My First Design Challenge

[billbenson]

On a different forum someone found that frequently banner and affiliate ads etc didn't validate for strict and it was often a pain to to change them. Suppose you had a bunch of rotating ads that change every week for example. He validates his pages for strict, then switches the doctype to transitional.

So depending on what you are doing transitional make make more sense.

Also, I'm still using win 2k as I've had no reason to upgrade and its pretty much the same as xp. You can't upgrade to IE 7 if you are running win2k however. For that reason, you probably should write sites that validate in IE6 as well as IE7, and FF for a while. IE6 will eventually drop off the list. You should be able to see what brower people are using from your stats. I forget if my stats package shows what version though.

[vangogh]

True about the banners and affiliates. If you're using any code from a 3rd party it may not validate. I think you can still use strict as a doctype in many cases, but it won't validate. Still it's one reason for going with transitional.

Now Bill c'mon it's time to enter the 21st century. Your OS is so last century.

[billbenson]

I stuck linux on my backup pc on a second partition. I'm going to buy a new pc with the next 6 months or so. I'm letting the dust settle on the blue ray stuff, plus I'm hoping quad core comes down a bit and buy that.

I'll buy a clone and probably use a dual boot win 2k (for now) and linux on disk 1. I'm sure I'll eventually buy a copy of vista for that, but not yet. I can check IE7 css on my wifes laptop which has vista. Until MS no longer supports security updates for 2k I have no real need for another operating system. All I do is email quotes and web design. So far, there is only one program I use regularly that I would have to buy for linux (its zend client and is already linux compatable), so not much reason to come into the 21st century yet.

Wifes trial McCafee (or however its spelled) trial just expired so I'm going to stick avast on her new laptop shortly. We'll see how that works.

My reasoning is two fold. MS software and associated software is expensive. Depending on your needs you may be able to buy a hp computer for $600, but to get all the software you need may be a lot more. Kind of goes against my grain.

There is also the convenience factor. The Vista that came with my wifes Dell laptop didn't even include a disk. I guess there is an online process for reloading it if you need to. With XP, you have to call Microsoft to reinstall it. At least a friend of mine did, but that may have been after a mother board replacement or something similar. With my old 2k, I just reenter the serial number.

We'll see how I like Linux, but I've seen some good reviews from people after they went through the learning curve. So I may be leaning towards 22 century

[vangogh]

Just kidding of course. The only reason I have XP is because that's what was available the last time I bought a laptop. I see no reason to get Vista and still haven't really heard much good about it.

I do need to get every browser I can get for testing, though.

I'm actually thinking of making my next laptop a Macbook Pro, installing Parallels on it and then installing one version or another of Windows through Parallels. I'll probably install Ubuntu on it too so I can have all 3 OSs running. I want to be able to test on as many OS browser combinations as I can and that seems like the best way.

Still need to improve my Linux skills. My laptop is a dual boot and I have Debian on another partition. But I never boot up on that side. I really want to be able to have both up and running at the same time instead of having to choose between them.

[orion_joel]

I am using for the most part Awstats for the stats on my site, and even though it does show which browsers are viewing the site it does not split between actual versions. So it just shows IE, FF, Opera, Mozilla, Netscape. Could be version 1 or 7 i dont know.

However i thought i would take a look at what information that google analytics can offer in this department, and yes it does offer a breakdown of which browser, and then the next level of which version. Surprising for IE the split of IE6 to IE7 was almost exactly 50%. But this i would expect would differ quiet a lot from site to site.

[billbenson]

I'm not going to go as far as to go with apple as that seems to be the choice of graphics people for the most part. I'm not saying its not a good product, just that I'm not sure its necessary for testing web pages. I don't have many apple site visitors.

Today, I have two similar clone computers Jan 2003 vintage. My strategy has been to maintain them as mirror computers for hot standby. If I don't have a computer running with email during the week I'm out of business. I also live in what is supposed to be the lightning capital of the world. That's not good for electronics. I'm not as good about backing up as I should be, but they are always within a week of each other. I have a monitor switch, so I have one monitor / keyboard / mouse that talks to either computer.

When I get my next computer I'm thinking of doing something like this:

Set up one computer as primarily web design. That would probably be the new more powerful computer. Some of the design programs are resource intensive. Zend, DW, FTP, and a bunch of browser windows.

Use one of my older computers as my sales computer. I still can get a lot of windows open on the sales computer and some I don't want to close so I don't reboot unless I have to.

I want to get another BIG monitor as well. They are getting cheaper so I want a 24" monitor for the design computer.

I think I'll cut over to an external HD for backup.

If I keep my email program open on both computers, but set the sales computer to get emails say every 31 minutes and delete the emails from the server; and the web design computer to get emails every 10 minutes but not delete from server, I will have close to a real time email on the web design computer.

This might sound extreme to some, but I effectively have two jobs. Web design and sales. If the sales computer is down I could loose a sale that is worth more than the computer. If I can't do web design, I'm not moving forward. If I don't have good backups, I could loose weeks of work.

I'm not sure exactly how I'm going to structure things yet. I do know I want hot standby, backup, and I think I want to use separate computers for design and sales.

[vangogh]

@Joel - I like Google Analytics. I think they offer better stats than AwStats. AwStats probably over reports things since a good portion of the traffic they record is like bots. They filter out the bots they know about, but many still get through. Analytics uses JavaScript which should filter out most bots.

@Bill - About 10% of my traffic comes via an Apple computer. I think it is important to be able to test especially for me since I never know who my next client might be. I have to take into account a lot of different sites.

I'd let to dedicate one computer here as a development server. I'll likely set up linux with Apache and PHP, MySQL and any other languages I want to play around with. My laptop hard drive fills up fast. I move things to an external drive, but it would be nice to have most things out on the network and be able to dedicate different computers to specific things.

[billbenson]

I've had Apache, php, and MySql running on my pc's forever under windows. I pretty much quit using it though because I never was able to get server globals working. For example every page with a form calls itself as follows:

<form method="post" action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] ;?>">

If you know how to configure this to get it working, I'd love to know. It may be easier to configure this setup under Linux as well which is my intention anyway.

[vangogh]

I can't claim to be the Apache expert. I haven't developed any forms locally so I'm not even sure if I have that same issue. I tend to send my forms to another page instead of calling them again on the same page anyway.

I think all the settings you'll want to edit are going to be in the httpd.conf file. It's located in the conf folder under the main Apache folder. If you search on the file name I think there's a lot of info online about how to set it up. I'm still learning my way around the file.

[billbenson]

That's probably the correct file, although it might be related to the php.ini file and under windows????

When I started out, I used multiple pages with direct actions. But say you have something like this:

customer data entry form (page is custData.php action is custData.validate) ->

Validate the form (if there is a problem, action is to return to custdata.php with the fields prefilled noting the error in red) Otherwise go to enterStuffInToDb.php

enterstuffintodb.php may also have an email included form there it goes to confirmation.php

Now you have 3 or 4 pages related to one script. If you do a lousy job of naming stuff its hard to figure out whats related to what. In a year are you going to remember what confirmation.php is related to?

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What I do is always call the same page. That way you have one page for one program, not four or more.

Using the server globals makes it transportable to other sites.

Name your submit buttons - if isset submit1 {stuff} else (other stuff)

Etc.

I don't think one way is better than the other, but keeping everything on one page is far easier to keep organized.