Summersault Blog

It’s a pretty common problem: you have an image on your website that’s attractive or useful to someone else - a logo, a photo, a cool piece of art. They build a web page hosted somewhere out there that makes a reference to your image. Now every time a user visits that person’s site, the user’s web browser loads up the image from your site, using up your bandwidth and, in many cases, displaying it for purposes you hadn’t really intended - sometimes called “hotlinking”. The other day I found someone who was using a 6MB image from my personal site as a background image for theirs - and they were apparently pretty popular, so it created a lot of large requests on our webserver. Recently one of our hosting clients and longtime friend of Summersault, Justin Simoni, was having this happen so much that he was regularly exceeding his bandwidth quota and incurring all sorts of hassle. So, we tackled the problem head-on, and even though there are lots of references around the net on how to limit this problem, none quite seemed to document the particular method we used. I’ll do that here in case anyone else finds it useful.
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In our last article we dove into the world of the image ALT attribute to help you find out how to get search engines to recognize your images. This time we’re going to focus on another often ignored tag, the page <title> tag.

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In our last article we looked in-depth into the world of META tags. Hopefully after reading that you’re on the way to getting your site listed at the top of the search results. As promised, this time were going to take a close look at Image ALT tags, the often ignored but oh-so-important tag that is nothing short of a necessity for all websites.

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If you already know about the world of website content syndication, RSS news feeds, feed reader/aggregator software, and all that jazz, you might wonder why I’m bothering to post Yet Another Article about it. I’ll just go ahead and say that I have purely evangelistic motives: I would love to see content syndication adopted more widely, both by end users, and by website content producers. So if this is old hat, you’re welcome to move along, not much to see here. If you’re wondering what website content syndication is and how it might make your life better, read on!
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You’ve spent the time and money to build a website or you’ve hired someone to build it. You wait a couple of months but you only receive a couple of visitors per day tops. You start to worry that maybe you’ve wasted your time and money on something that isn’t going to yield any results. What do you do?

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At work I happily run Mac OS X 10.2.8 and my main browser of choice is still Safari (version 1.0.3); it doesn’t really bother me that these are both a couple of years out-of-date since they remain in fine working condition. Sometimes, though, my crusty software does make me feel a little bit like a stick in the mud, what with Tiger coming out and Firefox catching on. But just the other day I discovered that, apparently, Google likes my software configuration quite a bit.
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I don’t like JavaScript. It’s clunky, it’s outside of my typical workflow and it tries to get up in HTML’s business when it should mind its own. So, when I found a way to solve a common website development issue that typically requires JavaScript without using any JavaScript, I jumped at the chance to try it out. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever designed a website with a form and needed to fit that form within a tight area you’ve run into this problem. When a form tag is rendered in a browser there is extra space adding above (and sometimes below) the tag. Up until this point I’ve worked around this problem by putting the form tag outside of some table <td> tags. However, this isn’t valid XHTML. I found a much better solution. Read the rest of this entry »