Incidentally, our nameservers are ns1.leadingedgehosting.co.uk & ns2.leadingedgehosting.co.uk

This post will show you how to set up your DNS so you can have ns1.yourdomain.com & ns2.yourdomain.com whatever your web hosts nameservers are.

We use the Plesk control panel so I’m going to demonstrate how to do this using that, but in principle, as long as you have access to your own DNS records you should be able to do this using any control panel.

Step 1.

Create two new A-records on your nameservers for your domain as follows:

These should point to your nameserver IPs.

Step 2.

Register your Glue records with your domain registrar. They will ask you for the IP addresses of your nameservers, these should match your IPs as set up above, and that’s it.

Your domain registrar may have the facility to register Glue records via their control panel, but many don’t, so you may have to email them.

Now you should be able to have ns1.yourdomain.com and ns2.yourdomain.com and use your web hosting companies nameservers as if they were your own!

However, the principles on which this new framework are built sound very enticing:

When you program in Cappuccino, you don’t need to concern yourself with the complexities of traditional web technologies like HTML, CSS, or even the DOM. The unpleasantries of building complex cross browser applications are abstracted away for you

They also go on to talk about how you integrate your applications with desktop applications and go on to demonstrate the first major application developed using Cappuccino 280 slides even allows you to import powerpoint presentations directly from powerpoint – that’s cool!

I want to write more on this, so I’m going to test it out and come back to you.

For example, I seem to get this a lot, you build a website using a Strict XHTML doctype and then clients start to ask you to put popup links in (target=”_blank”) now we all know that this goes against the strict doctype and doesn’t validate, but when I object to my clients, well, they still want this feature.

On reflection perhaps it’s not such a bad thing anyway, a lot of times a link will open a pdf and lots of users close the window expecting to return to their web browser, but actually end up closing their browser altogether.

Instead of putting the focus on web developers, perhaps we should ban these browser add-ins as a worse barrier to usability than target=”_blank” links, which in this example may improve usability…

I know I can switch to the transitional doctype to get round this, but generally I’d prefer not to have to.

I also understand that XHTML was developed to work across a number of applications / devices and therefore target=”_blank” may not be great for pdas or mobile phones, but neither is a pdf document which most mobile phone users can’t (yet) open.

I make a lot of websites, and I know HTML 4 & XHTML pretty damn well, but I can’t fathom the W3C definition of the <address> tag.

I quote:

The <address> tag defines contact information for a document or a section.

Tips and Notes

Note: The <address> tag should NOT be used as describing a postal address, unless it is a part of the contact information.

So what is it for then? Mostly when I have an address it’s for post; I quite like being contacted by post.

Are they saying don’t use it for addresses?

Can anyone clear this up for me?

I’m regularly called upon to build shops, or very simple CMS systems with image upload facilities. This is fine, no complaints about that, but when you’re creating a CMS with image uploads, you always need to handle what happens when your user doesn’t upload an image – or what happens if an image is deleted.

Now I know it’s trivial to create an if statement to conditionally show an image or not, but it would be even more trivial if we could just add another attribute to X/HTML <img> tags to allow specifying an alternative image if no image is available. I know we already have the alt tag, to show text or help users with screen readers, but how about something like altimg=”image.gif” as a new attribute?  Then you could just set it up once and everytime an image tag is loaded without a src=”" attribute, or the file specified by the src=”" attribute is missing you have a fallback image.

It would mean marginally less typing for me, potentially saving me from the devastating effects of RSI! It could also result in a slightly better end-user experience abolishing those nasty placeholders in IE (and firefox if you have that setting switched on.

Perhaps this has already been suggested elsewhere, I don’t know, and to be honest I haven’t really followed the HTML 5 development so far, so if this (or something similar) is already in there a) please let me know b) great.

<link href="" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="" />

but since we’re already using starting to use robots.txt files to reference our sitemaps like so:

Sitemap: <sitemap_location>

why not use it to reference our RSS feeds as well? It would be trivial do something like this in a sitemap:

RSS: <feed_location>

Thoughts anyone?

When specifying pixel dimensions in html attributes e.g. width=”200px” in an html email, drop the units – width=”200″ since for some reason Outlook 2007 doesn’t support the units.

Nice rendering engine MS…

If I’d known this stuff when I first started to design databases for web applications, I think it would have helped me a lot, these are not necessarily ‘formal recommendations’ or even what some people might call ‘best practice’, but these rules work for me when I’m designing my web applications. It makes development quicker, because I don’t have to think about the names of my columns and tables when I’m writing code.

So with that in mind, these are my ‘rules’ for database design:

1. Name everything in lowercase, that means table names, column names, everything!
2. always use the plural for table names
3. always use singular for columns names
4. always name primary key ‘index’ fields ‘id’ this prevents any issues with the name ‘index’
5. always name your database columns using something that accurately describes the content of the column e.g. email, first_name, last_name, tel

Short and sweet, but these rules stand me in good stead these days.

On a similar topic, and equally useful, use a database administration tool, like MySQLAdministrator since it’s so much faster than installing old faithful PhpMyAdmin. Don’t get me wrong PhpMyAdmin is still great, and I still use it a lot, but when I can get away with it MySQLAdministrator is just so much faster for creating databases tables.

This simple script normally returns the full Linux path to your files, e.g.

/var/www/vhosts/leadingedgescripts.co.uk/httpdocs/

Simply create a PHP file with the following contents:

<?php

echo getcwd();

?>

Copy it to your PHP enabled server (using FTP/SFTP etc) and visit it in your web browser.

This tidbit of information can be very useful when configuring a website on a new server.