Different fonts give different feelings. A nice story-book from the old days would probably start the chapter with a capital letter in this style. Maybe you would write a biography and want to give the reader a perspective of that there is much to come. You will go way back in time. The letter has a feeling of life – the leaves giving an impression and describing how life turns out and grows every day. I wouldn’t mind writing one myself about life. Probably it would be a lot of sketches and designs and not too much text - but it would be great fun. Actually today’s bloggs are sorts of biographies. Niklas and I are talking about everyday things that we like… Maybe it’s more like a diary until we make a book out of it.

I think it is a great way to start off a book or story using this kind of style. Fonts really give a lot of character to the text that you would be reading. The writer should be concerned about the fact that this sets the mood.

So this might give you something to think of the next time you read a book. What does this font tell you…?

Sometimes you need to fit a lot of data into an excel spreadsheet. You might want to choose 7 or 8 as font size. When you start typing in information you suddenly notice that the text, that numbers the rows, are too big and gets cut off, see below.



As far as I know there is no way of changing the size of the numbers and letters. If there is, then great, another way. But this is how you should do it otherwise. Keep the default size of 10 or 11 or what it is. Then zoom out, that is set the percentage of what you are viewing to 75% or something like that. This will give you the same effect but it also makes the numbers and letters of the columns and rows to look as if they have the same font-size.



Now, if you print this, it will probably be in 10 or 11 as font size anyway. What you do to fix that is that you set the scaling in the 'Page Setup' dialog to the same percentage. Now when printing you will fit more information on one page.

This time I have been talking to Niklas and we had some ideas that we wanted to try out. So of course the new project has to have a name. So we had a little chat and thought of a few different ones. Then we decided on a name that has the word ”elephant” in it. So that got me thinking of making a logo as well.

When I started out searching for good reference pictures of elephants, I looked in some good animal-books and browsed google too. So I drew an elephant with swirls and twirls to give it a more graphic cool look. At the same time I thought of making a little pictogram too. One that was more in the same colour scheme and one where the elephant is just a silhouette. Elephants mostly hang out in the warmer part of our hemisphere – that’s why I made the pictogram in yellow and orange.

We will get back on more of this elephant-project later.

I few years back I travelled to Italy. A very good friend of mine was going to get married. So it was a great opportunity to take a look at this well know city - everything from culture, politics and maffia. Mostly I remember my friend travelling there every summer to visit family and friends. He talked about the lovely beaches, sunny days and playing tennis - a great way to spend the vacation in younger years. He and his older brother and younger sister moved there many years ago – by the way, she was the one getting married. Times have changed and the wonderful summers have changed into everyday work and living there. Still a beautiful place, but my friend Robert tells me it wasn’t as glamorous as he remembers it.

Ahh – life I guess.

I have taken this picture over the bay in Napoli (Naples), looking towards the island of Capri. You can see its silhouette in the mist.

One thing I just realized was that Google Chrome has got a resizable textarea by default. That is you can grab it by the bottom-right corner and resize it. What happens is that the rest of the html on the page re-adjusts. However, you can not make it smaller than what you have defined it with using cols and rows.

Take a look at this one and grab-and-drag!

Yup, definately a textarea... Resizable in Chrome but not in Firefox or Internet Explorer

Cool and handy!

Christmas has arrived and I sat here sketching away and all of a sudden I realize that I have started sketching a face that looks like Father Christmas - funny how the surrounding world can affect you like this. I have given him a dominant and powerful look. Maybe even a tattoo-“ish” style one could say. Maybe Santa Clause isn’t the most usual tattoo - but why not?

It is of course the red on his white face that enhances his Christmas-look - the big moustache and the beard also show the modern day look of Santa.

Hopefully you will have a great Christmas!

A pretty new service on the web that's called TweetStats creates stats for your Twitter profile as several different graphs and also a cloud for your most used words.

Here is an example of a graph.

And the cloud for my profile.


You can also look at general trends as graphs and clouds, i.e. what's currently being twittered about by all users.

Cool service! Keep up the good work!

Christmas is coming and everywhere you look the Christmas-spirit is blooming. The windows in Sweden often have small lights lit – like a step-formation I would say. All the big stores and store windows have Santa Claus or elves in them – lots of parcels everywhere. People are running all over the place to get set for Christmas.

Not very many take the time to listen to some nice carols or something like that… or at least I would say that round about Christmas they are very nice to hear. After a few weeks of hearing them one can of course feel that they get on your nerves - but before X-mas like this – why not?

So I drew some “Carollers” singing. I mostly see these in Walt Disney cartoons or maybe in some old movies. Nowadays I haven’t seen anyone out on the street-corner singing - maybe some school-kids trying to make a buck – on the other hand these songs are playing everywhere.

If you feel like getting the lyrics or listening to some on your computer you should check out following links.

Mp3lyrics
Christmas carols
Christmas-carnivals
Carols.org.uk


Merry Christmas!

This time it is not a sunset. Instead I will show you a photo of the moon. As you might know, if you have seen the other pictures that I have taken from Venezuela, the sunsets are amazing and I have more to show. But the moon was quite amazing too.

Every morning I got up somewhere between 4AM and 6AM to put towels on the sunloungers that we were going to use for the coming day. It was a common thing to do among the guests at the hotel if you might wonder. I woke at that time anyway so it didn't matter to me. Many mornings before the sun got up and if there were no clouds, the moon took its place. I ran in and fetched the camera and got this photo. It is the same palmtree as the right one on this photo.

Another amazing photo to me. It could almost be the sun.

If you for instance have Lotus Notes version 7 and would like to install version 8 on the side, i.e. you want to keep both installations on one computer. Then you have a good description of doing so here. According to the instructions you have to make copies and rename at some places. But you can also do it another way that takes a little bit longer time but really don't require more than one change on one installation window.

So let's say you have version 7 and you want to install version 8.5. Start the executable for Lotus Notes 8.5. Go through the installation process. When you come to the point where the wizard asks for the location of where to install the program - change the path from <path>/notes and <path>/notes/data to <path>/notes8 and <path>/notes8/data or if there are other similar change them.

Now Lotus Notes 8 will be installed in a new directory. However your 7 version will not work. If you install the 7 version again now though without making any changes you will have two versions that should be fully functional. I don't think you should run them concurrently though,

The 7 version kept the Teamstudio toolbar buttons, workspace and so on. But you will have to adjust this for the new 8.5 version howver.

I felt like making a font that would be nice for T-shirts and big ads - something that felt bulky and strong. So I made this capital “A”. I even joined it at the bottom to give it a rigid base. I left the support lines to show you how I have been sketching and thinking about the design.

Compared to the last letter I made that was more ”swooshy” and thin – this gives a much more solid feeling. Could be nice as a team logo or symbol. I am in the process of making a logotype right now – maybe this could be a great font to use for that.

If you are out looking for inspiration or maybe even just some good fonts there are a lot of free fonts at: 1001 free fonts – or you can buy fonts at for example: Cool-fonts.com

I would also recommend “Font Book” if you want to get a good look of what fonts are called (that is their actual names) or what all the letters look like.

I have just for educational purposes created a simple web service consumer with Lotus Domino Designer 8.5 Beta 2. So I thought I'd share and perhaps make someone happy.

For this example I found a web service on webservicex.net which was kind of funny. It is called BibleWebservice and let's you get biblic information by book, chapter and verse. The address to the WSDL-file can be found here.

1. Create a web service consumer element. Name it and point to the WSDL-file either local or the url. The web service consumer gets created for you. Copy the class name that gets created, i.e. 'BibleWebserviceSoap_n0'.

%INCLUDE "lsxsd.lss" Const n0 = "http://www.webserviceX.NET" Class BibleWebserviceSoap_n0 As PortTypeBase Sub NEW Call Service.Initialize ("HttpWwwWebserviceXNETBibleWebservice", _ "BibleWebservice.BibleWebserviceSoap", "http://www.webservicex.net/BibleWebservice.asmx", _ "BibleWebserviceSoap_n0") End Sub Function GetBibleWordsByChapterAndVerse(BookTitle As XSD_STRING, chapter As Long, _ Verse As Long) As XSD_STRING Set GetBibleWordsByChapterAndVerse = Service.Invoke("GetBibleWordsByChapterAndVerse", BookTitle, chapter, Verse) End Function Function GetBibleWordsbyKeyWord(BibleWords As XSD_STRING) As XSD_STRING Set GetBibleWordsbyKeyWord = Service.Invoke("GetBibleWordsbyKeyWord", BibleWords) End Function Function GetBookTitles() As XSD_STRING Set GetBookTitles = Service.Invoke("GetBookTitles") End Function Function GetBibleWordsByBookTitleAndChapter(BookTitle As XSD_STRING, chapter As Long) As XSD_STRING Set GetBibleWordsByBookTitleAndChapter = Service.Invoke("GetBibleWordsByBookTitleAndChapter", BookTitle, chapter) End Function End Class

2. Create an agent. Add "Use 'web service consumer name' " in 'Options'.
3. Set target as 'None' in the agent properties,
4. Add this code in the 'initialize' section

Dim bible As New BibleWebserviceSoap_n0 Dim bookTitles As XSD_STRING Dim session As New NotesSession Dim inputStream As NotesStream Dim domParser As NotesDOMParser Dim domDoc As NotesDOMDocumentNode Dim domNodeList As NotesDOMNodeList Dim domNode As NotesDOMNode Set inputStream = session.CreateStream Set bookTitles = bible.GetBookTitles() Call inputStream.WriteText(bookTitles.getValueAsString()) Set domParser = session.CreateDOMParser(inputStream) Call domParser.Process Set domDoc = domParser.Document Set domNodeList = domDoc.GetElementsByTagName("BookTitle") Set domNode = domNodeList.GetItem(1) ' Now get the text in the tag and prompt it to the user (or something else) msgbox domNode.FirstChild.NodeValue

5. Run the agent

So this agent will, when run, display the name of the first book in a message box to you which is 'Genesis'.

A couple of weeks ago we got lots and lots of snow. It looked like in a story-book. A landscape all white – trees, everything covered. Very pretty I must say - and if you were out walking in the dark evening or at night – the reflection from the full moon gave a beautiful look. Now it has all melted away and no more snow – only rain!

So I took this drawing I made last summer – to illustrate the feeling that one carries around a rain cloud all the time - instead of one containing snow. I actually made this sketch for my good friend “Nippe” who also has been guest-blogging here on Wohill (with photography). He kept year after year choosing his vacation on the rainy days of the summer - but this summer the curse was broken.

Maybe it will snow at Christmas!
Need the weather-forcast?

There is something about me and sunsets. I just love them and get amazed by them. So that's the reason why I take pictures of them and sometimes display them here.

Here is yet another photo which is more from a distance than the other one. It show s less of the sun but instead more of the surroundings which all together creates a beautiful view with a mystic and powerful feeling.

This was actually the view we had from our hotel room and porch on our trip to Isla Coche in Venezuela. Can you imagine sitting on that porch with a Piña Colada in your hand doing nothing and just enjoying life?

Since our blog here on Wohill is not a Wordpress or Blogger blog or something similar but instead our self-developed and designed one - we have had to create all these little nice to have things ourselves that otherwise would have been offered as a plugin just to install or marked as a chosen setting. I see this mainly as fun to work with though.

One thing that I have missed for some time now is a way to automatically set a twitter status message whenever a blog post gets published. Since we are two or sometimes three writers I also need a way to check who the author is in order to set the status message on the right Twitter profile.

I searched the oustanding PHP-library PHP Classes and found a ready to use solution - the class twitter.class.php written by Lee FIndlow.

So I downloaded the class-file and created a function based on the example file provided by Lee Findlow.

function setTwitterStatusBlogEntry($uname, $passwd, $type, $url) { $T = new twitter; $T->Username = $uname; $T->Password = $passwd; $T->Status('New ' . $type . ' entry on Wohill -> ' . $url); }

So you simply call it with your twitter username and password.
When calling this function I also make conditional checks regarding who is the author and depending on that the function gets called with different username and password.

There are a lot of plastic figures and animals made today. You can buy them at the toyshop, clothing-store or e-bay and of course on lots of different sites all over the place. There are a few well-known designers that have made lots of nice ones. For example Mori Chack – at myplasticheart.com. He is a Japanese designer born in Sakai.

I wouldn’t mind making a few of these cool plastic characters myself - but that will be in the future I guess. I will keep you posted if I do.

This rabbit would be one of the characters that I would make in that case.

As a web designer you might get into situations where you need to make elemens transparent so that they can be seen through each other. An example is a vertical menu that roll down over the rest of the page. It looks really nice if it is transparent so that you can still see the background for instance. A way to do this is simply to set a color for that element (div) and make it transperent to some degree.

Here is an example on how to put several layers on an image with different colors on top of each other where each layer is transperent to different degrees.


Use css-classes that looks something like this. The first one contains the background color and is on the back. The other are nested inside it.

.divImage { background: url(images/someImage.jpg) no-repeat; height:300px; width:300px; } .div1 { background: #FF0000; height:200px; width:200px; -moz-opacity:0.4; opacity: 0.4; filter:alpha(opacity=40); } .div2 { background: #00FF00; height:100px; width:100px; -moz-opacity:0.6; opacity: 0.6; filter:alpha(opacity=60); } .div3 { background: #0000FF; height:50px; width:50px; -moz-opacity:0.6; opacity: 0.6; filter:alpha(opacity=60); }

So the HTML-code would simply look something like this to get a similar behaviour as in the example above:

<div class="divImage"> <div class="div1"> <div class="div2"> <div class="div3"></div> </div> </div> </div>

I was sitting sketching and scribbling yesterday and only had a pencil with me. Now I’m writing down some notes and have found a red pencil… so I have added some red to this duck I was sketching and then he got a bit of a crazy look. Really – this seemed to agree with the mood I saw a man in just a little further away in the coffee-shop I was sitting in.

I would have turned into a mad duck too if I had to wait any longer for my meeting to start.

The thing is that, sometimes, black on white paper is very traditional and it feels like it will last forever - but as you might see a two-colour sketch gives very nice clear impact.

Quack quack!

When I was in Barcelona we went all over the place - or at least to as many nice places as possible in the time we had there. It’s a beautiful city as I have mentioned before - and also very inspirational.

I like to look at culture and art, but I must say I like to look at the everyday solutions for people living there too. Like for example – I took a picture of the fonts and graphics used in their subways. Very clean and informational and yet interesting that they have used black – a powerful colour in itself – as a background-colour. This dark background really makes the typeface in white and the light-blue line pop out. It’s nice to see that one can use dark colours for such “important” and formal signs for public transportation.

I recommend Barcelona.

Here's a fun way of creating a bit different status messages - just to spice it up a bit and create confusion or maybe discussion. I found it via a friend on facebook.

RULES:

1. Grab the book closest to you. Now.
2. Go to page 56.
3. Find the 5th sentence.
4. Write that sentence as your status.

The original instructions contains two more steps but that's not applicable for all social sites and feels a bit unnecessary to me as long as everybody know the rules. Here they are anyway:
5. Copy these instructions as a comment to your status.
6. Don't go looking for your favourite book, or the coolest one you have - just grab the closest one

Here's an example from my closest book, the one that I'm currently reading - "Den siste tempelriddaren" in swedish or in english "The last templar" by Raymond Khoury:

"Naturligtvis ska vi undersöka det." or in english "Of course we will investigate it."

Completely meaningless, which suits the swedish kind of humour very well.
I guess it is applicable for all kinds of social applications like Twitter, facebook, LinkedIn etc.
I think I'll start doing this from now on from time to time but maybe it has to be extended some way for us computer geeks to also involve electronic books, internet sites, blogs, or white papers.

So I'll update my Twitter with it right away. Probably no one will notice,
Ok, I admit it. I am boooored...

Well, what do you think?

The years go by and graffiti has been around for ages. One probably even could call cave-paintings graffiti too - but if one counts more modern graffiti I would think that some of the young kids from the 60:ies, 70:ies and 80:ies have grown up and the rebellious lifestyle from their youth mostly lives inside a grown person’s body…

Maybe he or she has kept the old dream alive… design the town. Concrete walls and whole-cars have turned into computer-design and advertising. Still they are posting their stuff on town - but in a more grown up way.

So this dude is still hanging in there, and still got the cool and rebellious ”T-shirt”. Only a few initiated other people really know what it stands for… and the rest, ahh they just think: well he is the designer – that’s what we expect him to look like.

Keep up the good spirit.

A customer, who is a photographer, wanted a photo gallery for his creations.
So Randolph designed it with a functionality in mind and my task was to try to make it real. This new site is not completely tested or filled with photos yet but should be working as expected. Take a look at it below or see it live.



There is always a possibility of creating everything yourself, but it takes time, something that we didn't have much of in this project. So I needed an existing solution that I could modify instead.

I found a couple of candidate solutions but the one that became number one in my opinion was one that both looked really nice, that presented a very cool functionality and that was also pretty easy to modify to fit your own design. The choice fell on a solution from (E)2 Interactive which is free to use, but anyone using it should consider making a donation of course.

Take a look at the demo here. You can download the whole thing here. The solution consists of PHP, JavaScript and CSS and you almost only have to modify the css templates. There is also a php configuration file to look at with a few basic parameters.

As I said the solution consists of PHP, JavaScript, HTML and CSS but the actual frameworks used besides the own great work of (E)2 Interactive is Mootools, the Image Uploader class.upload.php that I mentioned in a previous post a few days ago, Scott Schiller's - Basic Rounded Corner CSS and Paul Sowden - styleswitcher.js.

So besides the actual photo gallery - an upload functionality comes with the package that really eases the administration of the site. As I wrote in the previous post about the uploader I added a choice to be able to categorize the images. The categories are hard coded in this solution but could pretty easily be made dynamic as well. When clicking on a category images from that specific images directory and corresponding thumbnails directory are loaded using a querystring to the same page. You could also use session variables if you want to hide it.

I had some problems (as often) making it looking and working the same with different browsers, primarily with Internet explorer 6. Some fixing with CSS adjustments made it look pretty much the same regarding layout. The problem with transparency and png-images remains however, So I tried out both the approach in this blog post and the one on this page which is a great solution. Both of them however had the side effect of making the links not working. So I used some conditional statements to not use the png-image if IE6 is used. I am sure I would find a solution if I would work with this enough, but It will have to be like this for now. Please give me a suggestion if you have any.

Great solution from (E)2 Interactive. Thanks!

I have the pleasure to tell you that a new restaurant and patisserie has opened – Nybrogatan 38 in Stockholm. You should take the chance to visit and look in to this new establishment. We have now completed the whole project – one probably would say though that this is when it really begins.

Before the doors were opened there was some designing and suggesting of ideas that had to be done and of course a lot of equipment and work was needed to get this place up and running.

As I have mentioned earlier it is Mattias Ljungberg (owner of Tössebageriet, in English - the Tösse Bakery) that has wished to broaden his business from making and baking bread and deserts to opening a restaurant / patisserie. He asked me to help out with a graphic profile and logotype. So we got started about a couple of months ago. He of course had some more help on the way… friends and workers, Stephanie Tham, who you can see on one of the pictures talking to Mattias Ljungberg, has been there from the beginning and helped out and seen to it that this project will succeed.


So guys – everyone – all the best of luck!

I have already mentioned a trip that we took to the Coche Island or Isla Coche in Venezuela earlier this year. Many good photos came out of that trip.

The sunset was amazing down there. Around 6-7 PM every evening a very large and yellow ball that looked like a gigantic orange slowly hit the ocean and moved down the horizon. There is an amazing feeling sitting on the porch with a beer or a drink in your hand and watching this kind of sunset.

I also have photos with only the sun, but this photo becomes a bit more live since there are clouds and even birds in it.

Take a look at earler posts regarding Venezuela here.

Now you can grade your Twitter profile and get a score of your Twitter profile power.
The Twitter Grade measures the relative power of a Twitter user. It is calculated as a percentile score where it like websites is better to have followers or incoming links rather than following or having outgoing links.

The score is calculated based on:
- The number of followers you have
- The power of this network of followers
- The pace of your updates
- The completeness of your profile
- More...

Well, I could certainly do better, but also worse I guess. My grade is currently 56 and my rank is 150,694 out of a possible 475,816 with 36 followers, 44 following and 252 updates. But I don't tweet that much either to be honest.

You can also take a look at your Twitter cloud on this site.
Funny thing, giving you a pretty good hint I guess whether you should get more active or not

Here's my twitter grade:



You can follow me on http://www.twitter.com/nickwick76

Fonts in general can give you lots of different feelings and ideas. The font in an ad can easily give you a good or bad feeling. Sometimes it’s very informative and sometimes it just shows you a great slogan. With magazine-ads readers seldom read more than the heading – if that even… If you are lucky they will see the picture or illustration and maybe even the logo.

This is why one has to have an appealing font. I like to design fonts, but it takes a lot of time as you might realize or even know. Every character has its personal feeling and yet that feeling has to be portrayed in all the other letters of that font. Has to… or not - you as the creator decides that.

There are lots of nice fonts – some are really well known: Helvetica (Max Miedinger in 1957), Times New Roman (1932) and so on. Some are serif and some sans-serif…

Here is the letter “a” - swerving and easy-going.

I have been searching for a good solution for uploading files and images from a html form to a server for some time and finally found the superior way - class.upload.php written by Colin Verot.

"This PHP script uploads files and manipulates images very easily. The perfect script to generate thumbnails or create a photo gallery! It can convert, resize and work on uploaded images in many ways, add labels, watermarks and reflections and other image editing features. You can use it for files uploaded through an HTML form, a Flash uploader, or on local files. It uses the GD library. This script is released under the GPL Version 2. If your project is not GPL, commercial licenses are available."

So using the default settings, that you get from downloading the package, you can choose which type of file upload that you want to do. Look at the file "index.html" for the options. You can either choose to upload a file, an image or multiple files/images.

For a specific solution I had to upload an image and at the same time a thumbnail for that image. This class makes it happen the best possible way by letting you create the thumbnail from the original one during the upload. You can decide the size of the file and even crop it. Read more about the many possibilities here.

The solution that I implemented have an upload page that look like this.

I have added functionality for being able to specify in which category an image belongs to. This will be more clear on another blog entry in the near future where I use the categories to display images in different photo galleries,

The other part you need to take a look at is the php-page to which the files are posted to. This page uses functionality from the class.upload.php class to process the files. In the package the example file's name is 'upload,php'. Posting an image and at the same time creating a thumbnail would look like this on the controller page where the form is posted.



So if you'd like to jumpstart and try this out I recommend to download the package and play with the index and upload files and you should be running this in a minute. Read the docs to find the ways to manipulate the images - there are many good methods.

I occasionally go to meetings here and there – who doesn’t… Sometimes people like to go to meetings hoping that they don’t have to sit there at desk and work. Maybe they don’t like what they work with or are bored in some kind of way. These people tend to drag out meetings a lot. Now I’m not saying that I don’t like meetings – because I do. It’s just that I don’t like meetings that take far too long, or nothing important is said. I would rather sit down and know that the meeting isn’t to get on further with the project – it’s just a meeting to chat and get to know each other better. If you really want to get down to it – it should only take a few minutes to establish what you or your client wants…

This is why my thoughts sometimes wander off. This time I started sketching a face… a face with a strong expression – a caricature?

Cats are amazing creatures - wonderful animals – gracious and smooth. They will balance on the most dangerous places without even twitching one little bit. Silently passing by without you knowing… and still being there when you look around. Just checking you out to make sure you feed them the next time too. But they will only come on one condition – that they master the situation. I could talk to you about cats forever, but I just felt like posting this picture for now. It gives the right feeling.

This is my cat – Puzzle.

If you, like us here at Wohill, run your blog or web site on an environment with PHP and MySQL, there might also be a chance that your admin interface is built with phpMyAdmin, which is a MySQL database administration tool. It is available in 55 languages with GPL License which basically means that anybody can use it, but read more about it to be sure.

On the web hotel where our blog is hosted there is such an environment and I must say that it is very easy to use and also powerful. You can easily create, modify and delete tables within a database and add, modify and delete fields for the tables in an intuitive way.

Backup or Export the data:

If your data is on a web hotel there is a big chance that there are already backup routines. However if it isn't or just to be really safe you can make backups yourself once in a while in case you for some reason would loose it all. Someone might get into your site via some interface and delete it all or you might be a victim of SQL-injection for example. There could be numerous of reasons.

So except for the obvious security precautions like changing your password once in a while etc. you could also export all of your data in the MySQL-database to a simple text file or a so-called .sql-file. The picture below shows the first page where you can see the option 'Export' which is the one to choose if you want to backup.



The picture below shows the page with the settings for the export. As you can see you can choose to export the data to different destinations like a pdf, cvs, excel or sql-file. I choose to export it as an sql-file since it later on can be used to import the data in case of any loss. You can pretty much leave the default settings as is but be sure to mark the checkbox for 'Save as file'. Below this setting you can also choose the filename and decide if the file should be zipped as well or not.



So in case of data loss you only need to run this file and all data will be restored again (the way it was when you last created the sql-file that is). And the way you will run it with the phpMyAdmin interface is via the import functionality in the equivalent way as for the export functionality.



What really happens is that the SQL-code runs, which looks something like this:

CREATE DATABASE `theDatabaseName` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET latin1 COLLATE latin1_swedish_ci; USE `theDatabaseName`; CREATE TABLE `theTableName` ( `id` int(4) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment, `name` varchar(45) NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (`id`) ) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=9 ; INSERT INTO `theTableName` VALUES (6, 'Text text text'); INSERT INTO `theTableName` VALUES (7, 'Text text text'); INSERT INTO `theTableName` VALUES (8, 'Text text text'); etc. etc. for all tables and values...

There is an easy way of getting web data in excel for further managing the data, stastistical reasons or just saving as is.
If you for some reason need to get live data from a domino server straight into excel or maybe you need to get data into excel from some other online source in a structured way - then Web Query Files (.iqy files) is what you need.

These files can either be created manually in notepad or some other text editor or by using excel. An iqy-file contains 1-4 required lines:

1. Type of query - Can be omitted. The only valid and also the default choice is 'WEB'. 2. Version of the query - If line 1 is omitted, this line has to be omitted as well. The only valid version and also the default value is '1') 3. Uniform Resource Locator (URL) - Required. The web document on which the query acts. Maximum 200 characters. 4. POST parameters - Optional. If it is a GET-query this line can be omitted, otherwise the post parameters are specified on this line.

More settings can be added to this file. The first lines described above must always come first and then the following parameters can be added for more specified adjustments. I am not going to go through all of these now but instead give suggestions to other sources where you can read more at the end of the post.

Selection=EntirePage Formatting=None (Can also be RIchText and FullHTML) PreFormattedTextToColumns=True ConsecutiveDelimitersAsOne=True SingleBlockTextImport=False DisableDateRecognition=False DisableRedirections=False

You can also create these files automatically from Excel:
1. Open a new spreadsheet
2. Click on 'Data -> Import External Data -> New Web Query'
3. Type in a web address in the adress input field and click 'Go'.
4- Click on 'Options' to specify settings, for instance if the content should be HTML-formatted or not.
5. Click on 'Import' and choose where the content should be put. Also click on Properties for additional settings. You can for example specify if the contents should be refreshed with online data for a specific interval.
6. Click 'Ok' and the data will be imported from the web address you specified into the excel spreadsheet.

Some examples:

A simple example would be to get the contents of your rss-feed into excel. Our feed at Wohill is valid and contains xml code and thank's to that the content is divided up into rows and columns. It could definately look better but this is the default behaviour and raw data. You can see it if you create a file called 'readRss.iqy' with this content, save it to your computer and double-click on it to make it run. It will automatically open up in excel.

WEB 1 http://www.wohill.com/rss.php

So XML rendered ok, but the best results comes with HTML and HTML tables.

Another example is when I need different kinds of data in excel about our blog posts. In this case I create a php-file which displays this data in html. And then I create an iqy-file to get the data into excel. An extra twist is that when I run the iqy-file I get a popup window asking how many posts I want to display.

The web page takes a query parameter called 'posts' which specifies how many posts to display from the newest and down. In the iqy-file we can via a popup window hand a value to the parameter 'posts'. So the iqy-file will look like this:

WEB 1 http://www.wohill.com/wohillposts.php?posts=["Number of posts","Enter the number of posts you would like to see an overview of"] Selection=EntirePage Formatting=FullHTML PreFormattedTextToColumns=False ConsecutiveDelimitersAsOne=True SingleBlockTextImport=False DisableDateRecognition=False DisableRedirections=False

Note in the results that it is HTML-formatted. If we would have chosen 'None' instead of 'FullHTML' there would not have been a black background for the headers and no links either.


A third example shows how to get the response from the Google search engine into excel based on a search query. The results in excel would be the same as if you would search directly on www.google.com:

WEB 1 http://www.google.com/search?q=["q","Enter the Search Term:"] Selection=EntirePage Formatting=FullHTML PreFormattedTextToColumns=False ConsecutiveDelimitersAsOne=True SingleBlockTextImport=False DisableDateRecognition=False DisableRedirections=False

It doesn't look that nice though. But a tip is to create a nice looking excel spreadsheet with perhaps white background and some default fonts and then use this as a template for the search results. In this case I would from the template go to 'Data -> Import External Data -> Import Data' and then browse to the predefined iqy-file. Note that the content/results will be placed where you put the cursor,

I also tried getting contents of twitter into here but didn't really succeed. Otherwise that would be kind of cool doing something like this with a refresh mechanism for all your Twitter friends.

Now, I am sure someone might say "why bother going through all of this when you can open the file directly in the open dialog of excel.". Well, you're quire right about that mr anonymous. But you will not get the other benefits of the web query. The data will be HTML-enabled by default and you can not make it refresh automatically unless you make it a web query. And if you dive deeper into this by for example writing VB-scripts there are great benefits to gain when you start combining this with managing advanced spreadsheets.

Now someone might also wonder if this works in Lotus Symphony and the answer is no. Actually I can't even open up a webpage i Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets. Hopefully that will be possible in later versions?

A special thank's to my colleague Anders Pamlin for coming up with this idea to me.

Some sources:

- Excel tutorial from ExcelUser
- Support pages from Microsoft
- Data collection on the world wide web using Excel
- Also look at the default iqy-files that comes with Office. In my installation they are in directory "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\Queries".

The fire engine is a really well-known symbol in our society. The firemen are everyday heroes I think. They put their lives at risk to save others - a very noble way of living. Of course there might be some cats to rescue - those that have climbed up in trees and can’t get down. Maybe somebody has fried some eggs too long and the smoke-alarm went off. Then I guess their lives aren’t at stake… but so many more times they might just be in the right place at the right time. So keep up the good work.

I have drawn a fire-truck in the very characteristic colour red. I don’t even know if there are any other fire-truck colours? If one shows this image to anybody – at least I think most of those I have shown it to say that they think it looks like a fire-truck or fire engine. This was my goal when I drew it! Still - I wanted it to look as plain as possible so one can easily recognise it - even if it was on a small little picture on a button or something like that.

Stay safe and try to remember to check if the oven and the iron are off before you leave the house….

I think that after designing lots of different things that have to do with eating – it is about time to show some hungry Vikings. I posted one the other day that was all set to get out and get some food. So these two are prepared to eat.

I used these to illustrate an information-film a while back. They are just as you see - meant to sit and wait to for food that they can eat. Don’t really now if they have been hunting or if they have been on some kind of raid and collected lots of treasures and food - but that is up to your imagination.

Lunch-time! Let’s go eat.

Today's title is a rephrase of Hemmingway's "The old man and the sea".

When I was in Venezuela I was quite fascinated by the pelicans and took many pictures of them. While walking on the beach one morning I came in a position where a pelican was sitting on a pole with a fisherman's boat in the background further out in the sea. It was a great shot but I couldn't decide whether to focus on the bird or the boat so I did both. And that's what you see on this picture - two photos of the same thing but different things in focus.

It would have been perfect if the pelican and the boat would have the same position on both of the pictures, but on the other hand this gives them both more reality I think when they are put together.

Anyway, it gives me a quite relaxing feeling and at the same time makes the mind spin.

Here are a some links to different icons which could be worth browsing. They should all be free to use, but you should of course check that on the site hosting the icons first.

I intend to keep this site updated and will add more links as I find them.
Please add some more if you have any, in the comments, and I will put them on the list as well.

- Create favicons (for the address bar, also animated)
- MpP Favicon Gallery (a set of favicons to use)
- AJAX icons/images. I.e. animated showing that something is loading.
- Web application icons
- 10 Beautiful icons set for web developers and designers
- VincentAbry.com (Follow me on twitter icons)
- Knob buttons
- Illustrator format icons
- Zeusbox studio (Feed icons)
- Smashing Magazine (Animal feed icons)
- Fugue icons
- High quality icon packs
- Famfamfam (lots of different icons (flags, web icons etc.)
- Some Random Dude (Different small red icons)
- twotiny (A variety of small nice icons)
- ten by twenty (Web icons)
- ProThemeDesign (Circular icons)
- icojoy (Web development icons)
- Paul Armstrong designs
- Brand Spanking New (Lots of mini icons for web development)
- Mini pixel icons (file type icons, web, user)
- UserInterfaceIcons.com (Different sizes)
- Milky (A stock vector iconset, larger icons)
- Tango Icon library (A complete set for your application)
- Different icons

Icon search engines:

- iconlet
- Iconfinder

Icon links:

- WebIconSets.com
- Devoper icon sets
- Smashing Magazine

I have been off with some of my friends to play some floor-ball - a kind of indoor hockey. In Sweden it’s called “Innebandy”. It is played with sticks made of plastic and a round plastic ball. There are a lot of different leagues and series that one can play in. We have some kind of training once a week – I like it a lot and it’s very nice to run about for an hour or so - six guys chasing a ball. Even better if you can score some goals and count points and see what team won this evening.

We joined a league called SIL and play in a very low division, but it is still a lot of fun and the whole team enjoys it a lot. Someone in the team came up with the name “Shock and Awe”. They thought it would give a good feeling. I also thought the team needed a logotype. I made a cartoon-inspired skull. I made some spikes coming out of the skull as well to give it some extra edge. I have actually made a team-shirt too. I’ll show it later on.

Go go SHOCK AND AWE!

On Wohill we use Google Analytics to collect statistics for the blog.
Wohill has been going live for almost a year now since the 3d of january and there are many interesting things to reflect over. We will publish more interesting visitor statistics at the end of the year.

I looked at the statistics since the 3d of january until today's date for different browser and operating systems that our visitors have and it was quite interesting. Some of these I have never heard of and it was also interesting to see that Firefox beats Internet explorer bigtime. Firefox has 55%, Internet Explorer 34%, Safari 5% and the rest of the list shares the remaining 16%.

One small thing I noted was that the web browser Flock that came in 2007 and was a really promising software is not represented at all. Has it died?



The list of operating systems is of course won by Microsoft and Windows with the impressing 86% followed by Macintosh and and 11,5%. Linux has only 1,5% which means that the remaining 10 operating systems share 1%.
It will be interesting to see whether these mobile and game console operating systems will grow in number in the near future since I predict much more activity for these in the next years to come.

If you have grown up close to the woods, or even been out for walks in the woods, you know there are nice edible mushrooms everywhere. Of course there are a few that you probably shouldn’t eat. Our guest blogger Nippe likes the “mushroom-hunt” – he doesn’t like to eat them but he likes going round in the woods looking for them… So by the way does Niklas – Wohill’s ”development-guy” - but I think Niklas is fond of making wonderful dishes with mushrooms.

So I thought I would draw some mushrooms for them - so they can have a look at this design and get inspired to go mushroom-hunting.

These are growing mushrooms that pop out of each other.

En