Friday, February 14, 2025

Goodies to Go ™
September 29, 2003– Newsletter #252


Goodies to Go ™
September 29, 2003–Newsletter #252

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


Featured this week:

* Goodies Thoughts Safe and Secure
* Q & A Goodies
* News Goodies
* Goodies Peer Reviews

* Feedback 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 – Safe and Secure


Doesn’t that title sound cozy?!! Beware, however, because as you
probably know by now, when you hear those words in this business it’s usually
the last thing you actually are! There are some things that you can do to help
build security on the Internet, however, and today I’m exploring the costs of
one of them.

That one is the secure web site. Any time you involve yourself in financial
transactions on the web, whether as a buyer or as a seller, or even if you are
simply giving out or collecting personal information beyond a name and address,
you need to be sure that the web site is securely encrypted. I am sure you, as a
buyer, are aware of the tell-tale key or padlock (depending on your browser)
that is displayed when you visit a secure site. It is something you should
definitely be double checking before sending in your information. It tells you
that the site’s server is talking with your browser with encrypted messages so
that only the people who should be able to read your info can. If you’re using
Internet Explorer it’s displayed in the status bar along the bottom (if you
don’t see the status bar, click "View"/"Status Bar".) Try going to a secure site
and double clicking the padlock — take a look at what it represents.

If you’re building a fairly simple site that is going to involve collecting
money, then one option open to you is to use a service like Paypal (http://www.Paypal.com)
Paypal is now a subsidiary of Ebay, which has some great advantages if you want
to sell your products through an Ebay store or in the Ebay auctions themselves.
There are hooks from each of their services into the others that make life a
breeze. You can also use Paypal to process your transactions from your own site.
They provide you with all the code you need and with instructions for its use.
When you consider the hassle (and sometimes the expense) involved in setting up
a merchant account to receive credit card payments, along with the issue of the
secure site itself, Paypal can make a lot of sense (cents too, maybe!)

When your site is more complicated than would suit Paypal, or when you are
simply going to collect personal information that shouldn’t be broadcast (I
think of unsecured web transactions as though they were on a CB radio,) your
only option is to set up a secure web site. To do this you are going to need an
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. This is a certificate that is attached
to your site and is used in the negotiation of a secure, encrypted connection
to, among other things, verify the identity of the site. Unless you run your own
server, you are going to need the assistance of your hosting company in setting
up your certificate, but you should in any case be able to choose your
certificate vendor.

For the certificate to work in the desired fashion, without giving the site
visitor any error messages, your certificate needs to be issued be a certificate
authority who is already recognized by your browser. This means, basically, that
you can’t issue your own certificate but have to go to a certificate vendor. The
famous vendors include Verisign, Thawte, Geotrust and the like, but there are
others.

These vendors charge for issuing their certificates. A basic 128 bit certificate
good for one year from Verisign is $349.00, from Thawte it’s $449.00 and from
Geotrust it’s $159.00 — a few moolahs no matter who you choose! There may be a
business reason for choosing one of these well known companies, but if you are
simply wishing to set up an encrypted, secure site for typical purposes you can
save a few dollars by going to a company called XRampSSL (http://www.xrampssl.com)

XRampSSL charge $89.95 for one year. Buy two and get one free! Years, that is.
For $179.90 you get three years — the equivalent of $60 per year — much
better. I have spoken with these guys and checked out their product. It’s the
real deal – it works just fine. If you need to set up a secure site for any of
the purposes I’ve discussed here, I suggest you check ’em 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

https://www.htmlgoodies.com/mentors
.



Q.  I’m making a form that will be used by users to apply for a job.
I want to make sure that the form will not be submitted if they type text into
the "phone number" text box. All my attempts have failed, Could you give me an
idea of what is going on?
<SCRIPT>
var x = 0
function checkdata() {
if ( (document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("a") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("b") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("c") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("d") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("e") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("f") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("g") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("h") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("i") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("j") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("k") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("l") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("m") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("n") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("o") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("p") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("q") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("r") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("s") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("t") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("u") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("v") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("w") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("x") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("y") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("z") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("!") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("#") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("$") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("%") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("^") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("&") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("*") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("(") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf(")") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("-") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("_") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("+") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("=") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("{") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("}") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("[") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("]") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("@") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("~") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("<") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf(">") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("?") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf(".") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("/") == -1) ||
(document.job.dobday.value.indexOf("|") == -1)){x = 1}
}
if (x = 1){
alert("no letters are allowed in the phone text box");
return false;}
</SCRIPT>

A.(1) Take a look at the HTMLGoodies Javascript Primer #29 – Putting It
All Together: Form Field Validation located at
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/primers/jsp/hgjsp_29.html
The example includes the validation of a numeric zip code that should be easy
enough to adapt to a phone number. It will also shorten your script
considerably.

A.(2) You could also use the method isNaN (is-Not-a-Number) to insure
that only numbers are entered. It goes something like this:
if(isNaN(document.job.phone.value))
{alert("Numbers only please!")}

Q. I have recently made an e-mail form with the help of the tutorial on
the site, and my form is made up entirely of text boxes. However, I find that
the
text boxes are ugly.. I would like the borders of them to be a different colour,
so they do not have that "greay shadow" look. I know it is possible to change
the colour of them, as I have seen it done on another website, but how can I do
it on mine?

A. The easiest way to do it is to set up a style for the "input" in you
style sheet, since you are only using text boxes. The following will also apply
to any radio buttons or checkboxes that may be in the form. If you add them
later, you may want to set up a class. But for now, add this to your style
sheet:
input { border: 1px solid black; }
You can use change the pixel size, or switch from solid to dashed. For colors,
you can use the text names that are available, or the hexidecimal (#000000).

Q. How do I make a link from a popup window close the popup window and
link back to a page of the main web site?

A. To refer back to the window that opened the popup you would use the
term "opener". I would suggest that you create a function in your popup to load
the page into the main window and then close the popup. The function could look
like this:
function LoadPage(linkid)
{
opener.location.href=linkid
self.close()
}
You can then call this function and pass the page you want to load into the
"opener" window as a value like this:
<a HREF="#" onClick="LoadPage(‘mypage.html’)">Click Me</a>
or:
<a HREF="javascript:LoadPage(‘mypage.html’)">Click Me</a>
The second example might be better because IE5.0 has a problem when you use the
"#" sign to void the link. You can also reference function in the "opener"
window from the popup by prefacing the function name with the term "opener" like
this:
opener.function_name()
As you can see you can reference just about anything in the main window as long
as you preface it with "opener".

Q. Is there a way to have something other than a button do this job?
<FORM>
<INPUT TYPE="button" Value="Change Three Frames at Once"
onClick="parent.frames[1].location=’zippy5.html’;
parent.frames[2].location=’zippy6.html’;
parent.frames[3].location=’zippy7.html’;">
</FORM>
I would like to have a blue underlined word do the same thing the button does,
to save vertical space in a clickable list arrangement.

A. You can use a text link like so:
<A HREF="#" onClick="parent.frames[1].location=’zippy5.html’;
parent.frames[2].location=’zippy6.html’;
parent.frames[3].location=’zippy7.html’;">Click Here</A>

Q. Recently we have discovered that someone has taken pictures from
several of our web sites and is using them on his site to advertise. I know
there
are JAVA scripts to disable right clicks and make this sort of piracy more
difficult with Explorer. Is there ANY way to stop this if the person uses
Netscape?

A. Keep in mind that the images on your site cannot be 100% protected
from people taking them. There is a way around the "no right click" script. But
it might slow them down if they don’t want to go through the extra effort. I
have tested this script in Netscape Navigator 4.7 and it works. I think it
should work in most of the browsers but I am not sure as to which ones.
Place the folowing code between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags of your HTML code.
<script language="JavaScript">
<!–
/*
No rightclick script v.2.5
(c) 1998 barts1000
barts1000@aol.com
Don’t delete this header!
*/
var message="Sorry, that function is disabled.n
This Page Copyrighted andn
Images and Text protected!n
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED";
// Don’t edit below!
function click(e) {
if (document.all) {
if (event.button == 2) {
alert(message);
return false;
}
}
if (document.layers) {
if (e.which == 3) {
alert(message);
return false;
}
}
}
if (document.layers) {
document.captureEvents(Event.MOUSEDOWN);
}
document.onmousedown=click;
// –>
</script>

 

 

 

 

Top

News Goodies


Optima Sues VeriSign Over URL Transfer
[September 29, 2003] Ghosts of the Sex.com fiasco again
haunt Network Solutions as the Irvine, Calif.-based software
vendor seeks $3 million in damages.

Click
here to read the article


 

Disney Debuts MovieBeam Service
[September 29, 2003] System uses vertical blanking interval for transmitting
movie data.

Click here to read the article

 

 

Windows Media Center, Take 2
[September 29, 2003] The company will release an OS upgrade tomorrow aimed
at making the Microsoft-powered PC the brain of the living room
entertainment center.

Click here to read the article

 



 

MSN Next to Hook Up with Reuters
[September 29, 2003] The two giants — major players in public and business
instant messaging, respectively — will interoperate in the latest of
Reuters’ connectivity deals, with help from IMlogic.

Click here to read the article

 

 

Adobe Overhauls PhotoShop
[September 29, 2003] The network publishing specialist unleashes upgraded
versions of popular apps, including its flagship Photoshop, and brings them
together in a single, integrated suite.

Click here to read the article

 

 

NetIQ Has Something for Microsoft, Linux Users
[September 29, 2003] With an already-impressive array of support for many of
today’s Web- and enterprise-based management applications, NetIQ adds more
to the management console.

Click here to read the article

 

 

Intel, SAS Take Business Intelligence Mobile
[September 29, 2003] SAS will bundle its business
intelligence software with Intel’s mobile architectures to
make wireless devices a bit smarter for corporate users on
the go.

Click here to read the article

 

 



Can MusicMatch Trump iTunes for Windows?
[September 29, 2003] The digital music software firm rolls out a
pay-as-you-go music store that piggybacks on the successful business model
of Apple’s iTunes.

Click here to read the article

 

TSA May Order Airlines to Share Data
[September 29, 2003] With carriers reluctant to participate in CAPPS II
passenger screening program, government could issue security mandate.

Click
here to read the article

 

 



Congress Kills TIA Program
[September 29, 2003] After nearly a year of controversy over the
Pentagon’s data mining project, defense spending bill eliminates funding.
Bush expected to sign legislation.

Click here to read the article

 

 

 

 

 

 

Top


Goodies Peer Reviews


 

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

 

 

 

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
https://www.htmlgoodies.com/mentors/

Last week I put out an offer for any of you who have scripts
you have written to send them in to share with other Goodies
to Go readers. I would like to see a few more examples of
your work. I think it would be a great way to share
expertise. Send them to

nlfeedback@htmlgoodies.com
with "Script Submission" in
the subject line. We’ll see what can be done once we have a
few more in hand. Remember we’re looking for any scripts –
Perl, JavaScript, PHP — whatever you yourself have written.

Thanks again for all your feedback!

 


Windows Tech Goodie of the Week:

The Evolution of Web Services – Part 2


http://www.15seconds.com/issue/030917.htm

Part one traced the technological evolution of HTTP-based
information
exchange and ended with Web services. In part two, Adnan
Masood continues
his examination of Web services and demonstrates their many
benefits
through a financial-sector scenario.

** and **

A Simple Method for Caching HTTP Requests


http://www.asp101.com/articles/john/httpcaching/default.asp

With the advent of web services and all the behind the
scenes HTTP requests that are processed these days, I
figured I should share the simple little classic ASP script
that we’ve been using so sucessfully for the last couple
years.
 


 

 

Top
And Remember This . . .

On this day in…

1941 Genocide Begins at Babi Yar

On this day in 1941 30,000 Jewish men, women and children
lost their lives in a massacre outside Kiev in the Ukraine.
Kiev had been taken by the Nazis on September 19. Adolph
Hitler ordered the deaths of all Jews and Soviet Officials
there and the order was carried out by SS personnel. The
30,000 were marched in groups to a ravine on the outskirts
of the city. There they were ordered to strip naked and were
then machine gunned into the ravine. By the end of the next
day, 34,000 had perished as the dead and wounded alike were
buried in rocks and dirt. The Babi Yar massacre marks the
beginning of the Holocaust.

Today was also the day that: in 1829 Scotland Yard
and London’s Metropolitan Police Force were established;
1895
Louis Pasteur died; 1915 275 die in a
hurricane in the Mississippi Delta; 1918 the allies
break through the Hindenburg line; 1944 Soviet troops
invade Yugoslavia; 1953 the Milton Berle Show
premiered; 1962 the first Canadian satellite,
Alouette I, was launched; 1963 The Rolling Stones
start their first tour as the opening act for Bo Didley and
the Everly Brothers; 1977 the Soviet space station
Salyut 6 was launched into orbit; 1982 cyanide laced
Tylenol killed seven people in Chicago (never solved and
"copycats" still sporadically occur, mostly in the Chicago
area – incidence has been reduced by tamper-proof
packaging); 1987 Henry Ford II died in Detroit;
1990
Washington National Cathedral construction was
completed (after 83 years of work);

Born today were: in 1758 Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson;
1901 Italian nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi; 1907
singer/actor Gene Autry; 1908 actress Greer Garson;
1916 actor Trevor Howard; 1929 actor/comedian
Bob Newhart; 1931 actress Anita Ekberg; 1935
singer Jerry Lee Lewis; 1939 actor Larry Linville
(MASH – Frank Burns); 1942 violinist Jean-Luc Ponty;
1942 actress Madeline Kahn; 1942 US astronaut
William (Bill) Nelson; 1943 Polish Solidaritet leader
Lech Walesa; 1948 sportscaster Bryant Gumbel;

 




Thanks for reading Goodies to Go!


 



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