Montreal-Toronto.com Now in Chinese

The Website Montreal-Toronto.com has now a Chinese language version:

蒙特利尔-多伦多

关于蒙特利尔、多伦多以及如何在两座城市间旅行的网站。

Website Fotofuerer-Zuerich with new Design

Fotofürer-Zürich (Zurich Photo-Guide), a very old website has been given a new design. The page shows various places that are good to take pictures in Zurich, Switzerland. For each place, a short description as well as a map (using Google-Maps) is given. The site is currently available in German only.

The design features a full-screen background image with the Munster of Zurich and semi-transparent content and menu widgets. Links have a blue-retro look to support the legacy of the site.

Website for Rent

A new idea is now being tested: Offer websites for rent instead of selling them.

Why should what works in the real estate market not work for the Internet Market? The client has no "investment" cost, is on-line immediately and knows exactly what he gets. The developer on the other hand, can let its creativity go wild and program without constraints. A win-win situation!

Bracher-Automation just released its first website that will be offered for rent: Toronto-Pizza.

It is a simple one page website that displays the menu and the phone number of a pizza delivery service. The lessee will have the possibility to edit the content using MyFtpWebEdit.

Style-Et-Tendance Online

And yet another project went on-line this weekend: Style-et-tendance.ca.

Style et Tendance is an on-line shop for European Clothing in Montreal. The website is in English and French and comes with a sophisticated back-end that lets the owner easily add and remove products from the catalog.

Safari-Plus.com: A website using MyFtpWebEdit

Safari-Plus.com is on-line since several days. The Website was developed for Peter Gaulé who offers Safari-Tours in South Africa. The target audience is Swiss, so there are French, German and English language versions.

The Website uses MyFtpWebEdit so that Peter can edit the content himself.

myFtpWebEdit released as OpenSource

Bracher Automation just released its Web-Application myFTPWebEdit as OpenSource. This application, based on TinyMCE and the Tango Desktop Theme, allows to edit html-formatted text as well as CSV tables over an FTP-connection.



To learn more and to download the software go to http://www.bracher-automation.com/en/myftpwebedit.php.

Electric-Car-Database: Website Online

The Database for Electric Cars is now on-line. Currently available in English, French and German, the site gives an overview of the cars that are currently in the market and on the drawing table.

Are you a car manufacturer?
- The site allows you to create an account an add your cars.

Do you have a website or a blog about electric cars?
- Use the data of the Database for free!

Add social network buttons to your website

A javascript function to share a web-page on social networks has been added to the free downloads section of Bracher-Automation.

Montreal-Toronto.com: Now in Russian

Монреаль-Торонто: Этот сайт посвящен городам Монреаль и Торонто, а также всем тем, кому предстоит поездка из одного города в другой.....

And yet another reason to avoid flash

Flash completely ignores the z-index and goes always on top of the page. Why is that bad? Imagine you want a hover menu to go above it -Big problem.

In many forums, people post that this can be taken care of by setting wmode=transparent. However, this does not work on all browsers.

Had to use a brute force solution using Javascript to solve this "minor" flash bug. I get the point why Steve decided to ban that technology from the iPad.

PS: Even big companies do not seem to have figured this problem out. Look at the following page with different browsers: http://www.bmw.com/com/en/insights/technology/efficientdynamics/phase_1/introduction.html

Many websites do have iframes without even knowing

So you are one of those who think iframes are the worst thing ever and should be banned from all websites?

Do you display any advertisements on your website? Yes? Well, then I have news for you. Changes are big that you use iframes on your own website without knowing.

How I found out about this? By accident. I could not get adsense to work on a page with iframes today (a point for the iframe haters here). The ads would just look weird and misplaced.

After a lot of coffee and even more tests, I narrowed the problem down to the "iframe" styling in my CSS file. A quick look at the html source after being modified by the provided javascript functions showed it: The advertisement is always placed in an iframe! Thats why my CSS code for "iframe" did affect the ads.

Conclusion 1: Never style the "iframe" tag without using classes or id's!
Conclusion 2: Many websites do have iframes without even knowing

montreal-toronto.com: First Google search result for "Montreal-Toronto" in Arabic

The Arabic version of Montreal-Toronto.com* was the first result on google.ca for the keyword "مونتريال تورنتو" (Montreal-Toronto) today.

*montreal-toronto.com is a website about Montreal, Toronto and how to travel between those two cities. It was developed as a proof of concept for the multilingual-content management system by Bracher-Automation. The website is currently available in Arabic, German (as well as Swiss-German), English, French, Spanish and Wolof.

Electric car database: Design makes progress

The design and database development makes progress. Soon manufacturers will be able to add their cars.

montreal-toronto.com read in Swiss German

montreal-toronto.com in Arabic and Wolof

Montreal-Toronto.com, a Website about Montreal, Toronto and how to travel between those two cities, is now translated to Arabic and Wolof.

Wordpress: Upload an image by ftp and add it to the Media Library

Got a message that says: "Error saving media attachment." when you tried to upload a file to the Wordpress Media Library? This is because Wordpress has no write permission in the "wp-content/uploads"-folder.

Instead of trying to figure out your write permissions (and probably doing something stupid like giving it chmod 777), you might thought to just upload your pictures by ftp and then add it to the library using the "Add from Server" Plugin by Dion Hulse.
- But now you have a "The uploaded file could not be moved to ..." error message?

The problem is that this Plugin tries to copy the file into the uploads folder. And with no write-permission, it can't do this.

So how do we get around that?

There is a simple hack that solves that problem. The only thing you need to do, is comment out lines 192-199 in the file "add-from-server.php" of the plugin.

Now you can upload your pictures using any ftp-client to the "wp-content/uploads" folder and then include them in the Wordpress Media Library, using the "Add from Server" option. A little error message appears, but it works.

Fotopanorama.ch - German: 1 million visitors

The German version of fotopanorama.ch, the oldest still maintained website of Stefan Bracher, just reached one million visitors over the weekend.

On fotopanorama.ch, Stefan shares his passion about panoramic pictures. The website is on-line since 2002 and has German, French, Italian, English and Chinese language versions, with the German one being the most popular. In total, 1515842 visitors went to the page up to now.

Spotlight Website: Electric car database

This website will be on focus for the next months. We will regularly post updates on the progress of the development.



The concept of the website is the following: Provide a database that gives an overview of the market of electric cars.

Blog Created

Welcome to the Blog of Bracher-Automation. Here we will inform you about the progress of our web-projects.