Archive for the 'World Wide Web' CategoryPage 2 of 4

Quick HTML page creation

A couple of days ago, I needed to create a basic, static HTML page, with mostly text and a couple of images, for another mini-site. I usually create those by hand, using a simple text editor; however, when the page is longer, it can be annoying to remember to close all the tags, replace every accented character with the proper ampersand code (e.g. á is á), and so on. In other words, it’s tiresome, because you can’t simply write the content.

On the other hand, I tend to dislike WYSIWYG HTML editors, as they, mostly, create “write-only code”. All I needed was for it to do what I said in the paragraph above: create the paragraphs automatically, replace the accented characters, and so on. And, also, create simple, readable, easily editable HTML, without adding unneeded stuff. In other words, what WordPress already does… but I didn’t want to use WordPress for that; it was to be a simple, static page.

I was pleasantly surprised with Nvu. It did exactly what I wanted, and the generated HTML was clean and virtually perfect - so much that, after I generated the initial version, I never touched Nvu again, it’s perfectly readable in a text editor.

(you can find the mini-site here, but, be warned, it’s in Portuguese, though an English version is coming soon.)

I’m guessing that Mozilla Composer (from SeaMonkey) would work equally as well, though I don’t have it installed.

Eric Giguere: the Single Page AdSense Site

Eric has an intriguing post called The Single Page AdSense Site. It’s, in a way, an even simpler variant of Making Money with Niche Websites, and it’s something I’d be doing in spades if I wasn’t such a lazy guy. :)

Windows Live Local preview

Just saw it on Ricardo Saramago’s blog: Microsoft’s Virtual Earth-powered Windows Live Local preview. Prepare to drool. :)

Impressive technology, certainly, and it’s nice to see that MS can do something “cool” without restricting it to Internet Explorer, requiring ActiveX, being Windows-only, and so on.

Of course, I doubt that 1) this will ever have more than a few places, and 2) this will actually be of use to someone, in place of a GPS navigation system, or even as a Google Earth competitor. It’s great, however, to impress other people, as they’ve surely never seen anything like this. :)

Asymptomatic: Statistics, anyone?

On Asymptomatic, there’s a recent post called Statistics, anyone?, where the author gives his impressions on a lot of stats packages, including Google Analytics, AWStats (which I use), Mint and others. Nice details concerning the pros and cons of each one.

The ensuing comments are useful as well - it’s always nice to have more opinions.

I think I’ll keep using AWStats, though I’m curious about some other stats options. The ones I’ve tried so far, however, have disappointed me - including Analytics.

Of course, AWStats isn’t an option if you don’t have access to the server logs…

Google moves something out of beta!

It’s Google News!

In related news, sub-zero temperatures in Hades have been reported.

SiteAdvisor

SiteAdvisor looks intriguing.

It’s a system of bots which subscribe to websites with generated email addresses, and then monitor how many mails it starts receiving in those addresses - and how spammy those mails are.

Then it rates sites based on how much they spam you - the demo shows what’s probably a browser plugin, warning you when you are about to browse to a “dangerous” site.

It accepts testers, as of now. Maybe I’ll try it later.

Best of the Web Blogs

Best of the Web, a popular directory site, has a new Blogs section. It is currently free of charge, which is great.

They seem to be very demanding about what blogs they accept, though, and they review submissions manually. Unfortunately, one of the requirements is that the blog must be 6 months old or more, and none of my blogs are (this one is little more than 4 months old, and the others are even newer). Blogs must also, of course, be active, and not “spammy”.

I’ll be sure to submit this blog there, a month and a half from now.

The usefulness of RSS

Recently, there has been a discussion on Slashdot about RSS, and about how only 4% of users knowingly use it. Most of the people involved in the discussion said things like “RSS is just a fashion these days”, or “I have no use for it - I’d rather go to any sites I’m interested in, myself”, or even “it’s just the second coming of 1998’s “push” technology, in disguise.”

The following is a translation of a comment of mine in Carlos Rodrigues’ blog, which I believe deserves a post here.

Continue reading ‘The usefulness of RSS’

One of "making money from the Internet"’s best kept secrets

It’s amazing that this thing has been posted in at least two places (this blog is one of them), and I’ve seen nothing, anywhere, coming from it. No blog entries. No discussions. Not even comments under the two blog entries. And it works - even my 2 “late afternoon” attempts have been actually making me money, which, considering that they don’t cost me anything in terms of time, effort or money, is great.

Let’s put it like this: imagine you can do something today, that, starting 6 months from now, will make you about a dollar a day. That’s $30 a month… insignificant, right?

But you can do it several times. As many as you want.

Continue reading ‘One of "making money from the Internet"’s best kept secrets’

The White House’s robots.txt

Take a look at it.

“Crawlers? We don’t want no stinking crawlers around here!” :)

(seen on BlogSEO)

Web design: the ugly, the bad and the good

The ugly:

You use FrontPage or something like that to create a web site, which produces highly broken code that, for some reason, works in Internet Explorer 6. It “works”, so you launch it. You lose 20% of your potential clients, and more of 50% of the “tech-savvy” ones.

The bad:

You use FrontPage or something like that to create a web site, which produces highly broken code that, for some reason, works in Internet Explorer 6. You see that your site doesn’t work in Firefox, Opera, Konqueror, and/or Safari, so you waste days trying to fix hundreds of HTML bugs. After that, you find that it no longer works properly in IE 6, so you end up using Javascript to detect the browser, and giving different versions of code to each. You curse those pesky Firefox / Opera / Konqueror / Safari “weirdos”, who just have to be “different”, refusing to use the “standard browser,” Internet Explorer, and only increase your workload.

The good:

You code a web site according to standards, which, assuming you didn’t make any mistakes, means that it works in Firefox, Opera, Konqueror and Safari. You test it in IE, and find that some parts don’t work properly due to IE bugs or lack of support for parts of some standards, so you work around those — sticking to the standards — and ensure that it works in IE as well. Again, assuming you didn’t make mistakes, it still works perfectly in the standards-compliant browsers. Furthermore, the site degrades gracefully (that is, it may not have all the bells and whistles, but it works, and all the content is accessible) in cell phones, Blackberries, PDAs, Sony PSPs, etc..

Report: “Why You Should Consider Budgeting a Site Redesign for Firefox 1.5 Now”

Seen on ProBlogger, an interesting report: Why You Should Consider Budgeting a Site Redesign for Firefox 1.5 Now. It’s not really a tech report, but, instead, a report for marketers.

Which I am not. :) But I found it intriguing anyway - seeing how “the other side” thinks, and which arguments can affect them (since they’re not that concerned with “the standards” or “doing things right”, or even “using and supporting the best software”, like I am.)




Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Portugal
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Portugal