"Generally, though, people tend to overlook the option of using the Web as a data source for Excel, be that source the Internet, an intranet, an extranet, or a Web Service. But they shouldn't. Web queries are an easy, yet remarkably flexible and predictable way of bringing data into Microsoft Excel from anywhere on the Web. You can point a Web query at any HTML document that resides on any Web server - or even on a file server, for that matter - and pull part or all of the contents back into your spreadsheet...When you start using Excel's Web queries, you will realize they are almost as limitless as the Web is.
"I love the fact that more and more devices are sporting built-in Wi-Fi. The lone hitch: Wi-Fi is useless without a hotspot.
What if you could marry the short-range power of Wi-Fi with the huge coverage areas of high-speed cellular services such as EV-DO to create a portable hotspot?
Since EV-DO works at freeway speeds, you could even give Internet access to an entire road-trip caravan.
Now I can surf for as long as three hours without being tethered to anything but a cell signal. The project isn't cheap, but prices for the components and service are sure to come down in the next year or so. In the meantime, you can find me in the hills around Southern California. I'll be the one surrounded by PSP-packing hikers."
"Computers are supposed to make our lives easier, not more difficult. As usability-conscious designers, we can make our users' lives easier by thinking about the way people interact with our websites, providing clear direction, and then putting the burden of sorting out the details in the hands of the computers—not the users.
It's that last part that we're going to focus on here. We've all heard and read about big usability mistakes time and time again: "Don't use images or flash for navigation," "Don't use Javascript for links," and I certainly hope we're all applying those lessons in our work. It's often the smallest usability quirks, however, that create the biggest annoyances for users, especially when it comes to HTML forms. Follow these guidelines, and you'll be off to a good start."
"Learn about RSS and how to programmatically create an RSS file for your FrontPage 2003 Web site. The download that accompanies this article contains a VBA project and an XSLT file that you can use to generate and display RSS feeds.
If you spend any time on the Internet, you have probably heard of RSS, and you may decide that you need an RSS feed for your Web site. An RSS feed is an Extensible Markup Language (XML) file that people can use to keep up to date with the content on a Web site. RSS feeds are frequently associated with weblogs (blogs), but you can use them for any Web site.
If you have a Web site that contains content that you frequently update, such as articles or stories, you may want an RSS feed to help your customers keep up with your updates. This article explains the XML behind RSS and provides a Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003 Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) project that you can use to programmatically generate an RSS feed for your FrontPage Web site. The download for this article includes an Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) file that you can use to display the RSS XML file in a browser."
"Throughout Learn the Net--in fact on most web pages--you will see words that are in color and often underlined. By clicking on these words, known as hypertext, you jump to other places on the page, to other pages on the site, or to other resources on the Internet."
"Most communities in the fifties had small town print shops that doubled as printers of local news and advertising papers. These printers could not afford graphic artists so they used stock clipart supplied by large companies who distributed common graphics for use in advertising sections of the papers. They were provided for the printer in lots of categories to meet any advertiser's needs."
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="3; URL=http://WWW.MiniByteTech.com">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
The operative line is:
<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="3; URL=http://WWW.MiniByteTech.com">
The value of content is in seconds.
The new location for this web site is WWW.MiniByteTech.com! You will automatically be redirected in 3 seconds. If your browser doesn't automatically load, click <a href="http://WWW.MiniByteTech.com">HERE</a>.
</body>
</html
"Links to numerous pages on the Web where home users can find software and information relevant to Windows PC privacy and security.
It also contains a rudimentary "checklist" of basic steps that home PC users can take to enhance their privacy and security while using the Internet.
Finally, you'll find a set of resources developed by the author of this site to help you protect your privacy and security on the Internet, including information about Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and the Gnu Privacy Guard (GPG)."
"Transactional email can be a website's customer service ambassador, but messages must first survive a ruthless selection process in the user's in-box. Differentiating your message from spam is thus the first duty of email design.
Email is one of a website's most powerful tools for strengthening customer service and increasing users' confidence and trust in the site. Confirmation messages and other automated transactional email can complete the user experience: they reach out to customers in ways that are otherwise impossible for websites, which must sit still and wait for users to approach."
"Once you choose a blogging service and set up an account, you will be provided with a standard blog template. But this template will suffer from a cookie-cutter design, and if you don't personalize it your blog may become lost. To be noticed your blog needs to make a splash - as there are more than ten million blogs out there. So what we'll concentrate on here is working with some design elements that can help you add more zing to your blog."
"One of the biggest misconceptions is that hackers will target only large companies. The truth is computers get attacked for a variety of reasons. Some of these include the following:
- Snooping: Reading private mail and other personal files.
- Destroying or corrupting computer data: Making files unusable, or making a whole computer unusable.
- Stealing computer data: Taking credit card numbers, e-mail addresses, company information and so on.
- Stopping computers from functioning properly: Blocking incoming traffic so that intended users cannot get access, etc.
- Misusing computer resources: Sending spam without you knowing it, etc.
- Pranks: practical jokes, breaking in just because it's a challenge.
The bottom line, don't think your network is safe just because you're not that important or well-known. Assuming that you aren't personally targeted, moderately secure networks usually cause hackers to attack elsewhere. Yet attacks can come from many different sources and your computer should be equipped to deal with each of these types of attacks."
" Finding quality images and photos for complementing an important article, essay or news report is already quite a challenge for many. Imagine when the goal is not just too find good images, but find some that you could openly and freely use without needing to pay royalties or one-time publishing rights to someone."
"PDPhoto.org is a repository for free public domain photos. Unless something is clearly marked as being copyrighted, you can assume it is free to use. But if you intend to use an image you find here for commercial use, please be aware that standards for such use are higher. Specifically, you should assume no model release was obtained. And pictures featuring products or property should be used with care. The photos are here to be used, but I don't want you to get either of us in trouble over it."
"There are many Web technologies, from simple to complex, and explaining each in detail is beyond the scope of this article. However, to help you get started with developing your own Web sites, beyond simple WYSIWYG designing of Web pages in FrontPage, this article provides brief definitions of the major Web technologies along with links to sites where you can find more information, tutorials, and reference documentation."
"The Web-based Newsreader allows you to participate in discussion groups directly in your Web browser; you don't need to install or configure anything. You can use the Web-based Newsreader to read, post, search for, and reply to messages in discussion groups from the part of Usenet that concerns Microsoft products and technologies."
..."the personal website of Matt Pfeffer. It is an experiment more than anything. An attempt to learn a thing or two, get some exercise, maybe have a laugh now and then.
Everything here is either trivial, or wrong."
"The guidelines this document describes will tell you how to improve the user experience on your site. They apply to web copy generally - both marketing copy and navigational (or instructional or "guide") copy - and their value is indirect but significant: Observing them will improve your site's ability to do its job well. "
"This style guide seeks to serve as a resource for anyone writing or editing web copy, and to document some of the conventions that distinguish good writing, as published on the web, from writing published in other media."
"I am glad to provide free editing help to nonprofit organizations and independent web publishers. The offer is generally for one-time edits of a web site, or of any reasonable amount of web content."
"FavIcon from Pics is an online tool that can generate a favicon from a picture, logo or other graphic of any size/resolution. It was also the first online tool that simplified the creation of favicons using a regular image without requiring manual edits."Makiko Itoh:
" Here's a roundup of some of the favicons that caught my eye. Please click through to the sites themselves, to see how the favicon works (or not) with the site. Maybe it will get you thinking about your own site's favicon."
"There is nothing quite like The WELL, and the secret has a lot to do with its evolution. Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant founded the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link in 1985, starting with a dialog between the fiercely independent writers and readers of the Whole Earth Review.
This set the tone for the open but remarkably literate and uninhibited intellectual gathering that continues today. Over the years, WELL members have made fast friends, created enduring traditions, gathered casually face-to-face in cities 'round the world, and provided support to strangers.
They have founded organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Craig's List, and documented what was emerging in books like Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community, John Seabrook's Deeper, and Katie Hafner's The WELL. They have gone into business together, fallen in and out of love, cultivated feuds, taken kickass vacations together and enriched lives.
Salon.com bought The WELL in 1999, and upgraded its servers to greet the century. These days WELL members enjoy access to Salon's remarkable independent journalist and the benefits of Salon Premium."
"In my discussions with other Google users, I am always amazed at how few of Google's tools they have heard of. For the most part, people are only familiar with the main search areas such as the web, news and images. And even in these areas, their knowledge of all the options that would allow them to better harness the power of Google is limited.
When I've told others of the vast features and formidable power of Google tools, they are quite frankly astonished. Compounding the problem of this unfamiliarity is the fact the Google does not make much of an effort to even tell us what's new and what's in public beta. You've usually got to hear about it somewhere else or just stumble upon it."
"ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a webpage. It should come in particularly handy for users who do a lot of web-based text entry (e.g. web mails, forums, blogs, diaries).
Even if your web application already includes spell checking functionality, you might still want to install this utility because it is definitely much faster than a server-side solution. Plus you get to store and use your personal word list across all your applications, instead of maintaining separate ones on each application."
"This site documents my attempts at understanding and exploring the possibilities of CSS. From standard navigation links to my more bizarre experimental techniques.
All my examples are produced with JUST CSS, no javascript, or any other language, has been used in any of the examples. The demonstrations are designed to work in all the latest browsers, but, if you're lucky, some may also work in earlier versions."
"You will no doubt come across many quirky layout issues when building a site with CSS. You'll end up banging your head against a wall time and again. This is an attempt to make the design process easier, and provide a quick reference to check when you run into trouble."And:
"The old-timers had to figure out the hard way all the tricks and techniques we now take for granted; lucky folks who came in later (myself included) can benefit from their sweat and tears.
In the end, when your skill using standard-based design eclipses your skill using old-school table-based methods, you’ll look back and marvel at how much more sense it makes to layout a page with CSS."
"[Participants] told us that they often copied and pasted material into Word where they could enlarge the font even more and make it bold, thus rendering it easier for them to see."
"We have not done a good job of catering to these screen-magnification or zoom users. Using CSS, it's easy to do, as we shall soon see. And moreover, using CSS to develop zoom layouts is almost exactly what developers of handheld and PDA browsers are doing in their quest for small-screen rendering of wide, multicolumn web pages."
"I would like to know how to only print part of email, as all the parts of an email conversations are not necessary to print. I have tried by highlighting the part I want and then choose "select" on print menu - but the font is so small then (no matter which printer I use). I can select in the print menu which pages to print, but that is not always clear where the page breaks happens. I could copy and paste into a word document, but then the details are missing."
"You can use a wireless network to share Internet access, files, printers, and more. Or you can use it to surf the Web while you're sitting on your couch or in your yard. Plus, it's easier to install than you think."
"Have you ever wanted to add a pop-up window to your Web site? Maybe you've wanted to add a hyperlink that closes the page or to display the current date and time. You can add all of these features and more by using JavaScript: A scripting language that can be used to add functionality to a Web page or a Web site, or to enhance the look of one. JavaScript scripts can run on any type of client or server computer."
"FrontPage 2003 introduced Dynamic Web Templates, a new and sophisticated type of Web page template that enables you to share a layout among several pages in a site, preserve specific regions of content from unwanted changes, and save time when you begin to manage the Web pages on your Web site.
By creating a Dynamic Web Template, you can make regions on attached pages available for other authors to add and modify content, while preventing changes to other regions on the same page. This provides you with control to preserve the layout of the pages and the template itself. When you update the content in a Dynamic Web Template, you can update the attached Web pages simultaneously."
"The Dynamic Web Template Interchange Guidelines have been established by a consortium of web designers and developers in an effort to provide webmasters using a third party DWT the ability to cross over from one design to another with relative ease. The goal of the DWTIG is not to standardize design; rather, to standardize the method in which the content is added to a DWT through Editable Regions within the design."
This is significantly simpler than linking to named destinations because it doesn't require any special steps to be taken in the preparation of the PDF file. I personally favor the page-linking method for this reason. In order to link through to a specific PDF page, begin with the domain, as you would for any web link:
http://www.mydomain.com/
Then add the name of the PDF document:
http://www.mydomain.com/myPDF.pdf
Then append "#page=" followed by the desired page number. For example, if you were looking to link to page 7:
http://www.mydomain.com/myPDF.pdf#page=7
So in all, the HTML link code would be:
<a href="http://www.mydomain.com/myPDF.pdf#page=7">Link text</a>
"When you save Web pages format with Microsoft Word, additional tags are added so that you can continue to use the full functionality of Word to edit your content.
To reduce the size of Web pages, you can save them in filtered HTML. Filtered format removes Microsoft Office-specific tags. If you save in filtered HTML and then reopen the file in Office programs, text and general appearance will be preserved, but some features may work differently.
If you reopen a Web page in Word that you saved in filtered HTML, your text and general appearance are preserved, but you may not be able to use certain Word features in the usual way to edit your files. For example, the appearance of bulleted or numbered lists is preserved; however, some of the Word functionality associated with lists will not be preserved.
If you will need to edit the file later, you can maintain two files: one in Word format and one in filtered HTML format. You can edit the content in the Word document, save it in Word format for future editing, and then save a copy in filtered HTML format."
