Ask Felgall

Some time ago I downloaded and installed Microsoft Virtual PC. Given that the computer that I have Windows XP running on is the least powerful of the computers that i regularly use and given what a memory hog that XP itself is, I didn’t hold out much hope for being able to install anything worthwhile into the Virtual PC but I thought that it was at least worth a look.

Surprisingly, apart from the fact that it ran extremely slowly (and I mean go away and come back half an hour later to see if the screen has changed at all yet - that slow), my attempt to install OS/2 version 4 into the virtual PC was quite successful at least past the first reboot (formatting the virtual hard drive) and second reboot (after installing the presentation manager). Unfortunately, things were running so slowly once it started to open the OS/2 desktop that there seemed little point in continuing with the install but i was impressed that the install actually got that far given the hardware that I have in that particular computer.

Microsoft Virtual PC certainly looks like something that may be extremely useful for me to use the next time that I buy a new computer. For running multiple operating systems on one computer at the same time this free software from Microsoft looks like a great product (who said I never have anything good to say about Microsoft?).

The latest addition to the member’s area is absolutely huge. The zip file is almost 70Mb in size and contains over 150 “Made for Adsense” web sites each of which contains several pages. Also included are tools to allow you to quickly and easily change all the adsense references to your account as well as eBooks on Pay per Click and Search Engine Optimisation.

The only reason I put it in the free area for personal use only rather than the Gold area with reseller rights is that the HTML used in creating all those hundreds upon hundreds of pages looks like it ought to have been left behind when Noah got on his Ark it is that antiquated. I certainly recommend completely reworking the HTML properly if you are going to use this product which makes it a lot less useful than it would otherwise be.

Windows is not the most stable of operating systems and there are many different reasons why it can crash on you. In this guest article you will find several suggestions on steps to take to reduce the chance of having the operating system crash.

First Steps To Fixing Computer Crashes

Eventually, if your web site is on the web for long enough, you will decide to move your site to a different web hosting provider either because your current provider lets you down or because your site has outgrown their service.

Provided that you have your own domain name you will not need to have your site offline for even a second if you transfer your site by following the appropriate steps in the right order. The only thing that may make your visitors aware of the move is that you may want to disable their ability to post comments etc. to your site at its old location during the period that the move is taking place (if you don’t then those comments may be lost).

Moving Your Site - Zero Downtime

My monthly newsletter is sent to all those who have signed up for it each month on the 22nd of that month. To receive my November newsletter if you are not already on the list you will need to act fast.

Sign up now and you will get the newsletter by email. If you don’t sign up straight away then you will have to wait a couple of extra weeks until I get around to adding the page to the web site.

Ask Felgall Newsletter

Most web hosting providers supply at least one tool that is supposed to make creating a web site easier for people just starting out. It is to their advantage to do so since if they don’t provide such tools then the beginners will get their hosting from a competitor who does provide those tools.

There are two types of tools that hosting providers usually supply that are aimed at newbies to the web. The first of these is some sort of “web wizard” which will allow them to create basic web pages and link them all together without having to learn how to write HTML. This sort of facility in fact does make the very first step in creating web pages much easier. The person simply selects one of a small handful of page layouts that the wizard supports and plugs in their content to create pages. The problem comes when they want to take the second step and make some minor modification to the way that their web pages work. These web wizards do not allow much choice in what you can do with them and so this second step change will almost always NOT be able to be done using the wizard. To make their minor change the newbie will need to go back to the beginning, learn HTML and rebuild their web pages properly from scratch.

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The Cascading StyleSheet reference pages are a much more recent addition to the site than the XHTML pages were since fewer browsers supported CSS at the time I started the site. Now of course all browsers with the exception of Internet Explorer fully support CSS 2.0 or 2.1 (and IE7 supports most of CSS 2.1 with only a few of the more advanced commands still not supported).

1. Font Controls
   Control the fonts used on your page with these attributes.
2. Text Alignment Controls
   Control the alignment of the text on your page with these attributes.
3. Text Controls
   Control other aspects of the appearance of the text on your page with these attributes.
4. Margin and Padding Controls
   Control the margins and padding around the parts of your web page with these attributes.
5. Border Controls
   Control the appearance of the border around parts of your page using these attributes.
6. Size Controls
   Control the width and height of parts of your page using these attributes.
7. Background Controls
   Control what appears behind the objects on your page.
8. Positioning Controls
   Control where the object is placed on the page.
9. Alignment Controls
   Control how the object aligns itself relative to other objects around it.
10. Visibility Controls
    Control whether or not the object is visible and if so how much is visible.
11. List Controls
    Control how lists are displayed.
12. Table Controls
    Control how tables are displayed.
13. Interface Controls
    Control how the mouse and the object having the focus on the web page appear.
14. Display Control
    Define whether your tag is inline or block, list, table or whatever.
15. Page Controls
    Control how and if the content will be printed.
16. Content Controls
    You can mark up your content with section numbers and quotes with these controls.
17. Aural Controls
    Control how the page will be spoken in talking browsers.

Note that when I first published this, all the links were broken as I forgot to add the www.felgall.com to the front of them. I didn’t realise this until a reader pointed it out to me. The links have now been corrected and I hope you find the information useful.

One of the oldest sections of the Ask Felgall web site is the series of reference pages on XHTML 1.0. Of corse its having been there for over seven years doesn’t mean that the information those pages contain are not still useful since the XHTML 1.0 standards are still the same today as they were back then. More recently I also added a page identifying some of what changed between XHTML 1.0 and XHTML 1.1.

1. Defining an HTML Document
   How to define an XHTML document.
2. Describing your document
   The head block of your XHTML document.
3. Core Attributes
   Core attributes you can use with many XHTML tags.
4. General Formatting
   Basic XHTML tags.
5. Images and Links
   How to attach images and link from one document to another.
6. Lists
   Defining ordered lists, bulleted lists, and definition lists
7. Forms
   The many field types that can be used in XHTML forms.
8. Tables
   Useful for tabular data (but should no longer be used for layout).
9. Sound and Motion
   Embeddinging multimedia files into your document.
10. Frames
    XHTML has a separate DTD just for frames.
11. Stylesheets
    Once you have defined your page content using XHTML you then need to define how it looks.
12. Compatibility Issues
    Ensuring that your XHTML will work with older as well as newer browsers.
13. XHTML 1.1
    What has changed in this new version.