Blogs

Skeleton Key - FileMaker Training: Wherever You Are

FileMaker Training: Wherever You Are photo by OfficeNow Skeleton Key will kick off its 2012 FileMaker online training schedule this week with FileMaker Server 101. Take a look at the line up of trainings available for you to attend from your desk, home office, or anywhere you've got a good internet connection.

January 9, 2012

FileMaker Hacks

Locating Matching Records, part 1

Sometimes a seemingly-simple FileMaker challenge turns out to be more nuanced and educational than first impressions might indicate. This happened recently when I was asked to help make a scripted search behave properly. Most of the time, the existing routine worked correctly, but on certain records it would fail. The challenge: Click a button to [...] Source

Kevin Frank

January 9, 2012

Captain's Blog

Local Blogs

For members who have been blogging on the site - many of you have or maintain an external blog. Initially when we set up the forum we allowed external blog link all that did was redirect a visitor to your actually blog, and counted how many times that link was clicked. I have since disabled external blog links but I have enabled RSS Import of external blogs - This way entries of your blogs can be imported as they occur. (10 per day) and you get the benefit of having view counts on each o

Ocean West

January 7, 2012

Workarounds

…are great. Of course. And necessary. Of course. Too often i spend time and energy railing against the powers that be to change their application/service/website to meet my individual needs. “This app should let me do this! Why doesn’t it? Will there be an update to address this? I should write support and have them [...] Source

January 6, 2012

Then again, no.

Awww, scratch that last post, as yet another thing has gone wrong with this horrific ‘easy’billing database. Now the invoice numbers aren’t updating – we had this problem before but the solution was ?? – it just fixed itself magically, as far was we could tell. I how to buy prescription drugs without a prescription [...] Source

January 6, 2012

Ignite Presentation about Emailing

Ignite email View more presentations from wingforward. Source

January 6, 2012

SMTP & Gmail

Sometimes someone else posts the definitive piece. Read this blog post by Lee Lukeheart, founder of Savvy Data, for the skinny on Filemaker and Gmail. Source

January 6, 2012

Pre-fill new fields with related data, quickly

Sometimes you need to add a field to an existing database that should have values for all the already existing records in the table. Say you’ve added a new field on an existing database. It’s not a calc field, but will have an auto-entered calculation field that will always be filled out. For example, in [...] Source

January 6, 2012

Make a new plan, Stan.

or even use an old one… just HAVE a plan, and STICK to it. A few thoughts for the next time we make a brand new database: We should set some strict naming and formatting conventions so that all the names used for tables, field, layouts and scripts use the same rules, allowing us to [...] Source

January 6, 2012

Learning

It’s funny how things I’ve studied thoroughly do not necessarily register themselves in my brain as useful knowledge until I’ve made use of them. In working with Filemaker, and learning it in a somewhat haphazard way, it’s cool to observe how I learn. First off, I started by reading many books and stuff on Filemaker [...] Source

January 6, 2012

Migrating Word Press

We’ve got a few websites based on WordPress. They’re little sites and have been hosted with GoDaddy since launch. GoDaddy is cheap, cheap, cheap, and good enough for the sites we’ve had up. But we want to drive more traffic to those sites, take hosting control of a couple other more complicated sites, and get [...] Source

January 6, 2012

Magento Shipping with Matrix Rate

The client is running Magento 1.1.8. Magento was installed and configured a couple years ago by another company. The client wants to change the way shipping is calculated. There are three types of shipping each with a single fixed price:, Ground ($12), 2nd Day Air ($35) and 2nd Day Air Oversized ($65). Samples of the [...] Source

January 6, 2012

GODADDY DISASTER

We are trying to move our website to a new hosting company (godaddy is SLOW and not very easy to use – and, as we just found out, VERY RESTRICTIVE). We researched a bunch online and found that a good way to move a wordpress site safely (and with little or no downtime) is to [...] Source

January 6, 2012

FileMaker Security Blog

Gas, Liquid, or Solid: Drive On

Gas, Liquid, or Solid: Drive On --By— Steven H. Blackwell January 3rd 2012 Happy New Year to FileMaker developers and users around the world. We have a lot of work to do in the FileMaker World in 2012, and I am eager to get started. A very key element and requirement for the reliable and safe deployment of FileMaker Pro files is, of course, FileMaker Server. And, of all the components of a FileMaker Server deployment, none is more important, I woul

Steven H. Blackwell

January 3, 2012

Skeleton Key - FileMaker Academy Members Create Resources For You

FileMaker Academy Members Create Resources For You In early 2011, a group of leading FileMaker Academy. The purpose of FM Academy is to further educate FileMaker users and developers to encourage best practices and foster further adoption of the software. These companies are based in various regions of the United States. 360 Works, Atlanta; MightyData, Dallas/Austin/Houston; IT Solutions, Philadelphia/New York; Anvil Dataworks, Washington, DC/Baltimore; Fiddlehead Software, Portl

December 23, 2011

SeedCode

Physical Calendars / SeedCode Sale

Beautiful stuff here… http://design-milk.com/2012-modern-calendars/ Especially this one from Calouette. And if you need a shared calendar, SeedCode Calendar is on sale (and bundled with Zulu iCal Sync) though Dec 31st. Source

John Sindelar

December 17, 2011

FileMaker Hacks

Long Documents in FileMaker 11

There was a time, many years ago, when the maximum number of characters you could store in a FileMaker text field was 64,000. With the introduction of FileMaker 7 in 2004, that limit was expanded to approximately one billion characters (2 Gb of data divided by 2 bytes per Unicode character), i.e., more than you [...] Source

Kevin Frank

December 17, 2011

HOnza's Bits @ FMForums

Marvelous Optimization #3 – Faster Imports

This example demonstrates that even a single-step script can be optimized. You just have to think a little bit out of the box… I was showing this as a surprise in my session Marvelous Optimizations at Pause On Error [x] London 2011. I used a sample file with 25 fields and 5,000 records and imported these records 5 times in a row in just 13 seconds. OK, 13 seconds is not bad but what if you need to import data into FileMaker Go over network? If you want to know how I imported the same data i

HOnza in Performance Tuning

December 12, 2011

Skeleton Key - FileMaker Training or Coaching?

FileMaker Training or Coaching? Training or coaching - which is right for you? The simple answer: Training is an overarching effort to teach you how to effectively use the FileMaker toolkit. Coaching is a more tactical approach that focuses on learning how to apply the FileMaker toolkit to your specific application. Here's an analogy that might make the distinction easier to grapple with: read more Source

December 9, 2011

Skeleton Key - Selling FileMaker App Dev Services - Tactical Steps to Improve Your Sales Funnel

Tactical Steps to Improve Your Sales Funnel Last week, I wrote about the theory behind these sales tactics. You should review that first if you're interested. The key is being able to identify an ideal prospect and 'know' who you are communicating with. There's a simple way to determine a qualified lead from an unqualified lead: ask the people involved. Now let's figure out how to ask. read more Source

November 29, 2011

FileMaker Hacks

FileMaker 11 Internal SQL Changes, part 2

Welcome back for a second action-packed episode, as we continue exploring changes to the FileMaker 11 internal SQL parser. We ended part 1 by looking at the INSERT/SELECT construction which, as you may recall, provides the SQL equivalent of a FileMaker “add new records” import from one table to another. Actually, when you use INSERT/SELECT, [...] Source

Kevin Frank

November 27, 2011

Skeleton Key - Selling FileMaker App Dev Services - Invest Time On Leads That Will Become Sales

Invest Time On Leads That Will Become Sales <p>I may be crazy for publishing this but we're putting our money where our mouth is. Skeleton Key advocates for transparent business practices. Have a look around our site and you'll see it everywhere. I'm going to pull the curtain back on our sales process. If that makes you uncomfortable, you have all the more reason to keep reading. read more Source