I occasionally receive email from people telling me that they think they’ve become quite the HTML/CSS mavens and are curious if there are any competitions they could enter to demonstrate their prowess. It’s a great idea if you think about it, because I know that I’ve certainly come across little CSS pages or JavaScript widgets that are just, well, amazing. So how do you get some peer and industry recognition for this skillset?
Having had oodles of experience with contract negotiation and publishing, I’m reviewing the contract that a very large publisher sent a colleague for a book she wants to write, and it amazes me how it has all the same anti-author clauses of just about every other publisher’s agreement I’ve seen (with a few notable exceptions). This is why people who aren’t familiar with the business really need to consider an agent, lawyer, or someone else who can represent their interests when reading through a legal document of this nature.
A reader who is rather quite technically inclined writes to me saying:
I’m experimenting with installing Ubuntu Linux on my Macintosh, and it’s working great except now the default operating system upon boot is Linux, not Mac OS X. How do I fix that??
A reader writes:
“I’ve been reading your book Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours and learning a lot, but I’m stuck on a disk usage problem. Suppose there are 5 people (A, B, C, D, E) in our group
and they share the same directory called “group.” The total capacity of this
directory is 100 GB. I’m looking for a program/command/script that can be
run to generate the following space usage update:A 5 5% B 10 10% C 20 20% D 40 40% E 5 5% total 80 80% free space 20%
This is an interesting question, so let’s dig into it and see what we can figure out…
I’ve been keeping an eye on a very interesting discussion about the difference between the Google pagerank of pages on a “www” domain name and the same page without the “www” prefix (e.g. “www.intuitive.com/index.html” versus “intuitive.com/index.html”). Google calculates pagerank based on quite a few different criteria – as detailed in my article How does Google figure out what pages are more relevant? Pagerank. – and if you care about that, and you should, you should be automatically mapping all non-www URLs to their www equivalent.
And here’s how to do just that…
A reader writes:
I’ve just bought your Teach Yourself Unix in 24 hours, and I have to
tell you that I love the book. I always answer the questions at the
end of each chapter without knowing whether I get it right or wrong.
Do you provide solutions to those answer questions?
As is fairly common, I recently received an email from someone seeking to crosslink our two sites. It is always a wee bit of a surprise when these messages arrive, though, given my article How not to build traffic: respond to email solicitations of Link Exchanges. You’d think they’d at least reference the points made in that article in their email!
Okay, I said in my response, tell me how you would propose we accomplish this. Well, his second message with the details of the proposed exchange – to build traffic on both our sites and increase our mutual page ranks, of course – quite startled me…
A reader writes:
“I’m old man (81), but I’ve learned a great deal from Creating Cool HTML 4 Web Pages; however, I have a problem. For the past two years I’ve been using WS_FTP95 LE to update and edit my Web site. I click on the WS_FTP icon, identify myself to the distant server. This brings up two columns. I click on the WWW file in the left-hand column. This brings up files in the left-hand column. I indicate that the file I wish to upload is in my A drive and click on the arrow pointing to the left-hand column. This, in turn, brings up a window in which I enter index.html which completes the upload.
A gifted young friend created a picture and uploaded it for me, but did not explain how it was done. He has since changed his residence without leaving me his new address. Unfortunately, my ISP recently changed their server. This left me faced with a problem: what do I enter in the WS_FTP transfer window to upload the jpg image on a 3″ inch floppy to the new server? “
