Posted by ljmacphee on February 28, 2007 under useful sites | 
This is a listing of my favorite online resources I’ve used designing websites and learning all about web publishing. Most of them have been on the web as long as I have and I expect them to be here a long while yet.
Legal Stuff
Chilling Effects keeps track of free speech issues, requests for removal of information and other legal issues that effect your website.
Electronic Freedom Foundation You should already know who they are and what they do.
Website Development
Webmaster World News and Discussion
Project Cool
W3C, WWW Consortium
Internet Application Workbook ( how to build an online community)
Web Developer’s Virtual Library (this is one of my favorites)
CGI-Perl
Beginner’s Guide to CGI Scripting with Perl
A CGI Tutorial
Obtain Perl, tutorials, information
Comprehensive Perl Archive Network
Perl Monks
XML
The XML Cover Page has extensive information on XML
VoiceXML Overview and Elements
VoiceXML Reference at Mother of Perl
Flash
Extreme Flash
Turtleshell
MySQL
MySQL Manual ( Chapter 3 covers 99% of what you need to know )
HTML/XHTML/DHTML…
HTML Reference Guide
Dev Helper ( click on the link ‘Training Center’ )
XHTML tutorial
PHP
PHP Manual
Javascript
JavaScript Lessons (excellent downloadable book/lessons, better than any javascript books I’ve bought)
Browser Information
Browser News News and information about browsers
Google Information for Webmasters
Usability
Posted by ljmacphee on February 27, 2007 under HTML, perl, tools |
I needed to update the TimesToCome Daily Horoscope page ( no longer on web ) but I didn’t want to have to do it manually. Now I can upload a week or month of new pages information and have the computer load the appropriate page for a given day by checking the system date. This script works great if you are only using straight html.
If you use Flash movies or javascript or other languages, they don’t work properly. The way to work around this is to use frames. Load your other languages and embedded code into the main frame and call the Perl script to update the secondary frame.
#!/usr/bin/perl#www.timestocome.com
#program to update a web page with new information daily.
##Name each webpage for each day you wish to appear daily_dayofyear.html.
##So the daily update for Jan 2 would be daily_2.html
#The page for Dec 15 would be daily_350.html ( don’t forget to adjust for leap years )
##put them off your top level directory in a directory#named daily.##Put this file in your cgi-bin directory with the proper permissions ( 755 )
###To use this link to#< a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/daily.pl > Page < /a >
#This link will bring up the page for today.
##############################################################
##################
#get day of year
$today = (localtime(time()))[7];
#add file extention
$tag = “html”;
#add file information
$name = “daily”;
#clean up and stick together to build file name
chomp($today);
chomp($tag);
chomp($name);
$temp = join “.”, $today, $tag;
$filename = join “_”, $name, $temp;
#open the file for reading
open(IN, “../daily/$filename”);
flock(IN, 2);
#lock the
fileseek(IN, 0, 0);
#rewind to beginning
#create the html page
print “Content-type:text/html\n\n”;
while ( ){
print ;
}
close IN;
Posted by ljmacphee on February 26, 2007 under css, useful sites |
As web sites get larger maintaining them becomes exponentially more complicated. You can use one cascading style sheet (css), link it into many documents and by changing the style sheet update all of the web pages that link to it. I recently did that at timestocome.com and wish I had done so from the beginning, it was a project. Now each section of the website each has its own style sheet.
Style sheets are very picky. If things are not working remove extra spaces and try changing the order in which you do things. Also, if I do not put a <p> before the text it doesn’t show because I haven’t defined it.
Another thing to watch is to clear out the cache in your browser each time you load a page to check your work. Otherwise you are probably looking at an older version of the page that does not show the most recent updates to your stylesheet.
Stylesheet example:
h4 { color: 446677; font-style: italic; }
h3 { color: 446677; font-style: italic; }
p { color: 222244; }
ol { color: 222244; }
li { color: 222244; }
dl { color: 222244; }
dt { color: 222244; }
a:link { color: 335588; }
a:visited { color: 224455; }
a:active { color: 224444; }
body { background: #eeeeff; font-color: #222244; }
Linking the style sheet
To have a HTML document use these styles link it in to the the HTML document in your heading.
Cascading Style Sheets, from the World Wide Consortium
CSS Tutorial
The Complete CSS Tutorial
Posted by ljmacphee on February 23, 2007 under HTML, graphics |
Colors and Codes for Webpages.
At one time there were 216 colors considered web safe. That meant they showed the same on all browsers and computers. With time and better computers and monitors there were too many cool things to do with too many colors. So people stopped using these colors. But if it is important to you to have a consistent look everywhere these are the colors you should use.