Patrick Burt - A Blog for Web People

Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category

Auto-Generating ALT Tags with Dreamweaver

Wednesday, December 24th, 2008

What I had on my hands were a bunch of HTML files. Each of these HTML files had pictures, and I’m damn sure a lot of them didn’t have ALT tags, something essential for accessibility (and also helps with SEO). Using Adobe Dreamweaver (and possibly Macromedia versions of Dreamweaver), you can do searches and find […]

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What You Need To Know About SQL Injection

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

Having seeing the effects of an SQL Injection attack, I thought I’d be able to tackle some tips on preventing SQL Injections in the first place.

All it takes is one vulnerability to affect your entire software application. If the vulnerability is general enough, you could be the target of scripts that scour the web […]

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Custom Web Applications? Check Your Host First

Monday, May 12th, 2008

I’ve gone through experiences recently with certain web hosts that reminded me that making assumptions when it comes to host+software compatibility is a big, big mistake.

What had happened was that I had read the software requirements before purchasing a custom web applications (think something along the lines of a forum, or newsletter software) and […]

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Tips On Developing HTML Emails and Email Templates (Part 2)

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

This is a continuation on the first article I wrote on developing HTML emails and email templates. Let’s jump right into some tips:

Use HTML markup to style whenever possible. Use attributes like background=”” whenever possible. CSS backgrounds will incorrectly render in GMail, so whenever applicable, make sure your background will work if applied to a […]

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CSS Layout Basics - Part 2

Monday, April 28th, 2008

Now you’ve gotten through Part 1 of CSS Layout Basics and you understand the basic principles behind CSS, we can get a little deeper.

Not all CSS requires stylesheets. Apart from a stylesheet, there are two ways to incorporate CSS: inline CSS and page CSS.
Inline CSS
Inline CSS is referred to when CSS is inserted to […]

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7 Tips For Getting Your Emails Through Spam Filters

Monday, April 21st, 2008

When developing websites, you’ll often be tasked with launching emails from your web server to a variety of destinations, whether they’re internal or external. These emails can be confirmation emails, newsletters, etc. However, sometimes they get caught in various spam filters, and since many spam filters are different, it’s hard to pinpoint what you need […]

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CSS Layout Basics - Part 1

Thursday, April 17th, 2008

In the event you’ve figured out that you want to ditch table-based layouts and build CSS-based layouts, but you just don’t know where to start, I’m here to help. I won’t go too indepth, but I’ll cover the basics.
You will need to have two files. An HTML file, and a CSS file. Both of these […]

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10 Web Development Tips Part 3 (CSS Edition)

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

This article is part 3 of our 10 web development tips series. If you’re interested in part 1, click here, or in part 2, click here. These 10 tips will deal more with CSS and developing your HTML base template from the design.

1 - Use ID instead of CLASS wherever possible
In the example: <div id=”myID”>myID</div> […]

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Tips On Developing HTML Emails and Email Templates

Monday, April 7th, 2008

UPDATE: I’ve published Part 2 on developing HTML emails and email templates.
HTML emails are a whole different ballpark than HTML websites. Your approach will be different and your design will be different. For now, I’ll discuss more about the development part of it, then the design part of it.

Your design should be no larger then […]

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How To Do An Easy 3 Column Layout With Floats

Monday, March 31st, 2008

When I first started doing CSS-layouts (instead of table-based layouts), I found that a lot of the solutions offered on the web included hacks and tricks to satisfy all browsers. Since then, I’ve refined my own personal technique which works in all browsers and validates as both CSS and HTML.

My method uses floats. Although floats […]

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