Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with internet and website

Help key West build a better City website...please!

Mike Mongo — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 12:55:33 -0800

Do you live somewhere interesting that has a great city government website? [Previously].

It's been a year and and half since this question was similarly posed, and here is my interest: I am partners at a high-gloss web-media design company, and subsequent to my run for mayor of Key West this year much of my time is dedicated to city government and related. Much of the related is web-related.

What I am looking for are examples of city government websites for cities similarly as unique and interesting as Key West, city government sites which present information and resources in ways that combine looking good with accessibility.

Here in Key West, as a semi-trendy travel destination, the island is already well-represented by travel sites and sites focused on "things to do". This is the City of Key West's present website. Our site was constructed by a design operation specializing in government websites, egovstrategies. While it is supposedly adequate, it is less than especially terrific, and far from engaging. After all. this is Key West!

What I am looking for is is a city government website which depicts quality accessible government in a smart and engaging manner. With all this in mind, I call upon the sensible (and aethetically sophisticated) input far-reaching and all-seeing Hivemind: Examples of great websites for other interesting cities?

Websites for flow charts or concept maps?

tnygard — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:10:19 -0800

Is there a good website for making flow charts or concept maps or cognitive maps in groups? A group of my students and I will be making a website together, and I am hoping to find a free or low-cost way for all of us to make such a chart together online. This would be to show how all of the sections of the website relate to each other. Any thoughts or experiences with such services would be most appreciated.

I need a crash course in the current best-practice website accessablity standards.

anastasiav — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 06:42:45 -0800

Give me a crash course in making our nonprofit website accessible. What are the best practices/standards? What's the lingo? I'm not building the site, but I have a meeting with the developers who are, today. They are doing this pro-bono for us (we're a community nonprofit with a goodly number of disabled users). Its important to our CEO that the website be accessible, but she hired me because she doesn't really understand the web.

I get the web fine, but I've never had to deal with this particular issue before. My first meeting with the developer is this afternoon. Help me talk with them about this issue and not sound like a N00b!

Pros & Cons of bringing web development in-house?

MeatLightning — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:33:22 -0800

Pros & Cons of bringing web development in-house? Hi all -
I manage a mid-size e-commerce website. We currently work with an agency to build and maintain our site. We are considering hiring a dev (C# / .NET, SQL) and taking over development... or at least much of it (still may go out of house for UX, front-end dev).

Anyone have any advice, experiences, warnings, etc they can share?

Have you gone down this road? How did it go? What should we watch out for?

thanks in advance!

No Mo Dogg(dot)

silsurf — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:24:50 -0800

What in the heck happened to doggdot.us? I used doggdot.us along with MeFi as a daily investigation of what is going on in the internet world of ours.

About a month ago it disappeared from the internet, my browser would time out in trying to connect to it, starting yesterday I am getting a 403 "Forbidden" redirect.

What's up with that?

I dont have self-control, but I AM lazy.

who else — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:24:20 -0800

Is there any way (on a mac) that I can block myself from being able to visit a website without being able to go back and unblock it, aside from getting someone else involved to block urls for me? Right now I have opendns set up and have blocked a url. But it would be too easy to just go log into opendns config and just unblock it. Is there anything that wouldn't let me unblock for a year or an amount of time I can set?
And I could block and throw out the password to opendns but I would want the ability to block more urls in the future.
With opendns I can still bypass it by just stopping using opendns but it is a hassle to reconfigure my IP settings, compared to just logging in and unblocking what I blocked. I need more roadblocks.

How do I restore the formatting in my blog?

FireStyle — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:07:21 -0800

I'm using the Hybrid-News blogger template for my blog. After doing some tweaking to the code, I lost the feature I loved the most - the condensed posts on the front page. Any ideas on how to get it back? (more in explaination). Here is the link to the hybrid-news template

Here is the link to my blog

Notice how in the template the stories are condensed to a few lines. Somehow, I lost that formatting, and my skills in CSS are elementary at best. Any idea how to get it back?

Thanks much, and if you like politics, feel free to comment on the site!

ass gas or grass?

Anonymous — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:53:01 -0800

What are some examples of Medium-High Traffic websites that have successfully started to make money and how did they do it? It's been 5 years since This Question and many things have happened on the web. I help to run a pretty high traffic (~150k visitors a month) site in a specific demographic. I have some ideas about how to make money off of it without driving away our users, but some examples of others that went from labor of love to money-making without a lot of fuss or being sold would be helpful, but I can only think of giant ones, or Metafilter, obviously. Unique details would help a lot.

Thanks!

How can I build an online tool that checks the size of an image?

ocherdraco — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:11:46 -0800

How can I make an online tool to show someone whether an image they've uploaded is high enough resolution for print? I work in book publishing. One of the things I do is to help my authors organize the images they've gathered to include in the book. The complicating factor is often that authors (who are often not the savviest computer users) just go on Google to find images, and often end up with images that are much too small to print, because they are displayed at 72dpi on screen, and the author doesn't understand that the size an image is on a screen is not necessarily the same as in print.*

It would be incredibly useful if I could have an online tool to point them to that would be able to tell them "The image you have uploaded [or "the image at that url"] will print at 2.5" x 3.5", which is approximately 1/4 page" or something like that.

It would need to be able to:

detect the dimensions of the image in pixels
display the dimensions, in inches, that the image will be when displayed at 300dpi
be able to tell the author a general size for that image (too small to print, 1/4 page, 1/2 page, full page, etc.) based on parameters I would include

How can I build this?

*I have actually had an author hold up a ruler to a computer monitor to say, "See, it's big enough!"

Travelplan2.0

mr.marx — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 10:59:41 -0800

Looking for a website that helps me plan a 5-day vacation in detail. A lot of travel websites out there, but all of them seem focused on either a) booking and price hunting, or b) diaries.

I'd like to think there's a site that let's me add all the restaurants, sights, shops and events I find researching an upcoming trip (NYC if it matters) so I can make a day-by-day plan, complete with maps and notes.

Is there such a website? Or do you have any other suggestions on how I could plan our trip in an easy way?

Extra points for suggestions that let's me keep a mobile version of the schedule online.

Cubed time? Ha, fool. Nature is a dodecahedron! You have been educated stupid.

Keter — Fri, 22 May 2009 15:07:34 -0800

SchizoFilter: I'd like to become a connoisseur of internet crazy. Does Timecube have a more harmonious 5-Day cousin? I know Cindy McCain (but not John, thankfully) is a Reptilian, but are they mole people, too? Can I get cursed by some chain-mail, please? I want all the crazy! Let loose your delirium, MeFi! I had been pondering asking this for awhile, but today's post on the Blue on crackpot physicists gave me the little extra bit of motivation I needed.

Off the top of my head, I'm familiar with some old favorites: UFO Watch, David Icke, and, of course, Timecube. I also remember being really fascinated by the chain of oddly disconcerting personal homepages (which I guess is more "spooky shit" than "schizo shit," per se) and conspiracy sites that appeared to be linked to the story of the Duclod Man, most of which I believe are now down.

I think the idea of the internet as vector and stage for modern folklore (the terrible layouts, OH, the layouts!) and possible role in reinforcing these pseudo/truly delusional beliefs is really interesting, and I'd love to have more material to munch on.

(Secondary interest: Any cool articles akin to the linked MeFi post about internet crackpots would also be palatable!)

WTF do these internet download numbers mean?

arniec — Thu, 14 May 2009 06:56:04 -0800

Help me try and figure out how many times my podcast is being downloaded. I have requests, unique hosts, bytes downloaded, etc. but while I understand what each mean individually, I'm not sure which to "trust". Preface: I'm using Dreamhost and these stats are coming from their panel stat application, which is running Analog 6.0

For a specific example, let me focus on one of my recent podcasts (a single MP3 show, not a series of shows). This show is showing 11613 requests in my stats. This is a LOT higher than most of the shows in that domain (the more "regular" shows are about 200 requests give or take), and I expected this surge as the most recent show is about the new Star Trek movie and given that movie's popularity it makes sense this show would have more traffic.

But I had been assuming a request was able to be equated to a listener...give or take, I knew it wasn't exactly 1:1 given Google bots, etc. but I thought it was a close approximation. For example, when most shows have 200 requests and this one has almost 12,000 I figured I could take that as a 5000% boost in popularity...

But then I looked at distinct hosts served and I'm only seeing a number of 3,216. Given how drastically different 3,216 is from 12,000 I thought something was up and dug deeper.

In the stats it then shows me the total data transfer for that domain for the month (144.27 GB) and it shows that the Star Trek episode has drawn 27.9% of my bandwidth for the month, so about 40GB. Dividing that 40GB by my file size (45mb) I figure I've only gotten about 917 downloads... again a HUGELY different number than 12,000.

However for one of the shows with 200 "requests", the math shows about 100 downloads... So I don't get why most of the shows would be off by 100%, but the show that should be most popular DOES have the most popular requests, but that number is off by 1300%.

Any ideas?

Give me some creative ideas for a burger joint's website

Paleoindian — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 20:34:11 -0800

Give me some creative ideas for a burger joint's website I do a little web design on the side and have been approached by a new local burger joint to build them a website. They don't deliver and have a simple menu.

The owner wants the site to be simple 1. google map 2. menu 3. phone and fax #

Any suggestions on how to spruce things up?

What's the right software to maintain and display a calendar of relatively infrequent future events?

gleuschk — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 11:49:49 -0800

What's the right software to maintain and display a calendar of relatively infrequent future events, as well as blog-like news postings? I maintain a website for specialists in my field of mathematics, and one section consists of announcements for upcoming and recent conferences. Another is for news announcements: a basic blog-style list of entries. Both are currently run by our 7-year-old Movable Type installation, in combination with a good bit of chewing gum and baling twine. I'd like to redesign the whole schmear, including the back end. Is wordpress (plus more gum and twine) the right solution? Is there some other system that makes more sense? Link.

Here's the current setup, which hasn't changed since launch in 2002: Movable Type runs two blogs: "News" and "Conferences". The former is your basic blog, except that we only show one entry on the front page, and generally have only an entry a month or so.

Each entry in "Conferences" is added when we learn about it, and post-dated to the first day of the conference. This system works ok, since most conferences are just a day or two, but there are some that are a week, month, or even a semester long, and this causes problems. When first posted, they're in an "upcoming" category that displays in one place, then changed by hand to a "past" category that shows up in another place when they're past. Drawback: I often forget to change the category, which makes me look stupid. We average about 3 conferences a month, though they tend to cluster in March, June, and October. Lead time is up to a year.

I'd like to redesign and bring it up to web-2.whateverwe'reuptonow snuff, both in front and behind. Wordpress seems to be the default these days. I could do the same acrobatics to get the conferences into wordpress, I guess, but it sure seems like there should be a better way. Do you know of one?

I run this out of my pocket and in my free time, so free and drop-in solutions are best, but if you've got good ideas, lay 'em on me.

Wayback Machine Plugin for ALL old/dead outbound links on a website?

bollockovnikov — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 01:19:17 -0800

My old website still gets a lot of hits. But many of the outbound links I posted years back are no longer valid, are dead or have changed location. Is there any way to integrate the Wayback Machine Internet Archive into my site's code so that links are redirected to the archive for the date they were originally posted? Ideally I would like an integrated plugin that directed old outbound links to their archived page on Wayback automatically. It would be great if visitors to the site hardly even knew their click had been redirected. I would like to implement it site-wide, so that either:

1. All outbound links were directed to the original date they were posted, or
2. If links are dead then the plugin kicks in and directs to the wayback archive, or
3. The plugin places a Wayback version of each link next to the original (something like: Original Link [archive])

(My site is a self-hosted blogger blog - the old version - if that makes a difference...)

Is there a way?

How do you disable access to a root directory on a web server?

jrholt — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 12:14:15 -0800

How do you disable access to a root directory on a web server? We have individual files that we're happy to let people download, but we don't necessarily want them going to the root directory to download all the files.

e.g.

http://www.example.com/files/filenumber1.jpg (okay)
http://www.example.com/files/ (not okay)

Can anybody point me in the right direction so that a user who tries the second URL is denied access? Should we be looking in httaccess? cpanel? Somewhere else? I was surprised to not find an answer after Googling around.

Resize a Website Neatly

mahoganyslide — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 11:58:45 -0800

How do I make a website behave nicely when a browser window is resized so that the website elements don't cascade onto each other? I work for a non-profit that cannot afford to hire someone to build a website that represents the organization. I'm probably the only computer literate person in the organization, but that doesn't mean much. I know a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, but I'm definitely a noob at building websites. Regardless, I (stupidly?) volunteered to try my best and build at least something.

So, I took a look at some online tutorials on HTML/CSS, played around with a few templates, and threw together a website. On the whole, it's pretty decent except for one problem: when you resize the browser window on the screen, all of the different elements of the website start collapsing onto each other which makes for a really ugly display of our content. How do I make it so that a window resize just starts cutting into the website or at least resizes the components neatly? For example, when you resize the browser window while you're surfing Wikipedia, the text and buttons don't jumble up. They're merely resized up to a point and then only a small segment of the website is displayed.

I don't even know what the relevant terminology is, and Google has therefore failed me. Are there any search terms I can use to find a guide, or do you know of any specific HTML/CSS code?

By the way, I'm using Dreamweaver to edit the website.

I appreciate any help that you can provide!

help me create a portfolio website that doesn't scream "student work"!

MagicalHypotenuse — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:20:31 -0800

I'm an independent graphic artist looking to create a simple but not amatuerish-looking portfolio website to showcase my work. And because of my limited budget, I pretty much have to do it myself. However, I'm having trouble getting started because there's so much information out there, a lot of it conflicting, out-of-date, too specific, or too general. Please help me do this right! Plenty Basically, what I want is a simple main page leading to a few different galleries of my work, a blog, and a contact page. Nothing outrageously fancy; just crisp, professional, and clean. (Flash is not for me.) Anyway, at this point I can't really afford something like liveBooks so I have to do it myself. I've done a very basic portfolio website for a class, so I'm not entirely clueless, but I'm definitely hoping for something more polished than my student work.

Obviously, there's a lot of information out there (and i n h e r e), but I'm finding myself confused and hung up on all the particulars.

Examples of the kind of stuff that makes me nervous: domain registration, how hosting works, making sure a site is visible in different browsers and on different screen sizes, structuring a website, updating, adding site navigation & text to Photoshop-created galleries, making sure my site doesn't get hacked, etc.

I know this is a vast subject and I'm not expecting anyone to spell out every little detail here on MeFi. What I'm hoping is that some kind and clever people can point me in the right direction, perhaps by recommending specific books or detailed online tutorials that deal with creating online portfolios that are a) readily intelligible by (relative) web design newbies; b) current; c) not tacky or gimmicky. Any other resources or general words of advice would be helpful.

Thanks!

Credit card number stolen! How do I protect others?

attercoppe — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 09:33:47 -0800

My credit card number was stolen! How do I determine the most likely culprit (or at least how they did it) and try to ensure it doesn't happen again either to me or to someone else? I have a relatively new credit card. It lives in my pocket, I have never handed it to anyone else or given out the number except as described below. I've used it twice at the grocery store, swiped it myself. On 10 January I placed an order through a website, on 12 January they ran my card, and early this morning (14 January) I got a call from the fraud department of my credit card company. Someone had made three small (>$10) purchases with my card. The purchases were dated today, 14 January. (Capital One was right on top of it!) Classic fraud flag, the thief checking the card works with small purchases before using it for something big. I confirmed I did not make those purchases, I won't be liable, that number is cancelled and they're sending a new card. No problem there. The question is, how did someone get my card number? The only answers that make sense to me are (in order of likelihood):

1) The website I ordered through has been hacked;
2) Someone at the company I ordered from stole it;
3) Someone in my building, no more than two apartments away, has been sniffing my as-yet-unsecured wireless router (dumb, I know) and got it.

I rate #3 as pretty unlikely given my neighbors. I'm on the third floor, far from the street and parking lot, and it's cold here - a random wardriver/walker is even more unlikely.

I let the company I ordered from know about this. Of course I was speaking to a lowest-level CS rep, and she seemed pretty sure that couldn't ever happen - "We've never had a problem with that before." Then again, she seemed to think I was implying a #2 scenario, that an employee there was responsible.

Am I reasonable in thinking this was a failure of security either with the company website, or within the company? Should I call back and ask to speak to someone as high up as I can get? How likely is it that their website is compromised, and that they don't know, or haven't told the majority of their employees?

How do I figure out how many visits my website gets?

helios410 — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:50:06 -0800

How do I figure out how many visits my website gets? My domain is registered with 1 and 1 Web Hosting, and I have the beginner package.

Flash gallery?

BoldStepDesign — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 11:13:35 -0800

I'm looking for a Free Flash gallery with admin panel, something similar to SlideshowPro (http://slideshowpro.net/). Know of anything?

Best Websites for Kids. 4th 5th and 6th Grade

snsranch — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:17:42 -0800

What websites would you recommend for pre-teens. My lovely teacher-wife has just set up her first website for her 5th grade students. Knowing that they will be hitting her site daily, she'd like to be able to direct/link them to other sites that are fun, educational and age appropriate.

The Googles have failed us miserably.

Thank you in advance!

Bonus points for FUN that sneaks in some education!

How do I properly separate two ColdFusion apps on IIS by subdomain?

odinsdream — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 06:03:41 -0800

Two ColdFusion applications on separate subdomains in IIS are getting confused with eachother. How do I properly separate them? Note: My experience with ColdFusion starts with Metafilter and ends with my recent editing of jrun-web.xml. We recently installed an additional ColdFusion application on an IIS server. There was already an existing CF app installed, so we created a new website entry in IIS and are separating them by subdomain, by giving them different Host Header entries in IIS, i.e.:

www.domain.com -> Existing (old) app
newproduct.domain.com -> Newly-installed app

Something, however, is causing them to run over eachother. Here's the basic scenario:

1. Load www.domain.com, the old app shows up.
2. Load newproduct.domain.com, the new app shows up.
3. Try to load the old app again, www.domain.com, but the new one shows up instead.
4. After a few minutes, you can start over with step 1 and get the old app back.

This is not a browser issue, since right after Step 2 I can hop over to a completely different network and browser, and Step 3 still occurs.

Both apps use "index.cfm" as their default page. I have lots of different applications separated on this IIS server by subdomain and this has never happened before, but they're plain PHP/HTML. I feel like this is a ColdFusion issue, but I don't know how to diagnose it beyond that.

Any tips are appreciated!

Ambitious? OH YES

Willie0248 — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:13:23 -0800

Due to my nitpicks with Drupal, Joomla, etc, I want to learn to program a custom web content management system. I have very little programming experience, so where do I go from here? Oh man isn't it annoying when some newbie says "I WANT TO PROGRAM" and expects you to point him to some magical book that will tell him exactly what to do... Well yes it is and here I am asking exactly that!

So what do I do now? What language do I need to learn? What other stuff? I guess what I'm looking for is a complete guide from idea to implementation with my limited skill set (a little php and other traditional site building skills)

I realize that a ground-up coding project is probably a little ambitious for a novice, so maybe a good, simple open source project to modify?

I dunno, you folks are the experts. Let's hear them ideas, hive mind!

Need an alternative to MyHQ for my homepage(s).

iamkimiam — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 22:30:17 -0800

Need to find an alternative to MyHQ.com. MyHQ is a web-based homepage that is simply lists of links that you can add to, customize, and organize into categories. You set it as your homepage, and voila!, every place you regularly visit on the internet is right in front of you. Their site is currently down, which has happened before, but this time I fear its for reals. I am literally lost without it (not to mention the 100+ organized links that I no longer have access to). This is different from social bookmarking (please do not recommend delicious.com; its a wonderful site, but won't suffice for this purpose). This would be like if you had access to your computer's bookmarks list as a homepage, from any computer, anywhere. There has GOT to be another website that is comparable to MyHQ. Anybody know what that is?

Thanks. I'm staring at the blank browser window and am completely clueless without my handy homepage! (I actually had to TYPE "ask.metafilter.com" into the URL bar...oh, the horror!)