Toastboy’s Tech Tips

I just recently found out about this place in Georgia called Dougs Coffee. I was so impressed with Doug that I decided to write a little blurb about his outfit.

He is roasting and selling some of the greatest coffee beans from around the world. Currently his most popular roast is the 1lb house blend of lightly roasted Columbian and Brazilian beans. Price: $8.99 / lb. ( thats cheaper than the crappy stuff at the grocery store) Check out the flavored coffees as well. All of his coffees are reasonably priced and he offers free shipping on orders of $50 or more.

Check him and his coffees out here

Even if you don’t need to buy some coffee today, you can check out his section brewing the perfect cup of joe and also some maintenance tips you might not have known about.

Cheers

I have finally succumbed to the powers that be and am now on twitter.

You can follow me here twitter.com/toastboy2k2

Aweber is awesome. They have this feature in which you can automatically send out emails to your list when you update your blog through rss. woohoo!

The setup is a breeze just login to you aweber account and click on the messages tab , and then on the Blog Broadcast link.

Put in your sites rss feed.

Choose your template. ( you can use the blank template and make your own too ).

Edit the message.

Set the send time.

Set how often you send it out. Either automagically when specified number of entries is posted to the rss feed or a predetermined time / date.

Check if you want clicks enabled.

And syndicate if wanted.

Away you go. Now when you post to your blog or site, and your rss feed is updated, off goes email to your list.

Great news.

a brief history

I have been online now for almost 14 yrs and have run toastboy.com since its original registration in november of 1998 and before that I worked for an ISP in canada for a few years and well before that was one of those geeks that had a BBS running on an old 386 with 4mb of ram. My BBS was hot because i had a 9600baud modem. Near the end, my friend and I had two 14.4kb modems and had upgraded to a 486 machine. The reason i’m telling you this, is that even in the time of offline ( before internet ) My friend and I were able to successfully build a BBS without the help of search engines, and ad campaigns.

Now that we have this wonderful Internet to run sites on, the opportunities are endless. Not to mention a lot more robust and visually appealing, and definitely a lot more interactive and fast.

list building 101

Building a list is a lot like anything you want to do in life. It really comes down to do people ( yes i said people ). If the people experiencing you like what you have to say ( or write ). Then they will listen. And keep this in mind. You can’t please everyone all the time. That’s what makes being a human being so meaningful and wonderful. I can try to convince everyone that life is all about computers, and car stereos and raising a beautiful daugther and being loving husband and father. But guess what, their are some people out that there that could care less. I do not take offence. I target my audience to ones that do like what I have to say, and give them all of my energy and information. And who knows maybe down the road the others may come back to find something of interest to them too.

ready, aim, fire

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After you have created your new beautiful template you notice that you have a footer that boasts the artisteer site.

To remove this, just open up your footer.php file in the exported directory of your template and remove or change the reference to artisteer.

Simple.

Toastboy.Com has a new look.

I have been playing with a new tool. Its Called Artisteer and I love it. It makes for easy template generation for Joomla, Drupal, and of course Wordpress.

You really are in full control of you template creation process. There are a few things that you have to manually edit like the footer, if you don’t have a privacy statement, or a contact us section. Also you may want to remove the credit back to artisteer and such. But that is pretty easy to do.

All in all I love this product, it helps to take an idea to completion in as little as a few minutes.

Check it out here. #1 Wordpress Theme Generator. Instantly create great looking and professional Wordpress Themes.

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After finding out that I could not install a specific pdf creator on my shared hosting server, i decided to use the fpdf pdf creator. IT works well for what I need. But I could not get the dang save as dialog to appear. I fought with this for a few hours, and after searching and finding nothing. I went to the source of fdpf to find the answer.

It seems that with the most recent version of fpdf, the ouput function has changed slightly.

$pdf->output(”name.pdf”, “D”) ;

This doesn’t work anymore.

The way the function wants to work is with a boolean true / false for download or display inline.

So the way to force the download is to leave off the “D”, or “I” that you were used to in older versions.

To make the pdf display the “Save as” dialog box, you need to rewrite the output call like this.

$pdf->output(”name.pdf”);

Leave off the other attribute and voila it works.

It you still want to display it inline with the browsers defautl pdf reader, just add anything after the file name.

$pdf->output(”name.pdf”, true);

And it will open the pdf file in the browser window.

Hope this helps some folks out there.

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LEAP! features interviews with many of the greatest visionaries, scientists and authors in the world today. It is mind-expanding, heart-opening, and a real treat for the senses. If you’re ready for a movie that’s an actual life-changing event in itself, turn on LEAP! and let your adventure begin.