Category Archives: Web

How to create your own icons – useful tips to know when doing small graphics!

I had cause to research search engine bots yesterday and I came across a few nuggets:

• Help the Googlebot understand your web site
• Google Information for Webmasters
• Nine things you can do to make your web site better
• If-Modified-Since and dynamic content
• Issuing Correct HTTP Headers
• Are you using If Modified Since?
• ob_end_clean

This recently publicised problem with almost all browsers (except IE) occurs when “domain names with certain international characters” look like common domain names. It’s not a new issue however, being a well known problem for several years.
You can test your own browser by following this link – does the url say http://www.paypal.com/?
For Firefox users there’s Spoof Stick which “prominently displays only the most relevant domain information”. It’s not foolproof though, and Secunia recommends that users:

Don’t follow links from untrusted sources.
Manually type the URL in the address bar.

Later… Richard Eibrand has the scoop in an ILUG post. Here’s how to disable this feature in Firefox:

• Visit about:config
• Search for “idn” in the search box.
• By default it’ll be “true”, but double click on it to set it to false.
• You don’t need to restart your browser, just go to the test page to see if it works. It did for me!

As a side note, Fuzzbucket says that IDN isn’t used much so it might be worth while having it disabled by default!
Later Still… That’s only a temporary fix as it’s reset the next time you restart Firefox. Here’s a more permanent fix using an extension that warns of IDN characters – Japanese and other sites that use those characters will still work!

This Google Search lists lots of the sites defaced by “Mhemphis of TechTeaM”.

Why don’t almost all the blogspot hosted blogs I’ve come across have a clear “Home” link or have the blog name linked to the root address of the site? It must be something to do with the default template at blogger.com is it?

Beauty? Ugh!

downTHEMall is a great extension for Firefox! Dead handy for downloading links off webpages.