PC Magazine penned an article, Embedding Fonts in Web Pages, that explains how you can embed specialty fonts into your web pages. If this worked all the time, it would be great! No longer would you have to turn certain parts of web pages into graphics, just so your page turns out exactly how you want it.
The only problem that I see with this method, is that it still doesn't support all browsers. We start getting into a scenario where we will have to specify that "this website works best with browser XYZ." Yikes! With the movement back to standards and stylesheets, I was kinda hoping that we'd moved beyond that.
I will keep an eye on this, but right now I don't believe that this is the answer. It might be a great solution for an intranet, where you know all of the browsers will be IE version 6.0. But in the non-idealized world we actually live in, I don't see this happening.
LinkPopularity.com: The Free Link Popularity Service is a great resource for anyone who wonders, "why is that site ranked so high, and my site ranked so low."
This service will quickly help you find out how many other URLS link to the URL that you submitted. It will let you know this for Altavista, Google and Hotbot.
| See who links to your web site. |
While its easy to talk about what XHTML is/isn't, sometimes all the talk in the word can't compete against a good concrete example.
The Style Guide for the Branch Libraries of the New York Public Library explains the markup and design requirements for all Branch Libraries web projects, along with various standards and best practices.
The information is timely and useful...and I really enjoy their use of CSS to make the pages layout quite nicely.
Let them sing it for you: a site that will turn your plain old text message into a song. For every word that you type, it will find that word being sung in a song. Then it will chain all of those words/song clips into one long song that can be emailed to a friend.
As Sir Elton John himself once sang, "I hope you don't mind...that I put down in words..."
Wow! They've done it again. The brains at google have come up with the Google Deskbar, which allows you to search with Google from any application without using your mouse!
Easy keyboard shortcuts (CTRL-ALT-G) which are redefinable will have you typing in your query in the taskbar. A mini browser window will pop-up with your results. Then, if you click in the corner of that window, you'll get your results in your default browser! (Which for me happens to be Netscape 7.1)
All in all, awesome.
I have finally come around to the fact that it's no longer the 90's. And as we rapidly approach 2004, I will no longer be coding new websites that are made to support version 4 browsers.
Here's a fact from White Papers // Client-Side Best Practices:
"Building a site to support version 4 browsers can double the time needed for client-side development."
Experienced designers choose colors intuitively...the rest of us need help. Finding the correct combination of colors can be frustrating and take a lot of time.
This tool, the color scheme creator, will suggest to you sets of colors that work well together...once you've given it an initial color that you choose by clicking on a color wheel.
Hopefully this will help out you fellow non-designers, I know it will help me.
Wow. I have now seen the light. For years, Microsoft has caused me to struggle as a web developer...because Bill forced me to run only 1 version of IE at a time. With Netscape I've been able to keep multiple installations on the same computer for years. But no, not with Microsoft....not until now that is.
Joe Maddalone reports in his blog entry titled Multiple IE's in Windows how to "trick" windows into allowing you to have more than 1 version of IE installed at a time. Thanks Joe!
Update: Found another entry Multiple Versions of Internet Explorer -- but this guy has .zip's that you can download, saving you from having to create these files yourself.
While CodeRed and Nimda have stopped being majorly annoying, I still get hit by infected computers looking to infect my Apache web server. Ha! Good luck. Not gunna happen. What it does do, however, is clog up my error_log files.
What I've done is take advantage of the strength of apache to set some variables and log these worm attacks elsewhere:
# For Code Red
SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/default.ida" iisworm
# For nimna (or whatever it's called)
SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/scripts" iisworm
# ... ditto all the way down
SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/c/winnt" iisworm
SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/_mem_bin" iisworm
SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/_vti_bin" iisworm
SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/MSADC" iisworm
SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/msadc" iisworm
SetEnvIf Request_URI "^/d/winnt" iisworm
LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined
LogFormat "%v %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" virt_host_combined
CustomLog /usr/local/apache/var/log/www/access_log combined env=!iisworm
CustomLog /usr/local/apache/var/log/iisworm.log virt_host_combined env=iisworm
So real hits get logged as normal, and any IIS worm related hits get logged elsewhere.
What's great about this method is that it allow me to define the environment variables once, and then use them in an VirtualHosts that I have defined. The virt_host_combined directive tells Apache to log which VirtualHost is getting hit.
In June 2003, NPD Research, the parent company of MediaMetrix, conducted a study to determine what percentage of Web browsers have Macromedia Flash preinstalled. The results show that 97.4% of Web users can experience Macromedia Flash content without having to download and install a player.
...or, why the heck are the links in my html not doing what I told them to do in my CSS sheet. It's because you need to have them in a certain order:
For more info, please visit Eric Meyer's Page on link specificity
XHTML is the next generation of HTML: XHTML is not very different from HTML 4.01, so bringing your code up to 4.01 standards is a very good start.
The Most Important Differences:
This XHTML Tutorial will help you on your way.
It is very important to validate your code using the available online resources.
You can also validate your CSS code while you are at it.
You will need to start each xhtml document with a document type declaration (DTD). There are three you can choose from:
If you have lots of existing HTML code, you'd probably want to use the Transitional DTD.
Finally, let's let our tax dollars work for us for a change! Here is a page from the EPA with tips to make sure your html code complies to XHTML standards.
Now that you know know a little bit more about robots.txt files, wouldn't you like to who is sending out the robots to your website in the first place?
Whenever a page is read from a web site, the log file records a number of details including the time, the IP address and usually the referrer page and the user agent. Some user agents are quite obvious, "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)", but others might just confuse you, "Mozilla/4.0 compatible ZyBorg/1.0 Dead Link Checker Beta-d01". When you need to look up which bot is hitting your site to determine whether or not they should be added to your robots.txt file, take a look at: the search engine robots page.
This site will let you lookup user-agents, as well as providing you even more inforation about robots that will probably come in useful.
If you ever take the time to look in your web server access logs, you might be surprised to see that you are getting tons of 404 errors for a file called robots.txt. While you could spend the time to make an elaborate file, why not spend 30 seconds to make a very simple one that will reduce the number of 404 errors, and make search engine spiders that much happier to visit your site.
A generic robots.txt file that welcomes all robots and denies none would look like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
More examples can be found at clockwatchers.com.
After years of coding, I'm realizing that CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) have finally hit critical mass. As this site proves, you can separate design from content. What are some sites that help me to rememember this?
I'll add to this list as I come across/remember more resources.
People are always asking me, "Hey Mark, how do I get my website listed/ranked higher in search engines." I'm never sure what to tell them, because there are so many variables involved. Came across this great guide, 26 steps to 15k a Day on searchengineworld.com. If you were to follow it, you would be well on your way to a better site.
Stumbled upon the Death Calculator which is on a promo page for 6 Feet Under, the HBO show. Answer some questions, find out how long you'll live.
I've put my results in the extended entry. (btw, I'm currently 33 years old)
Based on the answers you submitted, we estimate that you will be Six Feet Under in the year 2057.
And you will be 87 years old.
In other words, you have 54 years left to live.
So, enjoy them.
Having grown up in the 70s, I fondly remember playing on my colecovision and atari 2600 game systems. What would today's kids think about the games that I grew up with? Electronic Gaming Monthly tackled this subject in a recent article: http://www.egmmag.com/article2/0,4364,1338730,00.asp
http://www.ordinary-life.net/blog/archives/cat_web_design_backend.php has neat looking blog that has some great looking tools in it.
I think I wanted to remember this page because of the PayPalDev resources.
Wow, why would you ever bother licking envelopes and stamps again. I've found 2 companies that will do it for you:
http://www.amazingmail.com will send custom postcards for $1.00
http://www.cardstore.com - will allow you to create full color custom folded cards for around $2.50 each, and will mail them for you as well.