Website Development

I do website development for fun, not profit. In this section, I keep track of all the resources I use (or have developed) to make my website development easier or better. I prefer developing sites that are mostly “barrier-free” — I don’t expect visitors to have any special plugins installed, or even to have JavaScript enabled. Everything here uses straight-forward HTML (or XHTML), CSS, and is usually powered on my web host’s server side by PHP code. Except for images, this website should work fine on a text-only browser (e.g., Lynx) or on your cell-phone browser.

Reference

Named HTML Character References: a set of pages I’ve provided so that you can display all the named character entity references (see Section 24 of the HTML 4.01 Spec) using any font installed on your computer.
blooberry.com: Index DOT Css and Index DOT Html — There are many websites providing HTML and CSS documentation (including the W3C sites referenced in the introductory paragraph). This is my favorite one, which I always check first.
alistapart.com: A List Apart explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.

CSS Resources

www.positioniseverything.net: this site explains some obtuse CSS bugs in modern browsers, provides demo examples of interesting CSS behaviors, and shows how to “make it work” without using tables for layout purposes.

PHP Resources

www.php.net/manual: PHP (recursive acronym for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor") is a widely-used Open Source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. This is the official reference manual, complete with reader-added comments.
PhpPackages: Here's a page where I keep track of utilities, libraries, etc. written in PHP.

Validation

I make every effort to make sure the HTML/XHTML and CSS used by this website meets the standards of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). To do that, I use their online validators:

W3C MarkUp Validation Service: check the validity of your HTML or XHTML pages (including HTML or XHTML output from PHP, ASP, or JSP pages).
W3C CSS Validation Service: check the validity of your CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

Other useful online validators:

W3C Link Checker: check all links on a page to make sure they are still valid.
Robots.txt Validator: check the validity of your robots.txt file. Also provides links to pages that explain how to use a robots.txt file and the syntax it requires.

Test Server on Windows

See Apache-MySQL-PHP for Windows.