Dale's Web Site at FlavorJ - Technical Notes

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Technical Notes

It's low-hanging fruit to pick errors on web pages, and mine are not the exception to that rule. At least I can try to point out some bugs I've found and don't know how to manage. If you have insight and feel magnanimous in helping out, please, forward your ideas to me.

In the meantime, here are the bugs I've found or have been told about so far....

Animated GIFs

I've got two pages that have animated GIFs: the home page (with a scrolling spectrum in the borders), and the page describing how to view parallel images. I used a very old piece of shareware to assemble the frames, and one person has claimed it locked up his browser (a Mozilla variety, I believe - definitely pre-Firefox). Sorry! I suppose I ought to start looking into some updated imaging software. *sigh*

Web Counter / Security Hole

I was becoming curious about how many people hit the home page, so I looked around for a hit counter. Ideally, I would still like to find some code to compile in the Open BSD environment. But I punted, and went for a web site. As far as I can tell, here's how it works:
I sign up for a free (very nice) account with a philanthropic service organization.
I place some code on my home page (the page I want counted) that calls an image (of numbers) from the site offering the counting service.
When a new visitor comes to my home page, the user's IP or MAC address (don't know which, or whether something else) is checked against a database at the counter site.
If you're a new visitor, a new image is generated by very kind folks at www.digits.com, and sent to your screen. If not, then the current image is sent to your screen.
As nice as that is, it's a small concern for me, and might be for you. It means that your machine is being polled. Fortunately, the folks at www.digits.com are nice. I think. But, I'd really rather have the counter local, and your machine not polled. Of course, that also means that the counter will record actual traffic, not unique hits. Eh - it's a different statistic, and I've already figured out I get about 8 new hits a day. Thank goodness this isn't my livlihood.
If it bugs you, but you still like my web site, may I suggest marking my Recent Updates page as your way into my site? That way, you'll be right on top of anything that's new, you'll have the standard navigation bar at the top of the screen, and if the folks at digits.com ever turn to the Dark Side before I find out (and remove the code), you'll avoid them altogether.

Server Not Found

Quite a few people in a newsgroup wrote to me that they couldn't get to my site via the spelled-out address. So I posted the IP version to the group, and that worked. I guess FlavorJ.com doesn't ubiquitously exist in DNS servers. So, if you tell a friend about this site and they can't get here either, have them try this:

http://216.22.46.97/~skysea

Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is a realtively new browser that is much more secure than Microsoft Explorer. Actually, than Microsoft almost anything. So I'd like my pages to be Firefox-compatible. True to Pogo's assertion that TANSTAAFL, I've found I had to make a few changes at FlavorJ/~skysea to accommodate the differences.
I had to clean up a lot of sloppy code. MS allowed for my shortcomings in HTML.
Firefox HATES the "caption" tag, rendering the text as occupying the first column of a table spanning all its rows. Ugly. So I removed it from everywhere (I think).
Firefox ignores the 'bgproperties="fixed"' tag. That's annoying in the "Frolicsome Flowers" splash page.
Firefox ignores the alternate text for images, so the info tips on the "Nine Things to Ponder when Buying a Digit Camera" page don't bubble up.
Anybody? A little help (on anything but the first point - there's not enough help in the world for that)?

Animated GIFs
I've got two pages that have animated GIFs: the home page (with a scrolling spectrum in the borders), and the page describing how to view parallel images. I used a very old piece of shareware to assemble the frames, and one person has claimed it locked up his browser (a Mozilla variety, I believe - definitely pre-Firefox). Sorry! I suppose I ought to start looking into some updated imaging software. sigh
Web Counter / Security Hole
I was becoming curious about how many people hit the home page, so I looked around for a hit counter. Ideally, I would still like to find some code to compile in the Open BSD environment. But I punted, and went for a web site. As far as I can tell, here's how it works: I sign up for a free (very nice) account with a philanthropic service organization. I place some code on my home page (the page I want counted) that calls an image (of numbers) from the site offering the counting service. When a new visitor comes to my home page, the user's IP or MAC address (don't know which, or whether something else) is checked against a database at the counter site. If you're a new visitor, a new image is generated by very kind folks at www.digits.com, and sent to your screen. If not, then the current image is sent to your screen. As nice as that is, it's a small concern for me, and might be for you. It means that your machine is being polled. Fortunately, the folks at www.digits.com are nice. I think. But, I'd really rather have the counter local, and your machine not polled. Of course, that also means that the counter will record actual traffic, not unique hits. Eh - it's a different statistic, and I've already figured out I get about 8 new hits a day. Thank goodness this isn't my livlihood. If it bugs you, but you still like my web site, may I suggest marking my Recent Updates page as your way into my site? That way, you'll be right on top of anything that's new, you'll have the standard navigation bar at the top of the screen, and if the folks at digits.com ever turn to the Dark Side before I find out (and remove the code), you'll avoid them altogether.
Server Not Found
Quite a few people in a newsgroup wrote to me that they couldn't get to my site via the spelled-out address. So I posted the IP version to the group, and that worked. I guess FlavorJ.com doesn't ubiquitously exist in DNS servers. So, if you tell a friend about this site and they can't get here either, have them try this: http://216.22.46.97/~skysea
Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a realtively new browser that is much more secure than Microsoft Explorer. Actually, than Microsoft almost anything. So I'd like my pages to be Firefox-compatible. True to Pogo's assertion that TANSTAAFL, I've found I had to make a few changes at FlavorJ/~skysea to accommodate the differences. I had to clean up a lot of sloppy code. MS allowed for my shortcomings in HTML. Firefox HATES the "caption" tag, rendering the text as occupying the first column of a table spanning all its rows. Ugly. So I removed it from everywhere (I think). Firefox ignores the 'bgproperties="fixed"' tag. That's annoying in the "Frolicsome Flowers" splash page. Firefox ignores the alternate text for images, so the info tips on the "Nine Things to Ponder when Buying a Digit Camera" page don't bubble up. Anybody? A little help (on anything but the first point - there's not enough help in the world for that)?