5:30 Design Tip

I know that Eudora 7.1 and how it works with Windows Vista has very little to do with designing a Web site but I have found so little information on the Web about this that I figured I would try to help out those who are running into some of the same problems that I did.

When I first installed Eudora 7.1 on my new Windows Vista machine I would get an error regarding the history file. The error would say that the linkhistory.tmp file was not found or access denied. I would also have issues with the filters.tmp file and other .tmp files saying they did not exist or that access was denied. I discovered that published ideas to turn off the Vista User Access Control (UAC) would indeed help this problem, but then Eudora would be configured differently. Also, I didn’t like the idea of disabling the Vista UAC because it is a security mechanism even though Microsoft admits to there being some problems with it.

After several hours of tracing what exactly Eudora was doing and finding some documentation on line about Windows XP and Eudora 7.1, I did finally get everything configured and made it work correctly. There are still a few unanswered questions, but hopefully this information will help someone to use Eudora 7.1 with Windows Vista.

In order to install Eudora you must have administrator privileges on your machine. This has been true for several previous versions of Windows. Previous versions of Windows would automagically run all programs in an Administrator account with administrator privileges. This is NOT the case with Windows Vista. Vista, as a security measure, will run all programs as a normal user even in an account with Administrator privileges. You must specifically tell Vista to run a program with Administrator rights. This is the key to running Eudora without all the error messages. I haven’t found a way to permanently set this using the start menu, but you can run it from there. Simply right click on the Eudora executable and choose the “Run as Administrator” option. If you utilize a desktop shortcut you can configure this to happen all the time. Right click on the shortcut and select properties. In the Shortcut tab of the properties click on Advanced. Check the check box that says “Run as administrator” and click on the OK button. Each time you start Eudora using the shortcut Windows will ask you if you started the program. While this is a tad bit annoying, it allows you to keep UAC enabled and still run Eudora.

If you were running Eudora and just ignoring the errors, which did work sometimes, you may have made some changes to the configuration that will disappear when you start running Eudora as an Administrator. This is where I got really confused. Perhaps a Windows aficionado can explain why at some point because it doesn’t make much sense to me. Unless Windows is running as the administrator it cannot write to the Eudora data directory that is initially configured. For illustrative purposes I am going to use the default Eudora install directories. When you start Eudora it copies everything from the install/data directory into a directory C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Qualcomm\Eudora. Windows uses *this* directory for everything so this is where your configuration is located. If you copy this directory over (make a backup of the original directory first, just in case) to your C:\Program Files\Qualcomm\Eudora directory then everything works as you would expect it to and your configuration is as you would expect it to be. My guess is that upon closing Eudora, Windows attempts to write your data to the actual Eudora directory but UAC stops it from doing this. I wasn’t able to confirm that. Why it copies everything to the VirtualStore directory in the first place completely confuses me. This causes you to have 2 copies of all your email, etc.

However, these steps helped me to get Eudora 7.1 working with Windows Vista. I look forward to the stable release of Eudora 8 and hope that the Mozilla project does something really great with an already great mail client!

There are two ways that you can tell a search engine not to crawl your site.

The first is a meta tag on your homepage.

The second is a robots.txt file.

The meta tag is simple. As you are writing your page just add the tag:

<meta name="robots” content="none">

This tells bots not to follow links or index your site.

In the content attribute you can use follow or nofollow and index or noindex. The follow or nofollow tells the bots what to do with the links. The index or noindex tells the bots if they should remember the page.

You should also utilize a robots.txt file. Not all bots will pay attention to the meta tag. Google, for instance, does not. This file needs to go in the root directory of your Web site. You should find it if you go to http://www.mysite.com/robots.txt or http://www.myprovider.com/~mysite/robots.txt.

The file can be created in any text editor and contain the lines:

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /

Make sure that the filename is all lowercase.

These two methods combined should keep all bots from crawling and indexing your site. Now, it will stay a little more private for those family pictures you don’t want the world to know about.

Angie

Did you know that a search engine will look at what you have in the alt attribute of an image tag?

Some people will not put captions on photos with a person’s name in it. Instead they will just put something like “Baby and Nana together at Christmas.” However, then in the alt attribute to the image tag they will put “Little Johnny Someone and Nana Someone.” A search engine will find that as part of your page.

You should always use the alt attribute to describe what is in a picture, just be as vague there as you are in the captions.

Tomorrow, the two ways to tell a search engine not to index your site.

There are several ways to publish a Web site. Most hosting companies will provide you with a Control Panel these days in order to upload files to your site. Many will also grant you FTP or SCP access to the site. So, what is the difference and why do you care?

FTP and SCP are pretty much the same thing. The major difference to you, is that SCP is encrypted. What that means is that it is harder for a third party to intercept your username, password, or other information. There is a rather well known and free SCP client called WinSCP. You can download it at http://www.winscp.com/.

If you have the choice, go with SCP over FTP.

Sometimes you know what kind of a Web site you would like to publish. When you do I highly suggest visiting other sites of the same genre. This will help to motivate you. Not only can it give you ideas, it can also show you what not to do. Once you have visited plenty of sites, draw out what you want to see. Then visit a few more sites. By doing this type of research and preparation you are going to ensure that you have a well thought out site when you are finished.

Be sure to include in your sketch all of your menu options. And don’t forget the freebie sites that you want to utilize like YouTube, Blogger and MySpace. Make it fun, simple and unique and people will visit time and time again!