Friday, March 29, 2024

Goodies to Go ™
October 4, 2004– Newsletter #305


Goodies to Go ™
October 4, 2004–Newsletter #305

This newsletter is part of the internet.com network.
http://www.internet.com
 


Featured this week:

* Goodies Thoughts A Hosting
Alternative
* Q & A Goodies
* News Goodies
* Goodies Peer Reviews

* Feedback Goodies  
* Windows Tech Goodies  
* And Remember This

 


 

Goodies Announcement

The new Beyond HTML Goodies book
is now available!

 

Go beyond the basics
and learn how the pros add and use dynamic HTML features and advanced
JavaScript techniques. Beyond HTML Goodies demonstrates dozens of new and
different features readers can add to their existing Web pages using HTML and
JavaScript. The book starts with simple text and image tips, such as adding a
clock to a Web page or causing text to appear when the mouse moves over an
image. It gradually builds to more complex tricks, including manipulating forms
or working with cookies behind the scenes. Throughout the book, readers enjoy
Joe’s snappy style and “to the point” discussion of each “goody” in the book.

 

http://books.internet.com/books/0789727803

 

 


Goodies Thoughts – A Hosting Alternative


There are plenty of Goodies To Go readers who make a few extra
pennies on the side by developing web sites for local small businesses, friends,
etc. Each of these sites has to be hosted somewhere, and if it is not to be
ad-supported, then that usually means paying a fee to have it hosted at a
hosting service company.

In the past, I have discussed a few alternatives for hosting these sites,
including low cost services such as Direct-nic (http://www.directnic.com)
or even hosting at home (see

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/letters/276.html
) although this latter does
really require a high speed Internet connection.

The other way to fill your hosting needs is to co-locate a server at a hosting
company of get a dedicated server at a managed hosting company like Rackspace (http://www.rackspace.com)
If you do this you can expect high availability, high security and the ability
to host a bunch of sites on your server. This is a great solution, but it’s not
cheap (although I have seen these services for as low as $99.00/mo) and you’ll
have a tough time selling enough sites to make it pay for itself, and even
harder time to make any money!

So what’s the REAL alternative? Virtual servers, that’s what! Some of you are
familiar with the concept of virtual servers, I am sure, but for those who may
not be, let me give you a quick description.

As the name would suggest, a virtual server is not a dedicated machine, but
rather a "partition" within a computer that looks as though it was a complete
machine. To the administrative user, it has all the normal features you would
see in a dedicated machine, root access, all the usual services, drive space
etc. It provides the ability to add users, sites and all the Goodies you would
expect. Each virtual machine in a host computer is completely isolated from the
other virtual machines in the same computer, in terms of its files, tasks and
users.

The big advantage of a virtual machine for our purposes is that it shares the
cost of the host computer with all the other virtual machines, bringing the
price down for each. The down side is, of course, that you are sharing processor
power with the others in the host computer, and you have no control over what
they may be doing.

I have used a virtual machine for a variety of purposes and never run into any
major problems. For $35/mo you can get your own virtual machine with plenty
enough computer power to host a few personal or small business sites (though you
probably wouldn’t want to put any e-commerce onto it.) Suppose you had a few
friends who wanted to have a private host. If they were willing to pay, say,
$5/mo., paid three monthly in advance. If you could sign up two each month, your
own hosting would only be costing you $5/mo., and in three months’ time you’d be
making money!

There are several places you can get virtual machine hosting from — just do a
search on Google and you’ll find them. After looking around for a while, and
wanting a high quality, low priced, secure and reliable service, I chose A-Plus
Hosting in San Diego, California. Their website is
http://www.aplus.net — the
service I am describing is called their "hostmaster" service, and if you would
like more information about it, contact Liz Zacharieva at lizz@aplus.net — tell
her I sent you, and that you expect extra special service! I am sure she will be
happy to help you out.
 


Thanks for Reading!
 



– Vince Barnes


 

Top

Q & A Goodies


Questions are taken from submissions to our Community Mentors. You can ask a Mentor a question by going to

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/mentors
.

 


Q. I have created on a development site thru "Dreamweaver/UltraDev",
information which our project team are copying to another application. The
challenge we face is to have the information on the development presented as a
hard copy, with page breaks and hopefully in the same format (colors and all).
So far all we have done is to copy and paste the information into a word
document, but we are losing most of the original format.

A. Using CSS you can set the where the page breaks are when printing your
web page. If you are doing this within a company in which everyone is using the
same browser you may get away with it with few problems. Not all web browsers
recognize this particular attribute. I believe IE 5 and above and Netscape 6 and
above will recognize it. The CSS attributes "page-break-before" and
"page-break-after". Both instruct the printer to begin printing a new page, with
the difference being before or following the element the attribute is applied
to. For instance if you apply the attribute within the H1 tag like this:
<.style> h1{ page-break-before: always; } <./style>
The printer will start a new page before every H1 tag.

Q. Hello, I have a link question. On my site I have the link color scheme
to be black, which works well on the left bordered side of my page, but not on
the right side which has a black background. Is there anyway to change the color
just one or two links without changing the color of all the links?

A. Using CSS and assigning a class to each link you can use different
colors and other attributes to whichever links you want. For instance if you
want one of your links to be black and another to be white you would set up a
style sheet like this:
<.style type="text/css">
a.one:link {color: #000000}
a.two:link {color: #FF0000}
<./style>
Place the style between the <.HEAD> tags. Now apply the class to the actual
links in your HTML like this:
<.a class="one" href="default.html">This link will be black.<./a>
<.a class="two" href="default.html">This link will be red.<./a>

Q. Is there anyway that I can make multiple frames load at a time without
using a form, and using just a regular link?

A. There are a couple of different ways you can accomplish this. The
first example uses "inline javascript" to load two frames (in both examples you
need to specify the name of the frame that you want the documents to load in):
<.a href="#"
onClick="parent.frame_name1.location=’page1.html’;parent.frame_name2.location=’page2.html’">Click
Me<./a>
The second example uses a function that is passed the documents to load when you
click on a link:
<.script type="text/javascript">
function Doframes(page1,page2)
{
parent.frame_name1.location=page1
parent.frame_name2.location=page2
}
<./script>
<.a href="#" onClick="Doframes(‘page1.html’,’page2.html’)">Click Me<./a>

Q. I was wondering how to have information filled our on a form sent
directly to a e-mail address? If this is possible how can I implement it into my
website?

A. It does not work very well when you try to email a form directly to an
email address. Usually what happens when the attempt to submit the for is their
email client will pop up without the information from the form in the body of
the email. You should use a server  side language such as Perl PHP or Asp
to process the form and email it to you.
[Take a look also at:

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/articles/emailforms1.html


http://www.htmlgoodies.com/articles/emailformphp.html
  and

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/letters/226.html
  — Ed.]

Q. I want to design a home page which display different images each time
it loads. There will be 6 main images to be shown all will be displayed one by
one and when 6th image will be displayed, the first image will come again.

A. There are so solutions many available. It all depends on what type of
technology you want to use. My best suggestion is to do a search on Google or
Yahoo for "javascript image rotator". You will find about 10000 hits. Most of
them probably even have a demo so you can see what it will look like before you
try it.

Q. I have volunteered to create a web site for a science fair at our
local elementary school. I have just begun to write html, and find it really
easy. I would like to know if you could recommend any good html editor, that at
least had syntax checking and , I guess style sheet support. I want to keep it
simple, so others who follow me in coming years will be able to maintain the
site without having to learn something complicated.

A. Ease of use, inexpensive, style sheet support and I think the next
version, 2003 might even have syntax checking, I would suggest FrontPage 2003,
about $170. I have read a lot of very good reviews and it looks very promising.
It will be available October 21st. Some would argue that FrontPage is for
amateurs. I have used it since FrontPage 98 and have been very happy with it. It
gets better with every version and from what I have been reading FP 2003 has it
all. It is a WYSIWYG editor as well as an HTML editor. You can choose either or
both at the same time with the new version. I have used Dreamweaver, about $400
and it is a great editor but the price is far greater than FrontPage and the
learning curve is greater, in my humble opinion. If you are looking for a very
nice editor that has everything you are looking for (no WYSIWYG) you can try
CoffeeCup HTML Editor – http://www.coffeecup.com – about $50 and lifetime
upgrades. I own it and use it also. very nice editor but not all of the bells
and whistles as the others. For a free HTML editor with no WYSIWYG you can try
1st Page Editor – http://www.evrsoft.com/ I have never tried it but have heard
good things about it.

 

 

 

 

Top

News Goodies


Amazon Web Services Adds Alexa Data
[October 4, 2004] Amazon.com’s flirt with developers gets
more serious.

Click
here to read the article

 

 

 


Sun’s Java Infringes on Kodak Patents

[October 4, 2004] A jury finds Sun used technology patented by
Kodak to build Java; is Microsoft next?

Click here to read the article

 

Gmail Atom Feed Coming?
[October 4, 2004] Some users of the Google e-mail service have spotted the
first signs of a syndication feed powered by the Atom format.

Click
here to read the article

 

 

 


Sybase Eyes New Market for Mobile Integration

[October 4, 2004] The company accelerates its unwired enterprise
strategy to make mobile app development and integration easier.

Click here to read the article

 

 

 

Latest Tungsten T5 Adds Power, Resolution
[October 4, 2004] PalmOne’s latest handheld is designed for
style-conscious business users.

Click here to read the article
 

 

 

Yahoo! Local Unwrapped
[October 4, 2004] Latest local entry follows Ask Jeeves, FAST, and FindWhat.

Click here to read the article

 

 

 

WeatherBug Pitching Enterprises
[October 4, 2004] The weather service is now geared toward
temperature-checking enterprise users.

Click here to read the article

 

 



Minor Starts $50M Software On-Demand Fund
[October 4, 2004] The online business entrepreneur hatches a venture
capital fund to propel subscription-based software delivery.

Click here to read the article

 

 

 

Oracle-PeopleSoft Saga: A Market Ripple Effect
[October 1, 2004] Keep your eye on what IBM, Microsoft and SAP do in the
next year, analysts say.

Click here to read the article


 

 

How Low Can VoIP Go?
[October 1, 2004] Vonage and AT&T are cutting their rates, and new entrants
could further pressure prices.

Click here to read the article

 

 

 

 

Top


Goodies Peer Reviews


 

Every week a site is selected for review. Each week,
reviews of the previous week’s selected site are chosen for
publication on the HTML Goodies website.

 

The current week’s selected site is published in Goodies To
Go and in the Peer Reviews section of the website. 
Current contact email addresses for submitting your site and
for submitting reviews are published in Goodies To Go.

If you would like to have your site reviewed, sign up for
the Goodies To Go newsletter in the Navigation Bar on the
left side of this page. 

For full details about this program, see

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/peerreviews

 

 

 

Top

Feedback
Goodies


Did you ever wish your newsletter was an easy two way communications medium?
Ploof! It now is!
If you would like to comment on the newsletter or expand/improve on something
you have seen in here, you can now send your input to:

mailto:nlfeedback@htmlgoodies.com

We already receive a lot of email every day. This address will help us sort out
those relating specifically to this newsletter from all the rest. When you send
email to this address it may wind up being included in this section of the
newsletter, to be shared with your fellow readers.
Please don’t send your questions to this address.
They should be sent to our mentors: see
http://www.htmlgoodies.com/mentors/

Thanks again for all your feedback!
 

Top


 


Windows Tech Goodie of the Week:



VBScript String Concatenation
(And Why It Should Be Avoided Like The Plague)

A lot of ASP code makes extensive use of string
concatenation, and, although VB and VBScript handle it very
poorly, nothing is usually done about it because so many
developers are simply unaware of the performance problems.
This article not only explains the problem, it also
illustrates just how bad it can get and provides a few
alternatives. Of course… all the source code can be
downloaded and used in your own scripts.


http://www.asp101.com/articles/marcus/concatenation/default.asp


*** AND ***

Unit Test – Testing with NUnit Framework

Kamran Qamar introduces unit testing with NUnit and
offers some best practices, tips, and tricks.


http://www.15seconds.com/issue/040922.htm

*** AND ***

Creating a Tabbed Interface for Displaying Parent/Child Data

The end goal of this article is to create a custom
ASP.NET server control that will allow one to create a
tabbed interface by simply dropping a Web control from the
Toolbox in Visual Studio .NET onto the Designer.


http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/092204-1.aspx

 

Top
 
 

 

 
And Remember This . . .

On this day in…
 

1957 "Sputnik" Launched

Heralding the dawn of the "space age", the USSR launched the first
man made Earth satellite, the "Sputnik", on this day in 1957. It
launched at 22:29, Moscow time, from the Tyuratam space center in
Kazakhstan. Sputnik was 22 inches in diameter, weighed 184 pounds,
and traveling at 18,000 mph, circled the Earth ever 1 hour, 36
minutes. Its orbit varied from 143 mile to 584 miles from Earth,
until it deteriorated in January of 1958, when it burned up in the
atmosphere. Its launch caught the American Government and scientists
by surprise, and started what became known as the "space race".

Today was also the day that in: 1824 Mexico became a
republic; 1883 the "Orient Express" linking Europe to Turkey
by rail, ran its first run; 1910 Portugal became a republic;
1955 Rev Sun Young Moon left prison in Seoul; 1957
"Leave It to Beaver," debuted on CBS; 1966 Lesotho
(Basutoland) gained independence from Britain; 1974 John
Lennon released "Walls & Bridges"; 1984 US govt closed down
due to budget problems; 1990 Regional elections were held in
what was East Germany;

Born today were: in 1860 "Sherlock Holmes" illustrator Sidney
Paget; 1889 Olympic rower (father to Grace) John B. Kelly;
1895
silent film actor Buster Keaton; 1923 actor Charlton
Heston; 1931 comic strip crime fighter Dick Tracy; 1932
actress Felicia Farr; 1941 English author Jackie Collins;
1944
singer Patti LaBelle; 1945 actor Clifton Davis;
1946
actress Susan Sarandon; 1949 actor Armand Assante;
1961
actoe David W. Harper;
 

 




Thanks for reading Goodies to Go!


 



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