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Posts in Web
Continuing failed FTP and HTTP transfers with wget
As you can probably tell from my blog, I am constantly learning about new technology products. When I decide that I want to play with a new operating system release, or test out a new piece of software, I will typically retrieve the latest stable version of the software. When operating system ISO images are involved, this typically requires me to download several gigabytes of data prior to beginning my testing. Periodically transfers will fail, leaving me with a chunk of the original file…
$ read more →Website re-design gotchas, and how to avoid them!
I recently re-designed my main website, and learned quite a bit about CSS and XHTML in the process. I also learned that there are a number of things you should do before re-designing a site, and thought I would list them here for folks who are looking to change their site layout: Validate your documents with a free validator See how your site loads in various browsers Sketch out how you want thing to look before you start coding Make sure to design with the future in mind (this especially applies to associating CSS classes with tags) Make sure you consult best practices Read a good CSS reference before you begin Make sure you integrate USEFUL ads into your website (this will help cover hosting costs, which aren't free) Ask an expert what they like and dislike about your site Verify that your site doesn't have broken links Implement things iteratively (there is no need to do everything at once) Keeping these things in mind will made re-designing your site quite a bit easier, and may even turn up some surprises that you weren't aware of.
$ read more →Easily encoding documents prior to publishing them to the web
While reviewing the command lines on commandlinefu, I came across this nifty little gem: This command line snippet takes a file as an argument, and escapes all of the characters that can't be directly published on the web (i.e., it will convert a right bracket to & gt). This is super useful, and is a welcome addition to the nifty tidy utility!
$ read more →Cleaning up HTML files with tidy
I have read a number of documents on correctly using CSS and XHTML over the past month, and have learned about a number of common mistakes people make when creating content that uses these technologies. Most of the articles discussed ways to structure web content to avoid these pitfalls, which got me wondering if anyone had taken these recommendations and created a tool to analyze content for errors. After a bit of googling, I came across the W3C content validation site, as well as the tidy utility. The W3C website is super easy to use, and it provides extremely useful feedback that you can use to improve your content…
$ read more →Substituting text in the HTTP request body with mod_substitute
While doing a bit of research tonight I came across a reference to mod_substitute. This nifty module allows you to substitute text in the HTTP request body, which provides an easy way to do things similar to the following: I digs me some Apache!
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