Archive for August, 2009
(Please forgive me, but the posting and examples to follow rely heavily on Windows and Internet Explorer. (You can substitute Apple and Linux applications for most.)
Your web browser is a very powerful tool. It enables you to view many different types of files from within the framework of the browser.
For an example:
You can go to www.weuntangle.com/index.html and view my home page. This is expected, as it is a web page after all.
Now go here: www.weuntangle.com/examples/test.xls you will find that as long as you have Excel installed on your computer and are using Internet Explorer, you will be able to view this document “In Browser”
Your browser is capable of some terrific things. But it’s most primitive function is to show web pages, with all their links and pictures. Here is your most basic of web pages:
<html>
<head> </head>
<body> </body>
</html>
This bit of HTML scripting is very simple. Here are the components:
<html> </html>
This “tag” tells your browser that it is displaying an “html” document.
<head></head>
This tag is where bits of scripting and other tags go that pertain to background information for the browser. For instance you can place a <title> </title> tag in the <head> section and put a title at the top of the browser window.
<body> </body>
This section is where all the content of your page goes.
Now, the fun part. Open “Notepad” and type whatever comes to mind, once completed, save the document on your desk top. Name it “mypage.txt”
Close Notepad and return to you desk top. You should see you new document sitting there. If your desktop looks like mine, you may need to hunt for it.
Now that you see it, double click on it to open it again. What application is used? Notepad of course. Now close Notepad again. This time right click on mypage.txt and select rename on the menu that appears. In the box below your file rename it mypage.htm and hit enter. Windows will try to cover it’s backside by warning you that you could make this file unusable by doing this, but it’s ok. Click “Yes” and lets move on with our experiment.
With that done you should see the Icon that represents your file change to look like your default browser’s icon – that’s what we want, give it the old double click and watch what happens….
WOW! You just created a web page (OK an extremely mal-formed web page.) and without the taggings and sections we looked at earlier. This is because windows has associated the .htm (and .html) extensions to your browser and your browser is so nice that it is going to try and display the file no matter what. Remember that .xls file you opened earlier? Try this:
www.weuntangle.com/examples/test.htm (with Firefox it may complain before opening it)
Ugh! What a mess. What you just open is actually the Excel spreadsheet renamed with the .htm extension, but your browser tried very hard to display the file, simply because you told it to.
We are going to use the browsers ability to render pages to our advantage. The browser is very forgiving when it comes to webpage content, so it will try to render whatever is passed to it if it is named with an .htm or .html extension.
All this being said, Please take the time to learn html (or better yet xhtml) it will serve you well as you take on this serverless intranet project with me.
Note: you may belong to a company that has also locked down the types of files you can attach to emails. If this is the case you can sometimes rename your html and javascript files something like this:
Html file name:
mypage.htm
Renamed for emailing:
mypage.txt
When you later detach the file you will need to change the name back so you can use it.
Next up Javascript 101
Posted in 
Wow! I got my first two comments on my blog! And it’s only been 5 days that my site has been up….
Hmmm, Being the MAJOR skeptic that I am, I began looking at this simple comment that was left for one of my articles, it was left by someone calling him/herself GlenStef:
“Not sure that this is true:), but thanks for a post.”
Now this comment in particular was not all that funky, nor did it stand out as a particularly off topic thought. It was actually the fact that I had only just opened my site and had done NO advertising. The post that was being commented on had only been there a very short time. So my radar went off and I went over to our friend Google to do a little digging, here’s what I found:
- Mister GlenStef has a lot of accounts in some extremely diverse blogs
- Mister GlenStef has only a few things to say
- Greatings, Ugh, I liked! So clear and positively.
- yourSiteNameHere.com – da best. Keep it going!
- Hello, Thank you! I would now go on this blog every day!
- Everything dynamic and very positively!
(even the smiley showed up in every place posted.) - Not sure that this is true:), but thanks for a post. (Hey! that’s the one I got.)
Looking at this next one, I don’t think it’s from the same spamming bot because I didn’t see it posted from GlenStef and it was more complex, but I did see it on several blogs when I was researching this:
- I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
- Mister GlenStef appears to have many pseudonyms:
- Elcoj – on several sites
- Streightepale
- Eremeeff
- AlexAxe (The site I got this one from was a veritable cornucopia of spam comments)
- etc. etc. etc…
All these are marks of a robot in action. Why go to the trouble of making all these posts? It’s a thing called search engine result placement. Most of these blogs include a link of some sort back to the commenter’s “Home page” the more links to a URL you can get in the most number of diverse places, the more a search engine will view that link as relevant. All those links will (so the thought is) bump the URL up the Search Engine result list, putting more money in the spammers pocket.
As you can probably tell I am new to this whole Blog thing. Perhaps even naive, I don’t know, but I feel there has got to be some way to curtail these robotic spam comments. On the other hand do I really want to? Do all these spam postings from other sites make my article more meaningful on the search engines?
I was surprised to find that it wasn’t just the small little guys like me who were getting these posts and letting them through. Check out the policy blog site for Intel and you will find our friend GlenStef telling them the same thing he told me… I guess I’m in good company:
If you want to see more of this stuff, go to Google and search on “GlenStef” and “Not sure that this is true:), but thanks for a post”
I think I’ll spend some more time with this subject in the future, til then, enjoy.
Update: Here is a nice link you can follow for more information and some tips on preventing this kind of spam from messing up your blog: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_in_blogs