Posted by Duane on Feb 17, 2010 in
Uncategorized One of the jokes you’ll hear about us computer geeks is that we like to speak in TLAs, or “three letter acronyms”. Get it? We *have* a three letter acronym for the expression, three-letter acronym. These days of course they’re usually 4 letters since we ran out of 3 letter combinations a long time ago, but now I just sound old.
Anyway, if you’re going to play on the web you’re going to hear the term HTTP a lot. Some people think that it’s useless at this point, that web browsers should not even include it anymore because it’s just assumed.
I disagree, strongly. HTTP is a very specific thing, something that you will be paying for if you’re running a web site, so something that you should understand so you know what you’re getting. You should also know what else can go in that spot besides HTTP, and what the difference is.
It’s important to begin with a very simple concept, and build from there. Just about all the communication between networked computers takes the form of “request / response”. That is, your computer makes a request of another computer, and that computer responds. Now, both the request and the response (and everything else a computer does) reduces all the way down to a stream of 1’s and 0’s, so there has to be some sort of structure to those 1’s and 0’s that allows the receiving computer to know “Oh, ok, this is a request for a web page.”
See that P at the end of all the acronyms? That stands for Protocol. A protocol is an agreed upon set of rules for how communication between two parties will take place. Consider the transaction of going to a fast food restaurant. The person behind the register will ask for your order, you will recite some items from the menu. The person behind the register will tell you the total price, you will pay, then you will get your food. That’s a protocol. Remember that both parties have to understand the protocol for it to work. If you tried to apply the McDonald’s protocol at, say, the post office? It wouldn’t work so well.
The T next to the P stands for Transfer, and is really kind of redundant. Just about every request between two computers is a request to transfer some information from one to the other. We just put the T there to make it clear.
The rest of the letters describe what kind of transaction is going on. The most common are:
FTP : File Transfer Protocol. FTP is used for moving files between computers. Nothing is done with the files – you do not open email or videos, or display web pages. This is the Internet’s way of copying files directly between computers.
Do you need FTP? Probably not, since it can be simulated on an HTTP server. The most common usage for an FTP server these days is if you’re not currently in the business of moving very large files between computers, and then all of a sudden you have need to do so. Rather than expose a section of your web site for this purpose, you might instead opt to put the file you need to move on an FTP server somewhere, and let the people who need that file know how to get at it.
HTTP :HyperText Transfer Protocol. Much of what you know as the Web is actually a whole bunch of “hypertext” pages. This is what HTML stands for as well – HyperText Markup Language. You request an HTML page and your browser displays it. How you browse the web is by clicking on links in the web page, which signal to the browser to go get another page. This clicking on links? That’s the hypertext bit. It may sound obvious now? But really, this is the whole deal of the web, this linking thing. Before about 1991 or so, we just didn’t have that. Every time you needed a file you went and made another FTP request to get it, and then opened it up in an editor or something on your own. It was the brainstorm of the web founders to say “Hey, what if we made one single program that got the files, displayed them, and made a way to tie them all together so you could just follow links between them?”
Do you need HTTP? Well yes, of course you do. This is what the web is.
HTTPS : HyperText Transfer Protocol, Secure. The existence of HTTPS is a good reason why you should understand what HTTP is. What does it mean for a connection to be secure, or not? It’s hard to explain in short time, but consider two points. First, when that stream of 1’s and 0’s moves back and forth between your computer and the other guy’s? Yeah, bad guys can listen in on that. There’s lots of different ways, and it’s far too complicated to get into here. Second, how do you really know that the site you’ve connected to is who it says it is? You think you connected to your bank and typed in your password, but how do you know that you didn’t just click through to a site that looks exactly like your bank, but is really a fake site that has been set up to trick you into typing in your password? This is actually a technique known as “phishing”, and you may have seen it in the wild. Ever gotten an unexpected email that looks like it’s from your bank, saying “We have to verify your identify, please click here and enter in your personal information?” Yeah, that’s the bad guys.
There are a number of steps that you’ll need to perform if you want to support HTTPS, which mostly entail proving to the right people that you are who you say you are and paying for something called a “server certificate.” Once you have this, people who connect to your servers will have proof that you are who you claim to be, and the connection will become encrypted so no one can snoop on the conversation.
Do you need HTTPS? If you plan on doing anything related to ecommerce, any tracking of customer’s personal or financial data, then you absolutely want to set up HTTPS. No customer should ever be expected to enter personal information into a web site that is not secure.
For more information on setting up HTTPS, be sure to ask your hosting provider. They will no doubt have the appropriate step-by-step documentation.
SMTP : SendMail Transfer Protocol. Do you want to send email from your domain? On your business cards would you like to write “bob@bobspizza.org”? If so, you’re going to be running an SMTP server. When somebody tries to email bob@bobspizza.org, your machines will be listening for requests that conform to the SMTP protocol, and respond accordingly.
Do you need SMTP? It’s always a good idea to have email from your domain. Putting a Yahoo or Hotmail address on your business cards doesn’t look very professional. The good news is that your hosting option almost certainly has some sort of e-mail capabilities that came along with it, even if you have to pay extra for them. In other words, you don’t have to do any extra work to get this, you just have to fill in the right forms. Highly recommended.
VoIP : Voice Over Internet Protocol. I’m throwing this one in just for completeness, because it almost certainly won’t be of interest to you unless you’re going in to this business. I just wanted to show that they are not all variations on the Transfer protocol. VoIP refers to the ability to make a telephone call over the Internet. The concept is the same – an originating computer has to make a request of a certain format to the receiving computer, only instead of a one-time transfer of file, the connection remains open for streaming the conversation.
So that’s your lesson in Transfer Protocols, hope it made sense. At a minimum you’re buying the ability for people to make an HTTP connection to you, and probably an SMTP connection as well. If you need it you’ll also get the secure HTTPS as well. You probably won’t bother with FTP, because you likely won’t need it.
Posted by Duane on Feb 11, 2010 in
Uncategorized In your daily habits you’re probably so used to interacting with web sites on a variety of levels – contact forms, scrolling news stories, slideshows – that you don’t even realize there’s a lot of hard work that goes on behind the scenes. Well, if you want to host your own site you’re going to learn about it in a hurry. This article will examine the different levels of interactivity that you can provide your users via the web, and what it takes behind the scenes to make it happen. (The intended audience for this article is not programmers. This is a primer on programming for the business people who need to make some decisions about what sort of effort they’re going to put into this aspect of their web strategy. My apologies to my programmer friends who have stumbled here looking for a more in depth discussion, but we have other places for that.)
Step 0 : Brochure Ware
At the most basic, the web is really a content delivery format. There’s information on one machine and you want to get it to a different machine. The person who created the content formats it up with some special instructions about how to include pictures and when to use boldface text instead of regular. These formatting instructions are understood by your web browser. This is that HTML
you’ve no doubt heard mentioned. The whole circle here is very simple – your machine requests an HTML file from another machine, that machine serves up the file, your browser then draws the HTML file according to the instructions it was given.
The advantage to this system is that it is hands-down easy to work with. For hosting, all you need is a place to put your files. Get yourself an HTML editor to make some files, move files to server using an FTP program, and you’re done. You absolutely positively want to get started this way if you haven’t already parked your newly hosted domain. People can’t land on a web site that has no pages, so put one up even if it just says “Coming Soon”. In this mode you want to focus on writing your content, which works out well for you because who knows your business better? Break out your editor and start banging out the hard sell for who you are, what you do and why you’re the best at it!
The biggest disadvantage to this level of web building is that it’s about as interactive as a marketing brochure (hence the term “brochure ware”, get it?) In the old days a web developer would be given a copy of the existing marketing brochure and told to make the web site look like that.
As a general rule, nobody accepts plain HTML as good enough any more. There are just too many things that you can’t do (like something as easy as submitting a contact form to the site owner).
The exception to this rule is what’s called the “micro-site”. Sometimes when you’re promoting a specific product and really want nothing but a single page which is all content and links directing to a specific service (such as Lulu for an e-book sale), then it’s quite common to whip together a single HTML page for the purpose. This is very different from using this technique for your business’ primary web site, though.
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Step 1 : Client-side JavaScript
For a web page to do anything beyond interpreting the HTML formatting commands, it needs to run a program. The next logical question is, “Well, where to run it?” Should it run on your computer, or the server computer that sent you the content? Or somewhere else?
For now let’s talk about programs that run on your computer (“client side” in programmer lingo). The most common way to make this happen is using a language called JavaScript
. JavaScript programs are embedded directly into the HTML, and it’s the browser’s job to run the scripts when necessary. A simple JavaScript program might contain a list of a few dozen Shakespeare quotes, and then a simple timer that keeps refreshing one area of the site with a new quote every few seconds. A more advanced program might play some games with the user, or even make calls out to other web sites (more on that in Step 3, AJAX).
The major benefit to JavaScript is that many programs can be run with a single request. You may not realize it, but the slowest part of cruising the web is making that request to the other computer and then waiting for that computer to deliver the results. So programmers try very hard to limit the number of “server side requests” that we make. Any opportunity to do something client-side is considered a big win for performance. One of the best tricks you can pull is to refresh only one segment of a page without refreshing the whole thing, so you could keep updating the top news story without the user ever having to click Reload.
There are several disadvantages to JavaScript. One is that there’s only so much you can do entirely on the client side. For example in that game I mentioned above? Sure you could play a game, but could you save high scores? Could you make it multi player? Could you download fresh content? No, not really, not without contacting other computers. So while JavaScript can contact other computers, it’s a different way of thinking to work with both at the same time and that’s what we’ll talk about in Step 3.
The other major disadvantage of JavaScript is one of security. Anything that is on the client’s computer can technically be hacked by the client if they wanted to. You may not think your customers are interested in hacking your web site, but remember that not everybody who hits your site is your customer, some could be bad guys looking to mess you up. The classic example that all programmers know is what’s called “form validation”. Imagine that a web site is going to ask you for an email address, and it has to take the form of <word>@<word>.<word>. You could set up a simple check in JavaScript that says “If the email address does not fit that pattern, then show an error and do not send this page back to the server.” What you have to take into consideration is that someone could sneak around this program and submit a bad email address, just to see what happens. So it’s important to validate all your code on the server.
Step 2, Server-Side
Most of what you experience on the web today is the result of server-side applications. That is, when your computer makes a request to another computer, that computer is actually running a program to figure out what you want and provide you with an answer. An obvious example of this would be a web site that requires you to login before you can see anything. You request the “My Account” page, and then a controller program says “Do I know this person? Does he have an account?” If you don’t, the program kicks you to the login page. If you do, and you are logged in, you get to see the My Account page.
The scope of *how* to do server-side programming is wide open. One popular option is the programming language PHP
(sometimes referred to as part of the “LAMP stack”, which refers to Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP
). Most hosting providers offer PHP as part of their plan.
Another popular option is Ruby on Rails
, which is something of a combination programming language / web framework where many of the assumptions about typical requirements have been made for you, and you just plug in the code that is different for your business.
For the larger enterprises you may hear talk of Java, Enterprise Java
, or .NET
. Java and C# (the most popular .NET language) are typically the realm of trained software engineers and not the kind of thing that you pick up with a book from the local Borders. PHP and Ruby, on the other hand, are more open to teaching yourself, which is perhaps one of the reasons why they are so popular.
To run programs on your server, your hosting provider has to allow them. The best way to have any idea what this means is to have access to a developer/programmer. They will poke around and tell you in a matter of minutes what it would take you hours of research just to get your head around.
What your provider likely offers is some “one click installation” software. The idea is the same – these are server side programs just like you could have built for yourself with enough time and resources – but they’re already setup for you and ready to turn on. This is a very popular and useful option for quickly setting up a blog, image gallery, or content management portal.
The advantage of server side programming, of course, is that you can quite literally do everything that you can imagine. That’s the fundamental reason why the web is what it is, because every day someone is coming up with something you never knew you could do before.
The downside, though, is that the commitment is pretty large. You need to know *how* to program. You need a hosting provider that allows you to run your programs. You need to then get the programs running, which is not always as easy as it sounds – take that from a programmer with 20 years under his belt. Even when it’s up and running you still don’t get a break because then you have to monitor for performance and security holes and memory leaks … This is why there’s such a job as “web developer.” You almost certainly don’t want to take this on yourself.
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Step 3, AJAX (aka The Cloud, Web 2.0)
Give yourself a pat on the back if you already thought “If server side programming is such a highly regarded commodity, what if people setup programs to do the most common functions, and then used that JavaScript stuff to execute them?” You just thought up AJAX, the latest craze in web development.
No idea what I’m talking about? I just got through saying how JavaScript is great as long as it can talk to the server programs, but server programs are very expensive (in terms of resources) to maintain for yourself, right? Imagine somebody’s in the business of making those programs available. That’s cool for them, they can hire programmers to watch the site and keep it running and keep the hackers out, all that good stuff. But instead of then running a business on top of that, what they do is make those programs available to you, the small business owner. You put a bit of JavaScript on your page that makes a call to this other service and presto, you get all the benefits of that service without the downside of having to maintain it.
Want a specific example? Imagine that you want to run a mailing list so you can send out a newsletter. You need to put a form on the web site to collect email addresses, and you need a database to store those addresses. You need to handle it when somebody wants to unsubscribe from your list, and you need to generate email messages and blast them out to your subscribers. So what if somebody did all that for you? You just have to put a little “widget” on your page that invokes this other service, and it’s all done for you. Very handy.
This is central to the concept of what’s often called “cloud” computing. There’s a lot of redundancy on the web. Plenty of blogs, slideshows, “news tickers”, mailing lists and so on. It just doesn’t make sense for every small business that wants to get online to shoulder the burden of developing programs to do this. So the web has moved into what many call it’s “2.0” phase where you start by asking, “I need to do X, is there already a service out there that I can use that does X for me?”
The advantages should be obvious. Your time to market is diminished drastically. You can bring a fully functional website up with advertising, blog, rotating slideshow, you name it – in a matter of hours.
Disadvantages? Somebody else wrote the code, so you’re limited by what they offer. Maybe you hate the look of the widget they want to drop on your site, and you can’t configure it. Chances are very good that if the service is not something you have to pay for, then there’s going to be an advertisement on it that your users will see (after all, these services have to make money somehow). If you can’t find a service that suits your needs, then you have to decide whether you need it bad enough to make it yourself.
In conclusion, I hope that didn’t muddy the waters for you even more. If you’re putting up a web site these days then you’re really pretty firmly in step 3. Even if your hosting provider offers no PHP or other server-side solution, no one-click installs, you could still cobble together enough functionality using Web2.0 services to bring a very respectable web site up. You just need to start thinking about what functionality your site will have (will you have a blog? news ticker? mailing list?) and who you’re going to link to in order to get it.
Good luck!
Tags: ajax, html, javascript, php, rails, ruby, web2.0
Posted by Duane on Feb 9, 2010 in
Uncategorized Today I must have exchanged a dozen emails with a customer, we’ll call him Bob, discussing the role of the apostrophe in the web site address. I kept referring to “Bob’s Shoes” and he kept telling me, “No no, somebody already has Bob’s Shoes, I want customers to know that I’m bobsshoes all one word.”
I kept trying to explain that when you *tell* somebody your address, like, verbally, then you don’t spell it and you don’t tell them about the spaces and the apostrophes, so “Bob’s Shoes” and “bobsshoes” are basically the same thing. His point was that depending on which one you typed into the search bar, Google returned different results. Therefore it was important to control which one the user was more likely to type in.
This all being within a week of launching the site, which barely has any content.
It is easy to get caught up in the trap of “If I’m going to do this I want to do everything perfectly.” Guess what? You’re not going to, for a number of reasons. First because you don’t know how to be perfect at it, there are too many variables at work. Second and even more importantly, there’s no such thing as perfect because you’re aiming for a moving target. Did you know that Google and the other search engines change their ranking algorithms? There is no perfect set of rules for how to optimize. It’s an ongoing process.
This mentality extends to your whole online experience if you let it. Every blog post takes 2 weeks, 5 editing passes and ends up reading like a magazine article. That’s nice for quality, but all your readers see is one post every two weeks. You’re much better off with a couple of posts a day, both to get your SEO up and to stay in touch with your audience.
Posted by Duane on Feb 4, 2010 in
Uncategorized So I launched a site, and put up a blog post. Next day a friend asked, “How many hits did you get?”
Friend is new at this blogging game.
For a while, probably a long while, expect to get few to zero hits on your new site. You need to build up content for the search engines to care about you, and you need to develop a following that actually remembers you and comes back for more.
It’s like opening a new restaurant, I told my friend. At the beginning, especially if all you do is throw an Open sign in the window and never do any advertising, then it will take people a little while to find you. And by “find” I mean do something more than walk past you on the street and maybe look in the windows, I mean sit down and become a customer. Or, in this case, become a reader. Maybe comment on some of your posts, get engaged in some discussion. Nothing sadder than blogs with no comments.
Of course, there are plenty of ways to “advertise” your new presence without having to pay for actual adds. The social networks are the logical place. You’re on Facebook, Twitter? Tell people about your posts. You’re bound to get some clicks, even if it’s just your friends.
Two major obstacles with this plan:
First, you need a following on those services as well. How many Twitter followers do you have? That’s roughly how many people – at the most – will see your story. Perhaps you’ve got more friends on Facebook?
Which leads to problem #2, don’t spam your friends. Your friends aren’t necessarily your customers (they might come to your restaurant to support you, but if you expect them to eat there every night they’re going to feel put upon and stop coming). Maybe you have one friend in your group, in real life I’m talking about now, who belongs to one of those well known multi-level marketing gimmicks? And who, every time you together, is trying to sell you something and tell you how you too can be a distributor and earn fabulous prizes by hosting your own parties? Yeah, nobody wants to hang out with those people for long. Likewise, your Facebook friends don’t always want to hear your business posts, either. They may not always tell you, which is why I am. Friends are a resource to be used, but not taken advantage of.
In summary, patience is a virtue. I think I should trademark that, I’m pretty sure I’m the first one to say it. 
Focus on finding a voice. Generate content. Try things. If you build it, they will come. I am on fire today, there’s another brilliant idea that I just thought of!
Posted by Duane on Feb 4, 2010 in
Uncategorized Today a coworker cornered me (and a fellow coder) to ask about “programming” his own web site. How to submit a form, put it in the database, that sort of thing. We spent the next half hour talking to him about sql injection, open mail relays, and buffer overflow exploits. It may sound over the top, but it’s a reality – if you put a web page of any functionality up on a public web site, eventually it will be hit by hackers, and you have to be prepared for that. So you either only ever put up stuff that you don’t care if you lose, or else you protect your stuff of value.
My point is that sometimes you don’t want to do it yourself. Unless you’re prepared to hire a staff of software developers to build a site to your specifications, chances are very high that you’re better off piecing together some off the shelf software where somebody else has already done the hard work.
When can you do it yourself, and when you should you skip it?
Content
Content, the words and images that make up your site, should be what you’re the best at. You know your business best, so you’re absolutely the one best positioned to talk about it. This is also the reason that blogs are so popular, because a blog is really just a simple content management system – write up a couple of paragraphs of text at a time and everything else is done for you.
Design
What will your content look like? Technically it always has a design, even if that design is “black text on a white background.” How much design you add is up to you. The most likely next step is to use a pre-made design template. All the major content management systems and blogs have them, you just need to pick one out and fill in a few variables.
Of course, you may want an entirely unique design. If you want to do this yourself you need to get your hands on an HTML/CSS editor and start reading up. This is where you start to consider paying someone to do it for you. Keep one thing in mind, though – the designer you hire might well be just filling in a template anyway without telling you. If you feel that it’s a better use of your time to pay someone to do it, that’s your choice. Others are more hands on and don’t believe in paying good money to do something they could have done on their own.
Software / Frameworks / Functionality
Surprisingly, having software that actually does something on your web site is a relatively easy do-it-yourself task. Most hosting providers offer pre-packaged software installation packages, and all you have to do is click one. Want a blog? Not a problem, just install the blog software. What if you need the image gallery instead? No problem. Once you’ve got one installed, then apply a design template and you’re in business.
You can most definitely bring a site up entirely on your own, and you shouldn’t be afraid to try. It’s not about programming them anymore, it’s about configuring them. Make a few choices, fill in some fields in a form, and you’re in business.
Posted by Duane on Feb 2, 2010 in
Uncategorized Quick lesson, since this question comes up a lot. To get up and running with your own domain on the web you technically have to do two things. First you have to claim the name (“register”). Second, you have to point it somewhere (“host”). These are two pretty different things, but it’s easy to confuse them. Both are usually handled by the same organizations, too, so it’s very easy to get yourself into a shopping cart where you don’t know whether you bought enough or too much.
Hosting
If you’ve got a computer, you could, right now, install a web server program, write up some content, and have a web site. If your computer is on the Internet, it has an IP address like 209.191.93.53 or something. You could tell your friends to type that address and, assuming that your service provider is not blocking the necessary path to make it happen, they’d see your stuff. Congratulations, you are now hosting a web site.
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Wait wait wait, there’s all kinds of problems with this. You probably don’t want to host your web site on a computer in your basement. Not only will your service provider almost certainly block it, but there’s power outages and viruses and other issues to worry about. That’s why there are companies in the hosting business. You can pay them, and what you do is basically rent space on a machine of theirs instead. Part of your service agreement with them is that they keep the machines on, and running, and free of viruses and security issues.
To buy hosting means that you’ve entered into an agreement with a hosting provider, and you’re paying them some amount per month or per year to use their machines. They in turn give you one of those IP addresses, and a username and password that allows you access to the machine. That’s how you’d move your content over to their machine.
With me so far? Hosting just means making content available on a web server machine, whether it is yours or somebody else’s.
Registering
Once upon a time us old geeks used to trade IP addresses of cool sites to check out, because that was the only way around the net. Then along came this great idea, kind of like a big telephone book for the internet. What they did is to set up big machines all around the net who did nothing but run a big lookup program where you could associate a name to an IP address. Computers would then hit those machines all day long asking, “What IP address is associated with this name?” and they’d get back the information they needed. Presto, now you don’t have to remember IP addresses anymore and instead can just go to www.yahoo.com.
Registering a domain name means getting yourself into one of these servers. Of course you can’t just insert yourself, otherwise everybody would insert themselves for every domain. There is actually a process to it. You have to buy the domain for a certain period of time. This part is actually pretty cheap, and you can register names for less than ten dollars. That’s one of the big reasons why so many of them are taken, because it’s so cheap to grab up a bunch.
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When you do register a domain you’ll be asked what IP address you want to assign to the name. That’s where the hosting comes in, because if you’re hosting your site someplace then you have an IP address all ready to go. If you have that information, then once it “propagates” (meaning that all the name servers around the net have refreshed their information and know about you), then somebody will be able to type your domain name and get to your web site.
What if you’re not ready to host?
A common question is whether you have to do both at once, and the answer is no you don’t. Every domain registrar will offer to “park” a domain for you, while you straighten out your hosting situation. This is ideally to prevent a zillion broken web sites from littering the net, but really it’s for them to seize on the opportunity to advertise because what they’ll do is redirect the user to a page that says “Coming soon” and “This page brought to you by Us!” with liberal amounts of discounts and other marketing gimmicks. Hey, whatever works.
In summary? You can register as many domains as you want, and you don’t have to be ready to go live with a web site, either. It’s a good idea, if you find a name that you like that is not already taken, to just go ahead and grab it. How many names you can register is really up to your budget. You should definitely try to find one that’s a keeper, though, and register it for a good long time if you’re serious. You get the good discounts that way and you don’t have to worry about breaking out the credit card to renew it every year.
Once you’ve got the site, there’s many different ways to host your content ranging from pointing at a free service to actually having somebody build you your own site from scratch. But more on that at a different time.
Posted by Duane on Feb 2, 2010 in
Uncategorized I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the productivity poster-boy. I’ve got as many excuses as the next guy. If I acted on half the ideas in my head at any one time I’d be a very busy, and hopefully very rich, geek. But like everybody else I throw roadblocks up in my own way toward getting things done. I’d like to think that the very existence of this blog is my attempt to fix that problem and maybe help some others get over the hurdle as well.
Here’s the thing. More often than not it is better to do a little than to do nothing. If you’ve got a name in mind for your web site, and you see that it is available, grab it. It might not be there tomorrow. If you think you might want to start a blog, why not head over to Wordpress.com and start up a free one, to practice? If you need to showcase pictures of the products in your catalog, what’s better — looking at all the different image gallery software available and trying to decide which one is perfect, or actually putting one of them up so that customers can actually see your stuff?
The web is a very iterative, evolutionary place. Don’t be afraid to make some baby steps and learn along the way. You have to learn sometime, and better to make your mistakes now when your audience is small than later when (if you’re lucky!) a million people will see them.
