Cheninfo FAQIndex to Questions
Q: What's this Cheninfo website all about?This site is used to highlight what's been going on in our lives. It's mainly a monthly picture archive of what's we've been doing. Feel free to roam around. New items are mentioned at the top of the front page in the What's New box. go back to the top
Q: Aren't you afraid of putting all that personal stuff on the web?A: Actual it's not that bad. Believe it or not, we don't get any crank phone calls in the night or any strange visitors popping our door. As a the web designer Philip Greenspun says in his book Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing:
(By the way, the book mentioned above is a really good book on publishing stuff on the web... and it's free!) go back to the top
Q: How did you get the 'Cheninfo.com' domain name?A: Go to internic.net and try out a domain name (i.e. yourdomain.com). If it's available, you can register it. First it costs $70 for the first 2 years and $35 each year after (this fee should go down in the upcoming months). And next you need to obtain permission from your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or Web Presence Provider (WPP) to host your domain. This probably requires an additional setup fee. I went the one-stop route and signed up for a WPP that supports Frontpage extensions and registers my domain name at the same time. go back to the top
Q: Which host do you use?A: AAces.com - they offer 150 megs of space along with email accounts, mailing lists, FTP/telnet access, realmedia video and audio streaming, PHP and Perl, MySQL database, password protected directories and Frontpage extensions. So far, the service has been great. Ross, the guy who runs the technical support, usually answers emails immediately. I would recommend these guys to anyone who wants to setup a website. go back to the top
Q: How did you password protect your pages?A: With the host I use (AAces.com), one of the services they provide is a tool to give a password to any directory on my website. So, thereafter, any web page I place in the directory is "password protected" and anytime someone tries to access the web page, it'll ask for the password. So that's the easy way to do it. If you're not using a host which has this tool, you need to dig into a file called .htaccess, which contains a list of all the usernames and passwords allowable for a particular directory. Then the .htaccess file needs to reside in the directory that you want to "password protect". The other way is through a CGI script. The password to ask for my middle name is done through a Perl script. Some of these scripts are located the CGI Resource Index. go back to the top
Q: What tools do you use to build your web pages?A: Frontpage. Highly recommended for building websites. One of the best features I liked about Frontpage is that it keeps track of the changes you make, so when you want to "Publish" your website, it only sends down the changed information. It's a way of synchronizing between the information on your host and the information stored locally on your computer. Frontpage has an "Explorer" editor which lets you see your website as a whole. It also contains a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor to create or modify any web page. In this editor, you can pretty add anything you want... different size fonts, tables, forms, images and so on. The best thing about it is you can get a website set up in a couple of hours using one of its pre-set web formats, and you don't need to know a thing about HTML code. As the author of "Poor Richard's Web Site" states:
The cons of using Frontpage is (1) it's $150 retail... but you can get it for around $50 (legally!) at online auction sites, like Ebay or Yahoo Auctions. Make sure you're getting the original CDs along with their manuals and registration. And (2) if you decide to use Frontpage, you'll need a host which supports Frontpage extensions (see the answer to "Which host do I use"). Here's a summary of the programs I use for this web site.
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Q: What type of scanner do you use?A: UMAX Astra 610P. This was about $70 (plus UMAX has a $40 rebate, but I never got the check, so don't count on it). It's a 300 dpi 30 bit flatbed scanner, and it comes with its PageManager and Photodeluxe software (albeit older versions) to start you off on scanning stuff in. It's pretty easy to use, just plug it into your printer port, install the software and start scanning. The quality is okay (you get what you pay for), but by all means for website publishing, it's good enough. They say for web publishing, a 300 dpi 30 bit scanner is plenty fine, but for printing pictures and photo archives, you may want a 600 dpi 36 bit scanner. These usually run from $200 to $300. Look at scantips.com for more technical information about scanning. go back to the top
Q: How'd you do those picture thumbnails?A: Using Frontpage, it's pretty easy. There's an option under 'Tools' to make the thumbnails automatically. If you don't have Frontpage, you can use a shareware program called Thumbplus to create a web page with thumbnails... like our Joe and Tina picture collection. Thumbplus is a great program to organize all the pictures you have on your computer. go back to the top
Q: Do you know any good books on building websites?A: Yup, here's some books that have helped me.
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Q: How'd you do your Forums section?A: WWWThreads provides a package of CGI scripts which uses MySQL database to hold all the information. My AAces host allows me to use MySQL and CGI scripts. I'll write more about this later. go back to the top |