Archive for the ‘website’ Category

OneAndOne New Top Level Domain Name (TLDN) Extensions

Tuesday, June 17th, 2014

What to do when you succeed in ordering one…

Steps:

  • Initially you pre-order them under your existing package
  • If one is successful then it becomes Registered in your name.
    • This is communicated by email
    • Also it is displayed as Registered under the tab [My Pre-Orders] of the [Domain Overview] of (any of) your package.
  • However, it is added to your account as a new package, not under your existing package.
    • To see it, go to your initial login-page
      • → Page Title: “Welcome to the 1&1 Control Panel for your xyz package”
    • On top blue banner-bar, towards right, drop-down menu under [My xyz Package]
    • From that menu, select the (newly registered) domain name of interest.
      • Shown within its own unique “Instant Domain Registration package.
    • → Page Title: “Welcome to the 1&1 Control Panel for your Instant Domain Registration package”.
    • Click on [Domain Centre]
    • Click the domain name to edit the redirect or whatever.

Web-Scraping in Python

Friday, February 15th, 2013

http://blog.dispatched.ch/2009/03/15/webscraping-with-python-and-beautifulsoup/

Python is already on my MBP-MacOS system.

iWeb: Initial Experience / Confusions / Resolutions

Friday, November 18th, 2011

I had a go with iWeb (3.0.4) on the Apple Mac.  It is a mortal-friendly website-editor complete with templates and widgets etc.

Some non-obvious things:

  • Opening & Closing the App (iWeb)
    • On opening the iWeb app, you are prompted to select a template. I couldn’t see any way to avoid selecting a template.
    • There is a [File Save] but no [File > SaveAs]
      • So how does it get named?  Where does it get saved?
        • In app’s left-hand pane, select the Site in question, it asks for a Site Name.
    • The [File > Close] action closes the whole app, not just the current project (or whatever).
      • So I guess (???) there is no concept of “empty default page” here (???).
        • Though under each theme is the option of a Blank page.
  • Web-Page Editing
    • For the ??? template, you get a page with an elegantly paned “window” of assorted default images.
      • If you drag a new image on top of of one of the default ones, that new image becomes the replacement, and it inherits the “mask/zoom” capability.
      • If you simply drag an image to the same part of the webpage, it has no “mask/zoom” behaviour.  However you can add it via [Format > Mask] etc.
        • Format > Mask Shape ???
    • Setting a hyperlink on text involves an easy and intuitive-guessable method, but setting a hyperlink on an image requires a different and less obvious method.
      • [View > Show Inspector]
      • ???
  • Publishing (to Web)
    • You need to establish a location to publish to.  This will typically be an ftp server with upload-access protected by username and password.
      • Before anything else, get your username and password (for that location) to hand.
      • Personally, I like to peek around first, using an ftp client.
        • Mac OS already has a read-only ftp client built-in.  From Desktop, do Control-K.  A “bare bones” instance of Finder appears.  Click the tiny oblong button at top-right if you want to see the usual explorer pane/sidebar.  HOWEVER: it is not really up to the job…
          • I discovered this at http://osxdaily.com/2011/02/07/ftp-from-mac/
          • However it is read-only, hence no ability to add or remove files or folders.
          • Also it appeared (for me at least) not to refresh properly.  Scope for time-wasting confusion!
        • For the Mac, favourite add-on clients (according to the same osxdaily article are Transmit and CyberDuck.
          • Which one is best?
            • CyberDuck runs on both Windows and Mac.
            • There is a review comparing them at http://pixelspread.com/blog/59/transmit-vs-cyberduck
              • CyberDuck is free (but “begs”), Transmit is not.
              • One user (at least) claimed that CyberDuck used to be good once but as more features have been added, it’s getting more bugs.  Unverified.
              • Some users say that CyberDuck runs (more slowly?) than Transmit.
                • A user-comment says that this is because CyberDuck is Java-vased.
              • Both programs have Bookmarks/Favourites and both have a Dashboard widget that lets you drop files into to upload straight to a specified folder on an FTP server.
              • Their main difference is in how Bookmarks/Favourites works.  Transmit has dual panes, for Local and Remote, and when you make a Bookmark it includes both these locations.  CyberDuck in contrast only displays and bookmarks the remote location, requiring you to use a separate Finder for local, hence you drag files between these apps.
            • I see also, from is website, that Transmit has handy peripheral features like a Sync button.
            • I tried them both, concluding:
              • CyberDuck is pretty basic but it appears to work OK.  Setting up my ftp account was easy apart from the password, which only gets asked when you first attempt to log-on to that account.  It seems more for the beginner and explains about Amazon s3 storage etc.
              • Transmit feels “cleaner” to use and the dual-pane is definitely handy.  Also the Sync function is not a bad idea.
    • Before publishing, you need to define the location-to-publish.
      • If you just hit the “Publish” button, it will only prompt you for a MobileMe account.
      • To define the location, first in iWeb’s left-hand “explorer” pane, select the Site (as opposed to the Page).  This brings up a form where you can define the upload (ftp) data etc.
        • One entry in this form is for an email address.  But how securely is that email address presented on the page?  I am in the habit of not making life easy for email-harvesters, so I don’t want the email address to be in plain text in the HTML, I want it encrypted.  So I chose to just put a “dummy” address in here.
    • The webpage (root .html file etc.) gets placed in the specified location as follows:
      • An [index.html] file is created there.
      • Any existing files (other than by that name) are unaffected.
        • That is “safe” and also useful e.g. if you are in the habit of placing “robots.txt” files at webpage root.
      • A folder is created there, named after the Site.
      • The subdirectory is named after the page-name
        • The page-name appears in the app’s left-hand pane, it can be renamed.
    • What happens if you delete a webpage in the app then republish?
      • The existing subfolders for the now-deleted pages are not deleted.
        • I guess one would then delete them manually or else delete everything and republish the whole site.

Google Sites

Thursday, August 25th, 2011