Archive for the 'New web site' category

N|vu is a web development application with a WYSIWYG interface that is aimed to be user friendly, easy and powerful. It is supposed to be a serious competition for major commercial tools like DreamWeaver (N|vu is a free download making it a good contender).

Unfortunately, since it comes from the Open Source world, N|vu tends to receive a lot of reviews, but not often from the professional web designers. This is why I appreciated a lot to find a specific review that is aimed at comparing N|vu with DreamWeaver and includes very real-life issues of every-day life of a web programmer/designer. It is not only scratching the surface (looking at the menus), but rather trying to extract the best of it (digging into CSS code generation, consistency of the interface, etc.)

If you consider using N|vu for your professional (or serious) HTML/CSS editing and web site design, I advise you to take 10 minutes to read this review. Even if it dates back to 2004, it contains very neat information.

finally, it’s happened! Microsoft announced officially the end of FrontPage (Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 and Microsoft Expression Web Designer will come in Spring to replace it).

As a matter of fact, FrontPage did not really succeed in penetrating the pro market for web designers. Its utterly simplistic approach to web design was obviously far behind some serious competitors (or leaders) like DreamWeaver. But, non-specialists now stop using it -essentially- because they no longer need it. Today, ready-to-install blogs (like WordPress, or Joomla or Mamba or SPIP) have already marginalized web site design, but solutions including both the blog software and the web hosting (like WordPress.com) allow to forget completely about both the tool and the installation. You can immediately start using it… without even looking at FrontPage.

So, FrontPage saw its public disappear. FrontPage lost its justification. We won’t cry.

It may be a little oddity, but I feel it’s an interesting idea for all those who want to browse the web anonymously. Usually, there is only one solution: using an anonymizer proxy, but APAZ is bringing you a nice twist to it by allowing you to build your own anonymizer proxy (a server allowing to hide the actual origin of a web communication).

APAZ is a small PHP software that can be installed nearly anywhere you can host a small PHP-based web application. It provide on-demand anonymizer proxy. It’s no longer necessary to dig into long lists of more or less available proxy servers.

Congratulations to Emmanuel Saracco for this simple and good idea. Download from http://labs.libre-entreprise.org/scm/?group_id=107.

This is the tough question that BrowserShots.org web site anwsers for you. They provide a simple way to test your web site in a large variety of configurations and browsers. This is a very nice idea founded on the voluntary help of computers installed all over the world (widely distributed architecture).

This way, you will know how Roumazeilles.net looks on a number of exotic (or not) browsers:

Recommended to any web designer.

Even if I am usually in favor of designing web sites using tables, I wanted to provide a link to an interesting article taking exactly the opposite position: Why tables for layout is stupid.

For those wondering, my preference goes to HTML tables because they are easier to implement the 3-column designs that I prefer (those are really difficult to grasp in pure CSS).

The blogs of Le Monde (French major newspaper) just moved to a new level. From their previous TypePad-supported architecture, they are now using WordPress.

Good confirmation of the world-class quality of WordPress as a blogging software.

Source: Toni’s Garage.

For some time now, I use a small plug-in that I feel is quite nice to help me manage specifically the advertisment banners from Google AdSense on my web site. You may have already noticed one or two of those ads that appear right in the body of a posted article. Usually, it is quite difficult to do this when you publish using WordPress, but AdSense-Deluxe is flexible enough to allow this.

I hope that the ad banners so produced are not too unpleasant. On my side, I feel that they play a positive role in the financing of this little publishing activity of mine (your clicks on the ads bring me a tiny revenue; But small sums can pile up).

Anyway, feel free to tell me if you are uneasy with too much advertisment here.

It is said to be a good idea for any web site to use geolocalisation services. So, I added the little map you can find at the bottom right of the pages of this site (since today). It shows a map of Paris around our location.

What do you feel about this? A good idea? A bad idea? It’s your call.

If you are like me, organizing your CSS code is as difficult as understanding it. The Blog Herald has one neat post with tips about organizing and writing your CSS. I don’t know if it is perfect, but it already looks quite good.

If you want to publish a web site, you may be interested by the following series of articles I wrote about how to quickly create a full-fledged web site using WordPress.

1. Get a domain name
2. Rent web publishing space
3. Connect web space and domain name
4. Configure the Apache server
5. Install WordPress
6. Call the search engines

Now, you can fill the new web site of yours. Wasn’t it easy?

You certainly heard that the magic key to Internet audience for your web site is the visibility in Search Engines. Unfortunately, this is only a small part of the landscape. Out of the small circles of Internet marketing honchos, there are many false stories and true rumours.

If you want to keep your mind clear, here are a few simple messages to store.

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Now, if you want to fulfill the next step of this “creating a new web site” tutorial, you have to decide which software to use to write your web site. The choice is quite wide, but I will describe two main options:

• Doing it all by yourself
• Using WordPress

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Oops! This one is certainly more thoroughly complex than the rest of the steps of this “creating a new web site” tutorial. More positively, usually, you do not need to take this step.

In my personal case, for the creation of the Lexyk.com dictionary web site, I needed to add a small specific helper. I wanted all the sub-domains of Lexyk.com to point to the same location. In 99% of the web site, the only sub-domain used is www. The only address that the visitor knows about is http://www.lexyk.com. Nearly all the web site servers are configured to use www as the default sub-domain and nobody will notice anything peculiar.

But sometimes, you need to handle more sub-domains. The only easy way is to request access to a special information of the web server. On Apache servers, this is what is called mod_rewrite. As I needed to be able to route all sub-domains to the same location, I requested the following mod_rewrite from my hosting provider.

Essentially, after renting some space from your web hosting company, only this company and you know where your web site is hosted. Nobody else has this key information. Even more important, the company your hired to provide this information to the rest of the Internet (the registrar you hired to provide Domain Name Service – see Step 1) does not know about your hosting decision. You have to inform them.

In most cases, the registrar has some administrative interface to help them in this. In the case of the registrar I selected for my own lexyk.com domain, Gandi.net has such an easy administrative interface. They need to know where to find the right DNS information. This is the data that was provided to us at the end of Step 2.

So, I informed Gandi.net of the primary and secondary source of DNS information (ns3074.ovh.net and ns.ovh.net for OVH.com, the hosting company I’ve choosen for the web site of this tutorial: Lexyk.com). After providing this information, it’s only a matter of time and patience. As you may imagine, there are millions of computers to inform. This is done by the DNS protocol which will help distribute the information around the world. Generally, this take 24 to 48 hours. It may be faster in some cases, but your mileage may vary. You are a few hours from having your web site visible throughout the global Internet.

After reserving a domain name, your web site does not really move yet. You need to have some space where to put your data (your text, your images, etc.). Usually this is a space rented to a hosting company.

Note: It is true that you could buy this space (instead of renting it); You would just have to get a computer or some Internet appliance, but this solution often is not really applicable to a site that do not expect more than a few thousands visitors per day (most personal web sites will not get more than a few visitors per day).

Then, you will be crushed by the amazing choice option available (probably, if you just look at the ads on this page, you’ll find more than 4 different offers for hosting your web site). Choice is only more difficult, but I will just give a small bit of advice that you wan even use as a reference comparison. For me, it will be OVH.com and I point at a low-cost but very good offer named 20gp.

When I say low cost, I may mean cheap (but feature-full): 1.20€ per year (+1.20€ one-off installation costs). This will lead us to a full expense on the first year of less than 20€ (counting the domain name reservation). Indeed, it is affordable to anybody also able to pay for an Internet connection.

We will then be able to create the link between the domain name (still Lexyk.com in our example) and the hosting company we just hired. But before leaving the premises of the hosting company we must get an information that is usually provided in the email you just received after paying the hosted web space: The name and/or address of the DNS server located inside the hosting company. Write it down and keep it safe for now.

Blog-Republic.com/ has an interesting article by Darren about what should be considered as Realistic milestones of professional blogging success. It’s setting (or asserting) what you, the serious blogger, should expect in order to reach more and more serious levels of blogging.

I agree completely with the figures (for example, 1000-5000$ of annual earnings as a reachable spot). However, I am not so sure about what he describes as the way to reach these spots.

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If you want to create a new web site, the first step is to get a domain name. For the example I’ll use in the coming tutorial, Lexyk.com is the name of the domain I’ll use for a dictionary web site I am currently creating. Without it, no visitor will ever find your web site because typing http://192.168.1.1/ is usually not the kind of data visitors really want to type in the address bar of FireFox, Opera or Internet Explorer.

You have to pay for this name because there is a company (or actually a group of services companies) providing the infrastructure behind the translation between www.lexyk.com and the ugly dotted numeric address. This translation is known as a DNS (Domain Name Service).

In my case, I used Gandi, a French registrar (that’s the ugly name of such companies that provide registration services for domain names!) that I appreciate because they are reasonably priced (14€ VAT-included, per year) and support a large variety of basic and not so basic services. Nevertheless, I did need the bare minimum: a name, and DNS basic service.

Once you have paid for this name and the support for the transparent translation to a numeric address, you are ready to go to the next step (renting publishing space).