You may not agree with me, let’s face it the number of skills you could include is enormous – I guess my list is about the minimum.

My ideas are also directed at people who want to understand what they are doing rather than using tools that do all the work for you.

These tools are OK, but you can end up generating sites you can’t fix when they go wrong if you rely on them too much.

The Good News

Almost too good to be true – it promises to make programmers out of us all, by enabling us to not just build web sites, (there are lots of point and click tools for those already), but to build web applications.

If you are a small business, you can use the tool for free, for up to 5 users assuming you have the right software and hardware platforms available.

There is a  hosted version (I could not find any obvious reference to it on the website FAQ, but the co-founder Wayne Byrne said in a blog comment that it existed – so where is it Wayne???!) which eliminates the need for a platform of your own, but costs $10 per month per user.  So not much good for that new social marketing killer app you’ve been designing for the last few months. But it would be OK for a small number of users in your company.

The Bad News

Well, it’s bad news for me.

Iceberg runs on Microsoft Windows server with SQL Server and is itself an ASP.NET application. Iceberg supports Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista and is compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

The cost per user is too high even for the hosted version. If you have the skills to code a large application using PHP say, and any associated framework, for large numbers of users, you’d be better off doing it that way.

As a long time software engineer, programmer and web developer I do wonder how accurate these claims can really be.

All my experience of productivity tools is that you substitute having to learn to code for having to learn the tool. And when you think you’ve done that, you realise you ‘ve also learned how to work around all the things the tool does badly. Then a whole support industry is created on the back of the tool’s idiosyncrasies.

The people running Iceberg say their offering is something else altogether.

I personally hope it is here to stay awhile – or at least that we don’t go back to the animated, flashed, cluttered styling of the previous years.

That said – the web is evolving all the time – when will it start to look and behave like Web 3.0?

Here is an article that explains the look, feel and interactivity of a Web 2.0 type site and gives the reasons why this type of site works. It lists the features of Web 2.0 styling such as:

• simplicity
• central fixed layouts
• simple navigation
• strong colours, gradients
• badges
• icons

The article contains scores of Web 2.0 site examples. Some real inspiration.

If I really needed a long and drawn out flash presentation I would have to outsource it to someone with the right skills. And I can only imagine that would be if I wanted to build a full flash web site.

Mostly what I need, like many other people, are tiny flash movies that I place within an ordinary XHTML site. That way you get the benefits of free search engine traffic (because XHTML websites offer far more opportunities for search engine love than do, pure flash sites).

The product I love to use is called 3DFA. It is relatively cheap, and the interface has been improving over the years. It doesn’t take long to make a flash movie using the tools provided in 3DFA. The only disappointment is that the help is relatively terse.

That said, my advice is to spend an hour just trying to use the product.

Here is a page from a site I did for a client. The animation at the top is a flash animation made using 3DFA. The image slideshow in the bottom right, in case you want to know was achieved using this product.

Note that the curved edge to the slideshow animation was achieved by using 3DFA to create a flash mask for the slideshow.

I have a dedicated server at Rackspace for all my web sites. Rackspace are brilliant but they are expensive, and they only deal in the dedicated server market (at least at the time of writing this was so). With Rackspace I can get superior technical support 24 hours per day, on the phone or via ticketing system. I adore Rackspace. So I’m all right – what about you?

You Want Cheap, Reliable Shared Hosting . . . Don’t You?

Maybe you are just starting out, or if you just want a reliable, fully featured hosting service for your web site. What if you don’t know where to go?  You’ll need somewhere inexpensive, professionally run and well supported by people who will happily answer your questions all day long. I reearched such a host so that I can recommend them to others who want to get started online. The hosting service I recommend is Hostgator. If you are new to the web and want your own domain name and web site, then Hostgator is an excellent choice. Obviously, over time costs vary, but these people are based in the US where hosting costs tend to be cheaper than in the UK. Typically, the Baby package costs around $9.95 per month for hosting. You can buy a domain name at the same time you buy your hosting and that will be around $19.95 per year. There are cheaper places to buy a domain name, but unless you are buying hundreds of them, the ease of setup is worth doing it here in one step.

Already Have a Domain Name?

If you have already bought a domain name you can move it to Hostgator easily.  All you need to do is buy the hosting at Hostgator, and when the site asks you about a domain name you select the option ” I will use My Existing Domain and update My Nameservers only”. Next, when Hostgator send you the email containing your account details, you login into the place where you originally bought your domain name and change the names servers there to be the ones that Hostgator include in your new account email.

Don’t Yet Have a Domain Name of Your Own?

If you want to buy hosting AND a domain name, this is even simpler. Just decide on your domain name and buy Hostgator hosting. It will ask you to fill in the domain name you have chosen. IF the domain name you want is available, Hostgator will indicate this and allow you to proceed with the purchase of both the domain and hosting. If not, you’ll have to go back and try a different domain name. One thing though, it does restrict you to .com, .org, .net, .info and .biz domains.  I could not see how to buy a .co.uk domain name.   If you want a .co.uk domain name, then buy it elsewhere and then come back and buy hosting from Hostgator.

Some Reasons I Like Hostgator

• I bought a domain name and hosting for a friend on Hostgator yesterday and it was setup and running within 30 minutes.
• They have great technical support and you can access them 24/7 via the chat window or via a ticketing system. I use the chat window most often.
• Their cPanel is easy to use. So you can set up new email addresses and other technical features for yourself. If you get stuck – they will help you.
• They make website management as easy as it can be for beginners.
• Hostgator is ranked 21st out of 5000 of the fastest growing companies in the US.
• Hostgator is a transparent company – they tell you what is going on, you can read real customer reviews on their web site – nothing is hidden.
• Hostgator is brilliant for hosting WordPress blogs – get a special offer by clicking the Hostgator ad – but don’t forget to use the coupon code stated in the ad when you purchase.
• Fantastico is included so you can install scripts (like WordPress) with a couple of button clicks.

An Example of Hostgator Support

Here is a transcript of a chat session I had with Hostgator support at 6:45am (their local time) this morning. info: Please wait for a HostGator operator to respond. info: Welcome to HostGator Live Chat! You are now chatting with ‘Michael K.’ Michael K.: Welcome to HostGator Live Chat, how may I assist you? Liz: Hi Michael. I need a minute to type my question . . . hang on Liz: I have been having trouble with the contact form on my web site. The emails generated by my contact form are only getting through to my email account IF the person completing the email does not use gmail or hotmail as their return email address. Michael K.: That is strange, what are you using for the contact form? Liz: It seems like Hostgator are preventing me sending emails if they are saying they are from gmail, To see this happen, fill in the form but fill in your email address as a gmail or hotmail email address. If you do I don’t get the contact email in my inbox. If you say your email address is any other domain name (in existence or not), it reaches my inbox. Michael K.: Which mailing script are you using? Liz: I am using codeigniter – a php framework. Michael K.: And is it sending directly to the gmail address? Liz: It is using sendmail Michael K.: But it is set to send to the gmail address right? Liz: Yes – if you complete the contact form using a normal email domain address everything works. Surely it must be the server that is preventing gmail /hotmail addresses from being ‘spoofed’ Michael K.: It is probably on the gmail end, atleast that is my theory. Try creating a forwarder with us, and having that send to gmail. And set the script to send to the forwarder. Liz: I have already set up a forwarder so I could do that easily. Will you wait – or do I have to come back to you? Michael K.: Sure, I can wait. Liz: OK – I have changed the code – I’m sending a contact form now from a person with a gmail account to see if it arrives in the my gmail account. Liz: Oh my God! That worked. Please tellme how you knew that and why it made the difference? Michael K.: Because it was sending out the emails using the hotmail and gmail addresses in the “from” field, but werent coming from the hotmail and gmail ip addresses. Michael K.: Alot of email providers are setup to block that type of mail. Liz: Michael K – thanks very much. Michael K.: No problem. Thank you. Michael K.: Is there anything else I can do to help you? Liz: No – I am happy now. Thanks Bye Michael K.: Excellent, take care and have a great day! Michael K.: Thank you for using HostGator Live Chat! If you could take a minute to rate your experience with HostGator as well as my overall performance, that would help us to improve our customer service. To do that, just click the button that says “close” in the upper right hand corner. The survey takes less than a minute to fill out. Like this post? Publish It On Your Own Blog

There are so many technologies, techniques and practices to apply. You really would have to be superwoman/man to even think about incorporating them all. 

That said, today’s web page gives a great overview of some of the archtectural issues you need to include or consider when building a site.  

Not sure I agree with most of his nofollow ideas, but certainly the other items in the list are all part of basic good web building technique. Does your web site tick all ths boxes?

CodeIgniter Is A PHP Framework

• CodeIgniter is easy to use
• CodeIgniter saves time when coding PHP web applications and sites
• You don’t need a brain the size of a small planet to use it
• The forum community is very helpful and very knowledgeable
• You can install it in 3 minutes or less (I would say 1 minute, but I am allowing for those of you that might type very slowly)
• Form validation is no longer an experience only slightly better than toothache, but is truly a joy (as are many other things, but form validation is my favourite)
• CodeIgniter just works without having to fiddle about with DLLs,  rebooting servers, or weird and annoying post-installation system side effects (curable only after you’ve visited 8 different forums and googled for hours for obscure and marvellous solutions), that seem to accompany every other framework I’ve tried.

Try it – you won’t be disappointed. Well you might be disappointed if you are an evangelically purist programmer who is a stickler for coding elegance and strict adherence (punishable only by a slow and agonising death) to lots of esoteric OO rules. If that describes you, you may prefer to hand code the PHP framework yourself!

w3schools covers topics like HTML, XHTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript, PHP, ASP and SQL, but you’ll find a lot more there.

This site is a great starting point for learning to build web sites from scratch. W3Schools had over 11 million unique visitors in January this year. That is staggering.

The web site is completely free, and the site owners expect you to help them out by linking to their site from your blog, pointing out any errors you find on the site and so on. Help to keep this valuable resource free. Use it and link to it.

This means you can use unusual characters on web pages that are not found anywhere on your keyboard.

You may want to use them as bullet points on an unnumbered list tag, for example.

To use a unicode character, you can just look it up and prefix it with an ampersand, and end it with a semi-colon in order to include it in a web or blog page.

Here are some unicode character examples – these have been printed large, for clarity.

How To Embed Unicode Characters Like These, In Your Web Page

First, look up the character you need on a good Unicode Reference page.

Next, you prefix the code for te character you want with an ampersand, a hash, and the letter x, and post-fix with a semi-colon like so for example:

❤ produces ❤, and
⟿ produces ⟿

Don’t assume that just because you are using WordPress, or some other blogging tool that there are no broken links on your site.  I don’t want to sound like an ad for a shop named after Tessa Cohen, but I am assuming that removing broken links from a site is a good thing.

Google, the search engine we all rely so heavily upon, (for the moment), probably notices the number of broken links on a site and for all we know this forms part of its alogorithm for determining ranking.

Get The Free Link Sleuth Tool

Link Sleuth is a desktop application – you have to visit the author’s website, and download the installation, install it, and then run it from your computer.

All you do is provide a URL to check, and it will list all the links that lead from that main URL checking each as it goes for broken-ness.  Then it’s up to you to fix the broken links for yourself.  You of course would use Google’s Webmaster Tools to check all was well some days later.

I ran the Sleuth tool on this web site and, because I had mucked about with a couple of posts, then moved them, I had three broken links buried in the code somewhere.  Use Link Sleuth, a free tool written by Tilman Hausherr from Germany.

Tilman really doesn’t like Scientology or cults – he has long articles about these and other related subjects on his web site which you might find interesting . . .