1. security
Your password is the only thing, really, which stands between your web site and anyone who might want to make malicious use of your web space. Online security is an increasingly important issue and not something which can be treated casually. For all that your little site might seem highly unimportant, you may go on to write sites for proper organisations who would feel rather aggrieved if their web site was "cracked" or otherwise accessed in an unauthorised way. So please be aware of how to pick a good password.
Advice is given on this week's handout. The most important thing to realise is that simply picking a common, or even an uncommon, real word ("learning", "newcastle", "university") is inadequate, even though you might wonder how someone could crack that. The answer is, with electronic dictionaries like those built into Word. It is not that difficult, once one's got hold of a user ID, to simply set a computer up to try every word in a dictionary as a possible password. Names are no better, particularly of people close to you - for example, this is how Matthew Broderick's character gains access to the Pentagon's war computer in the best film made about this subject, War Games.
Remember that the vast majority of cracking is done not through sophisticated "electronic burglary" tools but simply because someone's got the password. Make yours secure - follow the advice on the handout.
|
2. publication problems?
Sometimes, a site which worked perfectly on your local machine stops working when you publish it. This column notes the two main reasons why this happens: check these first.
- Have you published a site which includes drive letters in any part of the code? If so, take them out! Common places where they creep in are in src attributes in <img> tags or href attributes of various different tag types (<a>, <link> or <area> being the most common). Drive letters (C:, M: etc.) are meaningless to the reader of your site because the page is not located on their drive C:, drive M: and so on.
- More problematic is the following problem. Sometimes, and for no particular reason (Windows often does things for no particular reason), a file will be saved with UPPER CASE letters somewhere in its filename, for example: mypicture.JPG or CSS.CSS.>In your code you may have, img src="mypicture.jpg". The incompatibility here usually does not stop a web page working when you're looking at it locally, but will stop it working when the site is published. It's a very irritating quirk and one it is hard to do anything about except, after you've moved the files, to rename them on the host machine (e.g. change mypicture.JPG back to mypicture.jpg or CSS.CSS back to css.css).
ALWAYS test your site in situ, that is, type in the URL and browse the site as any other visitor would. Check as many of the links as you can, download images, and so on. Better still, do so in several different browsers, including a text-only or non-visual browser if you have access to one (and if you're wanting to be a serious web designer, you should).
|
