Okay, this might be useless for normal users but this will be very helpful for the designers and HTML coders who always want their site to look perfect in most of the browsers. This recent update of IE6 to IE7 broke few things which made some sites look different in both the browsers.

So, now the question comes in mind is “how to check our site in both the versions of the browser?”

Well, it is possible. This might not be a new thing for few people but I am sure this is going to help someone here.

You can install standalone versions of IE on your machine. If you have already installed IE7 and want to install previous versions of IE, you can get standalone version from here or if you have IE6 on your machine and wish to install IE7 too (keeping IE6 intact) then you can download standalone version of IE7 from here.

I just installed IE6 standalone version on my machine and it really made my testing job lot more easier.

IE seems to act worst when it comes to CSS. You will end up banging head but you won’t be able to trace the problem for the issue.

Similar thing happened to me today when a friend told me that in IE it is showing character O on the left side of the page. (Check boxed area in the screenshot)

I tried to trace it myself but did not get any success so finally SitePoint forums came for the rescue and I got to know that my page was suffering from Duplicate character bug in IE. It was happening due to comments between floats.

I had placed comments between the left_box and right_box. So those comments were making things worse and the last character from right side link (View Our Portfolio) was getting repeated.

The problem got fixed once I remove those comments.

It’s pretty funny that we bang our head for these things, just to know that it was some stupid IE bug. lol

Thinking of using Indian Payment Gateways for your online service? Don’t go for them, they are a big joke. Here is info about some of the payment gateways.

CCAvenue: They are considered to be the best providers in India. (There is no competition in the market) They provide online order processing via Net Banking as well as by credit card. They charge Rs. 7500 as setup fees, 7% transaction fees for Credit Card Processing and 4% transaction fees for net banking. They also charge Rs. 1200 per year as Annual Software Maintenance Cost. (lol just another way to get yearly fees) They have other plan which costs Rs. 25,000 as setup fees, 5% transaction fees for Credit Card processing and 4% for net banking. The annual fees they charge is Rs. 2400 as Software Maintenance Cost.

But note that, it is not so easy to get account with them if you are running a web development firm. My personal experience was very bad with them. I felt as if I am begging for an account.

I applied for a basic account (Rs. 7500 one). Within 4-5 days I got email saying my account got rejected because I am running a web development firm and it is owned by a single person. This one was one of the worst excuse that anyone could give. But after requesting them couple of times, they approved only net banking facility on my account. I was left without credit card processing which was my primary concern for applying the account.

Read more…

I have noticed that many of the designers design a great looking layout but they fail in the coding part. I have seen big companies code like a kid who has just learnt basics of HTML and some WYSIWYG editor.

Some of the pointers in this guide will help you to make your code beautiful. Yes, I mean it…

1. Use CSS based layers for the layout and use tables only for tabular data: I have seen many big the companies / designers using tables to code the layout. Tables will just help you to increase the lines of codes. Let me explain it by giving an example:

Table based sample code CSS based sample code

Table Based Code:

CSS Based Code:

Now in this simple example, there is not much of difference in the number of lines (since it is a very simple piece of code) but what mainly differ here is number of attributes which are simply not needed for such a small thing. We can just define display:inline style in CSS for list and specify the padding to give the same output.

To check some live examples you can take a look at the code of these sites that I have coded, you will notice that the number of lines are less than 100 in the code. If I wanted to implement the same layout in table based layout, it would have taken more than 100 lines. So I can say that I saved 100 lines by using CSS.

But again I am not saying that you should not use tables at all, tables are needed to display tabular data.

Read more…

How to backup email accounts in Microsoft Outlook 2003?

This question was bugging me like hell when I was taking backup of my outlook data today.

I took backup of all the folders, rules but I could not find any option to take backup of email accounts.

I googled for quite some time but could not find anything…
I knew there was a registry key for this but it wasn’t so easy to find….
after digging the net / google for more than 30 minutes, I finally found the way to do it…

Just locate the following key in registry (start - run - regedit):

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles\Outlook

Then right click on the key, outlook and select option, Export…save it anywhere you want…
and run it while restoring your outlook.

This will restore your old outlook profile with all email accounts and rules.
But, you will have to enter passwords for the accounts again. It does not store the user passwords.

I hope this helps people like me..who are lazy to create the email accounts again…