Web Development
These pages give you an overview and provide some tips on the resources I used for the re-design of latz.org and the affiliated sites.
General Introduction
- Self HTML (in German) provides excellent coverage of all HTML related subjects, such as CGI scripts, server-sided includes (SSI), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and Javascript.
- UseIT by Jakob Nielsen explains how to design usable information technology, which also includes web pages
- Web Pages That Suck is also dedicated to optimize your page layout, but achieves this by showing you several Don'ts. Caveat: Some information on the pages seeems outdated, e.g. the author still advises not to use CSS.
- Yucca's free information site "The purpose of this site is to disseminate information and views on information technology and its utilization for communication, especially on the Internet." (Quote from the front page)
Avoiding Junk Mail
If you are proud master of a web site, you have most likely run into the problem of "mailto-link harvesting", a situation where spammers (originators of unsolicited e-mail) scan your web page for valid e-mail addresses that you offer for the visitor's convenience (such as the feedback link at the bottom of this page).
In order to avoid this situation, several options have been suggested: substitute e-mail links by feedback forms, use Javascript methods to dynamically generate the page upon loading (a technique that will work since the harvester bots are uncapable of executing Javascript), etc. All of those techniques have in common that they cause more or less hassle to the user (need to fill out a form, browser with Javascript enabled, etc).
One solution that I find very interesting is to substitute your plaintext mailto-links by their ASCII entries. Thus, a link that used to look like
mailto:john@doe.com
will now look like this to the bot:
mailto:john@doe.com
(count them, there are 19 letters in the original link and also 19 entities in the resulting core - for example, the @ gets translated to @). Every browser will translate that code into human-readable format, and the link still looks and behaves as a normal link to human users - only spam harvesters do not see a real e-mail address! In order to try it out for yourself, please have a look at the Email Address Encoder, the page where I first learnt about this concept. Good luck!
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
Forms
CGI (Common Gateway Interface)
- PPWizard, a HTML Preprocessor
- Matt's script archive provides some basic Perl scripts and can be a good starting point to forge your own solution. The problem with the scripts on this site is that most of them contain (small) errors and do hardly any error checking. If you have problems with them, try to look up the solution on Google's Deja archive, by searching for the line (or the script name) that gives you trouble. The threads you will find give you an idea how (in)famous Matt and his scripts are in certain newsgroups.
- Another CGI archive, with a large amount of Perl scripts.
- A thread on c.l.perl.misc about simulating SSI with Perl. This is usefull if you use SSI to include headers, menus etc in your page. In a nutshell: if the Perl script writes an HTML page as a response to stdout (as most of them do), and you want to view the SSI headers, footers etc, you simply open the file corresponding to the content you want to include, and print it to stdout.
Search Engines
- KISS local search scriptK.I.S.S. == Keep It Simple Stupid is a small perl script that uses a text file to identify the contents is is allowed to search on your search. Note that no indexer is needed, the search is done instantly.
- kscripts with K Search is another Perl script that can be used to search the contents of your site, although KSearch needs an indexer to run regularly. This fact prevented me from using it, since I do not have a posibility to run a cron job on my machine.
- Tips to optimize your ranking in search engines like Altavista, Google or Yahoo.
ASP (Active Server Pages)
Log File Analyzer
Graphic-related links and programs
- UnFREEz (Win32) is a free and very small animated GIF creator.
- IrfanView graphic viewer (Win32) with built-in support for many frequent actions (resize, rotate, resample), extracting frames from animated GIFs (no creation however!), and batch processing.
- Tools for image maps, an extensive list of utilities that make the webdesigner's life much easier when it comes to image maps.
- Local download of Map This! 1.31, an excellent, free image map editor (Win32) for NCSA, CERN and client side (HTML 3.2) image maps.
- Small introduction to image maps, covering both client and server side image maps.
- Iconbazaar.com is an online collection of images that can be used on your site, but be careful to read the licensing terms.
XML, XSLT
Achim J. Latz,
achim@latz.cc
, 01.12.2008