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<p style="color:#FFF;font-weight:bold;background:#FFC000;padding:1em 1ex;text-shadow:0 0 3px #000">Notice! As of 2008, I am no longer updating my site guide (these pages). It was a good idea, but never really took off (I’m too lazy, and now everyone just uses Wordpress anyway)… I may come back to it some day, or I may not (now that it’s 2012, I’d say it’s safe to say I won’t come back to it)… Currently, I’m putting anything new like this on my <a style="color:inherit" href="http://www.hardanswers.net" title="Hard Answers Website"><em>hard</em>answers</a> site.</p>
<h1>Welcome to my Site Guide.</h1>
<p>I’ve been playing around with web sites, <acronym title="Hyper Text Markup Language (and a file extension)">HTML</acronym>, <acronym title="eXtensible Markup Language">XML</acronym>, <acronym title="Cascading Style Sheet">CSS</acronym>, <acronym title="PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (HTML-embedded scripting language)">PHP</acronym>,
JavaScript and all the other technologies that come with a web site, for a while
now – it’s something of a hobby. As my sites have grown slowly more complex,
I’ve had to work out more advanced ways to do the things I need. Sometimes,
it has been quite difficult to find information explaining what I want to do,
so I thought I’d explain the techniques I’ve used, for the benefit of anyone
else who might be trying to do the same things I’ve done.</p>
<p>So, if you’ve been trying to do any of the below, here is how I’ve done it.</p>
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<li><a href="hotlink-prevention" title="Hotlink Prevention">Hotlink Prevention</a><br />
Ever had someone include an image from your site, into his or her site,
and use up all your (expensive) bandwidth? Here’s a technique that prevents
anyone from viewing files linked directly to your site, unless they’ve already
visited your site. </li>
<li><a href="caching" title="Caching">Caching</a><br />
There’s a lot of information out there explaining how to prevent browsers
and caches from caching your dynamic content – but precious little explaining
how to allow them to. Caching has the ability to save you money (by lowering
your data transfers) and make your site appear faster and more responsive.
Here’s how. </li>
<li>Static and Persistent <acronym title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</acronym>’s
(<em>Coming Soon</em>) <br />
Links should be something that’s static, something that won’t change.
Links like <a href="http://nedmartin.org/default?this=that&that=9dd4e461268c8034f5c8564e155c67a6" title="Bad Link">http://nedmartin.org/default?this=that&that=9dd4e461268c8034f5c8564e155c67a6</a> not
only look bad and are impossible to remember, but they’re often not followed
by search engines. How much better is <a href="http://nedmartin.org/default.html" title="Better Link">http://nedmartin.org/default.html</a> or,
even better, <a href="http://nedmartin.org/default" title="Best Link">http://nedmartin.org/default</a>?
Here’s how you can make your links look (and work) like this.</li>
<li><a href="templates" title="Templates">Templates</a><br />
As anyone who has tried to maintain a site of any size will know, clever
use of templates greatly reduces the time and complexity involved in updating
something that appears on every single page – or even the look and feel of
the whole site. Nearly all my sites use the same template system, which allows
the basic content to be generated easily, by anyone, as plain <acronym title="Extensible Hypertext Markup Language">XHTML</acronym>,
using anything from a text editor through to Dreamweaver – but displays it
consistently when viewed online. Here’s how I did it.</li>
</ul>
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<p>I hope it’s of help to someone.</p>
<p> Please feel free to <a href="contact" title="Contact Me">contact me</a> should
you have any suggestions. Note, though, that I am busy, and I can’t build
your site for free. </p>
<p> </p>
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Last updated Wednesday, 11 June 2014