I decided to quit the active web development scene. This means I will only have myself as customer from now on. I have a couple of personal projects that i have been giving low priority. I decided to take the most promising of those projects and work it out completely.

Although I started this as a web development blog, I will focus a little less on that subject. I will primarily write about my experiences while running the projects. I will not create a blogging schedule, I will just blog when I’m inspired to write about something.

Wish me luck on my newly chosen path.

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photo credit: manu contreras

Whenever you create something (take a photograph, make a logo, write an article, etc) the copyright for this product is yours, whether you express it or register it or not. No one can use this product without your (usually written) permission.

However, now people start seeing more benefits of sharing their work with others for use. Photographers now offer their pictures to be used by others more often; It’s common practice to use parts of an article that someone else wrote. But this would mean that you would have to ask for permission to use the product every time you planned to. This could form an obstacle, especially when there is a timeline involved.

The Creative Common License

This license let’s you keep your copyright, while you let others copy or use your work, only if they meet your conditions. One of the conditions of this license is that you give credit to the holder when using his/her work.

Let’s look at the conditions of this license:

• Attribution - You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it, only if they give credit the way you request.
• Noncommercial - You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it, only for noncommercial purposes.
• No Derivative Works - You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, but not derivative works based upon it. This means that they can only use your work “as is”. They are not allowed to change your work to be used in a product of their own.
• Share Alike - You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work. This means that others may change your work to be used for their own projects, only if they publish or distribute their work under the same exact license as your work.

It’s kinda obvious that the “No Derivative Works” and “Share Alike” conditions cannot be used in the same license, since the contradict each other.

Creative Commons and you

Creative commons can help you to spread your work. It is important to make sure you set the conditions and have a link to those conditions close to your licensed work.

On the other hand, it is also important that, when you’re planning to use someone else’s work, you check their conditions, beforehand.

Sources

http://creativecommons.org/ - Creative Common website
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/10/digging_deepercreative_commons.html - Article about CC and photography
http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/comics1 - Explanatory cartoon

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Tools

Before we continue, let’s make sure we have the right tools to get this done properly. You actually don’t need much:

• A plain text editor - Plain text editors save whatever you typed in them just as you typed it, without any additional styling or reformatting. If you open a file that you created in a plain text editor in any other aditer, you should see the same content you wrote.
  The most common plain text editor for Windows is Notepad. Microsoft Word is NOT recommended, because it saves a lot of style info with the file by default. Linux and Mac operating systems have their own default plain text editor, depending on the desktop that’s being used.
• A web browser - You will need to be able to view your work somewhere. And since we are building web pages, which visitors will view in a browser, we should be able to check our work in a browser.
  Since stats show that the majority of web users still uses Internet Explorer, it would be good if you had access to this browser to check your work, because things may be look different in IE, and we want our site to look the same in any browser. For instruction on installing Internet Explorer on Ubuntu, read this article.

Anotomy of a web page

If we want to make our website standards-compliant, we will need to use the prososed scheme to setup the web page. We’ll start from the top:

The DTD
The Document type Definition tag is actually simply telling the user agent which version of (X)HTML the page is written in, by linking to a file with the rules to be used when parsing the elements on the page. Our DTD will look like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">

The basic scheme
Let’s look at parts of a HTML page:
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

All of the HTML code is put within the <html> and </html> tags.

The head section (between <head> and </head>) contains information that will not be displayed on the web page. Some parts contain information that is used by the user agent (the title tag for instance holds information that will be dsplayed in the title bar of the browser). Other parts link to other files, for further processing or presentation of the content, like stylesheets or Javascript files that are used to get things done.

The head section usually also contains meta information, like the language in which the page is written (English, Dutch, etc), and keywords and description of the page.

The actual content of the web page is placed between the <body> and </body> tags. Whatever you put here, will be processed to be displayed.

I thought it was important to go through the basic structure first before we write our first page. We will do that the next time.

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I think this is my shortest post ever!

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• This will be my own content. It’s good to read the same thing in a different context.
• There are still too few places where you can get this information presented in tutorial form, from introduction to advanced techniques.
• This series can be used as reference for beginning web designers who want to work from scratch in order to learn more about how it all works.

XHTML

XHTML is short for eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language, which is actually a variation of HTML, which is combined with XML. XHTML is supposed to help to ensure that content is displayed properly on every device that accesses the internet. XHTML therefore has a stricter set of rules than regular HTML to create cleaner web content.

Accessibility for people with impairments has played an important role in the development of a language to give everyone the same access to information. Thus, for instance, the old bold tag <b> is replaced with <strong> and <i> is replaced by <em> (emphasis) since these tags are better processed on screen readers used by visually impaired people.

Also, tags that are not paired with a closing tag, like with <strong></strong>, are now supposed to end with a space and a forward slash before the closing >. <br /> is a very much used example of such.

XHTML versions
XHTML 1.0 came with 3 (what I, for ease of understanding, would call) “sub-versions”:

• Transistional - This subversion is allowing the use of a number of old HTML elements and attributes, that are judged presentational, in combination with the XHTML rules, to help ease the transition.
• Frameset - This allows the creation of HTML frame sets within XHTML
• Strict - This uses the strict set of XHTML rules as opposed to the “old” HTML rules.

XHTML 1.1 (also referred to as Module Based XHTML) is actually an updated version of XHTML 1.0 Strict. All elements that had something to do with the look of a website were removed from this version.

Please note that your website may display normally when don’t “abide by these rule sets”, but some user agents (programs on the user’s end that translate (X)HTML into the website you see) may have trouble displaying the content correctly. If you want your website to be displayed without problems on any web-accessing device, you may want to stick to the rules.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

CSS (commonly referred to as stylesheets can simply be defined as documents, containing information, which is used to style web documents. In other words, stylesheets are responsible for the look and feel of web content. These “styling rules” are widely accepted as standards.

Stylesheet use normal, understandable English words in their syntax. The biggest problem right now with stylesheets is that Internet Explorer is, what we call “non-standard-compliant”. So styles that would work in any other browser may produce a different effect in IE.

XHTML + CSS

The whole idea of these 2 is to separate the design of a website from the actual code that produces the website. XHTML is responsible for the content, and CSS is responsible for how the content is presented.

This way, your content is displayed properly on any device, even if that device is not equipped to process stylesheets. In any case, the content of the website will be displayed.

What’s next?

Now we took a brief look behind the scenes, we’ll be able to understand the next part of this series a bit easier.

Next time, we’ll start with a simple website, which we will use as a base for the rest of the series.

Excellent reading material

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML_2.0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets

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I’ve dedicated some of my time to studying the ins and outs of RoR. There seem to be a lot of information about RoR in blogs and wikis online. However, sometimes the information is limited.

Most of the information that can be found now is not up-to-date since it covers Rails 1, but Rails 2 is already out. This presents some roadblocks, since some defaults have changed (eg. SQLite is chosen as default database instead of MySQL).

Also, it seems like most of these people use RoR on their Mac computers, so they write accordingly. There may not be very much difference in how things are done on OSX as compared to Linux, but still, those differences can have you spending a lot of time looking for solutions.

While I’m exploring the worl of Ruby on Rails, I’ll try to document as much as possible to share my findings, so others, who might have the same problems, may benefit from it.

I found Typo, some blogging software for RoR, which I managed to install at typo.rehuel.com. There is very little information abot Typo 5.0.2 out there, so I hope my findings can benefit some.

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Recently I decided to remove Xubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn completely, format the hard drive and install Ubuntu 7.10 Gusty Gibbon. Before I did, I made sure I made a backup of my home folder and my data folder. After installation I just copied the old folders back to their places. It just was so great to see that all the settings I had for my programs were kept. All my preferences for Firefox, for Evolution, you name it.

After not using Akregator for over 6 months, I installed it again today. When I started the program, all of the feeds of blogs I was following were still there. I had forgotten about most of them.

I mention this, because I remember the times when I had to reinstall Windows and had to backup so many different things, that I usually forgot to put some of them back on their place. Some were just virtually impossible to backup. But in this case, it just took backing up the home directory.

See, Linux usually keeps the settings and user preferences of all the installed program in the home directory of that user. So if you copy this home directory to a different machine, you will still use the same settings and preferences as the other machine.

I keep exploring the world of Linux and believe, I will write about every little detail that makes me happy I switched from the Windows environment to Linux.

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I am going through my whole site now to see if there are words that may be unclear to the novice and add a definition to the glossary.

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People can add there own pictures and links on Google Earth, which actually is a nice feature. The problem with that is that there are more people who add the same marker. This makes GE a little cluttered with markers.

I was trying to show my wife where Rouseau is in Dominica. I counted at least 3 markers named “Rouseau”. When zooming in on Paramaribo you see a lot of makers. Some are to filenames of images, like IMG001.

I think Google needs to get a better grip on what’s being posted as marker for the whole world to see. I can’t see the fun of having 10 markers on 1 spot, with 5 of the same markers and descriptions.

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The move

On August 25 my wife Barbara and I moved to our neighboring country Guyana. She got a Deputy Program Manager position at the Caricom Secretariat. In the period before the move we were spending most of our time preparing. I had to make sure everything in Suriname was covered to keep my company running from Guyana. Doing Internet related business proved to be beneficial.

My computer was going to be shipped with my household goods, so I had to buy a laptop and get that ready to be used as my production box in the mean time. This proved to be a smart choice, since it took the movers/shippers more than a month to get our stuff shipped.

Projects

My Caribbean Business
Before the move I started working on a business directory for Caribbean based businesses, mycaribbeanbusiness.com. This directory will eventually grow out to become a business network site for this group. Due to the move I could not advertise this in Suriname. I decided to start the promotion in Guyana. I’ve been contacting businesses in different Caribbean countries to be my partner in that country. As soon as these arrangements have been made, the promotion of myCB can start in those countries.

Unfinished projects
Some of the projects I’ve been working on are transferred to different designers. Others are being finished by me. All new jobs are being forwarded to DesignXXL, which is run by a friend of mine, my contact in Suriname. I will keep taking care of the hosting part of my company, while I’m concentrating more on myCB, my blogs and my other web based projects.

My blogs

At the moment I am looking for someone in Suriname who can continue Exploring Suriname. In the mean time A few good notes is inactive, awaiting conversion to something else than a blog. I will keep writing about technical information and my projects in this blog and about my experiences in life and online on Blogging Notes.

I’m back… (I hope)

I now have most of my stuff on track, so I hope to continue writing about my progress and technical information I encounter on my journey.

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