CSS, Cascading Style Sheet Basics – The Style Placement

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Using a style sheet to define a web page is a good way to get consistency in page design from one page to another on a web site. The style can be placed in the web page directly or it can be placed in a separate file and called by a link from the web page.

CSS Within A Page

Using a style within a page is easy to define with the HTML tag <STYLE>. The type of style is “text/css”. So that tag would be <STYLE type=”text/css”>. Then everything after this tag would be the styles.

CSS Called From An External File

Using a style sheet that is called from an external file is a good way to have consistency between pages on a web site, since the same style can be used in each page without having to define it all over again in each web page.

The HTML tag to accomplish this is the LINK tag <LINK>. It contains 3 attributes, the href, rel, and the type. The whole tag would be <link href=”Style.css” rel=”stylesheet”>. What comes after the href is the name of the file and location of the style sheet file. In this case the style sheet is in the same directory as the web page that is using it, so only the “Style.css” file name is necessary.

Examples of how this is used will be shown in the coming CSS posts …

By: Tech Master Jim

 

PHP – What Is It?

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What is PHP? If you look over the internet, you’ll see references to PHP everywhere. But it wasn’t that long ago when there were only simple HTML web pages on web sites. These pages were static and displayed exactly what was written in the HTML code.

Then Came PHP

If you’re interested in the origins of things, Wikipedia has an excellent article about the beginnings of PHP. Like many languages it started out to solve one person’s problem, Rasmus Lerdorf. He wanted to have his own Personal Home Page that he could easily update. Thus, was born PHP.

PHP Script Has Evolved

From this early beginning, PHP scripts have evolved into a relatively complex set of commands that can perform many different functions to create dynamic web pages. In fact it’s the scripting language that the popular WordPress blogging software is based upon. All WordPress blogs are running PHP programming.

PHP Is Now Hypertext Preprocessor

Now that PHP has been release into the public, the early name changed to Hypertext Preprocessor. What this means is that the commands in PHP preprocess information to create HTML pages before the pages are sent back to your browser. This in turn gives great flexibility to the displayed pages. One HTML page can now display a multitude of different information, and in some cases look entirely different. That’s the reason a PHP script can create dynamic HTML pages.

Learning PHP to PHP Outsourcing

Whether you want to learn PHP, do PHP programming, become a PHP programmer, or just understand PHP code, the TechMasterJim blog can provide you the type of help you’re looking for. You don’t have to be a PHP developer to find valuable assistance in dealing with a PHP template.

PHP Training And PHP Tutorials

From time to time there will be some PHP training, discussion of PHP software, some PHP examples of dealing with specific problems, and occasional references to a PHP book that may be of additional help.

To keep you up to date on what’s happening, you can subscribe to my RSS feed and receive notification of new posts and PHP news.

By: Tech Master Jim

 

Excel Tips – Destination Formatting Of Copied Data

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Have you ever copied something from a web page and tried to put it into an Excel spreadsheet? If you’re like me, you would rather not type the information into a cell. You’d rather copy and paste it. At least that way you don’t have typos.

But what happens to the copied material when it is placed into the Excel spreadsheet? You wait and wait for Excel to figure out what the format needs to be to keep it like the web page. Then, it comes out bold, in large or small type, and maybe even different colors, depending upon what it looked like on the web page. You may also get an active link you don’t want.

Now what do you do? Well after the long wait to see what the data looks like, you could click on the little pull down “Paste Options” box and select “Match Destination Formatting.” But that’s an extra step.

Avoiding The Long Wait And Reformatting

If you don’t want to go through the hassle of having to do that or reformat the data, there’s a simple little trick to pasting the information into your spreadsheet cell. Just go up to the function bar, the space right after the fx, at the top of the spreadsheet after pointing to the cell where you want the data to appear. Paste the copied material into the function location.

When you do that, the original formatting of the data is not even taken into account, and the data appears just as if you had typed it in manually, just the way you want it.

Example:

            Copy This From Web Page Yahoo_web_page

When you copy directly into a cell you get this.

Excel_paste

Instead copy into the function line.

Excel_Yahoo_paste
Then you get this.

Excel_Yahoo_paste_done

One Caveat – Single Cell Copy Only

One caveat with this method is that this only works for single cell copying. If you have data that you want to show up in multiple cells, then this won’t work, because all of the data will be pasted into that one cell.

By: Tech Master Jim