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Sausage Sizzler - Webmaster Community Newsletter |
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G'Day Sizzlers!
After a successful trip to Washington State, Victoria BC and San Francisco, I am happy to say the future looks very positive for Sausage, which in turn means new products and services that will be available for you. If you don't believe me here is a teaser, http://sausagehosting.com.
You will also notice in the coming weeks a few tweaks on the Web site. You will see that we add in some brands under our Sausage.com one. Sausage Hosting being the first, then a rebranding of the Sizzler Forums to Sausage Forums. The changes are to help aid you in getting to where you want to be fast. They will also help us keep track of the various products and services we will be providing.
Another thing that will change soon is this editorial. It will be dropped and replaced with a Sausage Blog. This will then be a section within the newsletter. It will be written by various Sausage staff members and contributing writers. It will also give you the ability to quickly skip over the section if you are more interested in the tips, reviews and opinion sections.
Keep on sizzling!
Nathan Allan
Sausage Sizzler Editor
editor@sausage.com
How to be dynamic
As this weeks Sizzler Spotlight shows there is some debate over which out of ASP and PHP to use when creating a dynamic web site.
In my search for useful scripts this week I noticed that there seems to be a lot more PHP scripts out there on the web compared to ASP. Almost 2 to 1 if you like at sites like hotscripts.com.
Not only are there readily available scripts to help you get started but the sheer number of PHP tutorial and lesson based sites are overwhelming. you are sure to find at least one site that fits in with your style and learning methods.
At Sausage we pride ourselves in staying impartial and trying to support as many web based languages as possible, however I must admit a bias towards PHP, from a development and cost viewpoint it stands out from the crowd!
Review by Nathan
WinHTTrack v3.20RC6 WINDOWS ALL FREE
http://www.httrack.com/
This is a great little program not unlike Sausage's own Website Downloader, although admittingly this has a little bit more to it than our program.
If you need to download a web site and have it running locally this is exactly what you need. It will rip the site from the web and store it so it will work on your local drive. Great if you want to see how a particular site does something, or if you have had a catastrophe and need to get your hands on some previous site you have built.
Review by Nathan
ASP or PHP?
While browsing the Sizzler forums recently I came across a simple thread. A Sizzler Newbie was asking about the learning process of ASP. There are some very friendly responses too.
After reading through them I figured why not look to see whos asking about learning PHP. To my surprise, there aren't many people asking about the learning processes of PHP. There are plenty of discussions started by Rich or Herbert but not many people asking any of these questions which I ask below.
PHP vs. ASP
1. Is either language better than the other?
2. Is either one easier to learn over the other?
3. Is either one faster than that other?
4. Which / how many different - databases can they connect to? (Oracle, MySQL,
PostgreSQL, MSSQL, etc.)
5. PHP4 comes with 400+ functions built in. To match the same features, how much VB
Scripting does one need to do in order to have a matching ASP page?
6. If PHP has built in functions, that should make it a scripting language as well as a
programming language. Does that mean ASP is "only" a programming language?
7. Does ASP work on non-Windows servers? What about PHP? It works on non-Windows
servers, but does it work on Windows?
8. If both work on Windows, which works more efficiently?
9. How does ASPx compare to PHP4 and will PHP5 come back at what ASPx has to offer?
Share your thoughts.
ASP Discussion:
http://www.sizzlerforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=572
Review by Bram
The (St)age of the Internet and the Internet as a place of business
According to some sources, the Internet or World Wide Web began back in the 1960s. In the mid 1980s it was put into use for the US Military. Depending on your view, the World Wide Web is the brainchild of Al Gore, created in the early 1990s and becoming hugely popular in the mid-1990s.
The Internet as it stands today is based roughly on what started in the 1990s. In general terms, the Internet is pretty young. Depending on where you live, the Internet is either still in fall-out or gaining in speed. Generally speaking, the dot-com phase of the Internet has come and gone, but only in terms of "give me a gazillion dollars for my business that may or may not find a way to make a profit." This does not mean, however, that a dot-com cannot still be a viable business model.
If your market is the dot-com saturated United States, the Internet may be "just" a tool. In the eyes of some people it may be a has-been. Advertising? Ha! If your market focus is on Latin America or the Hispanic US market, that may be a different story. Search for the stats and you'll see that the Hispanic market is growing very well. If you can get eyeballs en masse to your site, advertisers are there. One of my companies, TodoBebe (www.todobebe.com) is a great example. Site traffic is climbing and traffic-generating content deals are increasing. Advertisers wishing to reach the growing numbers of online Hispanics are calling. TodoBebe (pronounced toh-doh-bay-bay) provides content and sells baby products. Its one of companies launched in the 1999 Internet craze that has been able to stick around and become a viable business.
What about the Internet as a place of business? Does it have a future? That depends on how its used. Buying stuff online for many of us is old hat. E-commerce was one of the earlier adaptations. Well, at least in the USA.
What about services? The services market is illusive and diverse. Companies may provide customers with online services such as online banking. On a similar level, more and more companies are pushing customers to pay bills online. Whats the benefit of this? First of all, it saves the company money on paper, cutting that paper to certain sizes, printing on that paper and then mailing that paper. For the customer it saves a stamp and also allows us to pay at the last minute or even automatically.
The above exemplifies B to C markets in the most basic form. What about B to B? A year or 2 ago ASPs or Application Service Providers tried to make a place for themselves but got nailed. It seems now that ASPs are making a comeback.
Speaking as generally or specifically as you like, which direction or directions do you see the Internet going? If the Internet is to become a mainstay in our economy it must mature to a new level. It must grow beyond e-mail and e-commerce. Paying bills online is e-commerce, isn't it?
Stating that the Internet needs to mature doesn't mean that it must become a mature market. In fact, because its closely tied to technology, the Internet may never become a mature market.
The question now is how and what kind of business to create that works in this market. This is separate from the idea of web design as a business. Web design would be part of a service.
CNN.com is not a business model. Its an online entity of an off-line company. Amazon.com exists solely as an online business, but it has offline ties, namely warehouses and sales of products.
Whats the future for business conducted online? What is the future of how businesses use or utilize the Internet? While some businesses may benefit from having on- and offline entities, others may focus solely on virtual business.
Technology figures into business in every aspect. It can be a positive or a negative. Depending on your business, articles like this can hurt you or be the answer to many questions. http://www.techweb.com/tech/business_apps/20020730_business_apps
Whats your take on all of this?
http://www.sizzlerforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=690
Discuss your experiences with Bram
CSS Skins: Cool Gimmick or useful feature for the site visitor
Im confident that many of us will agree CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a highly useful tool in a variety of ways. From font control to page layout to DHTML, it offers tremendous benefits.
When it comes to dealing with various browsers, a company must make a choice. If the companys sole business resides online, or if doing business online represents a good portion of business, it may behoove that company to create a few sets of style sheets so that all major browsers see the site as intended.
In the same light, if Bobs Travel needs a web site to show off their deals on cruises to the local market; they may not be so concerned with having a site that uses Javascript to determine which style sheet to serve up.
If you're company designs web sites, sure, it may be a "cool" to show off how wild you can make your site simply by clicking a link to change styles. But other than that, what use is a set of CSS skins?
At the moment, the one way in which I see this is a useful feature is in product sales. If, for example, company produces a shopping cart, it may be a great idea if the cart is designed to change appearance completely based on style sheet settings. That could include logos, colors of backgrounds, fonts, etc. and so on.
So I ask, are CSS Skins a cool gimmick or a useful feature? Perhaps its useful in an accessibility sense. Heres one example of a site using skins to increase font size:
http://www.alistapart.com
Come share your thoughts and sample uses!
http://www.sizzlerforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=689
Discuss with Bram
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