Cohesive Web

I was working upon upgradate & modification of a forum powered by SMF. My first job was to upgrade the forum from SMF 1.1.14 to SMF 2.0.1. I found no difficulties in doing the upgardate. If you are not well accomplish with SMF upgrade process then here is a good instruction for you.

My next job was to customize the board icons. I googled a mod for this purpose. It is cbi v0.5 (Custom Board Icons). I downloaded the latest version of the mod which is cbi172.zip. I tried to follow the installation process for the mod but got no result. Then I tried for the manual installation instruction for SMF version 2.0.1. But it was my bad luck as I found the modification wasn’t compatible with version 2.0.1. So I had to spent some time with the code to make it work. This is what I had done.
Continue reading ‘Working with SMF’ »

After a long days I am back for blog post. Last one month I was very much irritated with the problem occurred in some of my client website. In a Sunday morning while I was sleeping one of my client ranged me and asked me to check her website as she got a mail from google that her website is spreading malware. I got confused as I had never faced this kind of problem. I started checking the website. But the antivirus in my Laptop didn’t allowed me to open the site at all. Then I decided to go to my office to check the situation.

In my office I checked the site thoroughly(OMG, I was able to open the site in my office). I found iframe code with hidden visibility was inserted in some pages. To be more specific index pages. I checked all the index pages in office PC, deleted the infected pages in the server and uploaded the pages from PC. Checked, cleaned all the html, php, temporary files. Almost near about afternoon I was back to my home while thinking how this happened.

Iframe Injected

Next Morning after arriving in the office I started checking the website and I found it was again infected by the hidden iframe. Site url was different as earler it was .cn and next day it was .ru I was upset about how to fix the things. Believe me or not in the last one month this site got infected 27 times. Our team had experienced the same attack for 5 more site. It was a horrible experience for us.

We had done lot of googleing to find out the preventive measurement. We found out lots of information regarding this. Some of them are good and some of them are misleading too. So here I like to point out some effective ones only.

1. You should have good antivirus installed in your system from where you access web. I am using avast free edition and it works fine for me.
2. Please check your websites on a regular basis. If you see if any web page with a blank section in the top them be almost sure that it is infected. Your antivirus should give you warning.
3. If you find any of your website get infected then start following the next steps.
4. First of all scan your machine with the antivirus. A boot time scan is more preferable.
5. Replace all the pages in the website using a local copy from your system. If the web site is too big to repalce then try to repalce all the pages with name index. Then check the site again.
6. Once the site is cleaned change the ftp details for the site and if possible do the same for the other sites whose details are kept in your ftp application.
7. Keep checking the site in a short span of interval.

You should also check your site in google too. If google find out some problem with your site they may have shown a warning message like “This site may harm your computer”. Another way to check your site is
http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://www.yourdomain.tld

Continue reading ‘Iframe code injection’ »

In my earlier post I had discussed about the designing the liquid 3 column display layout. While developing the structure I had some problem with the column heights. Depending upon the contents length of those columns varies. I have declared the height property as auto in the css. I could have declared them with some specific pixel value to make the columns of equal length. But if you consider your pages to contain dynamic content generated by server side scripting then this technique may fail. Particularly in Internet Explorer the data part may be extended beyond the columns, which could make the structure awful. So I was in need to find some other solutions for that purpose.

I thought of using some JavaScript to make all the columns height equal. The algorithm to do this is very simple. Calculate the max height among three columns and assign it for all the columns. So first I introduced three different IDs for these three columns to access the properties of those columns using Javascript document.getElementById() method. So I changed the HTML code as follows:

[code lang=”html4strict”]

Header Text

Header text 2

The text….

• DIRECTOR SPEAKS
• STUDENTS
• ALUMNI

Copyright text

[/code]

contentDiv_left for the left column, contentDiv_mid for the middle column and contentDiv_right for the right one. contentDiv ID for the container div for these 3 columns.

Continue reading ‘Liquid Column Display Layout – Part II’ »

I was busy with some of my projects. Few months back I was interested in liquid column layout structure. I had used this kind of layout in one of my project. This time I am going to discuss about the features of liquid column layout.

Earlier web page designing was highly dependent on HTML table structure. Common practice was to design a web page using HTML tags like table, tr, th, td, tbody etc. Web page designer used to design a layout in a graphic editor like Adobe Photoshop and slice the layout in small images in gif or jpeg format. Then create a table structure and insert those small images in different cells. This technique is very useful because putting those small rectangular images into different table cells, a web page can be designed having the same look and feel as layout image drawn in graphic editor. If not wrong till today this is the mostly used methodology to design web pages.

Let us review this designing procedure. I have described it in a very simplest way. Sometime designing a web page using the table structure based on graphical layout becomes a difficult job. If the graphical layout contains curves, color gradient then the complexity increases. I consider the most crucial part in this process is to design the table structure. Many times designer uses nested tables while designing the pages. Merging cells and rows are also widely used. Another important factor is how to put images in the table cells. Most of the cases img HTML tag is used, but sometimes inserting image as background works wonderfully.

So unless you don’t have a good knowledge of HTML table structure you won’t be able to work as professional web designer. In my early days in this profession I had to suffer with the complexity of nested table structure while designing pages.

In recent years I found there is a trend to avoid this procedure of designing web pages. There are certain reasons behind this change. First and foremost reason I think the size of the web page. Using nested table structure increases the file size of the web page, but many times it becomes unavoidable. I have also noticed a peculiar case of Internet Explorer while opening a page containing nested table. If the web page contains heavy images and huge text in nested tables, browser’s status will show “Done” while display of the page is not complete. IE shows “Done” status when display of the outermost table is complete. Another reason, editing the table structure in those web pages is quite difficult, that’s why people like to avoid this procedure. I found many times editing that kind of pages make the complex table structure incorrect. Support for other HTML tags having boxed or blocked like display such as div, layer, iframe etc by most of the browser is another important reason. Increasing use of CSS for applying style to provide a good look is also important. I found designer uses div tag supported with CSS instead of table to design web pages. They have produces pages which looks same as page designed using table structure and most importantly they have able to reduce the file size a bit.
Layouts like liquid column display, clean structure are the outcome of this increasing usage of div like tag instead of table tags in HTML. Though this new methodology is not very easy but I found there is a rapid increase in number who follows this.

Continue reading ‘Liquid Column Display Layout’ »