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Wednesday, April 25, 2018

Organizing Your Favorites

Order in chaos



Basic stuff that bares repeating.
(IE7 is not that much different)

Microsoft:
Use Favorites to Get Around the Web


History and Favorites
  • Add a Web Page to Your Favorites
  • Go to a Web Page on Your Favorites List
  • Alphabetize Your Favorites
  • Remove a Web Page from the Favorites List
  • Organize Your Favorite Web Pages in a New Folder
  • Remove a Web Page from a Folder in the Favorites List



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Tuesday, April 24, 2018

List Your Addresses

When I find the time


Here's a simple suggestion that sounds silly to begin with, but may come in handy in the future.
Write down your email addresses!
How many do you have?
  • Created by an ISP when setting up an Internet connection.
  • Work email accounts
  • Club or hobby related
  • From any domain you’ve purchased
  • Email aliases created on your behalf.
  • Web based email addresses with Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail or many others.
Remember your old AOL/CompuServe addresses?


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Sunday, April 22, 2018

How Google Works

Fact and not



The magic that makes Google tick
  • Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed
  • Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster
  • Over 30 clusters
  • 104 interface languages including Klingon and Tagalog
  • One petabyte of data in a cluster - so much that hard disk error rates of 10-15 begin to be a real issue
  • Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster
  • An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters
  • No complete system failure since February 2000
Stanford University: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine  

Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page Google.com:
How Google Works
 
How Stuff/Google Works

The Economist: Case History
 
Or
 

It's all done with pigeons


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Friday, April 13, 2018

Free HTML Tools

Collection of helpful utilities




AXCEL216's MAX Speeed WinDOwS Tricks + Secrets:

HTML Authoring
Webmaster Resources

GIF + JPEG Shrinkers
Do you have large GIFs/JPEGs cluttering your internet/server space? Are your web pages loading too slow?
HTML Validators
These HTML/CSS/DHTML/XHTML validators check the accuracy of your code, reporting all aspects of design and eventual errors, flaws, invalid links etc
HTML Editors
Offline HTML + text editors
[D]HTML, XML, CSS + Java[Script] Resources
Java No Java... JavaScript dedicated web sites
FTP Transfer Tools
FTP transfer clients + FTP server tools



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Saturday, April 07, 2018

Crime on the Web

What does it look like?


PC World has an article on e-mail cyber crime, with examples of the notes.

Cyber Crime

FBI and Cyber Crime

Wells Fargo Example


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Friday, April 06, 2018

DNS FAQ

Domain Name System


Here's a concise collection of answers about the inner workings of the internet.

For instance:

What is DNS (Domain Name System)?
Websites have both a "friendly" address, called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and an IP address. People use URLs to find websites, but computers use IP addresses to find websites. DNS translates URLs into IP addresses (and vice versa). For example, if you type http://www.microsoft.com into the address bar in your web browser, your computer sends a request to a DNS server. The DNS server translates the URL into an IP address so that your computer can find the Microsoft web server.


DNS FAQ


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Tuesday, April 03, 2018

Site Maps

Point the way

"As a Web designer and HTML builder, one of the first places I visit on a Web site is the site map. The site map shows an entire overview of the structure of the site, and more importantly, indicates how much effort was put into usability testing during the site's construction."

Learn how to chart a better site map
By Jim Kukral -Builder.com

According to Jakob Nielsen's
Alertbox Usability Study on Site Maps

"27 percent of users turn to site maps when asked to learn about a site's structure. If your site map is poorly designed, you may lose 27 percent of your Web visitors. That could translate into millions of dollars of missed sales for an e-commerce site, or a massive amount of missed leads for a service company."


(A Site Map is a guide to a web site used by visitors. A Sitemap is a file used by search engines to index entries on a site. )


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Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Where's dat site

Server locations


YouGetSignal.com provides some tools that let you find out more about a web site. Who else uses that server, for instance, and where to server is located.

Sites on Web server

A reverse IP domain check takes a domain name or IP address pointing to a web server and searches for other sites known to be hosted on that same web server.

Network location

The network location tool is a utility that approximates and displays the geophysical location of your network address on a Google Map.



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Monday, March 19, 2018

Calculators on the Web

Figure the vigorish



It's sometimes easier to use a preset calculator than it is to write your own in Excel.
Here's a collection of sites:

  • Auto Calculators

  • Bond Calculators

  • Budget Calculators

  • College Calculators

  • Credit Card Calculators

  • Home Calculators

  • Insurance - Disability Calculators

  • Insurance - Health Calculators

  • Insurance - Life Calculators

  • Life Expectancy Calculators

  • Choose-to-Save - Life Expectancy

  • Mutual Fund Calculators

  • Paycheck Planning Calculators

  • Retiree Health

  • Retirement Calculators

  • Roth IRA Calculators

  • Savings Calculators

  • Social Security Calculators

  • Social Security Administration - Estimate Your Potential Benefit

  • Stock Calculators

  • Tax Calculators
Calculators


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Monday, March 05, 2018

Google Hear em See em

Accessible searching


Google appears to have a tool or mini app for almost anything.
Here are some of their answers to making information available to the greatest number of people.

(look at 1-800-GOOG-411)


  • Web Search:

    Result pages include headers to delineate logical sections.

  • Accessible Search:
    Promotes results that are accessible.

  • Book Search:

    Full-text access to public-domain works.

  • Gmail:

    A simple yet functional HTML mode that works well with screen readers
    .
  • Gmail Mobile:
    A lightweight user interface that is also speech-friendly.

  • Google Maps:
    Easy-to-use textual directions.

  • Calendar:
    A functional, yet speech-friendly user interface.

  • Audio Captchas:

    All services that use Google Accounts provide an audio alternative for the visual challenge-response tests that are used to distinguish humans from machines.

  • Mobile Transcoder:

    A mobile lens for viewing the web that produces accessible views.

  • Google Video:

    Allows uploaded videos to contain captions/subtitles in multiple languages for viewers who are hearing-impaired or unfamiliar with the original language.

  • Google Talk:

    IM clients inside a web browser can pose accessibility challenges, but the use of the open Jabber API means that Google users can choose from a variety of Jabber clients, many of which work well with adaptive technologies.

  • 1-800-GOOG-411:

    Here's an exception to the rule that we deliver most things through a web browser. Our experimental Voice Local Search service lets anyone who can speak into a phone search for a local business by name or category; get connected to the business free of charge; get the details by SMS if you’re using a mobile phone. (Just say "text message".)

Accessibility Services


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Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Web Accesability

Make it easy



"Accessibility, the design of HTML documents for accessibility by people with disabilities, is such an important aspect of the Internet today that the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) has adopted a set of guidelines for designing accessible Web sites. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) closely follow Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act.

For some Web sites, adherence to the WCAG is not optional; it is a necessity. Expression Web/FrontPage 2003 has tools for evaluating the accessibility of an entire Web site, identifying elements that violate the guidelines, and finding ways to correct the violations. The accessibility checker provides all of this functionality in a single dialog box.

To access the accessibility checker on the Tools menu click Accessibility (Accessibility Reports).

You can use the accessibility checker to check a single page or an entire Web site. The accessibility checker checks for varying levels of accessibility and specifically for adherence to Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act. You can check for errors or warnings, and you can add a manual checklist."

Expression Web Accessibility

MSDN:
Adding Rules to the Accessibility checker


Making Your Web Site Accessible to the Blind
Test your site:
Cynthia Says


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Thursday, February 22, 2018

Page Break CSS

Before or after


You can put a break on a web page like you can in a document.
A Cascading Style Sheet makes it simple

"The stub-ends left when paragraphs end on the first line of a page are called widows. They have a past but not a future, and they look foreshortened and forlorn."

Orphans are parts of a paragraph that begin on the previous page. An orphan has a future, but no past.

The only paging properties supported by Internet Explorer 7, Safari 3 and Firefox 2 are page-break-before and page-break-after.
The page-break-before and page-break-after properties enable you to say that a page break should occur before or after the specified element. The following example starts a new page every time an h1 heading is encountered and after every .section block.
h1 {
page-break-before:always }
.section {
page-break-after:always}


Etiquette of Pagination


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Saturday, February 17, 2018

Font Lister

A look see


I haven't seen, lately, how many fonts you can have on a machine, but I know it's a lot more than earlier versions.

Here is a free download that will create an HTML file that will show all the fonts installed on your computer.

"Using FontList, you can change the predefined sample text, exclude seldom used fonts from the list and change the path for the HTML file.

In your browser, you can change the style of a font and zoom in on a font. You can also view the character map of a font. And, for some, maybe the most important feature, you can create a print out of all your fonts.




FontList


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Tuesday, February 13, 2018

Reading Level Check

Abrogate Obfuscation


Writing a blog or designing a web page should be done with an eye on the complexity of the language.

For broadest appeal, it should be around an 8th grade level.

This site is at about the 10th grade.


Reading Level

(Avoid one of the reading level sites that offers to put a graphic on your site. The icon links to an ad for "payday" loans.)


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Wednesday, February 07, 2018

Privacy is Gone

Hide that search


We're not alone in the great world-wide internet.

"In 2006, AOL unwittingly divulged the personal lives of 650,000 customers by publishing their search histories as research data. Despite AOL's attempts to anonymize the info, the New York Times quickly outed a 62-year-old lady in Georgia whose searches revealed her dog was wetting the upholstery."

Slate.com


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Saturday, January 27, 2018

HTML Preview

HTML Tester

There you are, out in the wilderness of PCdom without a copy of FrontPage (Expression) around. How do you find out what HTML tags looks like?
(fire up notepad, save the file, open with a browser)

HTML Preview
Preview HTML in a new window by entering it into the form. This script allows you to pass anything to a new window.

Instructions help you create a preview on your own web page.

Such as:
HTML TEST BED


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Friday, January 12, 2018

IE Temp Files

Storage area


Every once in awhile when the Berners-Lee pipeline clogs up, you are instructed to delete the temporary files that IE saves.

You can do it with the Click of an IE Options button.

Here's where those files are stored:




As you see, you could move that location if you wanted to.

Finding the Temporary Internet Files folder


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Tuesday, January 09, 2018

Gmail Features

The top 10


Bill Kee, Associate Product Marketing Manager for Gmail, has a blog and has listed 10 major features of the free web based email system.
Including:

"When you get an email that references an address, look to the right and you'll probably see a link from Gmail pointing you to a map of the address on Google Maps.

Gmail also recognizes email text that refers to an event (e.g., 'dinner tomorrow at 8pm'), and will give you a link to add it to your calendar.

It'll even pick up on package tracking numbers from UPS and link you directly to the tracking page, so you don't have to copy and paste the number. I really like this last one when I order stuff online and want the instant gratification of knowing a package is on its way.


Gmail features Part 1

Gmail features Part 2


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Friday, January 05, 2018

MHTML

One file web pages



When a web page is created using HTML, the coding is normally contained in one file and the graphics in separate folders.

The Mime HTML or MHT/MHTML format changed that.

Starting with Office 2000 as an add-in and carried through XP as a "Web Archive" option, the format emerged in Office 2003 as a "Single file web page" selection in the File Save As dialog box.

Here are the Save As choices available in an application such as Word:
  • Web Page, Complete means that the contents of the page (including any pictures) will be saved into a folder as separate files, similar to those on the server hosting the site.

  • Web Page, HTML only means that only the HTML information will be saved. This option and Web Page, Complete will enable you to open the file for viewing in Internet Explorer (or any other browser) at a later time, even when you are offline.

  • Web Archive means that the page will be saved, along with any images it contains, as a single file. You can view a Web Archive later without being connected to the Internet.

  • Text File means that only the text on the page will be saved, not the HTML (or any other) formatting, including graphics.
MIME Encapsulation of Aggregate HTML Documents (MHTML)  

Short Summary of the MHTML Standard


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