Yeah, yeah. Don’t use tables. Blah blah blah. Use CSS and all that. CSS can be a pain at times (especially if you want it to work in Internet Explorer…), but it works really well…when it works. Really, if you’re making a new layout, use CSS. Here are some really cool CSS-based layouts. Inspire yourself.

• MediaTemple - This web host has a really cool and professional layout. They’ve got a black header with shiny black “plastic” tabs. Drop-down menus come out from the tabs and the links in them are highlighted with a cool rounded-blue image. See for yourself.
• Ars Technica - “The Art of Technology” is this tech blog’s tagline. Their layout is even better than their tagline. The header is a nice red, with navigational tabs along the bottom. Below that, it looks like the designer is a fan of cubism. Everything is in a box. It works well though, and is surprisingly well organized.
• DHTMLSite - A spartan layout with a navigation bar at the top. The logo is right at the top of the left-hand column. Even though the layout is lightweight, it still looks crowded.
• Wordpress.org - Not to be confused with Wordpress.com (the blog host), this is the site where you download the real Wordpress software (which is grwat by the way). The layout is reminiscent of a newspaper, being a light white-grey with black text and horizontal lines. Nice and uncluttered, it still looks great.
• Good-Tutorials - Their layout changes too often, unfortunately (a couple of times a year it seems). The current one is well designed, featuring blue gradients, tan, and white very well. Uncluttered and well though-out, it’s pretty good for a tutorial site.
• The Leaky Cauldron - Prepare to be blown away. This layout is all CSS and images. Easily edging out the Table-based Mugglenet.com which has a black background too), this is easily the best-designed Harry Potter site. That’s not an easy goal either, there are some amazing lesser-known ones. The Leaky Cauldron is the biggest HP site on the web (getting over 100,000 unique visitors a day). The layout is amazing, and AJAX is used quite well.
• Feedo Style - ORANGE! Amazingly it’s not that hard on the eyes, andi t’s not that dreaded “Safety Orange” either. Horizontal navigation, one-column content, not too bad. The diagonal-line-gradient on the background is a nice touch as well.
• Digital Web Magazine - Nice and clean. Blues, tan, white, etc. There’s a refreshing lack of advertisements as well.
• PotterCast - Considering it’s a sub-site of the Leaky Cauldron, I’d expect no less. Probably the best layout I’ve seen on a podcast site so far, it looks very unique (without being totally off-the-wall).
• YouTube - Airy (read: no visible lines around the edges), it looks very much like a Google site (despite not starting out as one).
• PC World - Hmmm. Reminds be of Ars Technica a little… It looks different in several ways though. It’s a bit heavy, clocking in at 74 settings on 56k and 12 on a T1. Reds, greays, and white again. It’s very dynamic, and much more cluttered than Ars Technica.
• Digg - Digg… Take a look at it yourself. The header’s the main part, and the lower segments are just divided by lines and padding. The header conveys an amazing array of information and navigation.

Is OpenID The Way To Go?

It’s an interesting concept, but with recent developments, it may not be the way to go.

In case you didn’t already know, OpenID is a decentralized identity service. Basically it lets you login to any OpenID-capable site with the same credentials. Your login data isn’t tied to one huge corporation though (in theory). You register and OpenID with an “OpenID Provider”, basically a website that stores all your login credentials and processes requests from other sites. Anyone can become an OpenID Provider.

The major advantage of OpenID is you get one “username” (more of a URL) that you use on any OpenID-ready site.

One thing I’m not a huge fan of is the way you login to an OpenID-ready site. Registration couldn’t be simpler. Just hit register and provide your OpenID. You’ll be redirected to your OpenId Provider’s site, where you’ll have to give the new site permission to use your OpenID by entering a username and password. Can you guess how you login? You head over to your OpenID Provider’s website (like www.myopenid.com) and enter a username and password. Yournow logged in to OpenID. Now to login to an OpenID-capable site, just enter your OpenID URL (which looks like http://you.yourprovider.com). You’ll jump over to your Provider, where you’ll enter your password. Having entered the password, you’ll bounce back to the page you where on previously, now logged in. The major advantage of OpenID is you get one “username” (more of a URL) that you use on any OpenID-ready site. Personally I think the whole process is a little clumsy and needs work. It’s an interesting concept, though.

What are these “recent developments” that make OpenID less of a good idea?

• AOL has an OpenID tied to every account.
• Microsoft is doing the same as AOL.
• Microsoft is trying to “integrate OpenId into Vista” (uh oh).

Those huge corporations will likely try to take the Open out of OpenID. They will struggle to become the largest Provider, and etc etc. Microsoft is trying to “integrate OpenID into Vista”? That can’t be good.

Let me point something out. If someone gets your OpenID password, they instantly have access to every OpenID-ready site you use. “Oooh, a credit card number.”? You don’t want that to happen, do you? OpenID must not be used with sites that store credit card numbers. OpenID makes it easier for crackers to get access to your stuff. All they need to do is get login data from one site, and they have access to everything. If Microsoft is integrating OpenID into Vista (probably with a patch or Service Pack), then we can assume that Vista will be storing your OpenId URL and password so that it can log you in easier. Does that sound like a good idea to you? Given Microsoft’s reputation for security…

If someone gets your OpenID password, they instantly have access to every OpenID-ready site you use.

But having huge corporations “getting into the OpenID business” isn’t good. It all helps them in their quest to conquer the internet. So these companies will have control of the systems that let people log in to tons of sites on the web. They could block sites, for example. Say AOL doesn’t want you to use a site that competes with one of their services, they just stop their OpenID’s from contacting the sites servers and… Do you get the message? These companies will do anything to totally rules the web. Look at Yahoo. They’re buying sites up and integrating them into their main site (Del.icio.us, Flickr, etc). I’m guessing they’ll be an OpenID provider soon. Have you heard of “Yahoo Brand Universe”? Basically they’re trying to take on fan sites like The Leaky Cauldron, or other somewhat smaller sites (Leaky isn’t that small. They get over 100,000 unique users a day). Here’s an article about Brand Universe. Sounds like they want to take over the web, doesn’t it? They want to attempt to put fan sites out of business. It’s to late to do that to Harry Potter, though. Fan sites like Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet have huge followings, then there are smaller fan sites fitting into Harry Potter niche markets (like The Site of Requirement).

If AOL, MSN, and possibly Yahoo are OpenID providers, what’s to stop them from buying up the smaller providers in their attempts to become the biggest provider? Nothing.

If AOL, MSN, and possibly Yahoo are OpenID providers, what’s to stop them from buying up the smaller providers in their attempts to become the biggest provider? Nothing. If AOL said they’d pay you $3 million for your OpenID-providing site, you’d have a lot of trouble resisting that much money, wouldn’t you. It will happen.

That’s why I’m not a huge OpenID fan. I like the concept, but it’s going to blow up in everyone’s face. That’s why I’m taking a different approach in NTugo, a new site I’m working on. I’m thinking of having OpenId’s working in tandem with NTugo Accounts, so you’ll be able to login with a username and password or an OpenID. An NTugo Account will optionally have an OpenID tied to it so you can login either way. Suppose one of those corporate OpenID’ers decides to block OpenID logins to NTugo (supposing NTugo got big enough for it to matter). A user could just login with a username and password instead. If they still want to use OpenID with NTugo, they could proceed to their profile page and bind an OpenId from a different provider to the NTugo account. Good idea, or what?

Hmmm. Maybe go and see what you have to do to become an OpenId provider….

Is it really possible to get free web hosting without looking unprofessional? Yes! You can actually find a web host with the following:

• 200MB (or more) of storage
• 5GB (or more) bandwidth
• PHP
• MySQL
• cPanel
• NO ADS
• etc

How can Geocities get away with giving you that horrible package full of annoying ads? They market the heck out of their service, and assume you won’t know what else you can get. Even their paid hosting is way overpriced (check out 1and1).

You can run a website for only $7/year if you try hard enough. Buy a domain name from 1and1.com for $7/yr and grab some free hosting (1and1 also has some nice bargain-priced hosting in the $3/mo range that surpasses the quality of most free hosts).

Where can you get good free hosting? Here are a few places to check out.

• Awardspace
• Cybertoad Networks
• EJ.AM

There are also a few free hosting directories where you can find more.

• FreeWebSpace.Net
  
• GoFreeHost
• Webhosts4Free
• Free Web Hosting List
• Top Free Web Hosting

Give free hosting a try. It’s great for running small to medium sites/blogs. If you outgrow it you can always move to a cheap paid host. I’ve successfuly run websites off free hosting (until the sites outgrew the hosts). No one guessed that I wasn’t on a paid host (though the frequent downtimes on one of then could’ve tipped people off).

You’ve seen URLs like www.areallylongdomainname.com/2007/03/13/a-page-with-a-long-name/ before, right? Now if you wanted to mention that during a podcast (or email, or something) you’d sound really stupid trying to read out that long address. Not to mention people won’t be able to remember it (writing it down could be hard too). The solution? A URL shortener. You’ve probably seen ones like www.tinyurl.com before. They spit out a cryptic (but short) URL like http://tinyurl.com/2r75b4. There’s a better alternative, though. Those of you who do podcasts, or other sites where short URLs are necessary.

Shorty is a PHP/MySQL-based script that allows you to run your own URL shortener on your domain. You can easily turn URLs like www.areallylongdomainname.com/2007/03/13/a-page-with-a-long-name into www.yourdomain.com/go/longurl. Magazines like PCWorld do this all the time to save space in their magazines. If you read PCWorld you’ll often see addresses that look like find.pcworld.com/45678 (or something like that). Shorty allows you to do the same. It’s really useful in podcasts (as I’ve already said twice).

Shorty can generate URLs that identify the target site with an alphanumeric code, a custom string of text (my favorite), or a couple other options. Another bonus is not relying on tinyurl’s servers (if they go down, so does your redirection).

Hey, it’s free. If you don’t like it, delete it.

Need a layout for a website, but don’t want to design it yourself? Go with a premade template. You can modify it until it’s unrecognizable in less time than it would take to start from scratch. A couple hours versus a whole day. Here are some good places to get templates (in no particular order).

• Templates Box
  
• Zeroweb
• Open Source Web Design
• OpenWebDesign
• Zymic
• WebDesignHelper
• Layouts4Free.com

As a Firefox user (get Firefox if you haven’t already!!!), I have collected a ton of Add-ons for my browser. They range in usefulness from “barely used” all the way to “totally useful and essential”. Here are my favorites (in no particular order):

1. Colorzilla - Allows you to retrieve a hexadecimal color code for any color on any website using an “eyedropper” tool.
2. Google Notebook - Allows you to save scraps of text and URLs to Google’s servers for later retrieval.
3. IE View - I don’t really care for IE Tab.I prefer IE View. What this useful plugin does is it adds an option to your context menu that opens the current page (or targetted link) in Internet Explorer (luckily I’m finding this less useful ).
4. MeasureIt - Webmasters will find this one useful. Activate this and you can measure the pixel dimensions of anything on any page. Unbelievably useful.
5. Remove It Permanently - Make anything you don’t like vanish from any online page. It won’t be back (unless you want it again).
6. Scrapbook - Save a copy of any webpage to your computer with this useful extension.
7. SEOpen - Check PageRank, backlinks, alexa rank, anything about any website.
8. Stylish - Don’t like Google’s white background? Tired of all that orange on CNet? Try Stylish, a Firefox add-on that allows you to apply custom CSS stylesheets to any page on the web.
9. Web Developer - A webmaster’s ultimate browser toolbar. You can do an insanely huge amount of things that will be useful during the development of a web site. A couple examples are resizing the window to a precise size, disabling CSS or JavaScript, validating your code, etc. One of the best Firefox Add-ons ever.
10. Dummy Lipsum - I don’t use this one too often. When building a web layout it’s often useful to generate some meaningless “dummy text” (often resembling “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…”) to fill out content areas. This add-on generates dummy paragraphs and lists for you.

That’s all, folks. Happy browsing!

Thinking of starting a blog? If so, you’re probably trying to decide what system to use to run it. I’d say the top two are Blogger (blogger.com) and Wordpress (wordpress.org. Blogger is mainly a pre-hosted service that stores all your stuff on Google’s servers. Not a bad arrangement, unless you want more control over everything (you know who you are). Wordpress is a set of PHP scripts you upload to your web host and follow some instructions to install it (it’s pretty easy and only takes 10 minutes or so). “Wordpress.com” is a service that gives you a limited Wordpress blog that’s hosted by someone else (sort of like the Wordpress version of Blogger). I don’t recommend this, unless you are unable to install Wordpress (if your host has Fantastico it can do it for you in 30 seconds by the way). If that’s the case, you may prefer Blogger anyway. I like the look and feel of Wordpress and it’s added power. I may move this blog over to a Wordpress setup eventually (keeping the same address, or course — you’ll barely notice a difference). One cool feature of Wordpress is a “Blog Importer”. If your blog used to be on Blogger or another service, Wordpress can import all your old posts and stuff. Cool or what? Well, enough ranting, it’s time for the Head to Head.

Blogger
Okay, first up is Blogger, Google’s offering.

Blogger has a nice feature set, but doesn’t clutter things or make itself hard to use. It’s a great introductory blogging system, letting you host your blog on Google’s servers or partially on your own. You can use either a subdomain resembling you.blogspot.com or point your own domain at the blog. The template system used since it’s launch in 1999 is amazing. You can install a new design just by pasting some text into a box, or by using one of the included ones in the template gallery. Making your own doesn’t take much beyond basic HTML and CSS knowledge either. You can still use that great template system or the new “layouts feature” that allows you to modify one of the several included designs just by dragging and dropping. Unfortunately this makes it harder to code your own new design. You can use either of the methods, since Blogger understands both. Comments, feeds, posting by email, multiple authors, and lots of other useful features are supported as well. Blogger’s pretty good, especially for the novice user (even if you have plenty of web experience, you may like Blogger).

Wordpress
Now it’s time for Wordpress, the option for those who want absolute control of everything.

If Blogger has a “nice” feature set, Wordpress’s is spectacular. You can separate your posts into categories, write static pages (an about page is a good example), you can easily manage a blogroll, etc. You can configure virtually anything if you want to. The templates used for Wordpress are available all over the web (just Google “wordpress theme”). They’re not quite as easy to make as Blogger ones, though you have a lot more you can do. It’s best to create a web layout first, then start template-itizing it with Wordpress’s “template tags”. Wordpress requires having a place to host it (with PHP and MySQL support). You can get such hosting for as little as $2.99/month. That price includes your own domain too. I like Wordpress a lot, it’s not quite as easy to use as Blogger, but it’s easy nonetheless. I highly recommend Wordpress, but NOT the service known as wordpress.com (it’s practically useless unless you want to pay them for “premium services”).

Conclusion
I highly recommend either Blogger or Wordpress for anyone wanting to start a blog. Blogger is great for people who are just getting started with Blogging and don’t know much about the inner workings of the web, while Wordpress is great for more experienced people. If you can set up a Wordpress blog (or if you know someone who can set it up for you), you’ll definitely not outgrow it when your blog becomes popular.

There are forums, blogs, webmail scripts, an more. What’s wrong with that? They ALL use their own database table to store login information. So if a webmaster runs a website that has a forum and other 3rd party scripts that require users to login, you’ll have to make your users sign-up and login for who knows how many scripts. It’s getting to be ridiculous. As a user, do you want to have to register to post comments, register to use a forum, etc all for ONE website? I didn’t think so, especially in an age where most sign-ups require email activation - which means heading over to your email client again. No, it’s not good. What can be done about it though? I believe that a standard login protocol needs to be developed. A database structure that stores login information that any script on the same server can access. That way your forum, blog, and CMS all work with the same login data. It would be extremely hard to set something like that up on your own. You’d be better off writing your own forum and CMS code rather than using 3rd party scripts. It doesn’t even require much development. All that needs to be done is the following:

1. Someone needs to find a MySQL database structure that will fit most applications.
2. This standard needs to gain a following of developers so as to make the standard, well, standard.
3. Major scripts would need to be rewritten to use the standard.

Simple in theory, but not in practice.

I think a good system would be to have a database with the table userAuth in it. This table would have the columns userID, userName, userPass, userEmail, userActivated, userBanned, and userJoinedDate. If a script needed more information stored it would have another table created and match up the data with the userID (which is not null and auto_increment‘ed). This system should work for most applications.

People need to stop trying to keep users on their sites. Take a look at about.com, Netscape’s new “Digg Clone”. Those two sites are especially bad. If you click an outbound link, it opens up with a frame floating up at the top. They’re obviously trying to get people to stay on the site (and make more $$$ of their ads). Okay, if I want to stay on the site, I’ll open the new page in a different tab with a click of that handy middle-mouse-button. And don’t forget all those sites (literally millions of ‘em) that open outbound links in a new windows (aaarg!). I don’t mind it as much now that I set Firefox to open new windows in new tabs instead, but I still prefer to be the one making the decision, not some webmaster who thinks their site is the best one on the web. [admit it, this one is. :-)] It’s a useless effort to try to keep your users from leaving. If they want to leave, they will. Your annoying schemes will only irritate them and help them decide not to come back. With the invention of tabbed-browsing, it’s insanely easy to manage multiple pages and keep the previous site open if you wish. It’s time to abandon old practices and let the users decide.

Script.aculo.us has got to be my favorite JavaScript library! Just FTP a few files to your web server and included them with a couple <script> tags. You won’t notice anything different at first, but your site has just become dynamic. With an insanely small amount of code you can create cool JavaScript effects, sortable elements, easy AJAX queries, AJAX autocomplete forms, and more. It’s based off the Prototype Framework, and anyone can use it for free. And I really do mean anyone! Just take a look at their quick Getting Started Guide and you’ll see. You can for a really basic example have a DIV disappear with a cool animated effect when it’s clicked just with this code:

<div onclick=”new Effect.SwitchOff(this)”>
Click here to close this DIV!
</div>

It’s amazing what you can do. AJAX queries become so easy you don’t have to think about it, complex drag-and-drop scripts become a few lines. If you’ve used JavaScript before, you can do it. Try it out.