Hunting Broken Links

Broken links can be a pain to try to find. No matter how good you are at programming, broken links are sure to appear randomly throughout your website over the years. A site that you were linking to goes down, or an old browser doesn't understand the ampersand. There are a million reasons one of your website links can break.

You can spend an hour every day going through your website and finding all of the broken links, or you can do it the easy way:

Hunt your Broken Links

Link Tiger will "hunt" up to 1000 links on your website and check to make sure they all work for free! (Paying for a subscription will increase the number of links and checked.) I've been looking for a good free link checker, and I think I've found it.

-Don't be nice to your broken links.
-Ashton Sanders

Keeping your Email Address Away from Spammers

There are many ways that spammers use to acquire email addresses. Some set up fake websites that request emails, and say they'll give you a 1337" flat screen TV if you do. Others buy the addresses or hack databases for them, etc.

Some have bots that search the internet for email addresses. The bots search a web pages code for "*@*.com" for example (where * = any amount of characters.) Some bots also search for "mailto:*@*.com" which is the HTML code that you would use to allow a user to click on the link to email you.

Is there a solution? Yes there is! You can replace the certain characters that the bots search for with their html entity code.

For example:

"m" translates into "m"

Phoenix Development put together a little form that will automatically turn your email address into unrecognizable gibberish, that will be translated fine by an Internet Browser.

Email Encoder

-"Spammers are annoying"
-Ashton Sanders

Web Comic

A friend showed this to me about a year ago, and I stumbled upon it, and must admit. The author of this comic is very very funny. He's got a degree in Physics and he is well versed with Internet Lingo.

xkcd.com

Current Favorite Comic:
#1 Programmer Excuse for Legitimately Slacking Off

-Enjoy,
-Ashton Sanders

The Problem with Web Developers

This post has been dwelling within me for the past couple days.

I've been trying to find a responsible ASP.net programmer for a three-week project. Unfortunately we have a problem with one of those words: responsible. How do I know they are responsible? How do I know they won't put me off for another project, even though I'm paying them top dollar to do this project right now?

Ask for references... Great, this guy made 50 websites in the last 10 years, and three of them are happy. I guess that means he's responsible.

It's a very tough situation, especially since it is very hard to switch horses mid-stream when you get into the complicated and extensive programming projects.

I think I've heard so many bad guys say this in movies... and I'll go ahead and repeat it.

-"If you want it done right, you got to do it yourself."
-Ashton Sanders

AOL - Service Review

You can really summarize companies in two general categories:

Customer Oriented

and

Profit Oriented

I have observed companies like Logitech and In-And-Out to be very Customer Oriented. When they (or even I) messed something up, they would go out of their way to fix it for me. And because of this customer orientation, I speak highly of them, and spend more money with them.

AOL is on the other end of the spectrum: Profit Oriented. They go out of their way to stop you from canceling their services etc. Their first programs were basically impossible to uninstall from your computer unless you were a computer genius... and even then it could take weeks to really get it off of your computer.

My first email address was with AOL, and when we realized that we could get better internet connection for cheaper elsewhere, we tried to uninstall it from our computer... for two years. Granted we didn't know a lot about our computer, but we did know that once something is uninstalled, it shouldn't keep making shortcuts on your desktop...

"But that was years ago, they are better now..."

If you believe that, I recommend checking out some of these people who tried to cancel their AOL account within the last few years:


Ask Dave Taylor how he canceled his AOL account.
Vincent Ferrari tries to cancel his AOL account.

AOL's business decisions have lead to shirts that say "Friends don't let friends use AOL" and hopefully will end up destroying them.

-Customer Service is King
-Ashton Sanders

Internet Explorer 6 and 7 on the Same Computer

Yes, in the world of Website Designing, you must make sure your website looks the same in every major browser. This means having all major browsers available: IE6, IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. You may even want to go as far as checking it on the Netscape, MSN or AOL Browsers. (Although I recommend never downloading anything from AOL, as I've observed legal but slightly malicious coding from them.)

If you're a PC guy, that means you'll need to find a friend with a Mac to check your Safari websites. Also, since when you install Internet Explorer 7, it deletes, Internet Explorer 6, you'll need to have two computers.... right? Wrong!

We can thank TrendoSoft for this beautiful program that will allow you to install multiple versions of IE on your PC!

Now your task bar can look like this:


And if you are using Internet Explorer, I recommend switching to Firefox for a even safer and user-friendly experience.

-Ashton Sanders

Plesk .htaccess Notes

I've recently been transferring a website to a Linux Plesk Server. I've run into a couple problems, and I'll be adding notes here on my blog.

.htaccess Notes:

If you have a line of "options" (ie. Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes), you should separate each option out into it's own line. The .htaccess line should look like this:

Options +Indexes
Options +FollowSymLinks
Options +Includes

-Ashton Sanders