Web Development Insight

Here at Smartlab Software we pride ourselves in trying to make a website as accessible as possible. We try and make the sites conform to section 508 (government) standard and WCAG priorities 1,2, and 3 as best we can. It makes good business sense.

One of the most common improvements is to add a label tag for every text and textarea input tags in a form.

current method

<p><input >Full Name</p>

using a label

<p><input id="fullname" type="text" >
<label for="fullname">Full Name</label></p>

If you want the text to appear before the input box move the label tag before the input tag like this:

<p><label for="fullname">Full Name</label>
<input id="fullname" type="text" ></p>

As you can see it is pretty easy to add the label tag. Your users will thank you for it.

Certain email addresses are reserved for a specific use. Their primary function is to make it easy for the administrators of various servers when they need to contact the most responsible person for a particular service.
The following names are reserved for this use:

* postmaster@mydomain.com
* abuse@mydomain.com

postmaster

The most responsible person for these services are most likely a system administrator or webmaster. The postmaster is responsible for any and all email that is sent through a system connected via the Internet. The most common reason that the postmaster will be contacted is when there is either a misconfiguration of the mail-server, or it is generating unsolicited bulk email (usually through a virus or Trojan).

Several RFC (request for comment) require a postmaster@mydomain.com account:

• RFC822 6.3
• RFC1123 5.2.7
• RFC2821 4.5.1

abuse

Though not required by any RFC, it is common to have an abuse@mydomain.com so administrators, or anyone for that matter, may contact you if your email is being abused.

I have both of mine forwarded to a catchall email account.

One drawback of having “known” email addresses is spammers know the common ones (like postmaster, abuse, info, test, …) and will try and exploit them.

Doug

Higher education should be a priority in anyone’s life as it eases the way to better jobs and self satisfaction. A convenient way to obtain a masters degree or an undergraduate degree is to take online courses aka e-learning (which I have done for many years). It is just the thing for a busy life because you fit school around your schedule, not the other way around. Having a master’s degree not only raises self esteem but gives employers an excellent reason to hire you. An MBA or undergraduate degree from an accredited school will open many new doors. This blog post was based on information provided by Blogitive. For more information, please visit Blogitive.com.

Sometimes a product is so helpful and priced so right that you cannot help but brag about it. My experiences with Vonage have been awesome.

I can carry my phone connection, a VoiP (voice over Internet protocol) box (about the size of a wallet stuffed with money) anywhere and plug in to a router or any Internet connection and voila - I have my telephone with me. Just connect the VoiP box to Internet using an Ethernet cable, connect the telephone, plug it in and you are good to go.

Purchase

I bought mine at a local electronics store. They activated the account and by the time I got home I was ready to go. The PAP box costs about $60 but ones are available with routers built in, too. Remember a high speed connection is a must. If you have a marginal speed connection there are packet prioritization boxes that prioritize your phone connection over Internet.

Maintenance

Everything is done on the Internet: call activity, account maintenance, voicemail, and a slew of other things. 911 number needs to be set up every time you change locations. Just provide your current address and activation is pretty quick. Payment is made through a credit card which is charged at the end of every month.

Voicemail

If a person calls and no one is home and the phone is active then the usual answering machine takes over. If Internet is down, a voicemail is generated. An email is sent and you can listen to the message on your computer (in the form of an MP3 file) or call the voicemail number and listen to it.

Advantages

The advantage of having a portable phone number is multifold.
First, my fax machine shares the same phone number as my business. If I go to another place that has a fax machine I can connect it up and I’m ready to go. Just having the capability of transporting my phone number to other places is a big plus since I travel frequently.
You can have more than one telephone number, too…in fact as many as you like.
The PAP firmware can be upgraded by Vonage at any time though I have not been notified of any upgrade.

Connection

My old telephone was a wireless whose base unit plugged into the well-known phone jack. The other handsets were distributed throughout the house. It still remains. The PAP unit is plugged into a spare phone jack which activates all the phone jacks in the house. Hence the base unit is downstairs while the PAP unit is upstairs. We were warned by a technician that the outside line to the house must be unplugged.

Virtual Telephone Numbers

One helpful feature is called the virtual telephone number. For example, if your parents live in Oswego, MO you could get a local number based on the area code so they do not have to make long distance calls. The number is tied to your regular number.

Epilogue

I have been with Vonage for about a year and been very happy with them. As long as the internet connection is up I am good to go. Voice quality has been very good. The only disadvantage I have found is that Internet must be up and power must be working - sometimes a problem in the Midwest. For about $17 per month I am one happy owner.

Doug

I have been fighting trying to upgrade from Flash Player 9.0.28.0 to 9.0.45.0 (Firefox and IE 7). First way was go to Adobe site and try to update the plug-ins. Neither one worked. I thought the browser cache was too small so I increased it to 150 MB (I normally keep it at 25 MB). No luck. Of course rebooting did not help. Nor clearing the browser cache.

Next was trying to download the entire player and install it. That scenario did not work, either. The install would start but say I have insufficient disk space. Free up 5000K more. There was plenty of disk space - well over 13 GB. Cleaning the temp directory was to no avail. Grrrr! Searching the Adobe site was a dead end as was the general Internet.

Finally I uninstalled the flash player from all browsers. Adobe has a tool to do this. Then I rebooted just to make sure , though it was not a requirement. Next I went to a site that uses a flash movie. I was prompted to install the latest version of flash player (I did this in IE7 and Firefox). Both browsers installed 9.0.45.0 and I was finished. Just to satisfy my curiosity I verified the flash player version.

Doug

I have spent a few days trying to figure out why I cannot send email, using asp.net 2.0, using 1and1 as host. The email would send locally but when I posted the code on a website it would not work. I would get back an error message containing:

'System.Net.Mail.SmtpPermission, System, Version=2.0.0.0,
 Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c533934e089' failed

I tried port numbers 25, 465, and 587.
Nearly everyone said to use smtp.1and1.com as the mail server but that turned out to be the problem…use mrelay.perfora.net instead. Here is the final code:

SmtpClient theClient = new SmtpClient();
theClient.Host = "mrelay.perfora.net";
theClient.UseDefaultCredentials = false;
System.Net.NetworkCredential cred = 
  new System.Net.NetworkCredential("myemailaddr", "mypassword");
theClient.Credentials = cred;
theClient.Port = 25;
theClient.EnableSsl = false;
theClient.Send(mail);

Now the interesting part was I posted the code and it worked fine until one day I received an error message containing ‘…mailbox unrecognized…’. This was a tough one to track down. It turns out I was sending terse message content with the From address as test@test.com. 1and1 construed this to be spam and rejected it. Once I put in “real” data the contact us form worked as expected.

Here is the web site:

Let’s Do Vegas! Contact Form

Doug

Don’t get confused: a regular sitemap (links on a webpage which summarize your website) is not a Google sitemap.

A Google Sitemap file will inform Google of the URLs on your site, including the dates when you last changed them. If and when Google is ready to crawl your site, it will take this information into account and use it to optimize it’s visit. If it already knows your site a bit and you signal that you have changed one of those pages (added a new link to it or just fixed a misspelling), then it will go have a look as soon as your site is up again.

Microsoft and Yahoo have joined Google to adopt the sitemap as a standard. sitemaps.org has an FAQ on sitemaps along with the XML schema and a few other tidbits.

Publishing a sitemap will not get your site crawled more often; it will just optimize the search bot visit when it does crawl your site. Likewise, it will *not* get more of your site crawled, but it might concentrate on the more important parts. When it does crawl your pages, it will process them regularly, meaning that any content you have on it will usually get used for web search.

How to Create a Sitemap

Google Webmaster Tools offers a python script that generates a sitemap.

Another popular tool is the GSiteCrawler: it will crawl your site, take a look at all of your pages (and yes, it will make counters count, if your gallery program counts all visits) and use that information to make a Google Sitemap file. In a sense, you are looking at your site with the GSiteCrawler and taking that information so that Google does not have to do as much work (and can concentrate on the important parts).

One advantage of running a sitemap crawler is that if it gets stuck on your site, so will Google and other search indexers.

There are plug-ins for blogs, such as WordPress, that will generate a new sitemap every time a blog is created or modified and notify Google of the change.

Google sitemaps are there to help the search bot; not improve your website’s search result placement.

Doug

Gold is a pretty good hedge against inflation while silver has been based on industrial use. Gold, gold bars, and gold coin have bought the passage to safety where other forms of money have failed. Since the United States operates in an inflation mode the yellow metal has has an allure of some protection. Many financial planners have recommended precious metals such as gold and silver as part of an overall investment portfolio. Gold, in any form, should be considered for an adjunct to long-term financial security. Ask your financial adviser before investing.
Please read our disclosure policy if you have questions.

I will be busy today upgrading to WordPress 2.1.2.

Doug

I am all for saving time. In the old days backing up a WordPress blog meant either using phpAdmin to back up the database or manually logging into each blog and using a backup plug-in.

No more.

Starting with WordPress 2.0 the bundled backup program was taken out and made a separate plug-in. Version 2.0 of the WordPress database backup plug-in takes advantage of WordPress cron program and will email a backup on a regular basis. I use once a week, though the granularity can be once an hour.

Once installed, go into Manage then Backup. On the bottom of the page the time frequency of the backup and the email address is set. Note if you choose once a week, the weekly backups are on the day you hit submit. Since I like getting backups on Saturday I started all my backups on a Saturday.

Note this only backs up the WordPress database; not the WordPress source code.

admin Doug