Goodies to Go ™
April 7, 2003–Newsletter #227
This newsletter is part of the internet.com network.
http://www.internet.com
Featured this week:
* Goodies Thoughts – Confessions Of A
Web Jack
* Q & A Goodies
* News Goodies
* Goodies Peer Reviews
* Feedback Goodies
* And Remember This…
Goodies Announcement
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Goodies Thoughts – Confessions Of A Web
Jack
"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" wrote the bard in "Romeo and
Juliet". That may be true, but what then does the name actually convey? And what
about other names; what do they convey? In the world of computers, some names
can be a little confusing, if not downright misleading! To try to sort out the
meanings of all these names would be a mammoth task, but I’d like to take a look
at a few that touch the world we live in; namely, that of the web developer.
In the corporate world, the person heading up the "computer department" used to
be known as the manager (or director, or other such title) of Data Processing.
This name seems largely to have gone out of style. The "Nom Du Jour" for this
position is now manager/director of either Information Systems or Information
Technology. There are those who argue that these two names don’t mean the same
thing, but most of the time they seem to be interchangeable. The difference
between the names "Data Processing Manager" and "Information Systems Manager"
is, to my way of thinking, somewhat akin to the difference between the names
"Trash Collector" and "Sanitation Engineer" — if you can’t increase their pay,
at least you can make their job sound better! My personal favorite is
Information Technology because it allows me to talk about the person who manages
IT, and I just love a pun!
Working in the Director of Information System’s department — the DIT’s
department (sorry!) — there is a variety of programmers and analysts. Depending
on the size of the department, there may be Database Administrators,
Communications Systems Administrators, Network Engineers, Systems Analysts and
others in addition to the programmers. These positions all involve
specializations that impact the edges of the web developer’s world. Web
developers themselves really fall within the "programmers" category.
In the minds of some, web development is not really "programming". They like to
think of programming as the task of writing programs in languages like
Assembler, "C" and its derivatives, Visual Basic, even COBOL and the like. To
me, a program is a series of instructions that tells the computer to do
something. My favorite analogy is the expression 2+2=4. In this expression, 2
and 2 are input data, 4 is output data and + = is a program. Using this
definition, all web pages are programs and all web page developers are
programmers. I personally like this thinking, though I do acknowledge that
professional system developers are usually dealing with far more complex
problems than a person writing a web page is dealing with. Add the capabilities
of Dot Net Architecture into the equation, however, and the lines definitely
blur.
Having drawn the conclusion that our web developers are programmers there remain
a few interesting of questions. What do we call the different kinds of web
developers? For example, there are those with a particularly good artistic eye
who can design a beautiful layout for a web page, knowing that it can be
accomplished on the web and providing the needed graphic images and color
specifications, but lacking the knowledge of specific codes needed to create the
pages. Are they no longer "Web Developers"? To me they are — they’re Graphic
Designers, specifically Web Graphic Designers or Web Graphic Artists; you can
even leave out the "Graphic" and have Web Designers or Web Artists. My vote?
"Web Designers". I believe there is a difference between a Painter and an
Interior Decorator. A Web Designer is a web developer with a particular talent.
What then of the coder whose eye is not so great for the art, but whose talent
as a page developer is outstanding. They are a Web Programmer. Together, they
are the central part of a Web Development Team.
Web programmers may also have a variety of specializations. Apart from HTML,
JavaScript, ASP, .Net, PHP, etc., there are such animals as Flash and Shockwave,
and Database systems such as MySQL, Access, SQL Server, Oracle etc. There are a
lot of opportunities for creating specialized names in here!
What then is a "Webmaster"? A Webmaster is a person using a title that really
should be left behind. the title belongs in history. There are so many
technologies available for Web Development, many of which are hugely complicated
systems, that nobody could master them all. I don’t think we want to use a term
like "Master" to represent the person who runs a team either. Manager or
Director sound a lot better than Master, especially when we remember that IDE
Hard Drives are configured together on a channel as "Master" and "Slave". While
in some circumstances some developers may consider the latter to be a fairly
accurate portrayal of their job environment, it doesn’t sound very favorable!
Then, of course, there’s the famous saying about a "Jack of all trades, master
of none." While I study various web technologies all the time, I recognize that
I have friends and colleagues I rely on who are much better than I am at one or
another technology. Thus I must confess I’m not so much a "Webmaster"; I’m more
of a "Web Jack"!
Thanks for Reading!
– Vince Barnes
Q & A Goodies
Questions are taken from submissions to our Community Mentors. You can ask a Mentor a question by going to
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/mentors.
Q. I have a Feedback form and have managed to get it to open the e-mail
programme in order for the viewer to e-mail their feedback to me, but the
problem I am having is to get the SUBJECT line to state "FEEDBACK".
A. If you want the subject line to be filled automatically you need to add
"?subject=FEEDBACK" to the MAILTO link like this:
mailto:info@Your_Site.com?subject=FEEDBACK
Change FEEDBACK to anything else if you want something different!
Q. Could you please tell me how to link one page to a specific point on
another page? Also, how do I link the top of one page to the bottom of the same
page?
A. If you want to link to a spot on a particular page you can use the
NAME ANCHOR. For instance if you had a long page and wanted to give the user an
easy way to get back to the top after reading the article you would place this
in the HTML near the top after the <BODY> tag:
<a name="top">
At the end of the article you would place this code:
<a href="#top">TOP</a>
That creates a link to the top of the page. If you want a link to a certain area
on another page it is done in a similar way. On the page you want to link to you
place the NAME ANCHOR in the spot on the page you want to jump to:
<a href="jump">Jump Here</a>
On the page you are coming from, the link would look like this:
<a href="#jump">Click here to Jump</a>
Here is the tutorial from the HTMLGoodies site:
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutors/pagejump.html
Q. How do you get your brower reset because I have no status bar and no
scrollbar?
A. You could provide a link like this to reload the document:
<a href="javascript:window.location.reload()">Refresh</a>
When the link is clicked on it would refresh the page.
[If you wish to restore the browser status bar (in Internet Explorer) click
"View/Status Bar"
Q. I have a flash uploaded that I would like to use as an intro…
although it wont play. I might have some thing wrong in my code, so here it is:
<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,29,0"
width="550" height="400">
<param name="movie" value="file:///saddam%5B1%5D.swf">
<param name="quality" value="high">
<embed src="file:///saddam%5B1%5D.swf" quality="high" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="550" height="400"></embed>
</object>
A. Your source is incorrect. Make sure that this line:
"file:///saddam%5B1%5D.swf" correctly points to where your file is. As it is now
it is looking for the file on your computer.
Q. How I could go about creating large check boxes?
A. The standard checkboxes used in HTML are just that, standard. I know
of no way to change their size. I have never done it and I have not found
anything about it.
News Goodies
Yahoo! Unveils New Search
[April 7, 2003] As promised, the portal overhauls Yahoo! Search,
integrating it more tightly into its network, and leaving some
questions about future plans.
Click
here to read the article
Orbitz Debuts Characters in TV Spots
[April 7, 2003] UPDATE:Orbitz.com goes back to television, at a critical
time for the travel industry..
Click
here to read the article
Sony’s Blue Laser
[April 7, 2003] The Japanese electronics maker adds new high-capacity
optical data storage disc drives and disc media to its storage arsenal.
Click here to read the article
Adobe Balances a Three-Ring Acrobat
[April 7, 2003] The company updates its PDF-making tool to version 6.0 with
XML, tunes the file standard to version 1.5 and re-brands its reader from
Acrobat to Adobe.
Click here to read the article
Comcast Rolls out Firewall Services
[April 7, 2003] Number one cable provider starts to bundle new security
features as it looks to hit 5 million broadband subscribers by year-end
Click here to read the article
Red Hat Delves into Applications
[April 7, 2003] The Linux distribution firm wades into the higher-level
applications space with its Content Management System and Portal Server
release.
Click here to read the article
Unisys Has High Hopes by Aiming Low
[April 7, 2003] Aiming lower than it ever has before, the Blue Bell,
Pa.-based enterprise system provider hopes a low-end but modular ES7000
system based on Windows Server 2003 will help it capitalize on commodity
space of the server market.
Click here to read the article
AOL Asks FCC to OK Video IM
[April 7, 2003] The move could enable AIM and ICQ to support Webcams —
features that competitors both offer.
Click here to read the article
OSGi Drives New Managed Services Platform
[April 4, 2003] The Open Services Gateway Initiative launches
Release 3 of its platform designed to bring managed services to
devices in homes, cars, businesses, and other environments.
Click here to read the article
Microsoft Divvies Up Office 2003 Editions
[April 2, 2003] The company breaks Office 2003 into six editions,
only one of which will come with the new InfoPath application.
Click here to read the article
Every week a site selected each week 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
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/peerreviews
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
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/mentors/
Inge Post wrote with a tip for those who want to use email
forms to capture data, but have one or another problem with
their host that prevents them from using such a form. Inge
has used a site call Response-o-Matic to process form data.
Their address is:
http://www.response-o-matic.com/
One thing I would caution you about though, is to think
about the data you collect under these circumstances. You
would be ill advised to collect sensitive, financial or
personal data with this method. Consider you visitor’s
privacy and security carefully. For relatively simple
applications, however, this site looks to me as though it
could be useful. Thanks for the tip, Inge!
I must say something more about Goodies Peer Reviews. I have
spoken about this a couple of weeks ago also, but the
program is now in jeopardy. The trouble is that although a
huge number of you voted in favor of us creating this
program, we are getting nowhere near enough of you sending
in reviews to keep it going. Leo Ludwig has sent in a couple
of excellent reviews,; Mark Abbott wrote a great review for
Zepheria Yachting. We have received a few one-or-two
paragraph comments about sites, but that is about it. If you
wish to keep this running, maybe you should consider
participating. Remember that links to the websites of
reviewers are also published in HTML Goodies, so you would
be getting free promotion on a site that gets millions of
visitors every month! Some people pay good $$ to advertise
here!
Top
And Remember This . . .
On this day in…
1891 P.T. Barnum Dies
Phineas Taylor Barnum, creator of the "Three Ring Circus"
died on this day in 1891 in Bridgeport Connecticut. He was
born in 1810 in Bethel, CT. At fifteen he became the
publisher of a local paper as a means of supporting his
mother and five brothers and sisters when his father died.
His creative mind landed him in several libel suits, after
which he promoted Joice Heth, whom he said was a 161 year
old former nurse to George Washington. This too, he later
admitted was a hoax. At age 32 he bought the American Museum
in New York from John Scudder and filled the building with
curiosities including the Siamese Twins, joined at the
chest, and his friend Charles Stratton, a small man whom he
named General Tom Thumb. He ran the museum for 26 years,
entertaining more than 82 million visitors. At the age of 60
he launched P.T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie,
Caravan and Circus and in 1881 teamed up with James Bailey.
The partnership created "P.T. Barnum’s Greatest Show on
Earth, and The Great London Circus, Sanger’s Royal British
Menagerie and the Grand International Allied Shows United",
better known as Barnum and London Circus. The unique feature
of this circus was the spectacle of acts performing in three
separate rings at once. In 1882, Barnum added the 6 1/2-ton
elephant Jumbo to the show and changed its name to "Barnum &
Bailey’s Greatest Show on Earth."
Born today were: in 1770, the poet William
Wordsworth; in 1915 singer Billie Holliday; in
1920 Ravi Shankar (who taught George Harrison to play
the Sitar); in 1939 film maker Francis Ford Copolla
and on the same day, transatlantic TV show host David Frost.
Thanks for reading Goodies to Go!
