.Net Starter Kits

An interesting set of tools designed for .Net. The Community Starter Kit will have a website up and running for you in no time. It includes polls, a discussion forum, a picture gallery and more. Check it out, along with the others at http://www.asp.net.

Custom Fit your Popup Script

Here's an interesting tutorial for scripting a popup window that dynamically resizes to the dimensions of a banner .GIF or .JPG image. It also introduced me to the built-in JavaScript function resizeBy(): Resize a Popup to Fit an Image's Size

SPAM!

Ok, just when you think you've got e-mail SPAM under control, the weasels figure out a new way to get at you. I got to experience it first hand about a week after I got the new web server running. It didn't take long for those pesty "messenger service" boxes to start popping up on the server's desktop.

Originally intended for administrative messages over the local network, Microsoft has the messenger service "on" by default when you install. This leaves a specific port open that SPAM lords can now scan for. If found open, they will send advertisements to your machine.

Although I don't endorse (or have even tried) the software this site offers, they do have some information and tutorials on how you can shutdown this new "loop hole" that SPAMMERS are exploiting: Stop Messenger Spam

Style Sheets for Accessibility

I've got a project where I need to add a "text-only" section to an existing web site. The best idea would be to use style sheets to control the font-sizes that each user can adjust to make the pages more readable. Here's an article on how to do just that: Build User-Controlled Style Sheets for Greater Accessibility

Got .NET?

I asked that question a couple of months back and now we can say "yes we do" here at randompsycho.org. So get ready for a whole bunch of posts about ASP.NET and C#. So lets dive into the Top 5 .NET Newbie Questions and Answers.

Fine tune your Server

So, you've set up your first web server with IIS. What next? Here's some tips: ASP 101 - Ten Ways to Make the Most of IIS

Actually, tweeking this spiffy little feedback form has been educational. After gettting the basics to work, I wanted to validate the form to check for empty fields (don't you just hate those e-mail with nothing in them?).

As one would expect, there's lots of tutorials on that subject, using either JavaScript or VBScript. Here's one using the VBS:
ASP Form validation

Since I mentioned the e-mail form that I added to this site, here's a tutorial on how to use the free JMail component with IIS:

How to send email using JMail from Active Server Pages (ASP)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Usability, revisited

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

Interview - Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D.