Customizing your 404 page

Google's recommendations on customizing your 404 page.

Compressing Video File Size

These two sites have been recommended to me to reduce file size media-convert.com and zamzar.com. Sometimes that's necessary to upload video to some web sites.

How to Make Any Page Your Homepage

How to make example.com your starting page (these instructions were written about 5 years ago and may be too old for some systems).

Netscape 4.0-6.0

1. Select "Preferences" from the "Edit" menu.
2. Click on "Navigator."
3. In the "Navigator Starts with" section, select "Home page."
4. In the "Home page" section, type "http://www.example.com/" in the text box.
5. Click "OK."

Internet Explorer

1. Select "Internet Options" from the "Tools" menu.
2. Click on the "General" tab.
3. In the "Home page" section, type "http://www.example.com/" in the text box.
4. Click "OK."

America Online

1. Make sure you are on the page, http://www.example.com/.
2. Click the link below with your right mouse button and select "Copy URL to Clipboard." (If the "copy" option didn't appear, highlight the following address: "http://www.example.com/" then go to the "Members" drop down menu and select "Preferences")
3. Click on the "WWW" icon.
4. Click on the "Home Page" box at the bottom of the pop-up window and then depress your "Control" and "V" keys (at the same time) and paste in the address. If the address does not appear in the box, simply type in what you tried to paste from above.
5. Click the "OK" button.

Internet Config (some Mac OS configurations)

1. Open the "Internet" control panel (in the "Control Panels" folder in your "System Folder").
2. Select the set for which you want to change the home page.
3. Click on the "Web" tab.
4. Within the " Default Pages" box, in the "Home page" section, type "http://www.example.com/" in the text box.
5. Save your changes ("Save Settings" in the "File" menu, or type "command-S"), then close the "Internet" control panel.

Valid HTML Code is Better Than Invalid Code

Valid HTML code will look better more places, function as designed more often and be well liked by things like search engines. The W3C Markup Validation Service is a good one since they are the organization that maintains the specifications.

Badge for Your Site Your Visitors Can Use on Their Sites

How to make a "badge" available to others who like it and want to display it on their sites/blogs.

1. upload the badge so it can be accessed by everyone on the internet
2. create code that people can use to use the badge on their sites, like this: <a href="http://www.example.com/"><img src="http://www.example.com/badge.gif" alt="a badge"/></a> where example.com is your site, and the "a badge" is a short text alternative text describing the badge for those who do not load or see the image
3. tell the people who want to use the badge about the code

Conditional Comments in Internet Explorer

Conditional comments allow you to have one block of code for some versions of IE and a different block of code for everything else. I've found that IE 5.2 for mac, for instance, does not support conditional comments, but IE 5 through IE 7 on windows seem to support conditional comments.

This code loaded in a browser will tell you whether or not it supports conditional comments:

<!--[if IE]><p>You are using an Internet Explorer that supports conditional comments.</p><![endif]-->
<![if !IE]><p>You are not using an Internet Explorer that supports conditional comments.</p><![endif]>

I recommend using it on live sites sparingly.

Redirecting Web Pages Using PHP

You can redirect the root level of your site http://www.example.com/ to a lower level webpage like http://www.example.com/directory1/directory2/filename.html ) in many ways.

One way to make such a redirection, if you have a Linux hosting plan with GoDaddy, is to make a text file named "index.php" and have the file contain:

 <?php
//Redirect browser
header("Location: http://www.example.com/directory1/directory2/filename.html");
?> 

Place it in the root of the "web/" directory in your hosting space and, barring a lot of complex configuration changes that may have been made previously, it should gentle redirect web visitors from http://www.example.com/ to http://www.example.com/directory1/directory2/filename.html .