Mark's Technomusings

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.
Download the full study.