2006 Nov 11 - Sat
CSS Resources
Here are some resources for using CSS in web sites. The big thing is that one should be
able eliminate the need for <table> tags. I have more research and tinkering to do
before I can convert this site over to a predominately <div> flavour.
[/Personal/SoftwareDevelopment/HTML/css]
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Free Development Tools
thefreecountry.com has a bunch
of free development tools. It is quite extensive, covering programming, webmaster, and
security resources.
[/Personal/Technology]
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favicon.ico
thesitewizard.com has a description of what to do with
the favicon.ico and where to put it. It seems there is some sort of link problem with the link ref as it is not showing in my browser.
More research is needed.
Here is a good Pixel Editor.
[/Personal/SoftwareDevelopment/HTML]
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Apache Rewrite
After taking a look at Google's
Webmaster Tools over a few days, I have come to the conclusion that Google doesn't crawl
cgi-bin type things. So David
Wheeler's rewrite page that I had come across a while back finally
makes sense. The page url's need to be modifed to turn things into a seemingly standard
directory structure.
Here is my version of a section of the Apache configuration file to handle the rewrites
found anywhere within my /blog subdirectory:
RewriteLogLevel 0
RewriteLog /var/log/httpd/rewrite.log
<Directory "/var/www/html/blog">
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
Options +ExecCGI
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !-d
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/$1 [L,QSA]
</Directory>
The first two lines helped figure out why the rewrites weren't working. By setting
RewritelogLevel to a non-zero value, of which I used a value of 4, log statements are
written to the directory indicated by RewriteLog. It turned out that my rewrite rule
becomes '^(.*)$' rather than Wheeler's '^/(.*)$'.
This only required one configuration change in the blosxom.cgi file:
$url = "http://www.oneunified.net/blog/";
[/OpenSource]
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Turing Test for Comment Submissions
People have designed various ways to prevent bots from successfully submitting web forms.
Perhaps the most common method is by using CAPTCHAs: common ones being those funny images
with characters
hidden in a disconcerting background. CAPTCHA is an acronym for 'Completely Automated
Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart'.
There appear to be a number of ways to defeat CAPTCHAs. But why bother implementing such
a scheme?
For the casual bot scanning the web, they may be tuned for bypassing CAPTCHAs. But what
if a site was to do something completely different? For example, David Wheeler's Comments & TrackBacks uses a simple arithmetic expression
to break an auto submission bot. So if every site out there did a variation on the theme,
auto-submissions could be prevented. On the other hand, if everyone did a little
arithmetic turing test, then we've come full circle with the bot being tuned to look for
such a simple test.
One side comment, Wheeler made his site, through a simple javascript, some how
better viewable with Firefox but less so with IE.
[/OpenSource/blosxom]
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Career Planning
In talking to a friend today, they were considering a career change. I remember way back
when, I was doing career changing, ie, finding myself. I think there were two books that
helped me the most. Both are by Richard Nelson Bolles: 'What Color is Your Parachute' and
'Three Boxes of Life'. The first one is re-written yearly. The second is a bit harder to
come by. Both helped me figure out where I was, where I wanted to go, and helped plan how
to get there. I recommend them both.
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