Category Archives: Web Design

Google’s Sesame Street Doodle – please stop

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Google has been celebrating Sesame Street’s 40th anniversary for about a week now. Their doodle is one of the Sesame characters. Although they are quite cute, I was tired of it on day two. When will they stop? Probably Nov 10, which is Sesame Street’s anniversary.

It doesn’t matter the browser of course, as long as Google is loaded, you will get Sesame Street. Firefox, Google chrome, and Internet Explorer has the doodle graphics. There’s no escaping Google’s reach here. Fortunately, I turned on my iGoogle theme to escape the Cookie Monster. Hopefully the monster will run out of cookies soon so we can get back to a more sophisticated web environment.

HelioHost.com – Free Web Hosting Account

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Edit 10/30/09 – I’m changing my mind. This review of Heliohost.com is being changed because Heliohost requires that you login to the CPanel periodically. This is definitely a maintenance problem for people who like to post a site and leave it untouched. The account will be suspended if there’s no activity.

Here’s a better free web hosting account than X10hosting.com has to offer. It’s Helio Host. This company offers pretty much everything a paid host would except puts limits on bandwidth.

  1. Subdomains of “www.mysite.heliohost.org” or “www.mysite.cc.co”
  2. There are minimum requirements to have a pre-existing domain name registered to Helio Host.

My example free site is “www.mediasolutions.heliohost.org.”
The control panel login is “http://mediasolutions.heliohost.org/cpanel”

X10Hosting.com – Free Webhosting Accounts

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There are dozens if not hundreds of free web hosting accounts each with their own set of features from which to choose. Thus far, the one that I find best is X10hosting. Here’s why:

  • Sub-domain URL = “mysite.x10hosting.com”
  • Up to 2.5GB of Disk Space
  • Up to 45 GB of Bandwidth
  • cPanel
  • FTP
  • Free Subdomains
  • No Advertisements

The terms are a bit strict with this account. Only one person is allowed to use the account. For example, if a web designer sets up the account for a client, the client is not supposed to edit files or upload files in addition to the web designer’s work. Proxy, file hosting, and image hosting sites are not allowed to be hosted.

There’s one significant disadvantage with x10hosting with the Inactivity policy.

Accounts found to be inactive are suspended for a 10-day period and then terminated. All data including any type of backup or stored information is removed with the account. To prevent an account from being suspended for inactivity it is required users visit the x10Hosting forums located at http://forums.x10hosting.com at least ONCE every TWO WEEKS. Accounts must also have a working website within one week.

Shopping Carts

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To integrate a shopping cart into one website, cart software must be installed, then connected to a payment gateway. An article about shopping carts recommended a company called digiSHOP. This company is expensive but the writer explained that it was easy to use and customize.

Personally, I tried Zen-cart and it was much too difficult to work with. I spent hours reading and trying to figure out the code without seeing any progress. Although Zen-cart is free, I would pay for it in hassle.

Once the shopping cart is established, then comes the expense of a Merchant Gateway or Payment Processing. The industry standard is Authorize.net for accepting credit cards and placing the funds in your account. Bottom line, if a person wants an ecommerce site, it will require a fair amount of money and a designer.

Easier payment solutions would be PayPal or Google Checkout.

Additional Research:
intelli-collect
2 check out
click bank

company w/ merchant accounts
merchant warehouse
insta-merchant
durango merchant services
merchant express

FTP access

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Below is a way to accessing an FTP server using one line in the URL. “ftp://” followed by the user name followed by “:” followed by the password followed by “@” followed by the website URL.

For example:
ftp://rsoukup:password@robsoukup.info

Uploading Video

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[kaltura-widget wid=”ev8xnhqi28″ width=”410″ height=”364″ type=”grey” addPermission=”3″ editPermission=”3″ /]
I’ve been attempting to upload video to WordPress but without success. It should be simple but I’m getting a max file size error even though the file is only 18mg. It’s a mp4. WordPress doesn’t have documentation on acceptable file types so this is an exercise of trial and error – hate those.

Anyway, I’ve installed two plugins thus far:
Embed Video – says it allows uploads but I don’t see it.
Interactive Video – uploads to third party and then back to WordPress. It has to be installed on server. Kinda scary.

Javascript

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Alas, semester two of four in my Internet Tech/Multimedia degree is finished and I’m relaxing between semesters by learning Javascript. Naturally, I never really learn everything that I need during the class so I like to do extra-curricular research between semesters.

w3schools.com has a tutorial on Javascript that is only helpful if you already know what you are doing. I’m conquering the “Javascript Bible” but figured the DIY exercises may be helpful for practice. Indeed, this is a great way to learn.

I’m currently trying to figure out if a switch will take non-numbers as its expression – that’s the parameter within the ().

Extensible Markup Language (XML)

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Once again I am on a learning quest – the never ending quest to learn web design. This time I just had the impulse to update my personal web site since it uses “old” technology and is table based. I learned CSS based layout from the CLBC web site. However, when I tried to validate my HTML code I kept getting failing scores. My friend, Jesse, informed me that I needed to use all XML code or none at all.

So, I learned the basics of XML coding. It’s easy so don’t be too impressed. Ta Ta for now.