The w3c Validator has been a part of just about every bit of HTML/xHTML I’ve written in years now. So much so that I usually install a version locally to speed things up. To that end, I’ve installed the latest beta version of the validator on htmlfixit. The official stable version is 0.7.4, however the version running here is 0.8.0. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a completely different kettle of fish. Different better error message explanations, a new fresher look and so on.

Try it out, in the very least it’s great to see the direction they are heading in and while it may not be a “stable” release, it is certainly usable and in my brief experience so far quite beneficial. In particular the new explanations make it a worthwhile exercise all by themselves. The Validator has been added to the htmlfixit online tools menu for convenience. Unless I find some very good reason not to, I’ll be using this version to do all my validating from now on.

Apparently there is no end to the lengths spammers will go to fill your Inbox with stuff you don’t want from people you don’t know. Today I received an email with a PDF attachment. I’ve never received PDF spam before, never heard of it in fact. So I opened it to see what it was. Low and behold I was then encouraged to invest in some company or other. The same message that gets filtered hundreds of times a day by my mail server. Guess now my mail server software is going to have to be updated to take PDF files into account. A quick check of the news sites shows I’m not the only one who has received them.

Someone recently pointed out a screenshot service that is available for free called IE NetRenderer. My experience has shown over time that most of these services become overwhelmed and eventually convert to paid services or disappear. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve not had a significant upgrade of our CMS backend in over a year and a half and we were falling prey to thousands of comment spam. (so much so that we had to disable the comment system about 10 months ago).

Today that changes and htmlfixit has a totally new backend. Comments should be open again (with spam protection and blacklists in place) and access to older articles is now much easier. (see the sidebar on the right hand side). There will be some fine tuning to come, but bear with us, we’ll get there in the end. If you have any suggestions as to the layout, feel free to use the contact form and let us know.

regards

Don and Frank
htmlfixit.com

Not so long ago we had a lovely open Forum here where there were no real restrictions and we all chatted happily. Then the spammers found our forum and filled it with ads and links in the hope of improving their Google ranking. The result of this was that the forum had to be restricted to registered users only which stopped the spam, but stopped Google spidering the pages as well. That loss of pages cost us hits, and advertising dollars that go towards the hosting of the site. To solve the problem we’ve updated the forum software. The new version has image capture on registration. It has email verification before allowing posts, and it has a much improved spam filtering back end. The point of all this is that we want to open the forum up to general browsing again and in fact have just done so. enjoy!

If I’ve come across a free tool online lately that I wish I’d written myself, it is this one. I was called upon recently to put a video online and embedded in a web page for a client so they could advertise it, and I needed to get it done ASAP. I was about to start hand writing code when I thought, ‘no I’ll give Google a chance first’ which I find myself doing allot nowadays. So anyway, I did a bit of searching and found this extremely well thought out and implemented online tool.

I’m still annoyed that I didn’t do this myself as I imagine it would be very popular and not that hard to knock together. The tool is called Embedded Media HTML Generator and it’s on the website of the University of California. You simply choose the format of the video you want to embed (from Flash, Quicktime, Real Media or Windows Media Video), you fill out the form detailing file names and locations as well as any optional settings and hit submit. You will then be presented with a heap of HTML code that can be inserted directly into your web page. Simple, easy and elegant. The only options they don’t provide are for choosing XHTML transitional or strict, but that’s easy enough to do by hand.

IT news has recently talked about how the Opera House and Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art websites were both compromised and how these sites were then trying to download malware programs onto readers computers. However I’ve not seen it mentioned anywhere that both of these high profile sites were running Windows server 2003 at the time. (see here and here.)

If these sites were compromised because they were not up to date with all current patches, then we simply cannot just blame the hackers/crackers for the problem. History has shown us time and time again that an unpatched Windows server will be hacked before long. That goes for any server OS really, but Windows especially.

I’ve been looking at stopbadware.org to see if they had some method of determining which sites were running Windows server, or at least some method of searching by country so I could write a script to do it myself but thus far I’ve been unsuccessful. If that changes I’ll be sure to let you all know.