Tyssen

Blogger is definitely the easiest to get up & running and it has a nice range of templates. Bit limited on the flexibility front. If you want more features/flexibility, Wordpress would be your next best bet. Both are free. Wordpress requires a bit more configuration and probably some knowledge of PHP would help. I wouldn't bother with any others. (Typepad is also good but you have to pay.)

I only just upgraded to broadband 2 months ago and now we've got a 1.5Mb connection and I love it!!! It's faster than the connection we've got at work.

Actually, I just learnt in another thread that this may not be as certain. Check out the discussion Brjn & I have been having on this subject.

Unless you learned HTML more than a decade ago, I doubt you know HTML 1.0. HTML 4.0 has been around since 1997. And it's not a case of having to learn it again - just a few new things here & there.

The reason I joined Xisto is the same - I'm putting together a site for my suburb's community association, a non-profit organisation. They want to build a highway through our suburb so the association really wants to be able to get info to people about what's going on. I've been working in various web-related roles for the last 7-8 years and am currently web developer/master for the company I work for. We've just bought another company so I'm redesigning their site at the moment too. I've also had my own personal sites in the past and done sites for free for friends/other people who needed them. When I get done with all the redesigns I've got on at the moment (three at present), I might get around to putting together a portfolio site for myself.

Sites I visit most are probably the ones I work on cos I'm the web developer/master for my company.Other than that I mainly check out sites to do with dance music and web design/development.http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/- to be amazed by the possibilities of designing with CSS http://alistapart.com/, http://www.zeldman.com/, http://simplebits.com/, http://www.maxdesign.com.au/ - for the latest tutorials & articles on CSS/XHTML https://csscreator.com/- for their CSS forums (always handy for sorting out problems) http://www.w3schools.com/- for reference on ASP, SQL & PHP http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/- ASP reference http://php.net/- PHP reference

Hmmm, it all seems a bit confusing at the moment - the two running parallel enabling backward & forward compatability. But it sounds like the choice of doctype you use should be determined by the type of content you intend putting on your site.

Jumped the gun a bit - forgot to set access privileges for my db. Admins/mods - feel free to delete this thread cos it's now superfluous.

I've just downloaded Wordpress 1.5.1 and uploaded all the contents to public_html and I've edited wp-config.php like so: <?php// ** MySQL settings ** //define('DB_NAME', 'myusername_dbName'); // The name of the databasedefine('DB_USER', 'myusername_dbUsername'); // Your MySQL usernamedefine('DB_PASSWORD', 'myPassword'); // ...and passworddefine('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); // 99% chance you won't need to change this value$table_prefix = 'wp_'; // example: 'wp_' or 'b2' or 'mylogin_'define ('WPLANG', '');define('ABSPATH', dirname(__FILE__).'/');require_once(ABSPATH.'wp-settings.php');?> But I'm getting Fatal error: Call to undefined function: get_bloginfo() in /public_html/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 304. I've been on the Wordpress site and there's some forum entries that refer to this but no-one's provided a solution. Some talk about problems upgrading from 1.5 but I've just started from scratch, so it can't be that. I'm relatively new to PHP & MySQL so anyone got any ideas what's wrong?

Why would you want to block other search engines from indexing your site, particularly Yahoo? Yahoo still accounts for something like 45% of all searches in the US - that's an awful lot of traffic you could be missing out on.

Unless your site is for commercial purposes and someone else using your content is harming your business, you really are wasting your time setting watermarks on all your images or trying to prevent people from right-clicking or viewing your source code. I mean: what's the point? Does it really matter that much? In 99.99% of the cases, you'll never know anyway so all you're really doing is wasting time & energy worrying about something that at the end of the day, if someone is really determined, they'll find a way around. Better off spending time actually putting useful, interesting content on your site or making it as aesthetically pleasing/user friendly as you can instead.

If you check the topic title, the program in question is Notepad++, and yes, it is a more powerful web editor than Notepad (the plain text editor) although it still doesn't have as many of the features I like to see in a text-based web editor.

Some of your links overlap slightly to the right when viewed in Firefox. Also, I don't think left-aligned images ever work very well (and they could do with a more margin/padding to push the text further away).

The java applet that loads up the news ticker on your home page caused my browser (Firefox) to grind to a half for about 2 minutes - not good. Also, you describe yourself as a programmer and talk about the site being "a valuable resource for the entire (programming) community" but there's next to no useful content. I see that some sections are still under construction so I guess that's still coming.

I got one of them emails about some guy who's got loads of money but it's all tied up and he needs your help to get the funds out of the country (he claimed he was Fillipino instead of Nigerian for a change) and asked for contact details to discuss the deal, so I sent him the phone number of the Australian Federal Police's on-line fraud deparment.

I've seen IE's market share reported as anywhere from 64-83%, but definitely not as high as 90% and falling all the time. I don't know what you're basing that assumption on, but the W3C HTML Working Group don't appear to be considering a new version of HTML. As far as I can tell (and this is what I thought was the case), HTML has been superseded by XHTML. Until this thread, I hadn't read too much up on this, but this thread has some useful info on it with both pros & cons. At the moment, it appears you are right about not all browsers interpreting XHTML properly when sent with the correct mime type, so it seems the main advantage is in 'future-proofing' your sites for when all browsers do accept application/xhtml+xml. To me, there doesn't seem to be much dispute about things going this way, so whether you do it now or some time in the future, it's still gonna need doing. To my way of thinking anyway. Aside from the technical issues, I also think using XHTML/CSS forces you to become a better web designer. I know it has for me.

A bit longer than that - the bug was first reported on May 2, but still pretty good going.

These email fraudsters have been getting increasingly sophisticated. I've had 2 HTML emails recently from banks which had all the right logos & graphics and came from what looks like an authentic email address (e.g. info@nameofthebank.com). The only thing is, I don't have accounts with those banks so knew straight away something was up. But if I was with one of those banks, there'd be no way of telling it was a fake. So best practice seems to be to view ALL emails relating to finances, banks etc with suspicion until you can prove otherwise.

That's what it says in their security bugs policy so it's not as if they've been trying to hide anything and when you think about it, it makes more sense to try & resolve a bug before it becomes widely reported because then there's less chance of unscrupulous characters taking advantage of it and using it for malicious purposes.

I've found it's generally quite useful to post a portion of your code and the full error message when asking a question of this nature. It's pretty hard to narrow it down with such limited information.

I saw this posted on another forum I use and the thread got deleted after 1 day cos the admin said the servers were taking too much of a battering. So yeah, good for users; bad for webmasters.

The more correct way of doing this would to take align="center" out of your image tag and apply it to your CSS instead:img { text-align: center; }

And what would those things be exactly? All XHTML forces you to do is mark up your document correctly - every opening tag must have a closing tag and tags/elements that became deprecated in HTML 4.0 cannot be used. The only other thing is that some tags have /> at the end of them which is not going to affect older browsers. I'm not sure what you're basing this assumption on so am viewing it with some at the moment, but I do know that IE is losing market share hand over fist to Mozilla, so if you wanna continue living in the past and coding your pages as HTML 4.0, go right ahead.

It most definitely is not the best - it produces overbloated, ugly code.

I use AceHTML 5 Freeware, a text editor from Visicom Media. Unfortunately, I don't know if you can get the freeware version anymore but I really like it cos of it's code colour-coding and extended search and replace features. It also has a handy menu for inserting HTML characters like & etc. (saves typing).