layouts, with IE hacks through 5.0x. But the hacks are not cutting it when using Flexible, floating % columns. IE 5.2x for mac just does whatever it wants to my layout and no hack makes it behave. 5.2x for Win blows up less, but takes advanced calculous to get the layout just right in all IE browsers. IE 6.0 at least can be forced to behave using MS's stupid conditional comments. 12% of the visits (@ 2,500) used a version of Firefox (I should have a pop-up that offers people 20% off our commission fee for using a proper browser ... the company would save money). 8% used Safari (@1,800) good browser. Along with Garage Band one of the few things I can stomach about a Mac. All the other major browsers were covered but under 1% ... including one brave soul who used his HPIpaq hand held ... I wonder what that experience was on Windows Mobile??!!! Oh, yeah! That's another thing! AGGGGHHHH!!!! 89% used a screen resolution from 1024 x 768 to 1680 x 1050 - okay, cool. That's how it should be. BUT!!!! A whopping 11% actually used 800 x 600 (that's over 2,250 visits! I can't ignore that!) I can't take it anymore. Why? Why did I decide a few years ago to become a true professional and perfect my craft, to use css only and code with validated standards? I was happy when I didn't use DOCTYPES. I didn't care if people using Mozilla weren't seeing my javascript. I wallowed in my ignorance and thought myself Joe web guy! Those of you out there who are now being offered the choice of the red pill or the blue pill ... for the LOVE OF GOD ... CHOOSE THE BLUE PILL!  YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW THE TRUTH!

For anyone interested in the solution that finally worked, all I needed to do was tell IE to use a "word wrap" and force a new line as follows: $description = wordwrap($description, 50, "\n"); What had been happening was that a long url was being "auto" wraped by Outlook. That's all. Everything else was fine.

[quote author=dustinnoe link=topic=105010.msg427646#msg427646 date=1157365734] Use this DOCTYPE so that IE6 will render the box model properly [code]<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">[/code] [/quote] Contrary to initially reported claims, IE 6 does NOT conform to Standards with the strict XHTML doctype. I have been fighting IE 6 to behave for 2 years. Among others, it does not support min-width, max-width; you need to muddy your clean code by using "conditional comments. It is nearly impossible to help you without seeing the rest of your css and in context within a webpage. IE is very strange when it comes to "cascading" and can handle it differently than a real browser. It also uses its own defaults for items you don't actually put in your css (like a:visited). But, a problem I had for ages was trying to specify and use all fixed widths and px sized fonts. A part of your problem could be using em font sizes within a fixed width container or vicea versa. Try either using flexible containers or fixed fonts. Assuming your #menu is the content and #menuwrap is the container: #menu {     width: 100%;     height: 100%;     border-right: 2px solid #999999;     border-bottom: 2px solid #999999;     border-left: 2px solid #999999;     background-color: #000000; } #menuwrap {     font-size:0.9em;     width: 20%;     height: 100%;     padding-left: 2px;     border-right: 1px solid #ff0000;     border-bottom: 1px solid #ff0000;     border-left: 1px solid #ff0000; } The other problem you are having is that you do not specify a width for your div: #div { margin-left: 158px; padding: .5em; } Paddings, Margins, Borders are the big killers in any IE; it is the dreaded "box problem" in a nutshell. But here you are designating a flexible padding! YE! GADS! IE is going to go to town with that! Since you haven't designated a width for the DIV IE's flex padding is going to determine it for you. I would love to see what you are trying to do with this. If it works in real browsers but blows upin IE, then the fix is right at your fingertips.

First, this can be relatively easily done just modifying some existing jscript code that already performs similarly with photos. Here is how it works with photos on a smaller scale for a client site I building http://www.jhrenovations.com/  - If you hover on the image the page stops, you can make it link, adjust speed, etc. the usual dynamic "dhtml" thing. This is an oldie but a goodie and should be able to be recoded to work with html instead of graphics. And, I've seen new sites designed for 1024x768 ... they don't last long before going back to 800 due to customer complaints.

[quote author=AndyB link=topic=106435.msg425687#msg425687 date=1157074660] It looks good to me, but I peeked under the hood. I was disappointed by "Rodzilla ...Implements CSS 2.0 Design" and then finding tables for layout. [/quote] Yeah, when I saw the web standard and no jscript error icons on my web-dev toolbar I thought the same. This wouldn't be too hard to layout "-tables". Otherwise ... very clean and visually professional. I did expect the bold, white rightcolumn headerbar text to be links and actually clicked on them to see. That's a wasted motion because I am ingrained to expect text there to be links. One of the keys to navigation is to lay it out as people expect (make it mindless and automatic so they don't have to think about nav and can concentrate on content) ... don't make them learn new navigation and don't make them waste motion (time) clicking on just text where it is usually links.

You are using what looks like either MS proprietary or just plain wrong CSS in many instances. But first, as ToonMariner noted, you need to redifine the a:link, a:visited and a:hover, etc within an id (#divname - can only be used once per page) or class (.divname - can be used more than once per page). You do NOT redfine the tag itself from line to line because of the cascade in "cascading" - remember that the style element of any element "tag", "id" or "class" is determined by the last use of it within the sheet. So you always want to redefine a tag level element used within an id or class by actually defining it in the id or class itself. for example (using your sheet): This sets the page default link and visited style. Unless properly instructed otherwise, all links will use this: a:link, a:visited{ font:14px Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #00FF00; text-decoration: none; } ********************* This sets the link in the class ".spiritlink": .spiritlink a:link, a:visited{ font:11px Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:#00FF00; text-align:justify; text-decoration: none; } ************** This is not "valid" css: a.menu:link, a.menu:visited{ font:12px Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #166503; width:150; margin-left: 6px; text-decoration: none; filter:Glow(color=#4FFF25, strength=5); } First, you need to define the link within the class like above - .menu a:link, a:visited{styles}, second, "width 150;" is useless ... 150 what? pixels? percent? em? points? You need to define a size type. Last, "filter:Glow(color=#FC8322, strength=5);" - as you are using it, this is an IE only tag and will be ignored (not work) by "real" browsers. The proper use of "filter" in CSS is usually as a "hack" to get IE to behave like a real browser. So it seems as if you are targeting your website design to IE only. You really should beware of falling into the IE only trap and nip this in the bud. I was an IE only designer myself for years up until the release of Firefox 1.1. When I discovered that 90% of the "styles" (like scrollbar colors and filters), DHTML, javascript and "layers" I was using didn't work in FF, Mozilla, Netscape, Safari, Opera. It has taken me nearly two years to learn how much I didn't know, how much I knew was wrong, how much I don't know and how much I most likely will never know. But at least in those 2 years I have finally learned enough how to make a web page behave in most browsers including IE 5.1, 5.5, 6.0 - although, again, I've only learned enough about this to still have the occasional 3 hour bouts of fighting with IE regardless. Books only helped so much - because they usually just pepper the page with footnotes about what browsers it doesn't work in and how you need to go learn all of the "hacks" to get it to work; and I have yet to find a hack thatworks every time). One of the only ways I was able to get a true handle on it was to reverse engineer free, web standards tableless css layouts - I started with www.csszengarden.com, then found [url=http://www.ex-designz.net/template/tempcat.asp?cat_id=13]http://www.ex-designz.net/template/tempcat.asp?cat_id=13[/url]

I think I posted before done, but you answered my question. Thanks again.

Cool. Thank you. And MAN this is fun stuff. Now, first question, do I need to actually echo the replace, or can I just redefine the variable to include this expression as in the example below? [code] //get flyer info $query = "Select * from temp where (flyer_id = '$maxid')"; $result = mysql_query("$query") or die(mysql_error()); while($myrow=mysql_fetch_array($result)) {                 $description = $myrow[description]; $description = str_replace("\\", "", $description); $description = wordwrap($description, 50, Chr(13));                 $description preg_replace('%(?:<br>){2}<b><font[^>]+>(.+?)</font></b>%',  '<p><strong>\1</strong></p>', $description);                 $listing = $myrow[numb]; $title = $myrow[title]; ... etc, etc, ?>[/code] This way it is corrected as a variable and I can insert it where I want within a webpage and an EOF. Question 2 - Just to be sure I follow your pattern correctly, is this basically what happened: 1.  [code]% (?:<br>){2}[/code] = start expression until ended, don't capture or backreference as a subpattern, and any character before the <b> twice is optional and : 1b. [code] <b><font[^>]+>(.+?)</font></b>% [/code] continue matching, include one or more characters from here on (after <font), then include anything before ">", capture any one or more characters as a subpatten, stop expression, 2. insert subpatter (\1) between [code]<p><strong>\1</strong></p>[/code], 3. newly revised variable. Thanks, Dave

The NYTimes requires that we add on garbage html to the end of our apartment listings "description" field. for example, our data entry people have to actually enter the follow html tags into our text description of a listing: [code]..yada, yda. yada long description, Incredibly low maintenance & taxes including a 14 year tax abatement! Marketed exclusively by Some Real Estate Co. <br><br><b><font color="#996699">*September, 2006 Occupancy</font></b> <br><br> <a href="http://www.SomeRealEstateCo.com/loft_media/tours/bchtourfinal.wmv"> Model Home Virtual Tour</a> <br><br> <a href="http://www.SomeRealEstateCo.com/sales/viewlistings.php?listing=310590"> click here for Some Real Estate Co.</a> <br><br> <a href="http://www.SomeRealEstateCo.com.com">www.SomeRealEstateCo.com.com</a>[/code] I want to replace the tags and insert the replacements correctly whenever using the description field in our own dynamic pages. I want the [code]<br><br><b><font color="#996699">*sometext</font></b> [/code]to be: [code]<p><strong>*sometext</strong></p>[/code] Would I use an array? If so how would I recognize text between the font tags to now be between the opening/closing <p><strong> tags? [code]<?php $description = "'<br><br><b><font color=\"#996699\">.*</font>'"; $patterns[0] = "'<br><br>'"; $patterns[1] = "'<b>.*</b>'"; $patterns[2] = "'<font color=\"#996699\">.*</font>'"; $replacements[2] = ".*"; $replacements[1] = "'<strong>.*</strong>'"; $replacements[0] = "'<p></p>'"; echo preg_replace($patterns, $replacements, $description); ?> [/code]

Whoa. I am trying to send a tabless css layout via an email. It doesn't look like it likes the style tags because of the # and my <div id=""> or <div class="">. I though you don't need to escape quotes within the EOF. I enter the page like doctype and head tags like below (sample): [code]<?php $message = <<<EOF <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html> <head> <title>(no spam here Mysite Lofts Inc.)</title> <meta name="copyright" content="(c) 2006, Mysite Apartments Inc." /> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <style type="text/css"> <!-- body {background-color:#fff;margin:0px 0px 0px 5px;padding:0px;font-family: Arial, Verdanas, Sans-serif;font-size: 12px;color: #663300;}a:link{color: #0000FF;}a:visited{color: #0000CC;}a:hover{color: #006699;}...etc. </style> </head>[/code] And then just enter my body, <divs> with previously declared database variables within like so: [code]<body> <div id="container"> <div id="heading"> <!-- close headinge --> </div> <div id="tabletop"> <div class="spacer2">&nbsp;</div>   <div class="style35">$title</div>   <div class="style35">$address></div>   <div class="spacer">&nbsp;</div>   <div id="tabletop2"> <div class="spacer"><h2>&pound; $listing</h2></div> $photo1url $photo2url $photo3url   </div> [/code] I am getting a parse error on the last line of the page (close php tag ?>) Do I need to dynamically create the web page that will be within the EOF using variables for the entire layout - headers, body, <divs>? Say [code]$headers == <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html> <head> etc. </head>[/code] then [code]<?php $message = <<<EOF $headers $body ?>[/code] It all worked just fine when using html 4.0 and tables - both in quirks mode and standards mode transitional html 4.0 and/or xhtml .

Your page is too wide. It is going to generate a bottom scroll bar when it goes beyond any screen. You set your "page" div at 1050px, then told the container to be 100%, then set actual values for your left and right columns of 250px and 750px (respectively). Then you specify "overflow: auto". With all of that fixed columns and 100% container width stuff then adding overflow:auto, you are going to need to scroll right. You are caught in that frustrating "overthinking loop" that results in adding more commands to your css than necessary. You are trying to emulate a table's fixed cell sizes but it's acting like css. I almost always work within the old 800px container width -centered on the page - then use % for my columns. There are a lot of people who still use 15" CRT monitors - I use one to make sure my design works on it. But you could try setting your container widths to width:95%, set your left column to 30% and your right content to 60%. I would lose that page width:1050px and the overflow:auto.

Hmmm. That is indeed a simple layout order solution within the markup body tag, and if all divs are the same and one on top of the other, the footer will indeed be last. But you are putting divs for left middle and right columns. 600px width is not enough room to work with for a container when creating a 2 or 3 column layout. But if you just want a top, middle and bottom, no problem. But that still doesn't take into account paddings, borders, margins, floats, clears, box level componants, navigation, etc. within the divs. What I mean is, it doesn't address the actual css for the div attributes. And if you try to have 2 columns float:left, and do not specify how the footer should handle that, you could end up with a 1200 wide container with a footer alongside the banner. The key to footers is to make the width match the container and not let it wrap. width:100%, clear:both works for most layouts.

The above is correct, but don't forget to set your body margins to zero. body { margin: 0; } Also, it will not help you if you put design tags in your body markup (bgcolor="#FFFFFF" leftmargin="0" topmargin="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" ). First of all, it is obsolete, but, it will over-ride any other css command. - remember the cascading rule ... the page will use the last design instruction it sees on the page. And, you may also have an issue with your use of all those absolute divs. They will look different in Web standard Browsers vs IE 6.0 and above. They will blow up totally in IE 5.1x and do strange things in IE 5.5. And from a design standpoint ... it is common to limit an overall design width to 800px. Many offices around the world still have 15" CRT monitors (13.5" viewable) set at 800 x 600. So, if you set your design to float, it will acommodate any screen type.

Okay. When I first started and came here, I would get answers like that as well. They are valid answers that specifically address the single action you said you wanted ... BUT, they assume you know everything else related what you want to do. You said you know how to send form values to a database. Do you really? If so you don't have much else to learn. But answer this, first: Do you know how to pass values from a form to a PHP processing page ? Do you know how to accept and process values (and, if any, hidden variables) using a php processing page? Do you know how to create the values/variables into an email format using a php processing page? If not, you have 2 pages to create: 1. Form page 2. php processing page

I administer a large NYC real estate firm website in NYC (over 250 agents); I've recently been asked to keep track of how many people request information from our website about apartment. Each listing has a "submit inquiry" button that opens a form for their specific information (name, email, etc.) and passes the Vars to a "sendmail".php page that emails the listing ID in the subject line and other vars in the mail_message, to the agent associated with that listing ID in the database. I simply wanted to have it also advance a counter on another page, with each submit. But I wanted to track it by a "calander" - Day, week, Month, including running totals. The tough part, is having it recognize a new day, week, month and ad the totals respectively. I've never done any actual math calculations with php. Any ideas. Am I overthinking?

[!--quoteo(post=383944:date=Jun 14 2006, 02:48 PM:name=lead2gold)--][div class=\'quotetop\']QUOTE(lead2gold @ Jun 14 2006, 02:48 PM) [snapback]383944[/snapback][/div][div class=\'quotemain\'][!--quotec--] Ok, here is my problem/scenario: I have a ton of static information... (about 30 pages worth) on a webpage [code]<p>bla bla bha</p> <p>blah blah blah</p> ... ... <p>blah blah page 15</p> ... <p>blah blah blah page 30</p>[code] What i want to do is tag only a [b]selected[/b] few paragraghs etc.. [code] <div class="abrv"> <p> blah blah blah page 15</p> </div> [code] Then i want to allow the ability to hide all the content except what was tagged. Basically i want to have 1 document, but have the ability to show an abreviated version of it at the push of a button and then also be able to flip back to the full "un"abreviated version. The current system is working with 2 seperate files... but i'm sure with the power of styles, this could be simplified into 1 document. Am i even on the right track? Could someone give me a hand or an example of how i'd do this? Chris [/quote] try [b]styleswitcher[/b] 1 - [a href=\"http://www.contrastsweb.com/switcher/\" target=\"_blank\"]http://www.contrastsweb.com/switcher/[/a] or [b]styleswitcher2[/b] [a href=\"http://www.contrastsweb.com/switcher/v2/\" target=\"_blank\"]http://www.contrastsweb.com/switcher/v2/[/a] For your purpose v2 might be better. Here is a sample of v1 on a site I am working on - [a href=\"http://www.manhattanapts.com/indexblank.htm\" target=\"_blank\"]http://www.manhattanapts.com/indexblank.htm[/a], the sheet switch links are on top.

As a real estate web admin, I get dozens of photos every day. Since our site uses them in different ways, I need to resize each one in photoshop to at least 3 different sizes, and upload them into three different folders. I do it this way because some ways they are used cannot handle the full sized photo simply "virtually" resized (the file size is still the same and uses the same bandwidth as the original photo even though it displays smaller). What I would like to do is be able to dynamically resize, rename and save the original to the various folders ... and have three completely new originals with their respective actual file sizes. I tried playing around with some code, and can get it to resize, rename and store, but they all still retain the original file size from the server. Any ideas? Thanks, Dave

[!--quoteo(post=362849:date=Apr 8 2006, 03:14 PM:name=Vorotaev)--][div class=\'quotetop\']QUOTE(Vorotaev @ Apr 8 2006, 03:14 PM) [snapback]362849[/snapback][/div][div class=\'quotemain\'][!--quotec--] Place the following in the .htaccess file (if mod_rewrite is available): [code]RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^/([a-z][A-Z][0-9]-/+).php$ $1.html [R] [/code] That should redirect all .php requests to the respective .html equivalent (page.php should become page.html, index.php should become index.html, guestbook.php should become guestbook.html, and so forth). [/quote] Is this a "blanket" conversion of all PHP? I have over 800 php pages and only want to convert specific files.

After leaving here to run through the logic, I realized that php would not even work (how would I have the cron actually "run" the php page?). The perl looks interesting. And it reminded me of a similar crontab command I had used a while ago to actually test for data after loading to a temp db table. But that was very flakey. So, the perl script 1 (wickning1) would only run the command.sql if the psv file was greater than zero (which is what I need, since the psv file either has something in it or litterally nothing; and no row would have less than 0 anyway. Script 2 (Fenway) using the "unless -z" would also only run if the psv file is greater than zero. They both test for the same condition before allowing the command.sql to run. So, I would have this command say, "pipecheck.cgi", and simply have the crontab run it: * * * * /usr/bin/perl/pipecheck.cgi I haven't used perl/cgi in over 7 or 8 years. And even then I didn't code from scratch (the danger of pre-written scripts). Dave

[!--quoteo(post=359706:date=Mar 29 2006, 11:48 AM:name=wickning1)--][div class=\'quotetop\']QUOTE(wickning1 @ Mar 29 2006, 11:48 AM) [snapback]359706[/snapback][/div][div class=\'quotemain\'][!--quotec--] I've never done any SQL scripting, so hopefully someone else can provide a better answer. However, you could always wrap it with another scripting engine like BASH or Perl, which probably provide a lot more flexibility. Then you just use your cron job to run the (for example) Perl script. [/quote] I don't understand. Do you mean to use a script language to actually perform the whole process? Hmmm. Interesting. Like, say, a php page that would perform the whole task instead of the mysql itself using the command.sql text. It would check the .psv file for data by inserting it into a test table, running a simple query and if field "numb" is NOT null, drop the test table and UPDATE (instead of re-creating) the "sometable" in the DB. The crontab would "submit" the php page at specified times during the day. This has potential. And I will think about the pros and cons as well as the proper logic. I would still, however, like to know if the SQL sripting could work. Thanks, wickning1. I never did mosey down that particular Avenue. Dave