Posts under ‘Tools’

I’m currently in the process of overhauling my oldest affiliate content site. This has been a very tedious process to say the least. The site was originally setup to use SSI (server side includes) since at the time, it was suggested to me to go that route in order to include things like a common sidebar navigation and footer includes. The concept is definitely sound, but the method to implement it is kind of outdated.

One aspect of Website development that seems to trip up a lot of new IMers is the transferring of files up to their Web server. This is done using FTP (File Transfer Protocol). Perhaps some of the confusion stems from the numerous varieties FTP clients that are available. Many of the WYSIWYG HTML editors have an FTP client built-in. However, I’ve found some of them awkward to use, especially the one in Nvu.

The other way to transfer files is to use the File Manager feature available in cPanel if your Web host supports it. However, after a few go rounds with this method, you’ll be desperately searching for something much less frustrating for transferring files.

In the previous post in this series on IM 101 – Web Design 101, I wrote about the importance of learning the basics of HTML and JavaScript along with a sprinkling of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). I talked about how grabbing some free HTML/CSS templates and hacking away is probably the most direct way of learning basic HTML. Where things start to get a little confusing is what tools to use to edit HTML pages.

OK, it’s now time to begin fleshing out the courses that I laid out in the IM 101 Basic Curriculum. The first one in the basic curriculum is “Web Design 101” and oh Lord, it’s a doozy! After thinking about it a bit more, I’m inclined to think that this course is best split out into at least 2, maybe 3 separate courses.

That’s because there are several components to the topic:

• Code Aspects (HTML, JavaScript, W3C Standards)
• Tools (HTML Editors, Graphics Tools)
• Design Aspects (Graphic Design, Usability, Page Layout, etc)

I had managed to get through most of my career as a software engineer without having to touch Microsoft Excel. My only encounters with this flagship product from MS was on the rare occasions that I actually did some business traveling and would then use an Excel template to compute my travel expenses.

It wasn’t until my last job position that I finally began to uncover the true power of Excel.