Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with Resolved and web

Is anyone familiar with 90 Second Web Builder?

fruitopia — Mon, 20 May 2013 05:30:00 -0800

Has anyone used it or does anyone know anything about its functionality? Posting this on behalf of my boyfriend. He asks:

"I'm thinking of purchasing a web developing tool called 90 second website builder to create the building blocks for an article selling website. I was wondering if the community had any dealings with it and what they thought of its features and how much depth (development-wise) it has. Also, would anyone know if it was possible for a web developer to modify the created website and add his/her own code easily, or would they need specific knowledge of the builder itself?"

He wants to be able to do the first part of the website by himself (to cut down on some costs) and then hire a website developer to do the hard bits.

Recommendations for a simple Web contact form?

steinsaltz — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 09:48:16 -0800

Someone with a simple .HTML/.PHP page and no content management system needs me to put up a "Contact Us" form. In the old days there were a lot of PHP scripts to do this, but I can't tell if any of them are still reliable and secure. Are there any recommendations for one? I'm familiar with all the great ones for Wordpress (Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7) but unfortunately can't use those because this site has no database. Any help much appreciated.

How to create a simple review/rating website?

vidur — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 19:59:10 -0800

I want to create an intra-company website for my co-workers to rate/review widgets. It will not be a commercial venture. Is there is a free or free-ish way to do this? I intend to do this as a fun side project. In my mind, it is something similar to "rate my professors", but pre-populated with widgets/criteria to rate. Users will not have the ability to add widgets. They will only be able to search for an existing widget by name, and then rate it along 2-4 criteria. Nothing too complicated. I have some techie skills, but nothing advanced. Is it possible to do this easily/cheaply?

How to automate 4 different web searches for the same query?

sdis — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 16:47:03 -0800

I'm learning a language (Hungarian) and I look up new words in a bunch of websites (2 dictionaries, Google images inside of Google Translate, Forvo.com). In general, I just copy and paste each word into the URLs, but there must be some way of clicking a button and searching all four websites at once. Is there? Here are the huge URLs, all searching for a generic search term, XXXXX:

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=hu&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.hu%2Fsearch%3Fq%3DXXXXX%26num%3D10%26hl%3Dhu%26tbo%3Dd%26site%3Dimghp%26tbm%3Disch%26sout%3D1%26biw%3D1075%26bih%3D696

http://www.forvo.com/word/XXXXX/#hu

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=hu&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fhu.wiktionary.org%2Fwiki%2FXXXXX

http://szotar.sztaki.hu/en/search?fromlang=hun&tolang=eng&searchWord=XXXXX&langcode=en&u=0&langprefix=en%2F&searchMode=WORD_PREFIX&viewMode=full&ignoreAccents=0

One thing that *may* prove tricky is that Hungarian uses some nonstandard characters, like ű and ő.

What's the name of this online puzzle series?

jorlyfish — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 15:32:18 -0800

Help me find a devilishly difficult online puzzle that I had worked on ~4 years ago. Difficultly: I remember a few of the levels and not much about the name. It's not the "Impossible Quiz" flash game. It was a series of increasingly difficult puzzles/riddles where I think you would enter the answer into a box and it would redirect you to a new URL for the next level, though it is possible you would enter the URL yourself.

I specifically remember there being one that was a number that was a PLU code - it may have been a number and you had to enter in "white asparagus" or whatever it was, or it may have been a picture of asparagus and you had to enter that PLU code. I also remember a dark blue image in which you needed to find a hidden pixel to click or number in (now that I think about it, all of the answers may have been numbers, but maybe not either... [I know, I know..]) that was a deep ocean or maybe a night sky scene. I also seem to remember there were up into the hundreds (maybe like 250?) of these puzzles, each one leading you to the next. Ciphers also seem like a likely choice of puzzle.

It's not an alternate reality game -- all of the answers would be able to be found online or from your own knowledge (as far as I got anyway), like looking up the PLU code. No traveling to Paris to scan a QR code or looking in the woods geocaching-style.

I don't remember the name of it, but I want to say it either was related to the creator's name (for some reason this sticks out in my mind more) or perhaps another superlative sort of name LIKE the Impossible Quiz - the whole point of it was that it was sort of ridiculous in difficulty in a sometimes arbitrary/artificial way (see: "pixel hunt").

Anyway, I'd like to try it out again, does anyone have any idea what the hell I'm going on about?

Wanted: Nest of irrigation control systems

letitrain — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 16:41:24 -0800

Is there a wifi/web-based irrigation control system available? Ideally it would track weather patterns and moisture levels. Not interested in ethernet cable-based systems. Basically looking for the Nest of irrigation systems.

How can I replicate the experience of the mid-90s web for a curious Generation Z tweenager?

allisonrae — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 17:32:11 -0800

Does such thing as an early web emulator exist? My 12 year-old stepson is learning HTML and CSS, and today I was trying to describe the web of yesteryear (for me, c. 1995-96). I'd love to show some visual aids. I have googled to no avail. I know early browsers are out there and I have some (Mosaic, early Netscape, early IE, etc.) and I know about the Wayback Machine. I am wondering if there is anything that sort of mashes up those two ideas (old browser/OS + preserved content) into a more self-contained ecosystem. I guess I was hoping to play to his attention span by not sitting there digging for and loading up half-broken archives from Wayback.

Failing that, if anyone has suggestions of any websites that are sort of frozen in time and still appear as they did back then, that would be super!

Is a domain name permanently assigned to a website or blog or can i change it?

maiamaia — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 06:12:24 -0800

If i assign a domain name to blogspot.com something is it permanent or can i reassign it? Late at night, i bought a domain name for three years. I literally know nothing about them. Until i can figure out something better, i thought i might assign it to a blog, as i found out how to do that with blogger. But i'm scared - i don't want to assign it permanently to a blog for three years, i want to learn to build an interactive website in that time! Can't i just change what i assign it to when i feel like it? I need to ask this, because all the answers online require me to know, for instance, that a domain name is not an URL (is it? isn't it?) and what a file directory or a server is and other incomprehensible things. (If is for fun, i don't care if nobody else sees it, so 'being brutally punished by Pagerank', whatever that is, i don't care about, as long as i can play with it. I missed the start of term for the website building course at the adult education centre.) Think of me as your gran (i am in age) when explaining. Thanks very very much.

Best way to create fantastic forms

cessair — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 07:21:56 -0800

I need to create a web form to gather information. In an ideal world, the service would create a hosted URL, people would fill out the form, when submitted, the form would automatically be emailed to 3 selected addresses, and there would be an option for the submitter to either save to pdf or print. Oh, and it should be free. Does this exist? Essentially, the forms are work orders. There will be a max of 10 per month.

I know and love Woofu, but it doesn't email the form, which isn't necessarily a deal-breaker, but the free version only gives 3 reports per month, and that is a major problem.

I suppose I can set up something that needs to be embedded in a wordpress site. Plug-in suggestions?

How would you do this if you were me?

Can you identify this spider?

cribcage — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 15:36:30 -0800

Can you identify this spider? It has been camped outside my front door for two weeks. I have never seen a spider this big behave this way. Usually around here they are smaller, and they move on quickly. This one is about the size of a quarter, and for the past two weeks it has made its home outside my front door. The web seems to be rebuilt every day or two.

It is located in front of a small doorframe window, so there is some light. It is about eye level. There is also an outdoor lamp immediately beside the web that was on the first night the spider arrived, but I have tried turning off this lamp for a few nights and the spider remains.

Thanks in advance for any help. I'm mostly just curious, but tomorrow night trick-or-treaters will be arriving on my doorstep and I'm wondering whether I should toss the spider into the woods beforehand. It seems a shame to disturb it, but still.

Move my new Wordpress site from subdirectory to root?

betsbillabong — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 17:55:10 -0800

Blog/website tech support needed! How can I move my newly designed Wordpress site from a subdirectory to the root, while somehow archiving the old indexhibit site which currently dwells on the root? I only have a couple of days in which to do this! More info: I'm an artist and composer with a website. My current website runs on Indexhibit (v.1, not v.2). Over the past year I've gotten frustrated with the lack of flexibility, blogging and technical support, and I spent the last six months designing and building a new website from the ground up in Wordpress, on the same domain. I've done this by installing Wordpress in its own subdirectory, "domainname.org/blog" and using a plugin that requires a password to see it.

I am almost, almost done! Which is exciting. But I realize I have no idea how to:

(a) somehow preserve/archive my indexhibit site, just for old times (is it possible to make it viewable only on my computer?), and
(b) even more importantly, move the new website from "domainname.org/blog" to "domainname.org"

I will be getting some press on Sunday night, and want to have the site up and running well by then. I realize that time is of the essence.

Any ideas? I had thought to move my hosting from Bluehost to A Small Orange, however their tech people seemed a little clueless. I'm wondering if anyone here, especially those who have used indexhibit or other smaller cms's, might be able to point me to tutorials. It's hard to find stuff about indexhibit - which is one of the reasons I'm switching!

Stupid Usability Question! Duplicating Navigation Elements

kwaller — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 10:51:52 -0800

Web navigation best practice: I'm managing a newly relaunched website, and my superiors want me to duplicate navigation options in a couple practices (clarification after the jump). Something in my Krug- and Nielsen-lovin' soul cringes at the thought. Am I overreacting? If not, can you help me assuage their concerns elegantly without compromising the information architecture? Setting the scene: The site relaunched about a month ago, and we're still in the tweaking and transferring content stage. I am the only person actively contributing to the multi-thousand-page site; my background is mostly in content creation, though I have taken a few good Web basics courses.

We have the typical five-section informative website—About Us, News & Events, etc. Say we have a regular lecture series or a neat piece of art (not a new series or a new exhibit; this is a longstanding institution). The Boss wants Lecture Series in the secondary navigation (the drop-down list from the primary nav) of not only News & Events but also About Us because "more people will see it and come to the event." Other Boss wants Art Piece in the secondary nav of not only Outreach but also About Us, because "Art Piece is good for marketing purposes."

As I mentioned before the cut, I'm a conservative sort of Web manager who trusts my audiences to figure out that events are under News & Events. I balk at duplicating elements in multiple sections because THAT DOESN'T GO THERE and SLIPPERY SLOPE. I'm trying to compromise by using some right column highlights to call out Art Piece and Lecture Series, but that's viewed as not quite enough.

What do I do? (Bad answer: Whatever they tell you to, because they sign your paycheck. That might end up the best solution for this scenario, but I'm looking for the best practice answer for future reference.)

Note: We're using a content management system that lets us repeat menu elements without duplicating pages of content, so our SEO mojo shouldn't be affected(?).

Thanks, Mefi.

Web page about recording research path, pre-computer age?

Speculatist — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 22:25:58 -0800

Machine for recording research path, pre computer-age? Library books on a waterwheel device? Please point me to the right web page... Hi hivemind - please help! A few months ago I'm was looking into the origins of computing. I came across a web page article about a modern web-service that records web-surfing research history (perhaps it was linked from metafilter?).

Either in the comments or in the article itself it linked to another webpage (.pdf?). This page pointed out recording our research histories is not a new need. I'm sure there was some text about why understanding how we reach a conclusion from research is important and that a forgotten father of modern computing did try to tackle this problem.

I recall seeing a black and white illustration / diagram of a man at a desk with books on a waterwheel-style device for ease of reading. It could be 18th/19th/20th century?

Can you please point me in the direction of the web pages that I saw?

I may well have mixed up two articles in my memory.
I'm sorry for being so vague, but any hints or tips would be much appreciated.

Help a beginner learn Java/J2EE

turniphead — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 13:20:55 -0800

I need to learn Java/J2EE. Where do I start? What resources are out there? How do I become a good programmer overtime? This is my first question, be kind!

I am an Information Systems student who was recently given the opportunity to interview for a summer internship where I would be working on back-end development for an online insurance quote system. Great! I want to be involved in programming and web/software development.

However, I won’t be taking any programming courses until next semester (Spring). I’ve been instructed to come up with a clear plan to demonstrate that I can learn Java/J2EE before summer. Regardless of whether I get the internship or not, I want to create and adhere to this plan. At best, I’ll be chosen for the position (seems unlikely). At worst, I will have more experience under my belt and leave a good impression with a potential employer.

I currently have experience with HTML and CSS (markup language, I know). I’ve also briefly delved into JavaScript and PHP. Everything I have done is self-taught. I am absolutely dedicated to this and I am a quick learner. I’d like to approach this as a complete beginner.

TLTR: Help a beginner learn Java/J2EE.

ML Safari vs Bob the Angry Flower

davidpriest.ca — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 14:18:02 -0800

Bob the Angry Flower refuses to load in OS X Mountain Lion's Safari. Why? Safari Version 6.0 (8536.25)

It was just fine in the Safari that I had prior to upgrading to ML.

Regardless the settings I use in the Develop menu, regardless the Preferences I choose, I get a set of empty html/head+body elements. Absolutely empty. And yet if I use the command-line "curl", I get a proper page.

No extensions. No proxy. No idea.

Stick with Flickr Pro or go with ????

tommasz — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 06:28:58 -0800

It's time to renew my Flickr Pro account and I'm hesitating. Should I stick with Flickr or not? I know this has come up before but the landscape keeps changing and it's hard to keep up. The community aspects of Flickr are of lesser importance to me now than they once were and have taken somewhat of a backseat to my desire for improved presentation.

I mostly use Flickr as photo storage for my Wordpress blog although I have a couple of sets that are linked to by (geographically) local groups on their websites. I'm willing to deal with most of my blog links and those sites going 404 (which will happen when my Flickr account reverts to free).

I've got some photos up on 500px but that's the only alternative I've personally investigated. Your suggestions are welcome.

How to ask client's IT team for SMTP access

circular — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 22:54:21 -0800

I'm running software on a client's server that needs to send email reports. It typically uses sendmail, but we switched the DNS over to the client's own special MX records instead of the local mail exchanger. My software can use SMTP--what do I need to know in order to ask the client's IT guy for access without looking like a complete idiot? Does the IT guy need to set up some sort of special account for me, or just hand over the SMTP credentials? Will he be willing to do so? (The software is completely above-board and needs to send email)

I've only ever used sendmail and not this SMTP stuff through a client's IT services before. Of course, I've used my own SMTP before, but this is a relatively large institution. I don't want to commit any gaffes...thanks!

(And of course, I hope this is just stupid simple and is done every day)

Help me get a client's video to play on his site

Guy_Inamonkeysuit — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 10:05:45 -0800

I'm a part-time web designer. I've got some experience with video, but not a lot. I have a writer client who has a video trailer for one of his books. Can anyone tell me what I need to do to get this thing to play nicely with browsers other than IE? Or should I just say the hell with it and put it on YouTube with links? Do I need to stick it into a Flash container as an FLV or something? The video works just fine in IE, but gives me trouble in Safari, Firefox, and Chrome (have not yet tried Opera). I snagged the video and the page code to run it from his old site.

The original parameters:

The original embed:

Any ideas, folks?

Video here (on my test site): http://www.alsirois.com/2009/JEGurley/hellRigVideo.html

There's no place like localhost... please help me get back there...

sodium lights the horizon — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:12:21 -0800

Just installed Apache on a new machine, and now any calls to localhost goes to one of my VirtualServers instead of the docroot. Help! I've read a dozen promising looking posts on various sites, but none of them seem to touch my problem...

I have a dev machine here (win7 / apache 2.2.21) which is supposed to be serving three things - localhost, site1.dev and site2.dev . No matter what I do, any attempt to browse the url http://localhost is serving me site1.dev instead.

Here's what looks like the relevant bits of my httpd.conf (irrelevant bits snipped ([...]).

[...]

Listen *:80

[...]

ServerName localhost:80
DocumentRoot "W:/wamp/www/"
<Directory "W:/wamp/www/">
   Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
   AllowOverride all
# onlineoffline tag - don't remove
   Order Deny,Allow
   Deny from all
   Allow from 127.0.0.1
</Directory>

[...]

NameVirtualHost *:80

<virtualHost *:80>
   ServerName site1.dev
   DocumentRoot "W:\wamp\www\site1"
</VirtualHost>

<virtualHost *:80>
   ServerName site2.dev
   DocumentRoot "W:\wamp\www\site2"
</VirtualHost>

Any suggestions as to what I'm getting wrong?

What are the ways we could expand services and support available to LGBT young people online?

Kirn — Wed, 02 May 2012 08:22:10 -0800

What are the ways we could expand services and support available to LGBT young people online? I have to convince a panel that I'm the person to increase the online reach of a UK-based LGBT youth charity, giving young people greater access to advice, support and opportunities. We want to reach more LGBT young people, particularly those living outside of cities, and to better use the varying resources of the online world to support those that we reach.

I'm already planning to talk about Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, phone, forums & email contact (plus producing videos & podcasts) - though if you have anything specific to offer in how to use these services in this context your help would be welcomed.

I'm more interested in what I'm missing. What novel ways might such an organisation reach out to young people online? Are there social networks/websites I'm not aware of that we might usefully expand into? How could we best use them? Am I thinking too narrowly?

I'm especially interested to hear from anyone who is LGBT who has insight into the kind of online presence and services they would like to see, or would have liked to have been available in their youth. What was missing for you that we could provide for LGBT young people now?

I appreciate this is a pretty open question, but any thoughts, suggestions or advice you can provide would be very much appreciated. Thank you!

What can I use to make my website?

nivekraz — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 07:38:39 -0800

Network guy dipping toes into web development. I want to create a "simple" site. The site would have members enter text and create tags for that text. The user would then generate "reports" based on the tags into templates. The data entered and reports generated would only we viewable by the user that entered it. I guess it would be a multi-user web based Cyrstal reports type of thing. What is the right tool for the job? It would be nice if I could use a pre-build enviroment like a CMS (Drupal, Joomla) as I have access to training and web host offer simple installers. I am savvy with Linux and would prefer free software.

How to sprite a back

steinsaltz — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:40:35 -0800

Web design question about using the CSS Sprite technique for speeding up page loads, but while hiding part of the background. I am trying to build a website where the hi-res background image--let's say it's about 960 pixels wide, and non-repeating--shares space in a larger PNG with all the other little images from the page.

I stuck this background onto a tag. The trouble is that if you scroll 2,000 pixels right, you can see all the other icons and pictures that aren't part of the background.

What is a good way of making the background image cut off a certain number of pixels to the right? I would just interpose a new to deal with this, but am worried about messing up some existing layout. Any help much appreciated.

Help me populate a spreadsheet by scraping an RSS feed.

croutonsupafreak — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 10:21:23 -0800

I would like to scrape information from an RSS feed into an Excel-readable text file for a completely legal non-copyright violating use. In a better world, I'd have access to the database that generates the feed, but since this ain't a perfect world it appears that scraping is my best bet. Are there tools that will help me automate this, or programming tutorials that will help me figure it out myself (it's been 15 years since I last write any code beyond simple SQL queries)? The XML is formatted thus, for each new post (but with angle brackets where I've put square brackets):

[item]
[title]A title[/title]
[link]http://URL[/link]
[guid isPermalink="true"]http://URL[/guid]
[description]Description, which may include embedded links and images.
[/description]
[/item]

I'd like to scrape this into an Excel-readable format, where each row consists of:
TITLE, URL (from "guid" Permalink, not from "link"), DESCRIPTION (First 50 characters, don't need links or images).

In an even more ideal world, I'd be able to do this in a smart enough manner that if I scrape the feed every day my software/widget/whatever tool can distinguish new content and only scrape that.

I know this is possible, would be super easy for the right programmer, and that without any help I could probably even cobble something together in a month or two. But I'm a writer without access to the "right programmer," and I'd really prefer not to take 1-2 months to try to figure it out.

Protean web framework

bjrubble — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:53:33 -0800

Is there a web framework/toolset that can handle (consistently) the whole spectrum from static content to full applications? I've inherited a website that's all over the place -- much of it is straight HTML, but there are also a lot of PHP pages of varying complexity, ranging from little bits of inline code to full-blown applications, as well as CGI (mostly Perl), some Java apps (via mod_jk), and a smattering of other technologies.

Each of these pieces was arguably a good choice for its particular need -- no point in invoking a full framework for straight static content, for example -- but this fragmentation is visible from the outside as inconsistency in look and behavior, leading to an unpolished and unprofessional user experience, so I'd like to start bringing things into a common framework.

My experience is coming more from the back end, so the systems I know (Django, Rails, SpringMVC, etc) are predicated on the idea that the app is running things and individual pages are just for surfacing its data. And while they "support" static content, they don't do it particularly well IMO. That really won't work here -- there is a lot of static/mostly static content, and it can't be treated as an afterthought.

Meanwhile, while I've never really liked PHP, in part because I haven't seen it work well for full-blown apps, its model of code injected into a page does work well for static content that might have just a couple bits of dynamic data in it.

So what I'm looking for is something that can work well at both ends of the spectrum as well as points in between, eg:
* Totally static page (but headers/footers/nav should be data-driven)
* Static page with a couple bits of dynamic content
* Dynamic content with full app functionality (eg. sessions, etc) but still driven by the page
* Typical MVC stack

My go-to for web development is Django, so my current approach basically a version of the staticfiles app that maps to any .html file in the public document path and processes it as a template, so "static" files can invoke Django template tags, but this runs into the reasons the staticfiles app is discouraged for production deployments. I like the idea of Hyde, allowing static-but-data-driven pages to be produced by an app but served by something like Apache, but I'd need something like this to work "on demand" rather than replacing the application server.

The other option I see is to accept that PHP does its thing well and stick with that for the simple cases, and basically try to build the common libraries into more of a framework.

Any thoughts / suggestions?

Wordpress getting hacked, need more security

hellodonna — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 08:17:50 -0800

I love wordpress but I am finding that it seems to be very unsecure when it comes to viruses and hacking. What do other Wordpress users do to keep their sites secure and safe? My sites are hosted on Dreamhost and I can't help but wonder if there's something about their one click install that leaves wordpress on their server open to attacks. It's hard keeping up with all the updates that are constantly being issued on wordpress and the plugins and the themes, but I do my best.

I seem to be doing everything right and yet my sites have gotten hacked. Any suggestions? Ideas? What are other people doing?