Sure, Webmonkey has a lot of great articles to read, but sometimes you want
to take a break from all that text and just kick back, relax, and let the
mellifluous voice of Jeff Veen carry you away. Well, this dream is now a
reality thanks to Webmonkey Radio. Jeff
will be interviewing some key players in the Web world, and he starts this
week with designer extraordinaire Lance Arthur.
10/22/99
PHP is a great language for making database-driven sites, besides being
useful for a wide variety of other applications. If you'd like to expand
your knowledge, we suggest you take a look at PHP Builder, an excellent resource
for all things PHP. The numerous articles are both useful and
understandable (imagine!), giving you a solid grounding in this powerful
language.
10/21/99
SpamCop's motto is "Protecting the
Internet community through technology, not legislation." When you get
spammed, give the email to SpamCop. It'll figure out which ISP the spam
came from and contact it for you using your email address so the ISP
admin can get back to you. You can also pay SpamCop a nominal fee to help
you filter your spam intelligently. Evany seems to like this service. At
least it's a productive way for her to vent.
10/20/99
Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly and
Associates fame gave the keynote speech at the XML World conference a
few weeks back, and it's been repurposed into an article called "Where the Web Leads
Us." In it, O'Reilly delivers a interesting overview of the open source
movement, examining its foundations and forecasting the effects it could
have on the future of the Web and business. It's worth a read if you need
some context for this ever-growing movement.
10/19/99
Are you one of the many people who got caught up in affiliate program
mania? You signed up with Amazon or whatnot, and every time somebody
followed a link to these sites from your site and bought something, you got
an extremely tiny percentage of the profits. It rarely added up to more
than a few cents, so why not donate it to charity? If enough people do it,
it could make a difference. GiveQuick can help
facilitate this process just visit the site, select a charity, and
adjust your links.
10/18/99
Jakob Nielsen of useit.com writes a biweekly column called Alertbox,
focusing on some aspect of Web usability. There's always a couple-three
pearls of wisdom in each one, and the latest edition, entitled "Good Content Bubbles to
the Top," is no exception. It reminds you how important it is to
prioritize your content, because "when everything is emphasized, nothing is
emphasized."
10/15/99
The World Wide Web Consortium recently released a new working draft of SMIL
(synchronized multimedia integration language). This XML-based language
essentially allows you to control time-based content on the Web, such as
audio and video. This capability will becoming increasingly important if
the mythical Bandwidth Boom ever gets here. Check out the spec and peer
into Shvatz's SMIL article for
a good primer.