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Goodies to Go ™
February 21, 2005 — Newsletter # 325
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Featured this week:
* Goodies Thoughts – Website Picture Protection
* Q & A Goodies
* News Goodies
* Feedback Goodies
* Windows Tech Goodie of the Week
* And Remember This…
Website Picture Protection
You have gone out and taken a set of beautiful photographs. You have spent
painstaking hours with your graphics program to create sharp looking, visually
stunning graphic effects and you have labored to put them all together on your
web pages. You are very proud of your work, and justifiably so — the result is
breathtaking!
And so, your site is published on the web. Response is great! Your friends are
very impressed, as are a couple of new business prospects.
Then, after a few weeks, you receive an email from a friend who has seen your
pictures on another site. You contact the offending webmaster who insists that
they didn’t get the pictures from your site, but rather got them from an "open
license" website. They give you the address and when you check it out you find
to your horror that all your hard work has been taken and published with the
claim that it is public domain.
Looking at the download counts you see that thousands of people have made copies
of it, and you realize that there is no way you are going to be able to track
them all down and prevent their use.
You contact the folks running the "open license" site and tell them about it.
They are profusely apologetic and immediately remove your work from their site.
They tell you that the items were submitted by one of their subscribers who
certified that they had full rights to them. They give you the subscriber’s
email address:
flybynight666@youha.com Oh great! You contact Youha who confirm that the free
account
was created, used once to send email to an "open license" website, and was never
used again. "We can resolve the user’s IP address for you, however," they
continue, helpfully. "It’s a place called the "Five Hundred Seat Internet Cafe"
located in the center of Metropolis.
You now realize that you are totally done for. Your sweat and toil has been
filched and made to look like it’s available to anybody. If somebody looks at
your site now, they well think that you simply use public domain stuff rather
than being impressed by your skills and talents. If you start over, how can you
prevent the same thing from happening again?
And there’s the question.
How do you protect your pictures and graphics? The answer is not popular. The
answer is, "you don’t."
There are JavaScript techniques to disable the right click; there are masking
techniques whereby another, transparent image is superimposed over the one you
wish to protect; there are mouseover and mouseout techniques that flip the image
to something else when the mouse is over it, or change the page completely as
the mouse encroaches; there are a variety of other coding techniques that people
have come up with to prevent downloads.
None of these techniques works.
The reason is simple. When the browser is going to take you to a page, it makes
a request of the website’s server, which responds by sending down all the files
associated with the requested page. The browser puts these into its cache
directory and starts to assemble them for display.
Regardless of the methods used to make capture off the displayed page more
difficult, the individual files remain in the cache until they are purged. This
purging could happen after some number of days, at some specified time or when
some particular event, such as closing the browser, occurs. This is a user
controlled option. Any pilferer worth their salt knows how to control the cache,
where to find it, how to locate any picture or graphics files they are after and
how to copy them out. If the page can be displayed, they images can be saved.
I’m sorry if this is bad news for you, but it is a basic fact of life. If this
is a concern for you, you might want to refocus your efforts into the content on
the site, and reduce the effort that goes into the graphics. If you want to have
the pictures out there, but want to make it as hard as possible for somebody
else to use your work, consider building a complex Flash or LiveMotion file, or
something similar, that contains your identification information along with the
pictures. This will help to stop all but the most hardened, and for them, it
might just be too much work to be worth it.
Thanks for Reading!
– Vince Barnes
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Q & A Goodies
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Questions are taken from submissions to our Community Mentors. You can ask a
Mentor a question by going to
http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1et7,1,b3d2,9l6f,2zkc,epin
Q. I have some stand alone HTML program that reside in multiple laptop computers
located in my client’s fleet of vehicles. I am attempting to find a program or
script that will act as a hit counter so I can analyze the traffic and identify
the pages or sections visited or more importantly, those that are not.
A. You might find that cookies would provide the feedback you are looking for.
Take a look at this HTMLGoodies page:
http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1et7,1,45f2,l316,2zkc,epin
Q. I would like to be able to create clickable buttons at the top of my page to
link to different places further down the page.
A. Add this link code to your button image:
<a href="#link1"><img src="yourbuttonname.gif"></a> Then where you want it to
link to, add this anchor code:
<a name="link1"></a>
When you click the button it will jump down on the same page to the anchor.
Q. I have a folder, and inside that folder is a webpage and images used on the
webpage.
There is another folder inside that folder, and inside this folder is another
webpage. I want to use the images from the previous folder. Is it possible to
link them in locally?
Or do I have to use an absolute link?
A. You can link to documents in other directories by specifying the relative
path from the current document to the linked document. For example, a link to a
file "my_file.html"
located in the subdirectory "files" would be:
<A HREF="files/my_file.html">My File</A> If you wanted to reference an image in
another folder you can use relative paths also.
For instance your page resides in a folder named "pages" and you want to
reference the image that is in another folder named "images". Both folders
reside on the site in the same level. The reference would look like this: <img
src="../images/my_image.jpg"> This tells the browser to look up into another
folder named "images" [The two dots mean "my parent folder" – Ed].
If the page were in a folder named "folder2" and this folder was in the folder
named "pages" the reference could look like this:
<img src="../../images/my_image.jpg">
This tells the browser to look two folders up for another folder named "iamges".
These are called relative links because you are specifying the path to the
linked file relative to the location of the current file. You can also use the
absolute pathname (the complete URL) of the file, but relative links are more
efficient in accessing a server.
By using relative links you make your site more portable. You can do all of your
work building your website on your local computer and when you upload the entire
site to the server, all of the links will work. If you use absolute links then
you run into the problem of having the files still linked to your local
computer.
Q. How do I move stuff where I want it on my website? I put the html in the
scripts area but when I go to my site everything is in the top left corner.
A. By default, text and images will be placed at the top and to the left. There
are tags for positioning, and stylesheets give more control. Sometimes tables
are used for precise layout. I suspect tables would be the most useful thing for
you right now, so have a look at the tables tutorials.
http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1et7,1,4ii5,b3c,2zkc,epin
Q. How do I make animated GIFs?.
A. Basically, you make each frame as a separate image, and your graphics
application combines them into one file. Imageready can do this. Shareware sites
may have Microsoft GIF Animator, which I’ve used and works adequately. There
will be other applications for animating GIFs. Probably shareware sites like
Nonags and Tucows are your best bet. If you’re willing to learn Flash or
Livemotion, they make animations which are smoother and smaller.
Q. Can you use Visual Basic for making baners?
A. Visual Basic is not the program you should be using for creating banners.
Take a look at PhotoShop( http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1et7,1,awvb,153i,2zkc,epin
) or Paint Shop Pro(
http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1et7,1,bxem,br44,2zkc,epin
)
Q. What function returns the square root of a number?
A. That would be Math.sqrt(arg) where arg is your numeric variable. There is a
whole list of Math Object methods in Joe’s book starting at the bottom of P159.
News Goodies
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Intel Chip to Drive TCP/IP
[February 18, 2005] The company embeds its I/O Acceleration Technology as a way
to let a CPU do its job and ignore network traffic.
Read the article:
http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1et7,1,54lg,hlje,2zkc,epin
ChoicePoint Data Theft Fallout Spreads to 145,000 [February 18, 2005]
ChoicePoint responds to pressure to let more people know if identity thieves
have their data.
Read the article:
http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1et7,1,a5dw,m0o,2zkc,epin
RFID is Inevitable But Dicey
[February 18, 2005] Burton Group says security and privacy concerns remain
despite RFID momentum.
Read the article:
http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1et7,1,cgt3,iayi,2zkc,epin
All Your Security, Baked Into One Appliance [February 18, 2005] Unified threat
management devices emerge as the hot new gadget at the RSA Security Conference.
Read the article:
http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1et7,1,lfdc,d4m5,2zkc,epin
Java Imaging Code Unleashed
[February 18, 2005] New APIs and I/O tools are helping Sun push its
Java-everywhere message to medical, commercial, network and government imaging
markets.
Read the article:
http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1et7,1,cf95,bdss,2zkc,epin
An ‘Optimal’ View of Windows
[February 18, 2005] Optimal Access would like to make your Windows life a little
easier.
Read the article:
http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1et7,1,1blb,gn3v,2zkc,epin
Analysts Skeptical of Qwest Claim
[February 18, 2005] UPDATED: Experts aren’t convinced a Qwest-MCI merger would
clear government review before a Verizon-MCI combination.
Read the article:
http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1et7,1,gggs,8elg,2zkc,epin
Sun’s Trusted Solaris 10 Coming This Year [February 18, 2005] The company bets
big on its user rights management, predictive self-healing, Solaris containers,
and a new cryptographic framework.
Read the article:
http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1et7,1,byaf,5eor,2zkc,epin
PDA Market Up or Down?
[February 18, 2005] New results from Gartner dispute IDC’s numbers on decline in
the sector. It’s all in how you count the devices.
Read the article:
http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1et7,1,ktp3,ewok,2zkc,epin
IBM to Sprout More Dev Centers Abroad
[February 16, 2005] The time is ripe for more centers, as enterprise software
booms in China, Russia and Brazil.
Read the article:
http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1et7,1,b5be,glq1,2zkc,epin
Feedback Goodies
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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 helps 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://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1et7,1,b3d2,9l6f,2zkc,epin
Thanks for all your feedback!
Windows Tech Goodie of the Week
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Source Code Viewer ASP.NET Sample Code
http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1et7,1,6xim,7t8x,2zkc,epin
This sample shows you how to read a text file off the file system and display
the source code in a browser. In addition to illustrating the use of a
StreamReader object, it also includes some basic error handling to handle things
like people specifying the wrong filename.
*** AND ***
An Easier Way to Highlight the Rows of a DataGrid on MouseOver
http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1et7,1,5dp0,385m,2zkc,epin
This article examines a surprisingly simple and clever way to utilize the hover
feature of CSS to add row highlighting to a standard DataGrid.
*** AND ***
Writing a Custom Membership Provider for the Login Control in ASP.NET 2.0
http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1et7,1,ilds,d5c0,2zkc,epin
In ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005, you can quickly program custom
authentication pages with the provided Membership Login controls. In this
article, Dina Fleet Berry examines the steps involved in using the Login control
with a custom SQL Server membership database.
And Remember This …
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On this day in…
1431 England began the trial of Joan of Arc; 1804 Richard Trevithick
successfully ran the first rail locomotive, the Penydarren locomotive, in Wales;
1857 the US issued the Flying Eagle cent coins; 1857 the US Congress outlawed
foreign currency as legal tender in the US; 1874 Benjamin Disraeli replaced
William Gladstone ans British Prime Minister; 1885 the Washington Monument in DC
was dedicated; 1916 the Battle of Verdun began (WWI – 1 million casualties);
1922 Britain granted independence to Egypt; 1925 the first issue of "New Yorker"
magazine was published; 1931 Alka Seltzer was introduced; 1947 E.H. Land
demonstrated the instant developing camera in NYC; 1924 24,000 rolls of Beatles
wallpaper were sent from the UK to the US; 1970 the Jackson 5 made their TV
debut on American Bandstand; 1981 Peter Sutcliffe, dubbed the "Yorkshire Ripper"
for his murder of 13 women, was captured; 1988 actor Dudley Moore married Brogan
Lane;
Born today were: in 1915 actress Ann Sheridan; 1924 Premier of Zimbabwe Robert
Mugabe;
1925 film director Sam Peckinpah; 1927 humorist Erma Bombeck; 1931 actor Larry
Hagman;
1932 King Harald V of Norway; 1934 actress Rue McClanahan; 1935 actor Mark
McManus; 1937 actor Gary Lockwood; 1943 record producer David Geffen; 1946 Tyne
Daly; 1946 Alan Rickman; 1953 actress Christine Ebersole; 1958 singer Mary
Chapin Carpenter; 1961 actor Christopher Atkins; 1966 British actress Bronwen
Booth; 1971 actor Jose Solano; 1979 actress Jennifer Love Hewitt;
