Stamp Column Archives

The Glassine Surfer Column Archive

This column originally appeared in the American Philatelic Society's monthly magazine, "The American Philatelist." Since then some of the information may be out-of-date depending on how far back you're reading.

June 2003

One program I like is "1st Page 2000," a piece of freeware from Evrsoft, because it's easy to use, heavy on options but light on memory, and it doesn't add any of its own program code to the finished html page.

1st Page has four general settings, geared to the user's experience and the technical complexity of the site from easy to hardcore. The features include keyboard shortcuts and toolbars, a "saved html" library, stacks of Javascripts, as well as support for SSI, Perl, Cold Fusion, et al. Naturally, there are tag lists, menus and a HEX color picker, plus a few Wizards to get you started with tables and the like.

The program will also teach you how html actually works. By splitting the screen, you can see what the results of your individual code changes on your pages in production.

1st Page 2000
http://evrsoft.com/1stpage/

The above is just the basics of setup, connecting the pieces, and going live. That might take a few weeks to ramp up depending on your familiarity with the Web. It's sort of like a military boot camp, and the real work comes down the road.

Maintaining a Website for the next few years will either be easy as cake or drain you. New sites happen all the time, but old up-to-date sites are rarer. The trouble is that maintenance depends on decisions made at conception, when the newbie designer didn’t have a  clue about what the future would bring. (If an army recruit spends too much time quilting in boot camp, his career could be affected.)

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Act local, change global.

People surf sites as if they were cable TV channels and expect up-to-date material and changes each month. It's routine, so you'd best better design for routine changes, where you have to remember that there are two types of changes, global changes and simple ones.

Simple changes are those tweaks needed on just one page and, though tedious, will be easy to take care of. Global changes, on the other hand, may require prayer.

Here's a typical scenario. You put your e-mail address on each of your site's 40 pages. In three months, you change your e-mail because you notice you're getting way too much spam. That's 40 changes, one per page. This can be done by opening all the pages in a text editor and doing a search and replace operation on all of them and then ftp'ing the 40 to the server, or you could have designed the pages to take "server side includes" and make one change.

A SSI is a file of regular html which your host's server will write into every page of your site you request it to include. These are very helpful tools. Every site's webpages usually has the same links on the side for site navigation and the same text on the bottom and top, and in most cases they are some sort of SSI.

When the webmaster adds or changes a page on the site, he only needs to make one change to the SSI that will appear on probably hundreds of pages, and when the work is easy, more work can be done. It's implemented with a simple command inserted on the page.

After you change your e-mail addy, you then learn how to stop e-mail harvesting by spammers, and you need to make more changes. This scenario continues until your site dies, as we live and learn on the Web.

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CSS 4U.

The same concept of global change can now applied to your site's overall design. SSI's help with global changes of content, while CSS controls the global look and feel of your sites design. CSS is "cascading style sheet" and the webmaster's best friend at 2am.

A CSS is a text file of html tags defining just about everything about how a website looks, and like SSI, one change here is global. For instance, if you want to change the background color of your webpages from black to white, one CSS change serves all. If a few folks say the your page's text is too small, a five-minute editing job will fix one or 1,000 pages.

Like SSI, a page invokes CSS with a simple command on the webpage, and then the user's browser passes the page through the CSS for formatting. The little trick about CSS is the "cascading" part. Initial commands have a cascading effect on succeeding commands in the CSS file.

If your first font command says the color is "red," all other font commands will insert "red" into the browser's pages, unless and until you put in another font color command.