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CURRENT MOON |
You might also wish to visit our Sites We Like page for our less technically-inclined links, as well as our Websurfing Resources page too satiate any urge you may have for a more meaningful websurfing experience.
Web Sites & Newsletters
These websites have provided us with invaluable insights, tricks, and techniques for our website design and implementation skills.
The Web Design Group was founded to promote the creation of non-browser specific, non-resolution specific, creative and informative sites that are accessible to all users worldwide. To this end, the WDG offers material on a wide range of HTML related topics, both online and in downloadable forms. Their HTML
Validator will check your website for complete and proper HTML coding. Different browsers have different levels of forgiveness to HTML coding errors, but all new versions of all browsers are becoming more and more strict (a.k.a., "Standards Compliant"). If you do not find and fix those niggling errors in your pages, fewer and fewer people will be able to see them as you intended.
The W3C MarkUp Validation Service is a free service that checks documents like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards. You should have this line (or something similar) as the very first line of your web page in order to use this service:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
SitePoint.com is an Australian site that has an amazing range of articles, tips, expert advice, and more, to help you build, ecommerce-enable, and promote your website. They have broad overviews as well as nitty-gritty details on a variety of issues confronting webmasters. They offer two biweekly email newsletters that always seem to have something of interest t
o me. *HIGHLY RECOMMENDED*
HTMLgoodies.com has some good, basic primers and tutorials on HTML coding, image maps, ASP, etc. They also provide a mentoring community that answers submitted questions. They also provide a weekly email newletter with selected tips and tricks.
Software
Here are some shareware, freeware, or adware programs that we've used and found useful in creating and maintaining our website. Please note that Riversdell and/or LunaTek Consulting have no connection with the purveyors of these software products.
WS_FTP is a good ftp program for transferring files to your website. The shareware Pro version is for commercial use, and the LE version is available as freeware to educational users, government employees (U.S. local, state, federal and military) or to non-business home users.
HTMLib was one of the first comprhensive libraries of the HTML language syntax. I still use it to double-check those "align" vs "halign" vs "valign" tags when I am coding my sites.
Alchemy Mindworks is an innovative Canadian company that has many nifty software products, including GIF Construction Set, which, through no fault of its own, is responsible for more of those annoying dancing logos than any other program out there. The company's website also provides a handful of novels, plus several non-computer
articles, including the amusing and informative Deficits and Deceptions - Economics for the Credulously-Challenged.
Arachnophilia Web Site Workshop is a smart HTML text editor. I used it to write all of this site's HTML code. Besides, Arachnophilia is distributed as CareWare.
is a tool that lets you create dynamic web pages. PHP-enabled web pages are treated just like regular HTML pages and you can create and edit them the same way you normally create regular HTML pages, but using PHP variables and commands allows you to serve up "dynamic content", i.e., the html page your site serves up to a browser can be different based on any number of vari
ables (time of day, browser version, contents of a database or other file, etc. Be forewarned that your web host must provide PHP and that you may need at least a passing knowledge of C or C++ programming to make much use or sense of PHP.
