Hosting and Domain Names
Setting up hosting and reserving domain names is that whole other realm that you will need to be familiar with if you intend to make a website.
A few terms you will become familiar with:
FTP – File Transfer Protocol
FTP, SMTP, HTTP, IDE, KFC, what the… In 350 years the entire English language will look like assembler code… a large string of 1,2, and 3 letter acronyms with weird punctuation. In the meantime, File Transfer Protocol or just FTP is one of the foundation blocks of the mechanics behind the internet. Its the programming contraption used to… transfer files.
The 301 Redirect and Why I Need One
The 301 redirect solves many problems that are associated with websites that have changed servers or changed hosting companies. The 301 redirect will … redirect… the incoming traffic to the specified web address. Pretty simple, one file takes care of the entire site however, that is not why I’ve called you here. One of the more subtle uses for the 301 redirect is to solve a not so well known SEO issue. The 301 redirect I show here is for this specific purpose.
No Such Thing As a Website
That’s right, there is no such thing as a website, no HTML, no HTTP, no Web Design. Websites do not exist, you can’t hold one in your hands. You can hold a computer or a disk drive but that is not the web site.
Automatic Copyright Year Updater
Have you ever given your websites a once over and all of a sudden noticed your footer has a copyright 1996 All Rights Reserved? Ack, what if you have 20 or 30 web sites? Do You have to go through each one and update the footer every year?
How to Make a WordPress Blog
Another how to make a WordPress blog article… talk about redundancy on the internet. Still, according to my “research”, there does seem to be a growing need for Web Design Tutorials as well as a surge in Blogging.
Blogging for Fun and Profit
Blogs are cool, I admit it. I’m a web designer and I design and make websites for a living so you might think I wouldn’t like an application that enables someone with little to no technical skills to make a website that includes a CMS (Content Management System) out of the box. Quite the contrary. No need to re-invent the wheel I say, heck, I could never build something as elegant and functional as WordPress.
Google Responsible for New Breed of Obsessive Compulsive Disorders
Top listings at Google are the subject, cause and effect of the new bread of obsessive compulsive disorders. Fortunes made and lost over a single word. I remember back when you could just type a word seven hundred times on a page and watch it jump up three pages at Google overnight (not that I ever did that). Search Engines are really smart now. No cheating, no cutzees.
Dynamically Display Images From a Directory
Here is a nifty PHP script I use on occasion. It reads a specified directory that you have populated with images, in this case .gif images then spits them out onto a nice 4 column table.
I used this for a page that displays customer logos. To add a new logo all the client has to do is size the image, make sure it’s a gif then drop it into the proper directory, done. To remove an image, just delete it from the directory. No code.
The client wanted to order 10 of the logos first and the rest alphabetically so I came up with the easiest solution I could think of witch was to put a sort on the array of file names before writing them to HTML then coming up with a file naming scheme that they could follow. I named the logos by the company name and just put a four digit number in front of the filenames they wanted to be ordered first. They started with 0010_name.gif then 0020_name.gif etc… This way if a new one came in that they wanted first they could name it 0015_name.gif.
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0">
<tr>
<?
$dir = 'path to directory';
$dirHandle = opendir($dir);
$image = "";
while ($file = readdir($dirHandle)) {
if(strpos($file, '.gif')>0) {
$count++;
$image[$count] = array ($file);
}
}
sort($image);
closedir($dirHandle);
$arrays = count($image) -1;
$loop = -1;
$c = 0;
while ($loop < $arrays) {
$loop++;
if ($c == 4) {
echo '</tr><tr><td><img src="'.$dir.'/'.$image[$loop][0].'"></td>';
$c = 0;
} else {
echo '<td><img src="'.$dir.'/'.$image[$loop][0].'"></td>';
}
$c++;
}
if ($c==1) {echo '<td colspan="3"></td>';}
if ($c==2) {echo '<td colspan="2"></td>';}
if ($c==3) {echo '<td></td>';}
if ($c==4) {echo '';}
?>
</tr>
</table>
Web Designer vs. Web Developer
For a time I was rather concerned about the semantics of the terms; who does what? Which one makes more money and what the heck do I call myself?
There is the school of thought where a web designer is the person who makes web sites and a web developer is one who does… other stuff… makes the forms go, puts your name on the pages. The web designer was the cool one, he/she knows “Flash” ooOOOoo. The developer was the other guy, down the hall, no one really knows what he does anyways so who cares. Today, neither of them have jobs unless they each learned some of what the other one did.