The web is primarily viewed through the computer screen, but sometimes it’s helpful to print longer articles. For anything longer than a few screens, I prefer to read a printed copy. Many sites will provide a “printer-friendly” version of each page through a special link. But, you can do the same thing with cascading stylesheets (CSS), providing both on-screen and printed presentations of each page automatically. This article is a brief explanation of adding support for print stylesheets through CSS. General Steps Assuming your web site is already using CSS, adding support for print is pretty straightforward: Decide where the…
I just reconfigured my Movable Type blog to use cruft-free URLs. The basic premise is to clean up your URL scheme by removing non-essential information, thus ensuring that your links will live on in the future as you evolve with different web publishing tools and technologies. In my case, I also wanted to change from my old method of daily archives (one file per calendar day, including one or more posts) to individual archives (one post per file). Among other benefits, this should help with search ability of the site because the entry post will be the same as the…
I continue to get a fair number of web server “404 Not Found” errors on my site (caused by users requesting documents that aren’t found). I strive to minimize such errors when making changes to the site, so normally I read through the server logs to find anything that needs to be fixed. To make this process easier, I recently installed a custom 404 error handler in PHP based on Harold Bakker’s Mail on 404 script. This script will send you an e-mail message anytime a 404 error is generated on the server. I modified it slightly to also send…
Anand Lai Shimpi (founder and chief of AnandTech) has started a weblog (RSS Feed). Subscribed. AnandTech is a great resource for PC hardware reviews, especially for the do-it-yourself PC builders out there. (Which reminds me, I really need to build a new PC. Still getting some use out of my Celeron 300 system with Windows 98, but it's really pathetic.) AnandTech also has two other RSS feeds for Articles and News.
Mike Gunderloy (Larkware) has a good series of articles giving advice for writers. So far there are three installments: Part 1: Writing Articles Part 2: Structuring Articles Part 3: Book Contracts Mike's site is a good resource for Windows development and network information. I subscribe to his full-text RSS feed to keep up-to-date. Update 2003-09-01: Two more parts have been written and a new index page has been created for all of the short articles.