Web Tips
Sunday, March 21, 2010
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Monday, November 28, 2005
Some nice Dreamweaver templates:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/download/templates/sample_sites/Department_Sample_Site/index.htm
http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/download/templates/sample_sites/Professor_Sample_Site/index.htm
http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/download/templates/sample_sites/Massage_Sample_Site/index.htm
http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/download/templates/sample_sites/Professor_2_Sample_Site/index.htm
http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/download/templates/sample_sites/Teacher_Sample_Site/index.htm
http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/download/templates/sample_sites/Photo_Sample_Site/index.htm
Free HTML & CSS templates
http://www.gordonmac.com/downloads/html/
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/web-publishing/free-csshtml-template-roundup-039947.php
http://www.oswd.org/
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Agile
Manifesto for Agile Software Development
TDD (Test Driven Development)
Introduction to Test Driven Development - Scott Ambler
Test Driven Development Isn't Testing - Jeff Patton
Agile QA
Agile Test Automation - whitepaper by James Bach (.pdf)
Agile Testing What is it? Can it work? - Brian Pettichord (.pdf)
Introducing Agile to a Legacy Project - Brian Marick
A Roadmap for Testing on an Agile Project - Brian Marick
Wayne Allen: pragmatic agility
Building Up Perfect Software - Jeff Nielsen
Ruby
Web Application Testing In Ruby - toolkit
Programming Ruby - very useful
esreveR nI gnitseT - Unit Testing with Ruby
Lapidary - Lapidary is a unit testing framework for the Ruby programming language which was superceded by Test::Unit which is a unit testing framework for the Ruby programming language that ships as part of the standard Ruby distribution.
Another link to Test::UNit docs: http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/test/unit/rdoc/index.html
Learn To Program (in Ruby) - Chris Pine
Ruby versus Smalltalk versus Objective-C versus C++ versus Java versus Python versus CLOS versus Perl5
General QA:
Software QA/Test Resource Center
QA Tools:
Web Testing Tool List: http://www.softwareqatest.com/qatweb1.html
Microsoft Application Center Test 1.0, Visual Studio .NET Edition
TestMaker - open source test platform
TestMaker whitepaper (.pdf)
IeUnit - open-source framework to test logical behaviors of web pages
Monday, September 26, 2005
How to show up on Google
The Truth About Google
What the Web's Leading Search Engines are Really Looking For
by Keith Boswell (2002 article)
Why Aren't All Of My Links Showing Up In Google?
My webpages have never been included in the Google index - Why? (from Google's website)
excerpt from above Google page:
"Your pages are dynamically generated. We're able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because our web crawler could overwhelm and crash sites that serve dynamic content, we limit the number of dynamic pages we index. In addition, our crawlers may suspect that a URL with many dynamic parameters might be the same page as another URL with different parameters. For that reason, we recommend using fewer parameters if possible. Typically, URLs with 1-2 parameters are more easily crawlable than those with many parameters."
"You employ doorway pages. Google does not encourage the use of automatically generated pages that are designed for search engines instead of users. We want to point users to useful content pages, not to doorways or splash screens."
My thoughts so far:
I've been asked to help make our museum's specimen catalog show up in Google searches. The catalog is a web-based data-driven system. Since the detail pages are dynamically generated, they don't exist long enough for Google to index them. My initial idea was to generate a page full of commonly-searched terms that each link to a results page, but this could consitute a "doorway" page, which is frowned-upon by Google. Also, the URL of a search results page might fail one of Googles other tests for overly complex URLs.
The curator says it would be enough to link to just their blank Search page, which could be accomplished by adding an elaborate META tag to the Search page with commonly searched terms. But Google explicitly states that they don't want this to happen, they want the page to contain the useful content. Google also seems to frown on auto-generating this page from a database.
So maybe if there was a Commonly Searched terms page that's actually part of the website it would be okay to load it's META tag and/or auto-generate a list of links.
The curator says it would be enough to link to just their blank Search page, but Google explicitly states that they don't want this to happen, they want the page to actually contain the content the user is looking for.
Optimizing Dynamic Web Pages (2002)
Search Engine Optimization Strategy
"...improper implementation of search engine optimization can get your site heavily penalized by search engines..."
Meta Tag Generator
another free Meta Tag Generator: http://www.1stsitefree.com/meta_gen.htm
"The most important promotion tags when you optimize your pages are: the page title, description, and keywords. Of these, title is most important."
Optimize your Pages for Search engines
Using Gateway or Bridge Pages to Increase Web site Traffic
Search Engines and Webmasters: A Love Hate Relationship
Search Engine Placement Secrets
Excellent set of links for Search Engine Optimization
An excellent source of information: http://www.deadlock.com/promote/search-engines/
Friday, July 29, 2005
Been researching Macromedia Contribute 3 and LDAP Authentication:
>http://forums.asp.net/987871/ShowPost.aspx
>
>http://www.linuxselfhelp.com/HOWTO/LDAP-HOWTO-1.html
>
>http://www.linuxselfhelp.com/HOWTO/LDAP-HOWTO-6.html#ss6.4
>
>http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/contribute/articles/cps_ldap.h
tml
>
>http://www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200503/ij_03_30_05a.htm
Monday, April 26, 2004
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
Style Master CSS Editor Tutorial
http://www.westciv.com/style_master/hands_on_tutorial_sm/03.checklist.html
Friday, January 09, 2004
How to hide your e-mail link from spam bots:
http://www.mikebknight.com/archives/general/archives/000844.html
Friday, November 14, 2003
blogger templates to download
http://www.xs4all.nl/~mosm/English/Webdesign_us/blogger_template_us.html
Monday, November 10, 2003
Monday, November 03, 2003
Movable Type SQL Plugin - new tags that can let you select entries, comments and categories using any criteria you’d like
Thursday, October 16, 2003
Worth hitting this site to check your computer for spyware and other parasites not picked up by anti-virus software. No download required, just go to the URL:
http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/
Here's a more comprehensive tool that you download for free:
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/
This question comes up a lot and I haven't found a place that describes it succinctly, so here goes:
Q: "How do I automatically re-direct someone to a different URL?"
A: Create an index.html (or whatever your default doc is) with the following content between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="5; URL=page-you-want-to-redirect-
to.html">
It's also a good idea to add some explanatory text and a clickable link in case the user's refresh is going too slow or it doesn't work for some reason.
Wednesday, October 08, 2003
I ended up using the MT plug-in MTGrid to build the facebook. Much simpler.
Other plug-ins I've used that are super-cool:
MTOtherBlog lets you point at another blog, which ios useful for multi-blog sites
And this plug-in adds the functionality to Rebuild All Blogs
Friday, August 08, 2003
Image-Magick installation on IIS / Win2K
I am hoping to use the photo-blog tutorial found here http://www.quixoticpixels.com/?qp=photoblog as the basis for an Employee facebook I'm developing in MT at my job. The tutorial / solution requires Image-Magick, which is an image processing tool which must be installed on your webserver. Since I am the host, I had to install it. It should have been a straightforward install, but I ran into difficulties since the (free) product is a-Unix type package that has also been compiled for Windows use.
I tried to follow the directions for the install on their site, but the .exe file they said I should download and run seems to have dependencies on some DLL's that are not available on my server (MSVCR70.dll, MSVCP70.dll, MFC70.dll, MSC70u.dll). I tried downloading these but it didn't solve the problem, so I subscribed to their mailing list and posted my problems. It took a few days of flailing around and trying different stuff...
Here's a link to the mailing list thread: http://studio.imagemagick.org/pipermail/magick-users/2003-August/010323.html
In case that link goes away, here's a summary of how I got it working:
Yay! Finally got it installed. Thanks to Mike Southern for pointing the
way....
I had originally tried to download ImageMagick-i686-pc-windows.exe, the
file indicated (and linked) by IM's Windows Quick Start doc, but it was
nowhere to be found on the ftp site. So I did a Google search for the
filename and found a copy here:
http://ring.maffin.ad.jp/archives/pc/meadow/snapshot/
I downloaded the file, copied it to the C:\ImageMagick folder on my server,
and double-clicked it to launch the installer. I checked the option to
install the Perl modules. It installed 5.5.3 for ActivePerl 5.8 build 804,
and passed the test with no MSVCR70.dll dependencies or other issues. Like
butter! I haven't tried the Perl stuff yet but I have gotten past the
first major hurdle and I can once again hear the birds singing.
It would make a lot of sense to make this file available on the
Image-Magick ftp site again until the issues with the newer .exe's is resolved.
Thanks to everyone for all your suggestions and help. I will now get on
with my life. ;)
Hopefully this will save someone some time.
Wednesday, July 23, 2003
Need to jot the order for installing MT (this may change as I learn more - this is a working post)
Installing Movable Type on Windows Server
1) Install ActivePerl (on IIS)
2) Download MT and unzip it to your server. I put everything into Inetpub/wwwroot/mt. You can ignore the instructions about putting files in different locations.
3) modify mt.cfg script
4) Install a database - I chose to use MySQL
5) Configure the DBI::MySQL driver
6) Run http://yourserver/mt/mt-check.pl to make sure you have the db driver installed
7) Run http://yourserver/mt/mt-load.pl
8) Once mt-load iruns successfully, delete the file for security purposes
Note: I couldn't get IIS to map .cgi files, so renamed all of my .cgi files to .pl - this caused an issue with the mt-db-pass.pl file, which MUST be named mt-db-pass.cgi to work. Also, this file should contain ONLY the password for your database, and nothing else.
more details to come
Using MT to build your whole site
I want to use an external host from home, to work on personal MT projects, and also host internally at work. I would like to play with MT before committing to using it, without all the installation fuss.
Monday, June 23, 2003
Thursday, June 05, 2003
What I really want is to be able to dump all of my content from my old pages into a database and then pick some options and voila good pages. But something tells me the technology isn't there, yet. I like the idea of using my own server, tho.
Been enjoying surfing some blogs today:
http://www.harrumph.com/ - Heather Champ, creator of that site and a bunch of others, is my new hero. She's got a cool boyfriend, apparently:
http://www.powazek.com/
Her layout reminds me of what I was trying to do with ultrajosh.com when I started it - e.g. super simple and functional.
http://www.mirrorproject.com/
http://www.jezebel.com/
Her designs let the content be the main thing, the design goes into the background where it belongs.
I gotta learn me this Movable Type stuff - or can I do the same stuff with Blogger and Dreamweaver? I haven't been having much luck finding free templates for Blogger that do what I want. It seems like re-inventing the wheel each time I drill down to the code level... must be a faster way.
Others blog platform/dev environments:
Grey Matter bye bye Blogger?
I like these designs:
http://216.77.254.136/
And here's some fun stuff:
http://www.slowwave.com/
Publications:
Scripting News
