Daily Cup of Tech

I am working on a project and I am storing large amount of data in Access.  I needed a quick an easy way to remove duplicate records based on a specific field in one of my tables.  I thought, “This shouldn’t be too hard since there is a query wizard to determine duplicate records.” 

Man, was I wrong!

After about a day of trying, I figured out the following little trick:

1. Make a copy of your original data table but just copy the table structure, not the data.
2. Edit the new table and change the field with the duplicates’s index to No Duplicates Allowed.
3. Save the new table.
4. Create an append query that will append all of the data from the original table to the new table.
5. Run the append query.  You will see a number of warnings/errors.  Simply accept them to complete the process.
6. Rename the original table.
7. Rename the new table with the same name as the original table.

You should now have all the duplicate records gone!

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One of the annoying things about web design is the fact that you are really quite limited in the number of fonts that you can use on your website.  Unless you’re really into rendering your text to graphics and adding a pile of alt tags so that search engines can see your content, there really is little that you can do.

Well, it appears that your prayers have been answered.  typeface.js is a javascript library that will render your text in real time so that your website looks the way it should without all of the advanced work.  Check out some examples of how this works.

You also aren’t just limited to the fonts that the authors of typeface.js produce.  You can upload any TrueType font that you may have in your library (i.e. c:\windows\fonts folder) and it will prepare it for the script.

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2009/03/24/embed-any-font-you-want-into-your-website/trackback/

From the Completely-Useless-But-Kinda-Fun Department, I give you the ability to edit any webpage on the Internet! Well, actually, you will only edit the cached copy of the page on your computer but you can sure make some very impressive looking webpages in short order.

All you need to do is drag the Edit Page link below to your Bookmark Toolbar.

Edit Page

Then, browse to your favorite website and click on the Edit Page shortcut. Now, start editing!

Once again, kind of useless but it can be really helpful when you would like to edit a page before printing so you don’t get all the extra junk!

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2008/08/23/edit-any-webpage-kinda/trackback/

As you can tell by the top of the website, my web hosting has been provided free of charge for the past while by AlwaysWebHosting. They have been extremely generous and I wanted to thank them very much for all of the help, support, web space, etc. that they have provided for me over the past while. If you are looking for a great web host, definitely give these guys a try.

Unfortunately, they can no longer provide me with web hosting and I am now on the hunt for a new host. This biggest issue that I am running into is the fast that shared hosting does not seem to be enough for my site. I use a lot of processor and I get a lot of traffic.

So, this is what I am now working on:

1. A new web host so that I can move Daily Cup of Tech
2. Ways that I can optimize my website to reduce CPU
3. Upgrading to the latest version of WordPress
4. Designing a new theme so that the website comes up quicker

Any suggestions/comments/ideas on any of these would be greatly appreciated!

Once again, thanks to AlwaysWebHosting for all the past support!

Trackback link - http://www.dailycupoftech.com/2008/07/07/thanks-and-farewell-alwayswebhosting/trackback/