Website Design and Coding Tips

[Andy]

I started to document how I am developing templates for my web design software. It's like a tutorial on how to make a modern web page using Style Sheets (CSS) and keeping everything simple. Each page will actually look like the end result of following the tutorial so even if you got lost somewhere you can view the page source to see the actual published code. This is handy, since it is not a beginners tutorial (I wanted to have my own quick reference) but there will be links to relevant sites at the end of each page for people to learn about the basics behind what I was talking about.

I have started with a centered content page like most blog sites have. The home page: Experiments in Site Design

Each additional tutorial will have a new page that will reflect the new page that has been designed. This is different to most tutorial sites where they have to keep their pages using the same template. But with my one, each page is likely to be different.

[Andy]

I am going ape with this now 

Can't hardly hold the twitching mouse still. It's kind of an amalgamation of web coding and software development balooning out of control! You will get some good stuff here if you have any Geek-like inclinations: http://www.sitesugu.com/geekzone/

At the very least you will see another birth of a blog but more crazy than before. The 1st "birth of blog" project was http://www.activelysenior.com/ by Bev

[TexasLady]

Hi Andy, sounds very interesting!    I sure hope to get in and look at all this.

I'm sorry to say I've not done much on blog, or on internet at all, as a matter of fact.

Seems I've been an accident waiting to happen.    Latest is a fall that sprained ankle, hurt arm and other leg, and put me out of commission for almost a week.    Thought all was well, but right now, the bad ankle is red and inflamed and am off to get xrays, etc.   

Hope to see more of you folks in the near future - unless another accident finds me!
           

[Andy]

Some blog-related tips:

I was saddened to find my poor blog at http://internetincomeclub.com/ was slashed down to a PR1 from 5 a couple of months back. It was a cruel blow but one maybe fairly dealt since I hadn't posted any new stuff and had a spam infested forum hooked up to the home page.

So my January spring clean (ok I was early) involved erasing the forum, removing the link to it from my home page and activating long posts rather than short snippets. Now it's back to PR5 so yippee doo dah 

[Andy]

If you want to hide files from the public but still let your scripts access your files you can use a very simple snippet of code on an apache-based host.

Here is the line of code:

deny from all

Save this to a file called htaccess.txt then upload this file to the directory you want to protect. Then rename the file with your FTP program to .htaccess I am a Windows user so I have to do it this way because of the unsupported file name structure.

This is a special file that tells the webserver how to serve pages. The dot makes it invisible to browsers and there is no file extension.

To allow your scripts to read and write data to this directory, you will need to set the access permissions of the directory to 777 using a CHMOD function. To test it is working you can browse the file with and without the .htaccess file in place.

You can do all of this using the free FTP program FileZilla available from: filezilla.sourceforge.net

This technique is particularly useful when you run scripts that store data to disk and you don't want the public to be able to access this data directly. Otherwise you have to use a database.