AskBrianWood

Flash Won’t Play

admin — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:53:13 +0000

Question:

Hi, I have been trying to embed a wheel carousel into dreamweaver. The carousel works fine in adobe flash cs4, but when I insert it into dreamweaver it wont play. Any ideas as to why this is? (PS I insert it like this. Insert>media>swf)

Answer:

Sorry for the barrage of questions – just trying to get a clear picture Is the file you are inserting a .swf? Can you view Flash content in your browser? When the file is inserted into the page in Dreamweaver, are you clicking the Play button in the Property inspector – and if you are – do you get an error? Have you tested the page in the browser with the Flash content in the page?

Resize an image and it’s frame

admin — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 03:29:02 +0000

Question:

How do I resize an image and it’s frame?

Answer:

With an image on the page, and the Selection tool selected, hold down Ctrl+Alt (Windows) or Cmd+Opt (Mac OS) and drag a corner of the image frame.This will resize the frame AND the image inside.

Set Links to be “Active”

admin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 14:58:58 +0000

Question:

How do I set my navigation links to they show as “active” (change to the color I specified) when I go the the linked page? I can get the link and the hover to work, but the active link does not work when I am on the active page. How to I actually tell the link it should be active?

Answer:

Yeah, the “active” link (a:active) is useless for the most part. If you want a certain link on a page to show as the “active” link – or to indicate the page that you are on, here’s what you can do:
Add an ID style to each body tag for each document to be able to tell what page the active link is on. That ID is not really a style you create, rather an id="home" you add to the tag, like this (this example is for the home page only – you need to add an ID to each page like for the contact page add an ID of contact):

On each page, add IDs to each tag like this (this is where I use a Library Item in Dreamweaver to make it so that the nav bar can be changed in one place):
id="home_link">Home
id="contact_link">Contact

Finally, we make a CSS style like this (replace the formatting with your a:active formatting if you like):
#home th#home_link a, #home th#contact_link a {
color:#F00;
font-weight:bold;

}
The last step (the styles) work this way: I have grouped 2 styles together: #home th#home_link a and #home th#contact_link a to make it easier.Each of these reads like this: #home th#home_link a means On the page with the ID=home, find the table header with the ID=home_link and make the link (a) have these properties.

Form Script won’t email

admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:56:24 +0000

Question:

I’m not getting emailed from my form. I have created my form posted it to my host. I have created a cgi-bin directory on the host and copied FormMail.pl into it, per instructions from the host helpdesk. I have created a hidden field on the form. ID:@recipients, Value: email@gmail.com. My “Send” is named “send” and has an action of “submit form”.I haven’t actually told the form to look in cgi-bin and execute FormMail.pl. It seems like I might have to do that….but I don’t recall it from the lesson.

Answer:

So you need to make sure that the
tag has an action that is set to the script located in the cgi folder. By clicking on the form container (the red box around the form), you can see the form options in the Property inspector. Type in the URL in the Action field to the script (like “http://www.mywebsite.com/cgi-bin/FormMail.pl”). This is crucial.Also, the hidden field should be named “recipient” not “@recipient” – lots of people do that. Here are the hidden fields I include:
            
            
You can also include a “required” hidden field – useful. Another step that is crucial is to make sure that you open the FormMail.pl script and set the @referrer (what website(s) can use the script) – you need to type in your URL in the list. This makes sure that only your site can access the script.