Good Things To Know

Reference: Web Development & Design Foundations with HTML5, Seventh Edition, Chapter 10.

Netiquette

If you combine the words "Internet" and "etiquette", you get "Netiquette", which describes proper etiquette on the Internet. The rules of Netiquette are unofficial, but if you want to be a member in good standing of the Internet community, you should follow these rules.

Don't send unsolicited mass e-mail, or spam.
Don't type in all CAPITAL LETTERS. Most people interpret all caps as the equivalent of your yelling at them. And besides, all caps are harder to read.
When you are sending e-mail to someone you don't know, keep the message short and to the point. You can ramble with your friends.
Don't use a deceptive subject in your e-mail messages.
Don't mark your e-mail as urgent if it is not.
If you are quoting someone else, only include the pertinent information. Edit out the rest.
When you are replying to an e-mail, include only the relevant portion of the original e-mail. Delete the rest.
If you are carrying on a "dialogue" with someone via e-mail, don't CC innocent bystanders. Only CC those people who need to be in on the "conversation".
If you are sending e-mail to multiple recipients, it is best to use the BCC feature of your e-mail program so the other recipients won't be able to see who else the message went to. You can usually send the e-mail to yourself, and BCC everyone else.
Don't forward a virus warning unless you verify it first. (See the section "Spotting a Hoax", below.)
Don't forward a chain letter.
Don't say anything in an e-mail message that you wouldn't want to see on the evening news. In other words, never assume that the recipient will be the only one who will read the e-mail.
Be careful what you write! The recipient of your message can't see your facial expressions. A joke or sarcasm may come across as an insult.
Your e-mail message can usually be considered to be a legal document and can even be considered to be a contract if you say that will do something. Be careful what you say you will do.
Get permission from the recipient before you send HTML e-mail. Some e-mail systems can't display HTML code. And HTML code takes longer to download.
Get permission before you add someone to your e-mail mailing list.
Get permission before you send a file attachment to your e-mail.
If you leave a comment in someone's website guestbook, do not be mean or critical in it. Take up issues or criticisms with them privately.
Cite all quotes and references. Respect copyrights.
Think carefully about attaching a return receipt to your e-mail. Many people consider a return receipt to be an invasion of privacy.
The Golden Rule: Do to others as you would have them do to you.
Don't expect an instant reply. Be patient. People are busy.
Don't be confrontational. You can discuss a topic strongly but be considerate and polite as you do so.
Help others when you can. Everyone started out as a newbie at some point in time.
Be forgiving. Everyone makes mistakes.
Keep your ego and power in check. Be kind.
Be encouraging when you can.

Copyrights and Bandwidth

Unless you have permission to download an image from a Web site, doing so is theft. Some sites, such as http://www.boogiejack.com, specifically grant permission for you to download images or other resources. But their permission does not grant you permission to alter the images or to save them as part of your own archive.

Text is also covered by copyright laws, simply by virtue of having been published on a Web site. You need the owner's permission to use text, too.

It is also possible to steal bandwidth. Do not link to an image on someone else's site. If you have permission to do so, download the image to your own server and link to it there.

You can be tracked down if you steal resources or bandwidth. Each Web server keeps an automatic log of where requests for resources came from.

Spotting a Hoax

You have probably seen e-mail messages claiming that a certain virus warning must be passed on to all of your e-mail address book recipients. Likewise, there are messages about sending money to a family with a dying child or some similar situation. There are also messages about how you can get rich if you will follow the instructions and forward the e-mail to five friends, send some money to the originator of the e-mail, etc., blah blah blah.

Almost all of these e-mail messages are hoaxes.

There are sites available for the specific purpose of identifying hoaxes. Some of these sites are:

https://www.hoax-slayer.com/
https://www.broadcom.com/support/security-center, which was formerly Symantec Security Center. Look for:
- "Threat and Risk Listing"

Copying and Pasting

You can save many minutes and even hours of typing if you learn some basic selecting, copying, and pasting skills. Here are some hints:

You can select text by clicking the mouse at the beginning of the text that you want to select, then holding down the Shift key, and clicking at the end of the text you want selected.
Another way that you can select text, this time a line at a time, is to click the mouse at the beginning of a line, then hold down the Shift key, and use the up or down arrows to select as many lines as you want.
Another way that you can select text, this time a page at a time, is to click the mouse at the beginning of a line, then hold down the Shift key, and use the Page Up or Page Down keys to select as many pages as you want.
In most editing programs, like Notepad, Ctrl+C (Command+C on a Mac) will copy selected text into the PC's clipboard. (By the way, even though we're talking about copying text in this section, this is probably a good place to mention a significant exception to this keyboard combination in image editing. The GIMP is a really good, free image editor. In the GIMP, Ctrl+C does *not* copy the selected, visible layers. You must use "Edit", "Copy Visible" in order to copy the visible, selected portion of the image.)
In most editing programs, like Notepad, Ctrl+X will cut selected text into the PC's clipboard.
In most editing programs, like Notepad, Ctrl+V (Command+V on a Mac) will paste text from the PC's clipboard into your document where the cursor rests.

Unsubscribing from Spammers' Mailing Lists

In most cases, you can't actually unsubscribe from a spammer's mailing list. If you click the link that says that you can unsubscribe, you are in reality confirming your e-mail address to the spammer. Many people ("experts", if you will) recommend that you simply delete the spammed e-mail and get on with your life. Or, if you are truly adventurous, you can go ahead and try the "unsubscribe" link, but don't say that you weren't warned!

Converting RGB Color to Hexadecimal Code

You can use the Windows Calculator program to convert RGB color values to hex values.

Click the Start button. Choose Programs or Program Files, then Accessories, then Calculator.
Select "View" from the main menu.
For Windows versions prior to Windows 7, select "Scientific". For Windows 7+, select "Programmer".
Click the "Dec" (decimal) radio button in the left group of radio buttons.
Enter the decimal value for the Red field.
Click the "Hex" (hexadecimal) radio button.
Record the Red hex value.
Repeat steps 3 through 6 for the Green and Blue values.

Creating Strong Passwords

If you use the same password for all of your online accounts, you run the danger of having someone discover the password and thus gaining access to every account you have. Here are some hints for safe password usage:

If your password is easy to remember, it is also probably easy to guess.
A "good" (but not "strong" -- see the next list item) password consists of a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, plus some digits (numbers).
A "strong" password is a "good" password that also includes at least one special character such as "&", "#", or "@". You can make a strong password fairly easy to remember by making it into a sort of phrase, like this:
```
H0r$e$andc0w$
```
which is a "strongification" of the phrase "Horses and cows". (The '0's' are zeroes, not o's.) This may seem to be too simplistic an approach, but this password *is* strong, and is very hard to guess or programmatically discover.
All of the experts say that you should use a different password for each account.
Keep a list of your login names and passwords. One place to keep this list is on paper. Then, of course, find a safe and fireproof place to keep your list!
If you have a smartphone or a PDA, you can store your password list in a really good, encrypted list program. Some suggestions are:
- Secret! is available at http://www.linkesoft.com/ for either $19 or $29 , depending on whether you also get the "Desktop" version, which I do highly recommend. It is available for the iPhone, too. Unfortunately, it is not available for the iPad.
- KeePass is available at http://keepass.info/ and is free. One really nice feature of KeePass is that if you keep KeePass running on your computer (in the system tray), you can use a specific keypress combination to instruct KeePass to automatically fill in your username and password when you have a login screen open.
- A recent addition to the smartphone and tablet app world is Dashlane, at http://www.dashlane.com.
- If you prefer hardware solutions, you might want to consider a http://www.roboform.com/ subscription. This system allows you to use many different devices to manage your passwords, logins, and file synchronizations.

Enabling Image Thumbnails in Windows Explorer

In Windows Explorer (not Internet Explorer) you can view images in a folder as icons or thumbnails if you click the "More Options" dropdown list (upper right in Windows 7+) or "View" and then "Thumbnails" (prior to Windows 7). You can also (in Windows 7+) click the "Slideshow" menu item at the top.

In the Windows 98 version of Windows Explorer, you may first need to right-click the folder in the left pane, choose "Properties", and check the box that says "Enable Thumbnail View". Then click "Apply" and continue as above.

Finding a Good Web Host and Domain Administrator

As we have previously discussed, a Web site needs to be located on a Web server. You also normally need to "buy" a URL, otherwise known as a "domain".

Many Web hosting services will register your domain name for you, but if you want to be sure that it is registered properly, you should probably do it yourself. The one exception to this consideration is GoDaddy.com, which has a great reputation for both registering your domain/URL and for good, inexpensive hosting.

Buy your domain name from a reputable service, such as:

After you get your domain/URL, you will need to rent space on a Web server. There are even some good free Web hosting servers available. Try to find a Web hosting service that others have had good success with. Here are some possibilities:

http://www.visionis.com
http://webservices.thesba.com (formerly http://www.crystaltech.com)
http://www.godaddy.com
http://www.freehostia.com

Use relative URL's on your site as much as you can. This way, if you have to change Web servers in the future, most of your internal links will still work.

Spell Checking Documents

You should spell check your Web pages before you upload them to your Web server! There are many options available:

Many text editors and HTML editors have spell checkers built in. Use them!
Copy/paste your text into Word for Windows or some similar editor. Run the spell checker there.
Copy/paste your text into an online spell checker such as http://www.spellcheck.net

Caching

Your Web browser caches the pages and images that it downloads from the various Web servers that host the sites that you visit. A cache is a temporary storage area.

The benefits of caching are these:

From the Web browser's viewpoint, the main benefit is to make subsequent displays of previously-viewed pages and images, happen faster. The browser checks to see if a page and/or image is in its cache; if it is in the cache, the browser displays it from the cache rather than requesting another download of the page or image from the Web server.
From the viewpoint of the network, and whoever is paying for the network traffic, caching reduces the amount of network signals and page loads.

There are several potential issues with browser caching:

The hard-drive space that the operating system of your computer sets aside for caching is limited. It may be large, but it is limited.
The impact of this limited storage space is that it eventually fills up. Some browsers (read: Internet Explorer, particularly) behave badly when the cache is full.
If you try the view a page's source in IE and the source refuses to display, you are probably dealing with a full cache. There are other symptoms, but this is the key symptom.

You can clear out IE's cache with these steps (assuming IE 8):

Click "Tools" in the top menu.
Click "Internet Options..."
On the "General" (default) tab, in the "Temporary Internet files" section, click the "Delete..." button.
Check or uncheck the items that you want retained or deleted, and click the "Delete" button.
If it has been a long time since you last cleared the cache, it will probably take several minutes for the computer to clear it out. Be patient.

Another aspect of the browser's caching the pages and images that it downloads, is that sometimes you may not want the browser to display cached content. If your site, for instance, offers updated information on a regular schedule, you will want to make sure that your users are seeing the current information instead of information that was cached last week, for instance.

You can force the user's browser to download a new, current copy of your content with a meta tag like this in your site's page(s) (in the <head> section):

  <meta http-equiv="Expires" content="0" />

The content value of "0" (that is a zero) will force the browser to get a fresh copy of the page every time the page is displayed. Some of the pages in this class site, by the way, have this type of <meta> tag in them for this very reason. The "eHandouts and Assignments" listing page is one example.

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