Free Icons

I am not a graphics person. Not even by a long shot. I can’t even get stick figures right. So, while working on a web site, I needed some icons to use on the page (RSS feed, print, etc.). The best icon sites I found are:

SearchIcon.Net
InterfaceLIFT
Free Icons Web
Icon Archive

All of them have huge collections of icons that are free to download. I had to use GIMP to scale some of the images because there weren’t any available in 16×16 or 24×24 size.

What sites do you use for finding free images?

20.Apr.08 Internet Comments (0)

Love: CMSMS, No love: ASP .NET

Man, I can’t believe how little I’ve posted in the last two months. There is a lot going on, new things are being learned, so I have plenty to write. I should have posted it for the simple reason of having a backup of the information.

Love
CMS Made Simple is awesome. I’m trying to decide if I want to move my site over to it or staying with WordPress. It depends on if I want to change the way I present information.

I’m almost finished with the new site, based on CMSMS, for a local private school and they are loving it. I like how easy it is to make a template and set options for each page. I also like how easy it is to add modules and configure custom tags. The school admins like how easy it is to create content (pages, news, etc.).

No love
ASP .NET is a pain in the arse (King’s English). My brother set up a site using DotNetNuke (his host set it up for free) and he wanted to use Google Checkout. He’s only selling one item so he can use a Buy Now button. The Buy Now button code uses an HTML form. ASP .NET, and therefore DNN, wraps the entire page in a form. See anything wrong? If you said, “You can’t put a form inside a form!”, you nailed it.

Hours of Google searching turned up nothing useful. There is a hack for putting a PayPal button in DNN that involves removing the form tags and using javascript but it doesn’t work with Google Checkout. There are a couple of DNN modules available to integrate a Google Checkout button but all of them cost $20 or more.

I’m very ashamed of the way I found to make it work. I used an iframe. Yes, I know. There are those that think iframes are horrid little pieces of HTML code that should never have come into existence but that’s all I could do. I put the Google Checkout form inside an html page (e.g. googlecheckout.html) and used that page as the source for the iframe.

Even though it works perfectly, I feel so ashamed. Maybe I’ll find a better way to do it soon. Suggestions for making it work would be appreciated.

One can pay back the loan of gold, but one dies forever in debt to those who are kind. - Malayan Proverb

19.Apr.08 Web Apps Comments (0)

Time to stop procrastinating

I have been wanting to learn how to develop web pages for a long time. Inevitably, something always happened so I would put off starting the learning process for another day. I decided a couple of weeks ago that I had put it off long enough. Part of what pushed me to go ahead and start learning was helping my friend design his site. I also wanted to try creating site templates.

My learning environment is pretty simple: CMS Made Simple (CMSMS) and Notepad++. I chose to work with CMSMS because it is, well, simple. It’s a lot easier than Joomla! as far as setting it up, management and the template structure. Notepad++ was chosen over a WYSIWYG editor because I like to learn how to edit things manually.

I will admit that I didn’t start completely from scratch. I am using the The Perfect 3 Column Liquid Layout and the The Perfect ‘Left Menu’ 2 Column Liquid Layout from Matthew Taylor as a base for my template development.

Everything is going pretty well with the process. I’m wearing Google out with all of the CSS searches. The W3Schools CSS Tutorial has come in really handy. I’m just happy that, so far, the page output has validated as XHMTL 1.0 Strict and the style sheets have validated as CSS 2.1 even after all my changes.

Who knows. Maybe I’ll be able to hang a “Web Developer” tag from my belt next to the “SQL DBA” buckle. If I end up creating a decent template, I’ll post some screen shots for your heckling pleasure.

You may delay, but time will not. - Benjamin Franklin

27.Mar.08 Internet, Web Apps Comment (1)

The rise and fall of online civilizations

Last year, I signed up for a subscription to Ping! Zine. It’s a magazine geared toward web hosting providers. I don’t do web hosting but I signed up because 1) the first issue had interesting articles and 2) it was free. The latest issue arrived a couple of days ago and one of the articles really got my attention.

The article title is The Civics & Sociology of Community Driven Content Websites (page 12). You can download the issue here (PDF). The main point of the article was comparing the governing style of Slashdot (representative democracy) and Digg (direct democracy).

If you want to know more, you have to read the article. What I took away from the article was a new way of looking at message boards. There are many where the admins and moderators rule with an iron fist. Say anything “out of line” and it’s an automatic ban. There are also many boards where it seems there is no moderation at all. Board members are free to say what they want without any rules of use at all (or they are simply ignored).

Is one right and the other wrong? What about the middle where everything appears to run smooth? Think of a message board as a country and you see the great thing about the Internet. Talk about open borders. Citizens (members) are free to move from one country (board) to another and it doesn’t matter.

The members will ultimately decide the fate of a site. I’ve seen members get tired of the moderators, or other members, of a board (Site 1) and so they start their own board (Site 2). Pretty soon, other members of Site 1 decide they like Site 2 better so they migrate there. Site 1 slows down and eventually just fades away. Of course, I’ve also seen a Site 2 start up but it’s gone not long afterward due to lack of interest.

Build your country and run it the way you want to run it. The members, whether many or just a few, will either drive it to success or over a cliff. Enjoy the ride while it last, Ceasar.

Let the people think they govern, and they will be governed. - William Penn

30.Oct.07 Internet Comments (5)

Is that a phish?

Phishing schemes are a form of social engineering that attempts to trick people into revealing confidential information (username/passwords, credit card numbers, etc.) by using fake emails and websites. These schemes have been getting a lot more sophisticated over the last couple of years. The criminals, phishers, are doing a better job of making the emails or websites look more like their legitimate counterpart. People are usually fooled by phishing because they don’t take the time to really look at the site/email.

McAfee has set up a quiz on their SiteAdvisor site to see if you can spot a phishing webpage or email. The quiz is only 10 questions long. Eight of the questions are visual and you must choose which screenshot is the legitimate site. Clicking on the images will give you a larger image. The last two questions are “choose one answer” type questions.

McAfee SiteAdvisor - Phishing Quiz

Some good tips on how not to be fooled by a phishing scheme can be found here. The latest release of the a few browsers have a mechanism built in to alert users if the site is suspicious.

Mozilla Firefox 2 Phishing Protection
Opera Fraud Protection
Microsoft IE7 Phishing Filter

It was announced at the OS X Leopard preview in August 2006 that the Apple Safari web browser would have anti-phishing built in when Leopard shipped. As of now, with the release of Safari 3 Public Beta, it is not available but neither is Leopard.

There are also a few free anti-phishing browser add-ons available. For Firefox, PhishTank SiteChecker and McAfee SiteAdvisor reside in the status bar, not another toolbar, and work very well. PhishTank is a community driven site that collects reports about phishing sites. The service operated by OpenDNS and can be queried by other sources through their free API. It has been used as a verification source for the Opera browser (Fraud Protection) since version 9.1.

Common sense, however it tries, cannot avoid being surprised from time to time. - Bertrand Russell

26.Jul.07 Internet, Security Comment (1)