As emailed to garonin@aol.com...

AD Turtle is on leave starting July 29th for one week, and has left me in charge of IO operations until he returns. Any correspondence with the Internet office should also be forwarded to me at absolute@squadron.org.

This week, I redid the Squadron.org/EHNet.org (etc) server. I installed Slackware v7.1 along with several other goodies for webmasters. We now support PHP3, PHP4, Apache::ASP (with perlscript), and mod_perl. Webmasters using PHP3 should give their php scripts an extension of ".php3", those wanting to use PHP4 in their php scripts, should use one of ".php", ".php4", or ".phtml". I have installed the PHP manual on my server, you can browse it at http://www.ehnet.org/docs/php/. For those people who would like to learn more about Apache::ASP please visit http://www.ehnet.org/docs/apache-asp.
Since my server has just undergone a major overhaul, there may still be bugs in my setup. If you find any, please notify me immeadialtly by an email to: absolute@squadron.org, or by contacting me on IRC (i usually use either AbsoluteK, or AbK as a nickname).

There are also a few common problems with EH webpages that i would like to talk about. There were several webpages I found that have spaces in either files or directory names. People using IE won't have any problems with those files, but people using other browsers will. For example, when trying to view a link such as "http://www.ehnet.org/A Directory" in Netscape, Netscape would instead try to get "http://www.ehnet.org/A". The simple solution to this is to insert "%20" in your html links for any file or directory which has spaces in it (ex. "http://www.ehnet.org/A%20Directory").

Another common problem, is when people specify an tag with an empty src="" paramater. This is commonly used to be a spacer. The problem with this is that it causes several different browsers (such as netscape), to display an "image not found" graphic on the page, making it appear as though your page was designed poorly, and that you do not take care of your site. The simple solution to this is to use a 1-pixel transparent gif as a spacer instead. This is something i use on the IO site at www.ehnet.org, and it works.

The last problem i want to talk about is people that insist on doing their graphics in 32-bit TrueColour. There is absolutly no reason why you should do it in that high a bit rate. Not only does it make your image files much larger, most people can not tell the difference between 16-bit and 32-bit colour. At most, it's only necessary to do images using 16-bit colour, and a lot of the time, you can get away with using 256 colours for images. You aren't going to impress anybody with your 32-bit images that take forever to load on a modem (which btw, is what most EH'ers use).

This weeks SOTW is ISD Relentless home page at: http://www.impstar.net/relentless/relentless.swf Congratulations on an excellent page.

CA:IO/VA Absolutek/CA-5/SSSD Sovereign
{IWATS-M1/2-IIC1/2/3-VBS-GFX}
GS/SS/PC/ISMx7/MoI/LoC-[LANC]

PS: Also, keep your eyes open this week for a new version of my "Installing the Apache Webserver & PHP on Win32" tutorial.