Internet Help, Tips and Tricks

Organising your files – Ztreewin
I use it all day, every day, and have done for well over 20 years (it’s origins are DOS). It will take a little while to get your head around, but if you just learn the basics of file management and don’t worry about the bells & whistles (zillions of them) you will find it an amazingly useful tool, and much, much faster than Windows Explorer.

Organising your files – Directory Structures
I use an alphabetical directory structure to make it easy to find almost any of the hundreds of thousands of files I have stashed. This file, for instance, is C:/Internet/d/dropbears/h/help/index.html – and I can find it immediately using Ztree because I know it’s an internet file on dropbears in the help section. Easy peazy.

External Storage Devices
Old news to most, but the price of storage has plummetted. You can now buy external USB powered pocket drives of considerable size very cheaply, which means there is no excuse for not doing regular backups and keeping a couple of copies safely stashed.

Favicon

This puts an icon in the browser address bar.

Here is the line which calls the favicon:
<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”/favicon.ico”>

Image Sizes
Images are often resized quite small to make them easily transmissible. Typically they will be about 100kb in size (around 800×600 pixels) as opposed to the originals which may be hundred times larger anywhere from 4mb to well over 20mb. However, being of quite small size they are not suitable for most types of publication and certainly of no use to webmasters for editing purposes. You can make a large image smaller but you cannot make a small image larger.

Batch Resizing Images
This is my pick of the photo resizers. It’s fast, free and frightfully easy to use:
http://www.faststone.org/FSResizerDetail.htm

Framebreaker

This script prevents other sites from framing your pages, effectively stealing both your content and your bandwidth.
<script src=”http://www.mysite.com/scripts/framebreaker.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>

Framebreaker.js contains the following:
<!–//
if (top.location!= self.location) {
top.location = self.location.href
}
// –>

Quite good 404 page

courtesy simon carroll
http://www.lastminute.com.au/info/error-page.html

“If you’re a novice, you may think that buying a computer is a scary and confusing process. But… buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth.” – Dave Barry