Web Design

Web Design

Web design is a process of conceptualization, planning, modeling, and execution of electronic media delivery via Internet in the form of Markup language suitable for interpretation by Web browser and display as Graphical user interface (GUI).

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Firefox Add-ons for Web Developers

Advanced Web Development by AskApache is a Firefox Collection I created since I’m always trying new Addons out and using multiple computers and I wanted a quick and easy way to install my favorite’s and keep a running list. Firebug, YSlow, LastPass, and Web Developer are the only ones I always use regularly.

I like the idea of the last.fm but it’s not as powerful as the site, which is awesome. Lately listening to Kings of Leon Radio…

· Developers  ·  RSS | 8:14 PM

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Advanced WordPress wp-config.php Tweaks

The bottom line for this article is that I want to make WordPress as fast, secure, and easy to install, run, and manage because I am using it more and more for client production sites, I will work for days in order to solve an issue so that I never have to spend time on that issue again. Time is money in this industry and that is ultimately (time) what there is to gain by tweaking WordPress.

Note: I spent no time on readability, this is primarily a read the code and figure it out article.. This is for advanced users looking for a reference or discussion and for those of you looking to advance. Feedback would be great if you make it that far..

· Tweaks  ·  RSS | 3:23 AM

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mod_rewrite Fix for Caching Updated Files

Web Developers sometimes use file.ext?v=004 as a version control system to force visitors to use updated files. This is terrible. Instead link to apache-003.css and set it to be cached forever. When you change the file you just change the links to apache-004.css. That eliminates millions of bandwidth and resource robbing If-Modified-Since requests. You only need Apache with mod_rewrite, and 1-10 minutes!

· update  ·  RSS | 9:20 AM

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Ultimate Htaccess Tutorial for .htaccess files

This is not an introduction to .htaccess… This is the evolution of .htaccess… The BEST, the ORIGINAL, the NEWEST, and the most HIGHEST, FLYEST .htaccess tricks I can find.

Originally known as the “Ultimate .htaccess Guide”, its changed over the years by adding new .htaccess tricks and .htaccess examples to it.. I also add my favorite .htaccess links, the best .htaccess articles on AskApache, the coolest .htaccess experiments, the Web’s best .htaccess hacks, and update this article on the regular.

· htaccess file  ·  RSS | 9:05 AM

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.htaccess trick to show Alternate CSS file based on IP

This past week I updated my sites apache.css file for a site-redesign. I wanted to make changes to the .css file that only I could see, so that my regular traffic and site-visitors would still see the old version. Here’s the elegant solution I came up with using .htaccess and mod_rewrite that works so well I’m sharing it with all you wonderful and incredible people reading my blog :)

RSS | 5:17 PM

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Optimize a Website for Speed, Security, and Easy Management

Learn how to setup, configure, secure, optimize, and create a low-maintenance website the AskApache way. I’m piecing together all the hacks, tricks, methods, and ideas discussed throughout this blog and all across Netdom and glueing them all together to show you how to have the most optimized, crazy fastest, and best website setup I can think of.

· web host  ·  RSS | 8:45 PM

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SEO Secrets of AskApache Part 2

This is part II of the Advanced SEO used on AskApache.com Series and describes how to control which urls are indexed by Search Engines and how to move them higher up in Search Results.

· AskApache  ·  RSS | 5:44 PM

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Mod_Rewrite Variables Cheatsheet

We’ve figured out what mod_rewrite variables look like, a cheatsheet of the actual value.

· Rewrite  ·  RSS | 1:05 AM

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Online Tool compares Packer, JSMin, Dojo, and YUI Compressor

· gzip  ·  RSS | 10:12 PM

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Pimp out your FeedBurner Count

I’ve had a lot of people ask about the FeedBurner FeedCount image on AskApache. Specifically how to set it up with custom messages and different colors each page view… It is pretty sweet..

· FeedBurner  ·  RSS | 4:50 AM

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AskApache.com May 2008 DreamHost Site of The Month

With a rating of 8.58, this marks the highest rated DreamHost Site Of The Month Winner in the History of the Contest!

· askapache  ·  RSS | 10:54 PM

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Faster Form Submission and Processing with fsockopen

Part II: Example illustrating how to speed up GET/POST form submissions. Uses fsockopen to initiate a server-side background request to process the submitted data, so that the result page of the form is displayed to the client lightningly quick.

· Submission  ·  RSS | 11:18 PM

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Faster POST and GET Form Submissions

Just a very brief look at speeding up form submission by delegating the processing and bandwidth to your server, not your client.

· fsockopen  ·  RSS | 10:21 PM

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Preload flash .flv files into browser cache

How I was able to preload many flash flv and swf files on one of my clients sites that has a lot of online video and relatively small traffic. Their site visitors would usually watch 3-10 videos per visit and so to make the videos load almost instantly on every page I came up with a way to preload the top 10 .flv files and the swf flv player files as soon as the visitor successfully started watching the 1st video. Of course I also setup .htaccess caching on the server so that once they downloaded the files into their cache they would never request them from the server again. I was having fun with this so its pretty funky and uses some really cool combinations of javascript, swf preloader from xml, css classes to help automate it all..

· preload  ·  RSS | 10:15 AM

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Firefox Adsense WordPress Plugin

If your WordPress blog uses AdSense, and you love Firefox you will love this plugin. When a user downloads and installs Firefox through your referral, we’ll credit your account with up to $1.00 (more details).

· toolbar  ·  RSS | 8:33 PM

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Random Bits, the podcast that gives you an insiders view

I was over at Alex King’s blog today checking out his mobile web plugin for wordpress and I noticed some fresh podcasts from some of the industry’s finest. The feeds are .mp3 and are easy to find and browse on the search-this.com site. They have some pretty nice articles over there as well..

· search-this  ·  RSS | 12:31 AM

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CSS Background Image Sprites

Using a CSS Background Image Sprite with the CSS background-position and background-image I can display all these icons: . I can even have them show up anywhere on the page!

· position  ·  RSS | 8:47 AM

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Getting flash to show up in front of content

I used to have a problem of controlling flash elements on my sites.. On one site we have 6 different flash flv movies that are all the same size and are in the same position on the page. But only 1 is displayed at a time based on what the user wants to watch. So the selected flash movie needs to have the highest stacking order/zIndex.

· ufo  ·  RSS | 12:20 PM

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Speed Tips: Use Multiple SubDomains

To make your site even faster, serve certain content from different subdomains. The reason this works is amazingly cool!

RSS | 7:50 PM

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Firefox, Firebug, and yslow are REQUIRED

A lot of the past and upcoming articles on AskApache are focused on speeding up a server or website, or just making things more efficient. I’m starting several speed tip articles that require the following 3 programs if you want to follow along, that is… if you can keep up! ;)

· yslow  ·  RSS | 4:07 PM

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Top methods for Faster, Speedier web sites

High Performance Web Site list of the best and newest methods to make web pages super fast using caching, compression, cache-control, etc.

· address  ·  RSS | 4:40 PM

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Speedier Sites use CSS Sprites

An Image Sprite is simply multiple images combined into one image. Using the background-position in CSS you can display a specific image from the image sprite.

Sprites reduce the number of files that are requested and downloaded by site visitors, resulting in noticeable decreases in Page-Loading times, Bandwidth usage, and Server loads.

· image  ·  RSS | 5:05 PM

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Best-practice Web Design Process

Web Design Process
I have spent a considerable amount of time investing in learning best-practices for modern web-design..
(as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium) This basically means that I can rapidly make changes to a site.
Let me break down the process
I use XHTML to structure the code on the webpage. I then use CSS (cascading style sheets), to style the XHTML, this creates the presentation. All that is left is for the client to supply the content that I plug into the XHTML.
XHTML == structure
CSS == presentation
CONTENT == content
SCRIPTS == dynamic structure/presentation/content
It is a very modularized way of designing web-pages. By using CSS, I can change 1 line of code and the effect is an instant change throughout the entire site.
Web Programming Languages
The programming languages that I use are php, unix shell scripts, perl, python, ocaml, and javascript.
I also rely and depend heavily on the open-source Apache web server. Coming from a background of computer security and linux/unix, I am very glad to go with a non-windows Apache environment. You can forget about worrying about virii and other attacks! I use Apaches .htaccess to do a number of things. One use is automatically changing all non-www urls to www urls. Another big thing it does is allow me to specify that pages that end in .htm will be processed as if they included php code. Which is how I am able to call scripts to execute from within the page, all transparent to the end-user, who cannot see the php source code, only the result.
Optimizing for speed and accessiblity
I am very much concerned with optimizing web-pages for speed and accessibility. If you view the webpage with images disabled (use …

· design  ·  RSS | 5:59 PM

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