On our sister site CenterNetworks, we use the open source content management system (CMS) Drupal. I’ve used nearly every CMS package, both free and the systems costing large sums of money and Drupal is my favorite.

On CN we get hammered with spam every day. So much spam that I had to turn off comments after three months because every post (some 2000+) gets hit.

One thing I’ve noticed is that within moments of posting some new content, spams begin to come in. Not minutes, hours or days, but moments. And after doing some research into our system and into the way Drupal handles content, I’ve realized why this happens.

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I’ve recently acquired two new hosting packages; one at work and one for my hobby sites. Both packages offer me, the consumer, a great deal of control over the server. One of the things offered by both of my hosts is an SSH connection.

Now, I realize that a great deal of hosts offer SSH connections to their customers nowadays, but many will lock the client down so much within those SSH sessions, that there is no point in even logging in that way. For instance, at Netfirms, you have SSH permissions, but about the only thing you can do is log in and log back out again. You can’t list the contents of a directory, you can’t use rsync to copy files to and from remote locations, etc.

Anyway, onto the point of this article: With my newfound freedom through SSH, I needed to find a decent SSH client that I could use on my Windows machines. I did a quick search and came across PuTTY.

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Web developers attempting to build accessible websites often make the same mistakes time and time again. Although they’re trying their hardest sometimes their overzealousness gets in the way and actually hinders the accessibility of their websites.

The below 10 guidelines tell you what not to do, so you too don’t fall foul to these same common accessibility errors…

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The other day, I discovered a minor inconvenience in the way MS Access handles the “Yes/No” (or boolean) data type.

You should be aware, when working with MS Access, that any “Yes/No” field in your table can only accept boolean true and boolean false (or “true” and “false”, “yes” and “no”, 1 and 0, etc.). It will not accept NULL.

Standard programming practice is, when there is not a “default” value for a field, to insert NULL if the user does not explicitly declare a value. Unfortunately, the fact that Access throws an error if you try to insert NULL into a “Yes/No” field really puts a damper on that logic.

As the title says, this is just a quick warning for people that may be using MS Access for their databases. I’m not sure if the same is true for MS SQL or not, but it’s obviously a non-factor with MySQL, since MySQL doesn’t offer a boolean data type.

The more we rely upon CSS, the larger and more complex stylesheet files become. Planning and organising your stylesheet is essential to creating a lean, manageable website. There are many ways of organising CSS code but the following are best practice…

Comment your stylesheet

Commenting your stylesheet makes it much easier to find the information or the commands you’re looking for.

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After my unfortunate adventures with the bandwidth limitations of my Internet connection, I decided to search the Web for some sort of utility that would help me monitor and hopefully limit my downloads and uploads.

While I didn’t find anything that would actually limit my downloads and uploads (no utilities that would temporarily disable my Internet connection if I got close to my limits), I did find a really nice utility for monitoring my connection.

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AJAX or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is an innovative way of using existing technologies to create highly interactive web applications. AJAX allows portions of the page to be updated without having to refresh and reload the entire page. It can increase site performance significantly and provide cutting edge user interfaces. Unfortunately it can also be a source of concern for delivering fully accessible web sites.

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Dallas Freeman has a post today describing a variety of CSS coder levels. Which one do you most closely resemble?

I would say that I am between a 4 and a 5. Here is the spec for a CSS Coder Level 4:

I have designed and coded a large number of CSS web sites. I can convert a design from any format into a CSS layout: Photoshop, Illustrator, napkin drawings, etc.

• I am completely comfortable writing and editing CSS by hand.
• I have a strong understanding of the cascading part of CSS. Particularly how some some CSS properties do, some don’t, and some depend on how the value is declared.
• I have a solid understanding of cross-browser CSS. I know how to use browser specific CSS statements and delclare browser specific stylesheets.
• I know and have tried some CSS hacks and understand the advantages and disadvantages of using them.
• I have a strong understanding of the different sizing values available in CSS (e.g. em, px, %, pt, “small”, etc.) and in what situations each make the most sense.
• I can quickly troubleshoot and solve CSS problems.
• I have a great collection of tools and resources at my disposal for inspiration, debugging, or reference.

I’ve seen a lot of articles on the Internet explaining how to export a page to Excel using VBScript. Unfortunately, they all seem to have problems in their methodology.

Many of the articles are helpful, but they don’t seem to include all of the information you need in order to export HTML content successfully from a VBScript page into an Excel document.

I’ve finally found a method to successfully export my data to Excel, and I hope it will help some of you, too.

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