·:[ Web - Technology Blog ]:·
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The snow is over and the temps have been rising the past few days. A new storm is forecast for next week with mainly light rain forecast.

She’s snowing! It’s been snowing since yesterday. We shall end up with greater than a foot. Woohoo!

Just designed a website for a cabin here: Prescott cabin rental

Below you will find 3 of my articles. I hope you find them helpful.

Erich Bihlman

I taught myself HTML back in the mid-nineties and was proud of the fact that I was able to accomplish the design of fairly complex web pages with nothing more than a starter HTML book, an HTML reference book, and the knowledge I had stored in my head. But back in those days, we web designers had what looking back was a fairly limited amount of tools with which to work, and the quality (or lack thereof) of sites on the web was lackluster at best.

Fast-forward to today: The hand-coder has more powerful and intuitive software packages available that will still allow us “to get our hands dirty”, which brings us to the purpose of this article. With the standardization of the much anticipated Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in the late-nineties, the web design community has become familiar with a much more powerful and precise method of web page layout.

“But how is an old-time web coder supposed to learn CSS the easy way?!” Well, I say you should learn it the way I, and countless others, have:

1. Download the Firefox browser
2. Install the Html Validator (based on Tidy) 0.5.9 extension
3. Open one of your “old” HTML files
4. View the source, click the “Cleanup the page” button
5. Check the “replace FONT…..tags by CSS” box, then Refresh

Now you have a very neat and tidy piece of code, with all the CSS dirty work done for you! At this point you can copy & paste the resulting code and use it in your project and start figuring out what it’s doing. I was amazed at how easily I was able to pick it up and start making changes on my own. When I wanted more information on a certain style it was a just a Google search away to many excellent CSS resources on the web. I find it much easier to learn CSS if I get to apply the modifications to the existing code that I’ve been working on, and I think you will too.

I hope you find this article helpful and if you follow these steps you should be able to add CSS to your web site design toolbox in no time!

There are several basic concepts to keep in mind when deciding to stay spyware free for good. This article will outline a spyware checklist for you to keep in mind when getting tough on spyware and taking back control of your computer using two popular free applications, Ad-Aware,and Spybot - S&D. Using these two programs in conjunction will eliminate a vast majority of spyware problems from your computer. For the purposes of this article, “spyware” refers also to adware, malware, and other not-so-nice “features” of today’s computing reality.

These are some tell-tale warning signs that your computer may be suffering from spyware-

* You receive many pop-ups
* Your computer is running slowly
* You may have invasive toolbars hijacking your browser
* Your home page may have been hijacked

Your first step to escaping spyware’s wrath is to download and run Ad-Aware and Spybot - S&D, the two leading spyware fighting tools out there, boasting millions of downloads each. Please remember it’s always safest to backup your system before installing a new program or executing one. After downloading the two programs, be sure to run the update feature to be sure they are current when it comes to detecting the latest threats. Remove the detected spyware using these two programs, then move to step two.

The second step in staying spyware free involves you to be proactive. At this point your computer should be free from spyware. What you want to do now is keep it this way, to do that there are helpful tips to guide you. In Windows 98 you can use msconfig to view the startup programs on your computer. This is helpful because you can control what programs automatically load when you boot your computer. To access this invaluable tool, go to START >> RUN, type MSCONFIG. If you check the startup programs occasionally you may see a new spyware entry that will alert you it’s time to clean out the spyware again.

The third step involves your web browsing habits. It means you must never click on an activex screen that asks you if you want to allow an innocuous looking toolbar, or “surfing aid”be installed. By clicking “allow” you are effectively giving these perfidious spyware authors free reign over your system and personal information. If possible you should surf with the security settings on “maximum” for safest surfing.

In summary, it’s important to avoid spyware for your computer and personal identity health. To do so, use free tools available to you and be mindful of your computer settings and surf the Internet responsibly. Following these easy steps will ensure a safe and spyware free existence for you and your computer!

(An RSS primer can be found near the bottom of the article)

A commercial website in 2005 is really costing itself money if it does not utilize the myriad advantages of implementing RSS feeds. RSS provides near real-time delivery of information your website visitors are interested in, it provides constantly updated content that search engines crave, and it is quite simple to implement.

RSS is a great way to increase relevant content to your website that your visitors will find quite helpful. For instance, if you have a website which covers “search engine optimizing”, you can search for that term in major news outlets such as Yahoo, then apply that search to an RSS feed which will provide constantly updated keyword-rich news and information to your site! We all know that a site that is updated frequently looks more important to a search engine than one that is static. Most news providers allow you to use RSS feeds from their site for free-And why not, since it gives them more exposure and links. These days blogs are most often associated with RSS.

Because the feeds must be handled on the server-side, a piece of software must be utilized to display the feed that is usually in the form of an “.XML” file on your web page. There are a few out there that handle this task for you quite nicely, I recommend Carp. It’s free, it works on PHP servers, and it is easy to setup and use. Once it’s installed all you have to do to put it on your page is put the code where you’d like the headlines for that feed to appear. The Carp documentation does a great job detailing the procedure on their website.

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a technology that has seen its popularity skyrocket in recent months that allows news items, forum posts, etc. to be delivered to your desktop using a newsreader called an aggregator. The Firefox browser allows for RSS feeds to be “bookmarked”, and that bookmark folder shows the latest feeds from that site. You’ve probably seen the links to RSS feeds (identified as little rectangles with usually the letters “RSS” or “XML” appearing on them) appearing on more and more websites, but didn’t know what it was all about. You maybe even clicked on one and saw a page of computer “code”. The reason it shows the code instead of easy to read information is because most browsers are not aggregators. That link is useless in your browser (aside from the Firefox bookmark technique mentioned previously), but it’s pure gold in your aggregator! The aggregator I use is another Mozilla product, Firefox’s cousin, the Thunderbird e-mail client that does a nice job as an aggregator. I use it to keep up on the posts of my favorite search engine optimization (SEO) forum at Seochat.com.

In conclusion, RSS is a great new technology that benefits website visitors as well as webmasters. When visitors are kept happy with more fresh relevant content, and search engines are excited to crawl your site and give it more weight, it results in more sales for you!