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The Web Developing Thread

 Post subject: The Web Developing Thread
PostPosted: Fri Aug 04, 2006 11:05 pm 
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Rad-X
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This discussion was taken from 'Personal Ambition' to its own thread.

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Re: theuninvitedmovie.com

Sorry Glurrk, I just hate the website. Lose the frames, put in a table structure and apply CSS. Nothing personal, just MS FrontPage makes me spit vitriol.

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Last edited by sic. on Sat Aug 05, 2006 12:59 pm, edited 3 times in total.

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PostPosted: Sat Aug 05, 2006 10:48 am 
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Rad-X
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sic. wrote:
Sorry man, I just hate the website. Lose the frames, put in a table structure and apply CSS. Nothing personal, just MS FrontPage makes me spit vitriol.


No offense taken, Sic. :) (I actually have no control over the website, and the guy who's running it is learning his way around. We've had other complaints about the site, so it's fairly obvious that it needs a LOT of work!)

Just so I can pass the word along, what's CSS?


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PostPosted: Sat Aug 05, 2006 12:59 pm 
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Rad-X
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Tool of the trade

EditPlus

Screw your FrontPage and learn the code, it's the only way you'll be able to make a decent looking site, regardless if it's your own source code or not.

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Upload robots.txt

You seem to be lacking. It does nothing more than provide search bots (like GoogleBot) simple rules of conduct. If you have nothing to hide from the bots, just upload robots.txt to the root folder containing the following information:

User-agent: *
Disallow:


Means anything goes. Also removes unnecessary 404 (page not found) hits from the site statistics.

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Use Doctype

The <!DOCTYPE> declaration is the very first thing in your document, before the <html> tag. This tag tells the browser which HTML or XHTML specification the document uses.

I use the transitional model, which is applied by adding the following tag:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

Others include strict and frameset. Simply put, strict is the Puritan model, while frameset is, obviously, for use with pages including frames. To use the others, simply replace loose.dtd in the tag with strict.dtd or frameset.dtd.

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Tables (HTML)

Tables are great in formatting the page to look a bit more slick. I personally use one big table (800 pixel width) in the bottom, and build all the content inside it. For this, I also create inner tables, which is often a necessity. Tables use columns and rows, and are relatively easy to handle.

Hint: The minute you start doing tables, use border="1" value in the tag. That way you'll actually see your table and see what changes you're making.

W3C manual on tables

Online HTML validator, need I say more? USE!


Feel free to use my site to look under the hood so to speak, not necessarily because its particularly brilliant, but because that's were my examples came from. Not the only way, just the way I did it. Also, I'm in the position to give away the source for fair use in this occasion.

To get the source: Use HTTrack, a free website copier, which will download a complete offline version of a given site into your hard drive. That way you'll be able to tweak and twiddle with a lot of things, including CSS. (btw, IMHO PHP functions require a server in order to work, though I don't use them here)

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CSS

Style sheets describe how documents are presented on screens, in print, or perhaps how they are pronounced. W3C has actively promoted the use of style sheets on the Web since the Consortium was founded in 1994. The Style Activity has produced several W3C Recommendations (CSS1, CSS2, XPath, XSLT). CSS especially is widely implemented in browsers. By attaching style sheets to structured documents on the Web (e.g. HTML), authors and readers can influence the presentation of documents without sacrificing device-independence or adding new HTML tags.

The best way to learn is through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which maintains the css specifications.

Online manual
Online CSS validator, to see if your specifications have any glitches - priceless for bug-fixing


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That oughta get your homie started. Phoebus and anyone else is free to contribute, I'm not trying to preach gospel here.

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Last edited by sic. on Sat Aug 05, 2006 1:43 pm, edited 5 times in total.

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PostPosted: Sat Aug 05, 2006 1:20 pm 
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Rad-X
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I put this thing into its own message, in case you might get your feet wet in the PHP pool right away. Just a precaution. :wink:

Oh, and you should consult Phoebus more on this, he's really the PHP geek in this neighborhood, while I'm merely the HTML grinder.

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PHP

I not sure whether your server has PHP installed. In case you do, there be a lot of little things that can ease up your life updating. The easiest thing is probably splicing an individual page into three parts, first being the opening of the page's structure code, the middle part being the changeable content, and last part the closing.

Like this for example:

Part I: All the opening tags, CSS link, etc, menus....
Part II: The content
Part III: Closing of the tags which have remained open during Part II

You do it with four files. Example: start.php (Part I), cast.txt (Part II), end.php (Part III) and cast.php. What's this? Four files? Indeed, the txt file includes the texts, pictures, etc. in standard HTML language. But it's not made to work on its own, as an independent document. Neither are the php-files of Part I and Part III. (The sole reason for them being .php files is that we include <?php after the <BODY> tag in start.php and ?> before the </BODY> tag in the end.php, so that they understand what they're supposed to do) In cast.php, we compile them. Like this:

<?php
include ("start.php");
include ("cast.php");
include ("end.php");
?>

Parts I and III are in this case interchangeable, we have the structure we want, and only modify the content. Hence, making a crew page with this method would need two files, crew.txt and crew.php.

A good tutorial

You probably shouldn't bother too much with PHP before you've got an idea of how HTML works, will probably save you a lot of nerves. Still, it's a handy tool.

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PostPosted: Thu Aug 10, 2006 12:10 pm 
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Rad-X
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Wow... all that stuff's WAY over my head! :shock:

(But, I've passed the message along and I've been informed that the website will be changed to something less minimalistic. (speaking charitably, of course!) :wink:


Thanks for the feedback! :)


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