Web Development

For those of you that don’t know, Deezer is a website that allows you to play a huge selection of songs by huge selection of artists for free, no questions asked. You can also create playlists and so on, if you register an account with them.

(If you want to skip all the preamble just go down to the code section and you’ll see code that will fix the Deezer problem. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, continue reading.)

But, it is a very weird site. They’ve changed their layout a few times, it used to be “blogmusik.net”, but they’ve always been buggy. Apparently it’s run by someone in France as many of the writing is in French, which is often quite confusing.

Most people can ignore all these oddities as they can still search and play music.

Well, quite some time ago there were “grayed-out” songs. Meaning you couldn’t click on them anywhere. There was no support saying why they were that way, no FAQ, no instruction. It annoyed a good many users, including myself, so I went to the forums and found a simple work around. You could right click and say “Play This Track” and it would play.

I thought it foolish of them to have unexplained grayed-out songs that could be played with a right-click. I used this for many months, then I was informed they changed their layout.

Sure enough, next time I went to play a song from them, different layout, and you could no longer right-click to play a track, but there were no longer grayed-out songs. There were songs that simply wouldn’t play.

Well this was worse, again, nothing in the support or anywhere on the site saying why you couldn’t play these tracks. Some people on the forums reported adding them to a playlist, and then playing them would help. This, however, was not a universal solution.

I found, on the forums, someone who wrote a line of javascript to copy and paste into your browser, click “enter” then refresh your page, and it will work. I thought it was a weird solution, but worth a try. It worked!

With no further ado, this is the code:

I haven’t inspected this code thoroughly, but basically it looks like it sets your cookies to make it look like you’re from France.Today, I found out something strange. It was the first time I had used Deezer on a new computer so I knew I had to find that code again. It was not in the forums, and other people were asking for it, and someone noted that a moderator removed it. Apparently, in that forum someone posted it again. By the time I got there, it was removed.

My father had saved this code away in a google document, so I asked him for the link and used it. Yep, still worked. So, this is my “protest”, so to speaker, to their unexplained censorship. If they were kind enough to explain why they had unworking songs, why they didn’t want the code around, I could respect their wishes, but at the moment it seems very illogical.

-Kerry

I found that many of my friends with new laptops were complaining that their DW8 wasn’t remembering their FTP information for some of their sites. I told them they probably just forgot to click the “remember password” and dismissed the problem.

I found that I only lost the username and password to the last site that was open. If I didn’t get the password and I tried to connect to another site, I lost the username and password to that site as well. It started to really bother me as I had to frequently re-find the passwords to many of my sites. I decided to find a solution.

And so I did! I found that the problem is usually caused by DW8 and IE7 running on the same machine. A weird bug, but a bug nonetheless. An easy solution was to get the Dreamweaver 8.0.2 Updater, which totally solved my problem.

That totally made sense – most all of new laptops come with Windows Vista, which comes with IE7. I had held off before because I knew I needed IE6 for web development and so had never encountered the error. Well, there’s your solution!

If you want the whole Macromedia Support issue on the topic, click here.

Hope that helps.

-Kerry

The shopping cart I have been developed hit a major slow a couple weeks ago and I couldn’t find a solution, which is very rare. Well, a couple days ago I looked for a PHP forum. This was after I had given up on 1&1 support after many calls and many emails, Paypal thought it was on my hosting end and wasn’t getting many responses and other companies told me to switch hosting providers.

Well, I explained my situation and in about a 24 hour period they figured it was my cURL version was old because it was an old PHP version (4.4.7) on the dedicated SSL. I had tried to get 1&1 to upgrade this before using .htaccess, but your .htaccess files don’t affect your SSL server. I now knew that I had to get it upgraded for it to work.

I was thinking about this for a while. In the mean time I sent a support request to Paypal seeing if there was any alternate solution to using the old cURL version (they didn’t really know what I was talking about) and sent a request to 1&1, thinking I would just badger them a bit more, hoping someone could change it.

Before I go on, I thought I should comment quickly on 1&1. After asking them how to upgrade to the higher PHP version, I explained the reason being I needed to upgrade the cURL version.

They responded and told me I needed to upgrade my PHP version. I responded saying that I had asked that question, and I needed to know how.

Next response tells me that sorry, but you can’t upgrade your PHP version. Great, well I already had another solution worked out, I just didn’t like it.

PHP 5 has its own extension “.php5″. I tried this on the server and it did support it, meaning 1&1 had lied again. This handled my problem and I was able to connect successfully to Paypal! Yes! Now I just have to finish implementing WPP (Website Payments Pro).

-Kerry

P.S. I also have another script that I will be blogging about soon. It generates Atom and RSS 2.0 feeds, but its not in a finalized form though it does work correctly.

Hello once again!

I have very exciting news about Photoshop! Ok, only exciting if your photoshop hasn’t been working for the past six months and you finally figured out the bug.

Apparently Windows doesn’t like to have more than 1000 fonts loaded in the system. Takes up too much memory. Here’s a chart on what causes system delays: What Slows Windows Down? I was without this datum until yesterday, and I had loaded 5000+ fonts onto my system from a package my friend gave me.

My friend dug up this article on photoshop problems (he was having the same problem as me) and removed most the entire package of fonts and just left the originals, and voila! It worked! I tried it and it worked as well!

My lesson has definitely be learned. I hope this blog helps some people out.

-Kerry