We provide a wide variety of services that are mostly accessed with a web browser. People visit Google from a large number of browsers and platforms; in addition, we also understand that every user is special and may have special needs. Accessibility at Google is about making sure that our services work well for all our users — independent of your needs and abilities at any given time.

Official Google Blog: Overview of our accessible services

Web accessibility is a real bugbear of mine. It’s important for so many reasons, not just the moral and ethical but accessible websites tend to do better with search engines. This is a really helpful list of Google services.

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Tags: google, accessibility

Well, overjoyed with my Bubba server’s web hosting capabilities I’ve decided to set it up for testing the various CMS systems I’ve had my eye on (joomla, CMSimple and Wordpress I’m already using elsewhere, MoveableType and Drupal are on the todo list) as well as trying out some templates for people.
Of course the thing is, I don’t really want it [i]that [/i]visible on the net. I don’t have a domain name, just a fixed IP but I get a little paranoid in these matters.
So I thought, lets just set up a password protected folder on the website. It’s Apache on Debian so htaccess will let me do that.
Well yes, but the only thing the article from About on setting up .htaccess and .htpasswd does not say that you might need to adjust the settings for Apache to enable this feature.
A GUI is not part of the sterling features of the Bubba (there’s got to be some cost for the low power draw ARM CPU) so I’m having to learn vi as well. How complicated can one text editor be?!
Well I’m nearly there but it got to 1am and I decided that it was high time to go to bed.

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Tags: linux, web hosting, bubba

How to Install PHP and MySQL Under Windows XP, from Technical Enterprises - White Papers, Webcasts and Case Studies - ZDNet

MySQL, for database functions and PHP for server-based scripting. While many books and articles describe how to install these open-source tools under Linux, this paper shows how to install these products under Windows XP.

Happy as I am to run Linux when I’m working on CMS websites and templates there are times when it is quite inconvenient. I never thought I’d ever say this but a quick read through confirms my experience that this may be easier in Linux but this is a thorough guide and essential reading.

66 Ways to Build Links in 2007 » Make Money Online with Brandon Hopkins

If “Content is King“, then links are what put that king on the throne. Build links and you’ll be able to display your content to the world. Don’t build links, and your King won’t have a kingdom. Hopefully you already use most of these, but if only 5 of these tips get you a new link, that is 5 links you didn’t have yesterday!

How do people find your website? People are more likely to follow a link from a website they already trust; I have seen significant rises in the traffic to this site when it has been mentioned elsewhere. It wasn’t my motivation for posting on a fellow blog but it was a welcome reward.

W3Schools Online Web Tutorials

At W3Schools you will find all the Web-building tutorials you need, from basic HTML and XHTML to advanced XML, SQL, Database, Multimedia and WAP.

The quality of the material I have looked at here is excellent. The only disappointment is the inability to save whole tutorials as PDF or even one print friendly page; I can’t use a notebook standing on the train.

Definitely worth a look

Linking to a story about writing good blogs! Still it’s well worth a read and as a professional writer most of what is said is relevant to all writing not just blogs.

5 ways to building a better blog

5 ways to building a better blog

Welcome to your one-stop shop for comprehensive info about how Google crawls and indexes websites. You can learn here how to ensure that your site is easily crawled and indexed and access tools that will enable you to diagnose crawling issues, study statistics on how your site is doing in our index, and tell us how you’d like your site to be crawled and indexed.

Google Webmaster Central

XAMPP is an integrated server package of Apache, mySQL, PHP and phpMyAdmin (the AMPP in XAMPP) that all run from a removable drive. Everything is pre-configured and ready to go just by unzipping or installing it.

XAMPP | PortableApps.com

I find myself increasingly reliant on my USB key for letting me work wherever I happen to be. This sounds like a great idea. Then again, not sure how many systems departments would be happy with people running this on their computers.

This site was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to “try out” some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be the administrator of any site here, allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs.

OpenSourceCMS - Home

Now this sounds like a really excellent idea, much better than trying to set up a web server at home, or messing about with live sites

Backing up your Personal website.

Like many people you have one of those cheap personal web sites that don’t allow direct shell access or file access to the server. This is a real problem if you want make a copy of your web site for backup or other reasons. The solution is simple but requires using the command line in a terminal.

The program wget allows you to make a copy of a web site with the command line option –mirror. This allows you to download a complete copy of the files on your web site to your home computer.

This is an example of how to do it:

wget -nv –mirror http://YourWebSite.com/

This should download all files on your web site except possibly the CSS files. To find the CSS files you can view the HTML source of your home page by right clicking your mouse while you are viewing your web site in a browser and then selecting “Source” or “View Source” in the popup menu. The location of the CSS files will be listed somewhere in the top of the displayed source information. Search for .css to find it. You can then (usually) add the specified directories and css file name to the basic url of your website and view the css files in your web browser. This allows you to copy and paste the CSS information into an editor and save it on your computer.

For more information check out the manual:
http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/wget.html

From the guys at TuxMagazine.com. I don’t think this will backup any databases but this is certainly a great example of the command line making something easier.

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