In an effort to garner web design inspiration, I frequently visit CSS galleries to increase my design vocabulary and see new, cutting-edge design trends. Often times, however, these websites are consistently making the same amateur design mistakes that shouldn’t ever be done by gallery-worthy web designs.
I recently switched from Apache/Linux to IIS/Windows in order to develop ASP.NET applications on my shared web host (ixwebhosting.com). Unfortunately, IIS6 doesn’t support Wordpress permalinks because it doesn’t have the ability to use mod_rewrite unless you install a third-party ISAPI filter. Because I’m on a shared hosting plan, I don’t have access to install ISAPI filters and my web host won’t install them for me.
There are a few different 404 page-based hacks that allow you to retain your permalinks, even with IIS. The most popular fix, which worked fine for me, was Keyboard Face’s IIS Permalink Fix. I used his fix, and a GET variable fix from Ikailo to make a PHP-based 404 page that redirects all 404 pages back into Wordpress, thereby bypassing the need for mod_redirect.
Maki, the author of an internet marketing and social media blog called Dosh Dosh, recently revamped his website with a completely new design, which received both positive and negative feedback on his blog post announcing the new theme. Being a long-term subscriber of his website, I would like to provide a review of his new theme. As a developer, I’ve found that one of the best ways to improve my own skills is to evaluate the skills of others.
If you haven’t heard of DoshDosh.com, I highly encourage you to visit — he has phenomenal content related to blogging, freelancing, marketing, etc. that would be extremely useful for any web developer.
A reader recently asked about enabling SSL for a web application, but without the hassle of applying for a verified certificate. This article will outline the process to enable HTTPS on a Windows XP machine, but the process of creating a self-signed certificate is applicable to just about any version of Windows.
What is a certificate?
A certificate is a file that contains a set of instructions, which are read by a client computer, outlining the process of properly encrypting and decrypting data. The certificate is unique to a website, and ensures the security of the client’s data to and from a server.
There’s nothing more amateur than displaying a big, yellow unhandled exception page for a .NET application. Professionally done ASP.NET websites need adequate error handling and recording. It’s not enough to catch exceptions and display a friendly error page — you need to record any unhandled errors so that they can be fixed.
