PLS Tech Tips

When you register a domain and then decide not to renew the domain, it goes into a probation period where no one can use it for 30 to 90 days (I think it depends on the registrar as to how long). If you decide to renew it during that time, it will cost you quite a bit ($80 if you use my service - quite a difference from the $6-$10 that it costs to renew if you catch it before it expires! And by the way, I have no say in that price - that’s how much it costs me). No one else can acquire the domain until it is out of the probation period. After that, it goes back to the public and can be registered just as if it had never been used before.

When you see a site that says that a domain name is already taken and that you can ‘click here to see how you can buy it’, someone has already registered that name and is trying to resell it. It could be that the current owner doesn’t want the name anymore and is willing to sell you the registration by transferring the domain registration to your name . OR more likely, someone registered the name thinking that someone, like you or me, would really, really want the name and come along and pay them an outrageous amount of money to buy the name from them.

If you aren’t careful, there are some sites where you go to look for available domain names that will capture what you look for and then buy those names knowing that you are (or someone is) interested in that name. Then when you come back later and decide to actually register the domain name, it’s already taken. When you go to that address, they then tell you that you can buy the domain if you really want it, but it’s probably going to cost you. Reselling domain names can be big business.

If this happens to you, it may or may not be the fault of the site where you are looking for the domain name. Certain spyware or viruses can be living on your computer that will intercept your browsers web pages and ‘read’ what you are looking for and then send this to themselves so that they know what to buy. I have not necessarily ran into any known spyware that does this, but I have run into spyware that makes certain words on a page become a link. For instance, one of the websites I built suddenly had all these links every time the words ‘employee’ or ‘employer’ were used - but only when the owner of the website looked at the page. The owner called me complaining that I had made all those words link to Monster.com. I hadn’t made the web page link to monster.com at all and it didn’t show those words linked to anything in my browser. It turns out that he had spyware that intercepted his web browser input from any website and turned certain words into links. I’m assuming it was an affiliate to Monster.com - or at least someone that would benefit from traffic at monster.com.

I got off track from the original question, didn’t I? Sorry. I hope I answered your question somewhere in all of that though.

In summary, when you really want a domain name, go ahead and get it - it’s only $8.95/year or so and even if you decide that you didn’t really want it, it’s worth the risk - at least in my mind. And don’t let your domain names expire unless you really want to get rid of them.

Cindy
(By the way, I’ll plug my service here - you can get really good service on domain names at http://domains.promised-land-services.com You can also become a reseller of my services and get a commission - I make quite a bit of spending money selling domains. And if you become a reseller for me, you don’t have to know any of the technical stuff because I take care of that. Ok, I’ll quit advertising now.)

I will be teaching an Advanced HTML online for free beginning 7/31/06. You can join the Yahoo group where the classes will be taught here We will spend a lot of our time discussing tables and forms but we will touch on other advanced topics such as frames, image maps, javascript, and more.

If you, or someone you know is interested in participating, please sign up soon!

If you want to send your visitor to another web page without the user clicking on a link, there’s an easy way to do with a very small php script.

Of course, your server will need to allow you to use php code. If you are a Promised Land Services customer, then your website has php access by default.

Let’s say that I have a page on my Sonrises site that I want to redirect my visitors to my Promised Land Services site.

The page on my Sonrises site is named pls.php - so the URL would be http://sonrises.com/pls.php

The .php is necessary on the end instead of .html.

This doesn’t mean you can’t use HTML code inside the page, you can have both HTML code and php code in the same web page. The server will first translate the php code and then send the resulting HTML code to your browser. In other words, php code dynamically creates HTML code to be sent to the browser.

In this case, the php code redirects the user to my Promised Land web site. The only php code needed for this is:

The at the end tells the preprocessor that the php code is finished. The code in between will transfer the browser to http://promised-land-services.com.

It’s THAT easy!

This was a question that I was asked by someone in one of my HTML classes. I thought it might help someone else as well.

Question: Is the </p> necessary.

Answer: It depends on what you are doing.

eBay’s editor tends to either ignore certain tags or just not care whether the ending tags are there or not. Either eBay’s editor tries to help you out by adding the ending tags for you, or they just ignore them altogether. I’m not sure which.

All browsers are written a little differently and handle your HTML code a little differently. BUT, there is an HTML standard - a set of rules that define HTML - and most browsers stick to this standard. Many browsers are more lenient about the rules and don’t require the ending tags. But, other browsers may require the ending tags.

If you are building a website that could possibly be visited by anyone from anywhere using any kind of browser, then you want to make sure that you stick as close as possible to the rules so that ALL browsers will work as you expect when you write the code. If you leave off an ending tag and the users browser expects an ending tag, your web page could end up looking really strange.

So, for eBay, it probably doesn’t matter right now. Later, if eBay changes it’s editor, it may become an issue. For websites, I always recommend that you stick as close to the rules as possible. Not only because of different browsers accessing your sites, but because of the search engines that visit your sites as well. Google is a stickler for obeying the rules and whether or not your site has correct HTML code may be a big factor in how well your site ranks for your chosen keywords.

You can find the standards website here:

http://www.w3.org

You can buy several domain names and have them point to the same website. I did this on my cindycullen.com site - I also have cindycullen.org, cindycullen.net, and cindycullen.biz and they all point to the same website so that no matter which one someone types in, they get my website. I didn’t want anyone else to get my name and use it for something else.

I also have promised-land-services.com and promisedlandservices.com. The reason I have both of those is because the one with dashes looks better in print but is hard to say in a radio ad or over the phone. The one without the dashes is harder to read. So, I got both and point them to my Promised Land Services site. Now, regardless of what they type in, they still get my site.

I sometimes get long and short domain names. If it’s in print, it’s easier to read and understand a long name, but once they are familliar with your site, they may prefer an abbreviation. So, I also registered plsvcs.com and team-pls.com so that I have shorter names. I could point all those to the same website so that no matter what they remember, they come to my site.

You can point domain names to parts of your site or to other site URLs. For instance, if I want the webhosting part of my Promised Land Services site - http://promised-land-services.com/web-hosting.php to have it’s own domain, then I can point my plwebhost.com domain to that one webpage.

There are many different ways to use domain names and at only $8.95 per domain name per year, it’s an inexpensive marketing tool. You can get inexpensive domain names at my site - http://domains.promised-land-services.com

You don’t have to use your control panel (cpanel) to upload files to your website. You can use an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program to move files between your computer and your website. If you are using the Windows operating system, you can use a free program, ftp995, to upload and download files to and from your website. You can get this free program at http://ftp995.com I’ve used the program and it works GREAT!

You will need to use your website URL as the server name and then your username and password that you got when you requested your website. The FTP995 program will list the contents of your web site on one side and the contents of your hard drive on the other side. You can drag and drop or you can right click the filename you want to copy or move. It works a lot like Windows Explorer and should be rather intuitive. But, if you need help, you can always contact me!

You can find your file manager link for your website in your cpanel (control panel). File Manager will let you manage your files, of course, by creating new ones, renaming files, copying and moving files, deleting files, uploading files, etc.

Once you’ve clicked the file manager link, a new browser window should open up with your website contents listed. Beside each file, folder or option listed will be a small icon. If it’s a folder, a small folder icon appears just to the left of the folder name. If you click on the folder name, a list of options for that folder will appear on the top right of the browser window. These options include deleting the folder, changing the permissions of the folder, renaming the folder, moving the folder and copying the folder.

If you click the folder icon, you will be taken inside the folder and a new list of files and/or folders will appear with icons indicating whether it is a file or folder. Again, you can click on the name to manipulate the file or folder or the icon to go inside the folder.

If you click on an icon next to a file or document, it acts as if you clicked on the filename with a list of available actions you can take on the file in the top right corner of your browser. Clicking on ‘Up One Level’ will take you outside of the current folder. Clicking on ‘Upload Files’ will take you to a window that allows you to browse for a file on your local computer hard drive to upload to your website. Clicking on ‘Create New File’ will allow you to create a new file in the current folder. And ‘Create New Folder’ allows you to create a new folder in the current folder.

Working online with your files can be relatively simple and straightforward with a little guidance.

Please let me know if you have any questions about your file manager!

I recently upgraded my server. The new server had a newer version of MySQL installed. And all of a sudden, my scripts that used passwords in the database tables quit working.

After doing some research, I found that MySQL changed the length on the PASSWORD function used in the SQL queries. The length of the field it produces is now 41 characters long. All my password fields were set too short and so they were not converting correctly. I changed my table layouts to 41 characters for password fields and everything worked correctly again.

One way to tell if your version uses the new length is to look for an asterisk (*) in the first character of the generated password. The new version always puts this asterisk at the beginning.

I didn’t research enough to understand everything about the change - I just didn’t have the time. You can find all the details at the MySQL website. I just read enough to know what I needed to change to make my passwords work again. But, I did read enough to know that the change was made to increase security in the encryption scheme used for the passwords. So, I guess that’s a good thing.

Let’s say that I want to put two pictures side by side on my website like this:

but I want them to be nicely spaced across the page.

One way to do this is to use tables. Tables have rows and columns. Where the rows and columns intersect, they create cells. For two pictures side by side, we just need a 1 row by 2 column grid. I get this by using the table, table row and table data tags like this:

<table width="100%">
  <tr>
    <td width="50%" align="center">
      <img src="http://sonrises.com/images/1.jpg" width="160" height="120">
    </td>
    <td align="center">
      <img src="http://sonrises.com/images/2.jpg" width="160" height="120">
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

This code will give me this:

Notice that I start with a set of table tags:

<table>
</table>

Then I add the rows - in our example, there is only one row:

<table>
  <tr>
  </tr>
</table>

Then I add the columns or cells - in our example, there are two inside the one row:

<table>
 <tr>
  <td>
  </td>
  <td>
  </td>
 </tr>
</table>

And then I add the code that I want to show up in each cell - in our example, it was a picture. It could be anything. Then I add attributes to the tag to change the width of the table and the cells. I also added attributes to center the pictures in the cells.

Tables are VERY useful in designing your web pages.

If you have a picture named pic1.jpg in your images folder on your domain.com, the the HTML code to make that picture show up would be:

<img src="http://domain.com/images/pic1.jpg">

To make this picture link to your page1.html, you would use the following code:

<a href="http://domain.com/page1.html">
<img src="http://domain.com/images/pic1.jpg"></a>

<img src="http://domain.com/images/pic1.jpg" width="100" height="100">