Craig Moran

Well, not been around for a while.

The reason being for this is the project I have been working on, now live!

.htaccess Tutorial.

Many web developers and designers have heard of this file. Sitting in the root directory of your site, this can do many things such as:

• Redirect users
• Stopping image hotlinking
• Force the www version of your site
• Much much more…

This really is an invaluable file for all webmasters.

Be sure to check out this site, all visits are appreciated.

Craig

Just a quick post to keep you all updated.

Christmas is going to be a very busy time but there are some exciting things coming to CraigMoran.co.uk in the next couple of weeks.

A very interesting and informative tutorial - can’t tell you what on yet

A couple of site reviews

More depending on what I can fit it. I will be going on vacation on the 20th-27th, and apprntly the Swiss Alps where I am staying do not have internet access, so that should be interesting.

Keep checking back for updates, and thanks for your support.

Craig M

BBC 1xtra listeners will be familiar with the name Kid Cudi, his single “Day ‘n’ Nite” has been getting a lot of airplay. Cudi is featured on the track “Welcome to Heartbreak” On Kanye West’s new album 808s and Heartbreak.

Cudi’s mixtape, “Kid Named Cudi” is available for FREE download, courtesy of clothing company 10 Deep. I strong recommend my readers to give this a listen, you will not be disappointed;).

Download is available here, enjoy.

About Conditional Comments

One of the main problems facing web designers today is getting their site to render perfectly on a wide range of browsers, and getting your site to display correctly can often involve various CSS hacks, often resulting in messy and invalid code.

An alternative method of achieving this is accomplished through detecting which browser your visitor is using, and then letting them see a version of your site specifically for that browser. There are many ways of doing this such as inserting a script into your code, which is fine, however if the rest of your site is just plain HTML, loading a scripting engine can take quite long and is unnecessary. This is where conditional comments come in.

Conditional comments give us clear advantages over scripted browser detection techniques. They allow designers and developers to fully utilise the improved features offered by today’s latest browsers, whilst still having pages that downgrade in an elegant fashion for the older browsers that are still in use.

Terminology

Downlevel browser

– Browsers earlier than Internet Explorer 5.

Uplevel browser

– Internet Explorer 5 and later, this also includes modern browsers such as Firefox.

Downlevel-hidden

– A conditional comment block ignored by downlevel browsers. Internet Explorer 5 and later versions display the content of the comment if it evaluates to be true.

Downlevel-revealed

– A conditional comment block that is displayed by downlevel browsers. Internet Explorer 5 and later versions display the content of the comment if it evaluates to be true.

Benefits of Using Conditional Comments

Low client-side impact

- When a downlevel browser encounters a downlevel-hidden comment, the browser skips the HTML inside the comment saving the client machine resources.

No script required

- Conditional comments are just plain HTML so they don’t require scripting or DHTML, meaning that no scripting engine needs to be loaded, reducing page load times.

Cross-browser

- Conditional comments were developed with Internet Explorer 5 in mind, but their use is not restricted to just Internet Explorer. They are used to customize the content displayed to browsers, IE and non-IE, whether they support conditional comments or not.

Syntax

Expressions

So, you have finalized the design of your site. Every missing end tag has been found, both your HTML and CSS validates and every critique comment has been applied. So what next…?

For a lot of people, getting your site up and running is one of the hardest and most confusing things they have to do, so let’s take a look at what exactly it is that you need to do.

1. First thing you need to do is register a Domain Name, this is the actual name of your site, eg. www.google.com. You can check that the one you want is available and purchase it from many sites such as names.co.uk and 123-reg.co.uk. If you have any trouble, all these sites have good FAQs that will give you plenty of information.
   
   Tip - choosing a domain name relevant to your site/business will help in getting good search engine results.
2. After purchasing your domain name, the next step is to choose a hosting company. In simple terms, these are huge memory banks that you rent space on to put your site online. There is an endless list of web hosts and prices you can pay depending on the features you will need. The most important things you should look for are:
   
   Disk space - This is the physical amount of space you will receive on the host’s server. The amount you will require depends on the size of your site. The most common forms of data stored are images, videos and others such as CSS and PHP files. The actual web pages do not take up much space on their own, for example, the home page of this site is less than 10 KB, (0.01 MB).
   
   Bandwidth - is another word for data transfer rate - the amount of data that can be carried from one point to another, i.e. from your host’s server to your browser. If you have a webpage which in total is 50Kb, each time a user opens this page you will use 50Kb of your bandwidth allowance. So, if you have 100 visitors per day, then each day you will use 5Mb of your allowance, equating to 150Mb a month. The good thing however, is that you can use the same image more than once, then the user only has to download this file once only, and it is saved temporarily to the user’s machine. Techniques such as using CSS Sprites will save you a lot of bandwidth.
   
   PHP/MySQL support - These allow features such as a wordpress blog, forums and much more on your site.
   
   Customer support - When the worst happens this will become the most important aspect of hosting. Have a loot around on the Internet and ask around about partiular hosts.
   
   Price - Often the biggest determiner when choosing hosting, bare in mind though that the features and support offered by a £9.99 a year host will often be not as good as the more expensive ones. Finding the right balance between the two is essential.
   
   The best thing to do is determine what features you will need, and then look around for the best deals; some good sites are dream-hosting.co.uk and fortunecity.com/.
   
   
   Tip – in a lot of hosts you really get what you pay for, a £2 a year host is cheap, but the customer service and uptime is likely to be low. Spending a bit more money on a better host will pay off in the long run.
   
   Tip – the internet is a great place to look for reviews and testimonials of hosting companies.

3. Once you have set up your domain name and assigned this to your hosting plan (your host will give you detailed individual instructions and help on how to do this), the next thing to do is to actually get your files online. The easiest way to do this is by using an FTP, that connects to your host’s server and puts your files online. My personal favourite is FileZilla, this is a very easy to use piece of software and is completely free.
   
   Tip – as long as your web page names consist of alphanumerics [0-9a-zA-Z], you can call them whatever you want. However, your homepage must be called index.(php/htm/html), as browsers recognize this as the default home page. Spaces in names are strongly advised against as some servers cannot process this.
   
   Tip – if you want to call your page “contact us” for example, it is much better to call it “contact-us” rather than “contact_us”, as these are read better by search engines.

Your site is now online. Good luck with your new website and remember to update it often. For troubleshooting any problems, there is always plenty of advice in the forums.

Well at last I’ve got this blog up and running.  This is a bit of everything blog, useful web design and development articles, tips & tricks, reviews on the latest music, software and gadgets.

I hope you enjoy what I have got to put, and I look forward to writing again

For more about me please check out the about page.

Thanks for reading

Craig