WebPublishing.me

It’d be great if lottery websites set up APIs, RSS feeds or publicly-accessible JSON data so that web developers could re-publish lottery numbers on their web sites or in their apps. Unfortunately, state and national lotteries don’t have much interest in sending consumers to web sites other than their own to find results/winning numbers.

When I first started looking into this issue, I thought that lottery commissions might actually copyright winning numbers. However, a blurb on Saliu seems to indicate they can’t:

“I don’t think a lottery commission will ever claim copyright ownership over its drawings. No religions can claim copyrights over their gods. The lottery draws are ruled by Randomness the Almighty. No entity has copyrights over Almighty Randomness. Anybody can publish things like “These are the winning lotto numbers drawn by this lottery commission on this date…”

What lottery commissions can do, however, is stop your automated script from scraping their site for data by blocking your IP. That means that if you want to publish winning lottery numbers on your site, you’re probably going to have to enter them by hand, or pay someone else who’s entering them by hand to provide you with a feed. I’ve found a few sites online that do just that. I can’t vouch for any of these (and there are lots more out there), but these sites claim to provide accurate lotto numbers that you can re-publish on your site for a fee:

• LotteryFeed
• Lottery-Data

These sites both provide winning lottery numbers in XML, Javascript, HTML, or text.

So, I had to spend about 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get my prodigy.net email address set up on my Kindle Fire. It’s a bit tricky since Prodigy was bought out by Yahoo many moons ago. On the off chance there are any other prodigy.net users out there who find themselves in the exact same situation I did, here’s the solution:

When you’re prompted to set up your email, select “other” (not “Yahoo.com”), then pick “Pop3.”

In the username field, make sure you see the full email address. In the server field, enter the following: pop.prodigy.yahoo.com. Next, you’ll be prompted to set the credentials for your outgoing emails. The format will be the same. Instead of using pop.prodigy.yahoo.com, though, you’ll want to type in smtp.prodigy.yahoo.com. Now, you should be good to go. Hope you’re enjoying your Fire as much as I am!

Got an embarrassing book you don’t want people to see when you’re showing off your Kindle Fire? Amazon hasn’t made it easy to remove those books from your carousel, but it is possible. Here are the steps:

1) Visit the following link http://www.amazon.com/manageyourkindle to permanently remove the book from your Kindle collection. Note that this means if you want to read the book in the future, you’ll have to re-purchase it.

NOTE: Before proceeding, keep in mind you’ll have to set up everything again on your Kindle (this includes email, Facebook access, apps you may have downloaded and set up, etc.).

2) Go to Tools (by hitting the gear icon in the top-right of the Kindle) → More → Device → Reset to Factory Defaults. This will remove all of your personal data from your Kindle and power off the device.

3) Power up your Kindle Fire. This could take a few moments as the device resets itself to factory settings.

4) Re-register your Kindle again by following the prompts on the screen.

It’s frustrating not to have full control over what shows up in the carousel. Hopefully the cumbersome process outlined above will be updated by an upcoming Kindle Fire release from Amazon.

This should be simple, but cutting out images with rounded rectangular corners in Photoshop is frustratingly difficult when you’re first learning how to use the software. This is how I do it (although I welcome suggestions on making it easier!):

Step 1: Open your image in Photoshop.

Step 2: Select the rounded corner tool:

Step 3: Set the border radius (to determine how curved you’d like your corners to be):

Step 4: Use your cursor to draw the rounded corner rectangle on top of your image:

Step 5: Click on the vector mask shape you’ve created:

Step 6: Now, drag that vector mask onto the layer that contains your image so it looks like this:

Step 7: Click on the layer that contains your image (and the vector mask) so the background of that layer name turns blue:

Step 8: Now, click specifically on the vector mask so that it gets outlined with a small black outline:

Step 9: Right click on your image (where the rounded rectangular outline appears) and select “Make Selection”, then click “OK” when prompted:

Step 10: Hit “CTRL+C” to copy the selection and then “CTRL+V” to paste it as a new layer on your image.

Step 11: Return to your layer palette and turn off all the layers (by clicking on the “eye” symbol) EXCEPT for the layer that you just pasted:

Step 12: You should now have a perfectly beautiful image with rounded corners!

Gingerbread photo by avanzero.

I’ve never been the best at creating regex statements, so I stumbled upon this one in a forum. This regex seems to work when validating email addresses (or web site addresses) if you’re using FS Contact Form for WordPress:

/^(([\w]+:)?\/\/)?(([\d\w]|%[a-fA-f\d]{2,2})+(:([\d\w]|%[a-fA-f\d]{2,2})+)?@)?([\d\w][-\d\w]{0,253}[\d\w]\.)+[\w]{2,4}(:[\d]+)?(\/([-+_~.\d\w]|%[a-fA-f\d]{2,2})*)*(\?(&?([-+_~.\d\w]|%[a-fA-f\d]{2,2})=?)*)?(#([-+_~.\d\w]|%[a-fA-f\d]{2,2})*)?$/

Just paste the above into the “Validation Regex” field and click “Update Options.” Here’s what mine looks like (click image for a larger version):

NOTE: This regex should work for any PHP-based validating that you’re doing (even if you’re not using WordPress with FS Contact Form).

UPDATE: Silly of me not to have noticed this before, but there’s already a built-in email validation option in FS Contact Form. Just select “email” from the drop-down and you’re good to go (click for a larger image):

I’ve recently starting using the FS Contract Form plugin for WordPress, and I think it’s the start of a great new relationship. It did, however, take me a while to figure out how to create a drop-down menu. Here are the steps:

1) Scroll down to the “extra fields” field on the plugin’s options screen.

2) Paste the following into the “Label” field (be sure you’re not pasting it into the “Default Text” field):

Options: , Red; Green; Blue

That will create a drop-down that looks like this:

3) Under the “fieldtype” dropdown, select the “Select” option.

4) Click “update options.” Your drop-down menu should now be active once you insert your form into a post.

Here’s what a completed drop-down menu screen should look like:

If you’re using WordPress, you’re probably savvy enough to start your own online business. Check out my post: The Top 51 Best Ways to Make Money Online and Work From Home.

Here’s a fast and dirty way to resize an image using Javascript. I’ve set it up here so that you can see the re-size when you click on the image:

<img id="wallpaper" src="http://webpublishing.me/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/sample-image.jpg" style="margin:0;padding:0;" onclick="resizeWallpaper()"/>

<script type="text/javascript">
function resizeWallpaper() {
document.getElementById(‘wallpaper’).style.height = 1000 + "px";
}
</script>

Click here for a working example of resizing an image onclick. Once you’ve got the basics down, you can then figure out how to do cool things like fitting an image to the client’s window size:

<script type="text/javascript">
function resizeWallpaper() {
document.getElementById(‘wallpaper’).style.width = window.innerWidth + "px";
}
</script>

Click here for a working example of fitting an image to a client’s window size using Javascript. For illustrative purposes, I’ve selecting fitting the image to the browser’s width. Please let me know if you’re aware of a simpler way to do this!

I often use the excerpt field in WordPress to populate my meta description tags. By default, the latest versions of wordpress hide the excerpt field until you proactively add them to your post and page editing screens. To re-add the excerpt field to WordPress, do the following:

1) Login to the WordPress Admin.

2) Click “posts.”

3) Click “Screen Options” in the top right of the page.

4) Click the “excerpt” checkbox under the heading “Show on Page.”

5) Minimize the “Screen Options” drop-down.

Now, you’ve retrieved the missing excerpt field in WordPress and you’re off to the races!

As a beginning web developer, the first time you try to paste some HTML code snippets into your WordPress blog can be annoying. You want to show off the actual code, and your browser converts that code into commands! Don’t worry, though. You have a few options:

1) The built-in code tool. If your wordpress theme supports the “code” command, you can simply paste your code into your post, highlight it, then click the “code” button above the text-editing window in your WordPress admin.

2) Convert all your HTML symbols into entities. This is a favorite trick of mine. Character entities are converted from a string into the underlying symbol they represent. That way, the browser doesn’t interpret them as HTML. One of the more common character entities you may have run across is the copyright symbol (©). Since the symbol doesn’t appear on most keyboards, you’ve got to use a character entity to get it to appear on a web page (and that character entity is &copy;).

Similarly, you can use character entities to get your browser to ignore brackets and quote marks in your text. Just paste your code snippet in Notepad (or Dreamweaver or whatever), and do a find and replace on the brackets and quotemarks. Here are the character entities you’ll need:

< = &lt;
> = &gt;
" = &quot;

Just do a find on this symbol: “<” and replace it with this: “&lt;”. Repeat that step for the “>” and quote symbol (using the entities above) and then post the code chunk into your blog.

Want to turn off smartquotes for good? If you don’t want smartquotes to appear anywhere on your blog, you can try setting up a php plugin following these instructions from Lance Bledsoe. Note: I haven’t actually tried his suggestion, so proceed at your own risk. I’m assuming it works, though, since Lance’s post doesn’t contain any smartquotes!

PayPal buttons can look boring without any accompanying text around them. One simple way to add some spice to your donation button is to let users type in the amount they want to donate before they click the donate button. Here’s the code to do just that:

<form style="margin: 4px 0px 0px 4px;" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post" target="paypal">
<input type="hidden" name="cmd" value="_donations" />
<input type="hidden" name="business" value="<put your paypal email here>" />
<input type="hidden" name="item_name" value="Donate to the North Building Project" />
Donation Amount: $ <input style="color: #666;" type="text" name="amount" value="0.00" size="5" />
<input type="image" name="submit" src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/btn_donateCC_LG.gif" alt="PayPal – The safer, easier way to pay online!" />
<img src="https://www.paypalobjects.com/en_US/i/scr/pixel.gif" alt="" width="1" height="1" border="0" />
</form>

Be sure to test this out thoroughly before you use it, but it should make customizing your donate button a bit easier!