I just launched a real simple web site, Free Horoscope Daily with my father. It contains free, daily horoscopes, and nothing else. I was sick of all the clutter that ends up on horoscope web sites, and wanted to make one that was simple and good. It may grow in the future, but right now I like it how it is.
Please, I'd love to hear your feedback. Drop me an email if you have something to suggest or that you'd like to see.
If someone were to write a worm that went around the Internet, eliminating the vulnerability of the computers it passes through, is that immoral? Is it illegal? Since the worm is doing no damage (unless you consider patching a hole to be damaging somehow), I wonder what the implications would be. What would people say if Microsoft released a patching-worm before someone released a damaging one?
It turns out I wasn't done last week when I switched the site over to XHTML 1.1. It turns out that according to the W3C, text/html is not an allowed type for XHTML 1.1. And the type application/xhtml+xml brings with it a number of concerns. The biggest concern is that Internet Explorer doesn't support this type.
I found this great guide which suggested giving Internet Explorer XHTML 1.0 Strict while browsers that support application/xhtml+xml can be server XHTML 1.1. I went ahead and did this. I had to do the following:
That's all I needed to do. There are other things that may need to be done, for example changes to DOM Scripting. I feel better knowing that I can support the cutting edge, while still supporting older browsers that are behind the times.
That's right, I've updated this site so it is now valid XHTML 1.1. It was previously XHTML 1.0 Strict. So what did I have to change?
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
That's it! Not too bad at all. I was also looking at what's coming in XHTML 2.0. I really like what I see. The downside is that XHTML 2.0 will not be backwards-compatible. The upside is, from what I can tell, it won't be very difficult to port an XHTML 1.x page to XHTML 2.0.
It looks like most web pages will only need to worry about a few things like the elimination of the <img> tag (this won't matter to those using CSS to add images), and the replacement of h1-h6 tags with a single <h> tag. However, it seems that pages with lots of JavaScript forms will need to have a major rework: HTML forms are replaced with XForms, JavaScript Events with XML Events. I guess we'll need to wait and see what the final specification has to say.
I installed XAMPP Version 1.4.13 on Windows XP. The first thing that impressed me about XAMPP was that the installation didn't require a reboot. Every other lazy program seems to need a reboot after installation, but this one doesn't. And it's server software!
XAMPP is started in a console window. This way it's not running when you don't need it. When you first view localhost in the browser, there is an interface to let you test your installation and view demo applications. There are also links to phpMyAdmin, so it's easy to go in and start setting up your database. I'm also impressed at the performance. My laptop didn't seem to mind running the server.
If you're doing PHP and MySQL development, try this out. It's only 25 megs, it takes no time to get up and running, and its easy to uninstall -- just delete the folder. You have nothing to lose.