January 25, 2003

Build it and they will (not) come?

As the randompsycho.org web server gets upgraded to the .NET framework this weekend, I ponder the question: "Is the web design world ready for .NET?" I personally will be making an attempt at learning asp.NET and C# and therefore will be blogging more posts on the topic.

Your comments are welcome. I even stuck in a spiffy feedback form in the lower right-hand corner.

Poll results: Not yet for .NET?

Cool web tricks

Ever see one of those pages with the cool popup box when you mouse-over a link? Not just the little trick that Internet Explorer does if you include the "title" attribute to an "a" anchor tag, but a real popup box with a caption and colors, etc. I tried searching Google for it, but never got the right combination of keywords to find such a creature.

Well, I finally tracked it down and it's a free JavaScript anyone can use: overLIB

January 22, 2003

OOP: The web of the future?

Things have come a long way from simply learning some HTML and then using FTP to upload files on a Unix server. This article is part of a series on how to get up to speed with the new big thing, ASP.NET:

Object Oriented C# for ASP.NET Developers

Here's a good article for those of you that use Dreamweaver:

Customize Dreamweaver to Your Needs

January 15, 2003

If you're a web developer working on a government contract, you've had to heard of Section 508 by now. Here's some some good reading on the topic:

Tips for managing Section 508 testing

Hosting your own with Linux? The latest version of Red Hat offers a new GUI interface:

Easily configure Red Hat 8 and Apache
Newbie 101

I stumbled on this site quite by accident. Includes a "free" area that covers the basics and they sell a companion book and CD-ROM.

PageTutor.com: HTML Tutorials & Javascript

Everyone needs a program for making thumbnails of their favorite photos, right? The bonus here is this one is free:

Easy Thumbnails Software

January 08, 2003

More JavaScript Tricks

Anyone with feedback or a guestbook as part of their web site could benefit from client side form validation. The article is also a good introduction to using this in passing form values to your function:

Form Validation on the Client Side

December 18, 2002

Pros and cons of .Net

There are two sides of every story, especially in the case of .Net and adopting web servers into your enterprise. This articles makes some good points as to why or *why not* to jump on this bandwagon:

.NET My Services. Gone but not forgotten? - The Register

November 20, 2002

An interesting article for creating a faster loading Flash web site:

Fast-Track Your Flash Site

Add borders and margins to your pages

Nothings more dull than a plain old web page. These tips on using CSS can make your pages more attractive and readable:

Fancy Paragraphs With CSS

November 07, 2002

Usability, revisited

SitePoint Editor Kevin Yanks interviews usability guru Jakob Nielsen, discussing topics such as design, Flash and accessibility:

Interview - Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D.

October 30, 2002

Know your DOCTYPE

Version 6 of both Internet Explorer and Netscape are moving closer to the W3C HTML standards. But for those using depreciated tags and attributes, this could spell trouble. Declaring your Document Type can mean the difference between a broken page and one that works the way you intended as discussed in this article:

HTML Tip: New Headaches with IE 6

October 23, 2002

Some things in life are still free...

Take text editors for example. In addition to EditPad and HTML-Kit, Crimson Editor is a good replacement for Notepad. One of the more useful features is syntax highlighting for several programming languages such as C,C++,C#, Perl and Java. It's also a great HTML editor with macros, spell checker and a FTP client built in.

Crimson Editor - Free Text Editor for Windows

September 26, 2002

And for all you .ASP coders out there...
Essential ASP Hints and Tips

The Dom-father, Part 2

Just in case you didn't get enough from the first article, here's a link to the next installment:

Rough Guide to the DOM - Part 2

September 25, 2002

SPAM Attack!

SPAM is everywhere! When will this ever end? Never. The big thing now is to exploit the very popular Perl script FormMail. If you have ever hosted a web site on a Unix/Linux based server, you've probably either seen or used this script.

FormMail is a generic HTML form to e-mail gateway that sends the results of a form to the specified users. Version 1.6 has some well known security flaws. If you are using this script, you need to upgrade. Soon.

Matt's Script Archive: FormMail

As an alternative, there is a totally rewritten version from the nms Project:

Matt's Script Archive: nms Project

September 17, 2002

Who's your DOM?

To really use JavaScript and CSS well, you need to understand the Document Object Model. Unfortunately, the history of the DOM has been rocky since the major browsers have not implimented it consistantly. Standards have been developed and this author shows some examples using the open-source browser Mozilla.

Rough Guide to the DOM - Part 1

Objects, functions, methods - Oh My!

Still yet another JavaScript tutorial with part one covering some of the basics of JS Objects and Functions. I've read quite a few tutorials and written one or two myself. What I'm noticing is that each author has a different "slant" on how to do things. Isn't programming wonderful?

JavaScript Object-Oriented Programming Part 1

September 06, 2002

Hijacked!

Yes, I have been hacked. Well, my computer here at home where I view my e-mail, anyway. I think it started with one of those SPAM e-mails that will auto-launch a new browser window. Then, the web page that gets loaded in the popup exploits a security hole in Internet Explorer that allows a Registry entry. This little line in the Registry subsequently sets your browser's home page and search page (most likely to a porno site) every time you reboot. It took me a few times to finally track this little bugger down. The one that I was infected with is called HTML/Oprad and I found other similiar exploits, Reg_Startpage.A and Trojan.Winreg.Start.

These trojans take advantage of security hole in Internet Explorer versions 4 and 5. Read the security bulletin and then download the Microsoft patch here.

If you think you've already been infected, search on Google using the keyword OPQFile. You'll find lots of tips on how to root that little annoyance out of your system.