Accessing Folders Quickly
I create shortcuts to folders I access frequently and keep them all in one folder named, as you may have guessed, "Shortcuts". Over time I have ended up with at least 50 of them.

I just had the idea of alphabetizing these shortcuts into three subfolders, e.g. 0-H, I-P, and Q-Z. I put an underscore at the front of the folder names so they will always stay at the top. So now these shortcuts and the folders they point to are much more accessible.


You can create a shortcut to Windows Explorer that will open up your folder in a double-pane Explorer window using the following syntax:

explorer.exe /e,/root,"folder path"

and substitute the folder's path for "folder path", keeping the double-quotes. All you have to do is click on the shortcut and it will do its thing.

The other option is to make a normal shortcut to a folder, and then in a Windows Explorer window, open up View,File Types. Find an entry for the "Folder" filetype and add a new command, named "explore." The syntax of the command would be:

explorer.exe /e,/root,"%1"

This will show up in the right-click context menu on folders as "explore", and will have the same effect as the first method.

If you can't add a new command to the Folder file type, just create a new file type called "File Folder, for example, and use explorer.exe for the program it is opened by, create an "open" command of explorer.exe "%1", and an "explore" command as described above.

HTML and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
Hello again. Sorry I've been gone so long :(

I think you are reading an HTML document right now! Someone recommended to me quite a while ago that I learn CSS for writing my website (www.leopardlounge.tk). I looked at it, but I was really, really intimidated by it. Today I wanted to use the same formatting to highlight certain words in my site's main text, which I wanted to change. I found that I was writing the same HTML tags, which changed more than one text attribute and were long, over and over again.

It is my impression that, in addition to separating the actual data from the formatting, one of the reasons for CSS is to write a style of HTML tag (a certain named configuration of that tag) once and apply it in the body of the document more than once. This also standardizes the look of the document, customizes the HTML tags for use all over that document, making the document hang together better.

The best tutorial I've seen is at w3schools.org. In the meantime, though, while you're reading this, let me give you a little idea of some of the syntax.

I copied a piece of code that defines the classes and is placed in the HTML document :







The syntax of the class definition that you see is [(HTML tag name) {tag attribute: value}].

In this case, these classes give the tags certain attributes that are applied every time you use them unless you specify otherwise.

Notice that you can specify a left margin for the paragraph tag in pixels (px). You can also specify font sizes in points where applicable. I'm impressed, anyway :)

See you next time...