TagIt

TagIt! I have officially wrote the beginning of my first jQuery plugin.

I have been working on a much larger application and needed a lightweight tagging plugin for jQuery. I looked around but couldn’t find one that fit my needs. Lightweight, auto-complete, handles key/value pairs. I really wanted something that I could send some auto-complete values to that not only had a value, but a key.

I decided to take the plunge… and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The project is open-source and I hope someone can get some use out of it.
Your feedback is always welcomed.

Check out a demo on my website.

Excel Macro to Extract URL from HYPERLINK Formula

After searching the internet for a macro to extract the url of a hyperlink I found numerous possibilities, but none worked. After further inspection of my hyperlink, what I needed to do was extract the URL from the HYPERLINK formula, not the Address of a hyperlink. There is a difference. Here I share the code I used to make this happen.

This code will allow you to select several cells with HYPERLINK formulas and then use my macro to replace the formula with just the URL.

Sub ReplaceHyperlinkWithUrl()
Dim s As Object
Dim oldString As String

For Each s In Selection
oldString = s.Formula

Dim startIndex As Long
startIndex = Len(oldString) – 12
oldString = Right(oldString, startIndex)

Dim endIndex As Long
endIndex = InStr(oldString, “”””)
oldString = Left(oldString, endIndex – 1)

s.Formula = oldString
Next s
End Sub

960 Grid Adapted to 1120px

I have used the 960 Grid System on a few projects and wanted to include it in the use of a recent work related project. Problem was that I needed to utilize more than 960px of the screen.

The solution? I adapted the 960 16 column grid system to be used as a 1120px 16 column grid system.

The 1120px design scheme allows for each of the 16 columns to be 50px instead of 40px wide, while still keeps the 10px margin on the left and right which creates the 20px gutters.

While this is fairly specific to my needs, it may solve someone else’s problem as well.

Eliminating Internet Security Warning in Outlook 2007

Have you ever gotten this pesky little notification from Outlook each time you first open it up and perform a Send/Receive operation?

I did until I realized what Outlook was trying to tell me. In this article I make use of GoDaddy’s SecureServer mail server settings, but if you are encountering this error, it’s more than likely for the same underlying reason.

For a time I connected to GoDaddy’s servers without using SSL, so when I converted I left my connection urls the same, just changed up some ports and set Outlook to use SSL. Well in doing I made Outlook mad at me. It started telling me that GoDaddy’s certificate couldn’t be validated. Well that didn’t make any sense, because well, it’s GoDaddy. So I did some digging.

Since SSL certificates are only good for the domain name specified when purchasing them (unless it’s a wildcard certificate, but that’s another story). When I looked really carefully at the certificate, I noticed it was issued to pop.secureserver.net. Well that url isn’t being used in my Outlook connection settings, so I updated my settings (incoming mail server url in this case) to match the url that the certificate is issued to and voila.

For those not using GoDaddy, the url you should be using is listed in the Issued To field when you click on “View Certificate”. That field must match in your Outlook settings, otherwise, you will get this beautiful message.