Personally I have to admit that I am quite the little Apple maniac when it comes to IT products. A topic that often raises many eyebrows, when getting into the classic Windows vs. Linux vs. Mac discussions… Normally being quite faithful and happy with Apple’s products, I also have to admit that they in my opinion have failed miserably at least once in recent history! Namely with their so called Mighty Mouse. The concept seemed pretty good. Take a regular mouse, make it look good, and ad a scroll-wheel that enables vertical and horizontal scroll. Unfortunately the wheel constantly clutters up with dirt, so it won’t work properly after a while. The buttons sometimes didn’t react properly etc. I ended up throwing away three of them for those reasons. So, good concept, but poor product. Shit happens. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to the development course. Now it’s time to learn about forms. You may have noticed that forms are used all over the web to get user input. This happens in various ways, by entering information into text fields, select something from a drop-down box, chose among multiple options in buttons etc. The one thing that is valid for all of them, is that it is in some way or another a method of getting information (input) from the user. In this part we will go through the basic form and input elements.

The form itself

The typical HTML form is enclosed by the <form> tag, which holds two important attributes, “method” and “action”. The “method” attribute specifies in what (technical) way the information is being submitted. In our example we use the “post” method. If you are interested, you can read more about different methods here. The “action” attribute indicates where the data is being sent to. This should be the program/script that handles the data. We will get further into scripts etc. in future articles, so for now, please accept that this is just the “destination” of the data. This article is meant to describe the HTML form elements. Not the data-handling itself.

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Today we will take a look at tables. Tables are in general comparable with tables in for example Word or Excel, and should be used the same way in HTML. That basically means that tables are a way to represent tabular data. They are not meant to be abused for other purposes, such as for example layouts. It has been “normal” for many years to use tables for page structure, which has distorted the use of tables. The correct way of doing layout is by use of div containers and CSS positioning (like described in a previous part of this course). Tables are for data.

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Every website looks a little different, but somehow they all still contain similar elements. Like a menu, a content area, a top banner (called header) and a bottom (called footer). These can be arranged and displayed in varuous ways, but mostly they are all there – somehow. In HTML there is the <div> tag which is suited to define and seperate such areas from each other. Combined with CSS styling, these <div> containers, as they are often called, can even be positioned to match the layout you want on your website. So let’s have a look at a sample <div> container structure (part3a.html of the project files):

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So, you want to have your own blog? There are many ways to accomplish that, and lots of tools out there to help you. I would like to present Wordpress to you, which is one of the most popular, and probably one of the best, blog applications available today. Wordpress can be installed on your Servage account with just a few clicks in the Autoinstaller, whereafter it is easy to further customize your blog with your own theme, plugins/addons etc. So if you want an own blog today, read on.

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There are sooo many web 2.0 apps out there, that it can be quite hard to find what you really need. When searching for a service or and application you can use or integrate in your project, I often find myself overwhelmed by a rather large amount of possibilities – of which many turn out not exactly being the right thing. Of course a large supply of web 2.0 apps, open source scripts, code snippets etc. is nice, but sometimes I find it gets to the point where the large availability of such solutions obfuscates the possibilities. It’s hard to get an exact overview of which service does what, and more importantly, what it does not do. I personally find, that briefly browsing through the individual projects websites is the most efficient way of getting a good overview of their features. However, there are so many results not leading to project sites when searching for “best CMS”, “paypal CakePHP module”, “AJAX star rating” or whatever else you might be currently looking for. Often you end up on discussion boards, mailing lists or something else, where people are discussing problems, support, development, but not digging the general overview of features you are really looking for. So wouldn’t it be great if the search engine could give you a list of project websites when searching for a specific term? Read the rest of this entry »

In this part you will learn how to format (style) web pages’ main content, such as text, paragraphs, lists, images and links. The formatting will be done with CSS, which was introduced in the first part of the Bbelek Web Development Course.

Just to recap: HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the language used for the content of your website. CSS (Cascaded Style Sheet) is the language used to describe the design of your content. It is important to remember that we strictly separate those two elements from each other. One of the main advantages of this, is that you can not only have different people working on content and design separately from each other, you can also completely switch layouts without having to change the content (by applying a new CSS file to the same HTML content). These advantages may seem a little abstract at the moment, so please just remember: No design stuff in the HTML file Read the rest of this entry »

You may already have heard, the currently used Internet Protocol IPv4 (Internet Protocol version4) is running out of space faster than originally thought.

The protocol we are currently using to do all the ‘funny things’ around the Internet has already been developed back in the 1970’s. At this time no one could imagine what this protocol would be in use for in the future. Today we are transferring Exabytes of data from one point of the world to another in a few seconds day by day. Due to technical limitations IPv4 can handle 4.294.967.296 unique systems in total. Many of those IPv4 addresses have already been assigned to ISPs, universities and other organizations. Back in 1994 the Internet Engineering Task Force already predicted that IPv4 would not be suitable forever, so they started to develop a replacement for IPv4. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello and welcome to the Bbelek Web Development Course. Over the next weeks we will take you through a series of tutorials that will show you how to develop your own web site and application from scratch. The course if designed for anyone that has no or little prior knowledge about website development. After this course you will have a good overview over the main technologies used – namely HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL. The course itself will take you through these areas by building a little Blog-application step by step, that will feature creation, modification, display and design of content. Read the rest of this entry »

Mozilla Firefox 3.5.5 is out, just eight days after the browser updated to version 3.5.4. For Windows, Mac, and Linux, the new version of the browser fixes three bugs: one critical bug across all platforms, and then one lower priority one for Windows and one lower priority one for Mac. Read the rest of this entry »