wdvltalk Roundup
February 2001 - Page 1

Please note that any suggestions and/or recommendations regarding Web hosting companies, software, etc. are solely derived from the members of the list and do not necessarily constitute a recommendation from the editors of wdvl or internet.com.

Links are provided in the comments and suggestions for additional help or information. So now, on with our first installment.

[version 1.02]

Does anyone know the free homepage space on the Internet? This was one of the first question asked last month. Several recommendations came from list members, some with comments.

• "Try www.tripod.com, www.geocities.com [or] www.angelfire.com. If you're looking for free space to host your domain name, well, let me know when you find somewhere...."
• "http://www.freeola.com will host your existing domain for nothing. Unlimited Web space, unlimited e-mail addresses, free e-mail redirection, free CGI (Perl and PHP but no MySQL) and SSIs..."
• "To host your domain for free ... go to http://www.hypermart.net."
• To which came the reply "And get adverts all over your site, unless you feel like paying them $10/month?"
• "Sure ... free always comes at a cost :-)"
• "I use http://www.crosswinds.net/, works great. I especially like the file management system. 25 MB of space for one banner."
• "http://www.lineone.net is good. I think you get 50 MB of space and no banner. I have not had any problem with trying to get into my Web site like I did with Crosswinds. At one time I think Crosswinds was asking for money to keep it[s] site up too. LineOne is in the UK, and you have to sign up to use their free ISP. I sign[ed] up for it and do not use it since I am in the US. It works better than any free US homepage that I have found.

Updating Web pages without benefit of HTML editor or knowledge of HTML: This question challenges the Web page developer to allow his client to add information to the Web page without his help.

• "If you're running Apache-Linux, use PHP or Perl. If on Windows, use ASP. You would need to create a form that accepts the text to be replaced and then make the HTML file. Changing images is slightly more complicated as you have to take into account their dimensions (width and height). Images can be uploaded using a little server code."
• "You can find some scripts at http://www.phpbuilder.com"

Do any of the search-engine spiders deal with <DIV>s? This question deals with the <DIV> code and whether it creates problems with search engines.

• "They should be OK with DIVs. As far as I know, the worry is that if you're using a table with your navigation in the left cell and your body text in the right, a non-table browser/search engine spider will get all the nav info before the page itself. This is a problem if the search engine prioritizes words depending on how high up the page they appear (which some do, apparently)."
• "Excellent point and it affects not just non-table spiders — even those that can handle tables will still hit the nav bar first, and you can see it in search results all the time, when the description of the site is Home | Products | Site Map | Contact etc.

  But I have good news: if you're using tables and want to get around this problem, just use a dummy cell above the nav bar on the left, for example:

     <table>
     <tr>
     <td><img src="shim.gif" alt=""></td>
     <td rowspan="2">
        <h2>Main Body Content</h2>
        <p>All these lovely relevant words</p></td>
     </tr>
     <tr>
     <td><h3>Nav Bar</h3>
         <a href="foo">link</a><br>
         <a href="bar">link</a><br></td>
     </tr>
     </table>
  

  Notice how the main content comes ahead of the nav bar in the source code, but the nav bar still goes down the left, it's just offset by one pixel (the transparent shim.gif)"

Can anyone recommend a good Javascript editor? While this type of question can sometimes start a war, it seemed to be fruitful in our discussion this time.

• "EditPlus 2 has been my favorite editor for some time now. It has syntax highlighting for Javascript — and lots of other languages — as part of the default installation."
• "Besides notepad?! I use Visual Studio 6.0 (specifically, the VC++ 6.0 editor) for HTML and Javascript."
• "Can EditPlus 2 replace strings in a bunch of files?"
• "Yep, select [Replace] from the [Search] menu and, under the [Replace in...] bit, select [All open files]. ... However, what makes the difference with UltraEdit32 is that you do not have to open any files in order to replace a string with another in a bunch of files. You just specify in which directory these files are."
• "This is holy war territory anyway, I'd always recommend everyone to try out a few and see which one sticks."

wdvltalk Roundup
February 2001 - Page 2