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I found a website useful for designing my own site and took parts of the code to modify it for my personal use.I have added my content but parts of the html and css are from this original website.
do I attribute the work by providing a link to the original developer's page ? I've done so under the footer but was wondering if more is required to give proper credit.
You do so in whatever manner the license they gave you to use their code says you should, and you should ask the copyright holder if it is unclear.
Legally? It depends entirely on the license that the original author has decided to publish their work under. There are a multitude of open source licenses each with slightly different attribution and reuse requirements (even Stack Overflow)
Morally? That's entirely up to you. If you're using a substantial amount of code, a callout on the page may be appropriate. Maybe just a comment will do. Or maybe no attribution at all if the license (and your conscience) allows it.
I'm trying to find out what's the worst case scenario, damage or repercussions of embedding an image from an ambiguous third party website from a security point of view. In specific, what technical access does the 3rd party gain to exploit?
For example, a user posts an image URL and then the image is directly embedded like so on a website:
<img src="http://www.site-thats-not-mine.com/image.jpg">
I understand that the image could be malicious, or even that it's not really an image, but what's the worst that they can do due to this? It's not like it's an uncommon practice either.
Generally, the worst it can do is track the end user. Any headers sent along with the request for the image can be used to keep a database on end users of the image. Another bad thing it can do is change -- it could lead to a broken image on your site if the image is removed or if the server goes down; and if the image is replaced with something else, it could lead to similar problems (even possible legal issues -- for example, if the image is maliciously replaced with the intention of deceiving end users of your site).
There are also browser exploits to consider, but those are not the general problems.
For example image file can be crafted in special way to exploit bugs in browser or image libraries to hack visitor machine.
Other possible things that could go wrong - remote site is down or image is gone. Or instead of lovely flower images your site will one day start displaying bestiality p0rn... It's better to serve own content :)
The worst thing that could happen?
I'd say: the universe could implode. (though I am not sure if that would be such a bad thing...)
No, that is mean in a serious though somewhat exaggerated way: since it is impossible to know all possible exploits that do exist or might be developed it is formally impossible to limit the worst possible outcome of a missuse. Such a question cannot be answered seriously. You might want to re-think your question instead.
I work with my professor to implement web-based decision support tools. I am a seasoned programmer, and am at ease with the various web technologies we use. However, my professor isn't, and he usually has to rely upon me to do even the most basic tasks like adding publications and presentations to an existing list. However, he now wants to be able to do these basic tasks by himself since we both feel it will be more efficient that way, and to leave the hard-core tool implementation for me.
He suggested that we purchase Dreamweaver to achieve this. However, I do not have much experience with Dreamweaver since I prefer to work with bare HTML, CSS etc., and Emacs and Eclipse have filled these needs very well for me.
What do you think we should do? Do you think Dreamweaver will be a good tool for this? If not, is there something else we should look at? How far will he be able to get along without knowing much HTML? Do you think I should give him a crash course in HTML? Feel free to opine!
NOTE: The website is not based on any CMS; it is completely bred in-house. We use HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. However, my professor will most likely dealing only with HTML (no CSS etc.)
For these types, I often (while cringing) reach for WordPress.
If your customers can make a Facebook post, they can edit content in WordPress. Just stay on top of the updates for it, as exploits for WordPress are found with very high frequency. Even with this maintenance, it will still be easier than doing updates for them.
It shouldn't be too hard to convert your site over to a template that you can use within WordPress. If you can't, you can easily embed content from WordPress into your site via feeds, but there is a performance penalty for this.
If you build the site with Dreamweaver, Adobe Contribute is a good option that is pretty much WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), and it is designed to work with Dreamweaver templates.
Basically, it helps prevent novices from screwing up the site too badly by locking users out of template areas (the areas that are supposed to stay the same from page to page, such as navigation).
I have a website http://www.bccfalna.com/ and the contents on this site are in HINDI Language. I want to make all these pages read only for peoples so that they can not copy the content.
Since I have written some books in HINDI Language on Computer Technology and I know that there are very few Information in HINDI language on the Internet about the Computer and I.T. Technology so I want to sell my EBooks in PDF format.
To show the usefulness of the contents of my books, I have placed all the contents in TEXT format in my website, so that people can see, read and can make decision to buy the book if the book is useful for them.
Since I have placed my whole books in Content form on my site so that various search engines also can give more and more traffic to my site but I am afraid that since I have placed all my content on my site in text form, any one can copy and will not be interested to buy them as PDF Format EBOOK.
I want that people can Read the content of my site but can not be able to copy the contents in any word processor.
Is it possible?
I don't want to make image like content, because Google, Yahoo like modern search engines don't gives too much importance to image sites.
I don't want to use Flash like sites too. The reason is same. Modern Search Engines don't gives too much attention to these kinds of sites.
I want my contents in TEXT format but I want to make them READ ONLY. Is it possible? If Yes: I would like to know HOW? and if No, I would like to get the alternative type solution.
Is there someone Genius to solve this problem? Thanks.
Generally speaking, any web content that is readable by a search engine will also be readable and copyable by people visiting your page.
I suppose you could examine the user_agent in the HTTP request to determine whether it originated from a popular search engine or not; if it did, return the plain-text of your content; if it did not, return a raster image of your content (text in an image can't be selected for copying and pasting, but it could be OCR'd or otherwise printed by the user). Some websites will use a script to disable right-clicking to save an image (but such scripts can easily be circumvented). Some sites will place a transparent image over the image containing the content (but this, too, can be circumvented). Note that the user_agent can be falsified if the web surfer knows you're treating search engines specially.
I suggest the best approach, though, is to keep things simple. Only publish the first chapter of your book and a table of contents online, or else only publish the first page of each chapter, or something similar. Search engines do not need the complete text of your book, only representative samples. Nobody will go to the trouble of copy/pasting your text if they can only get to a portion of the complete book.
You can't make it indexable to search engines and incapable of being copy & pasted... Google has to be able to copy words from your text to use in it's index. Maybe you could put snippets of the parts you want indexed in text format and put the majority in image/flash. It's not uncommon to see chapter previews on websites selling books.
Try Google Books:
I don't know if it works with the HINDI Language (It works. Some examples: http://www.scribd.com/doc/15257971/Google-Hindi-Books)
This solution allows Google to index and everyone to read the whole content. Anyhow copying remains awkward.
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/tour/
"Read-only" means they cant modify your webpages, "readable but not copyable" is impossible by definition, and makes about as much sense as "I want to give someone some water, but I dont want it to be wet". So, to answer your question, no this is not possible at all. (I regularly have to deal with people who think that this (and others) law of physics/mathematics doesn't apply to them, so sorry if I sound a bit rude.)
On a practical level, if you only give them some of the information, then they will only be able to copy that part of the information. (If they buy the book, they will be able to copy the rest from there.)
As others here have said, what you are asking is not possible.
If you host content for people to view in a browser, and for Google to index, there is absolutely no way to stop anyone from copying it. It is possible to make copying the content difficult (or at least inconvenient), but there's no way to stop someone from copying it if that's what they really want to do.
The only alternative, as others have already said, is to only post the first chapter of the book, and allow your readers to make a judgement based on that chapter. If they like the chapter they'll buy the whole book. This is a pretty common practice.
I understand that posting only part of the content is not what you want, but if you want to make it impossible to copy the whole book then this is your only real option.
The other alternative is to not worry about it. Cory Doctorow (and others I'm sure) publishes all his books under a Creative Commons license. They are free to download from his website but he still manages to make money from selling actual books. If people like your work enough, they'll pay to have it in a nice format.
There is, a way to instruct the browser to disable copying text. This does not, however, prevent copying, just makes is difficult. Not all browsers recognize this, especially older browsers. However, there are ways around this, the user can download the entire page and search for the text embedded in the HTML.
Another way, is to make it a graphic, rather than ASCII text. That way would mean that if anyone really wanted to copy your content, they would have to go through the process of using OCR (optical character recognition), then proof read plus correct the result.
Another way is to make it into a Flash animation, that can also be bypassed by doing a screen capture, then doing an OCR. In short, there is no way to prevent copying of material displayed in a browser ... but you can make it difficult and, hopefully, people won't bother.
FYI, typically people want their website to be read-only, to make it difficult or impossible for hackers to change their website content (i.e. replace content with vandalized content) ... not to prevent people from accessing the content legitiamately uploaded to the website.
Hope this helps.
Scan the text and post as an image, people can still read but not copy the text directly. They can copy the image but that will not matter as it would be the same as just reading from the screen they would have to retype it all if they wanted to steal the work.
Although I've done programming, I'm not a programmer. I've recently agreed to coordinate getting a Website up for a club. The resources are--me, who has done Web content maintenance (putting content into HTML and ColdFusion templates via a gatekeeper to the site itself; doing simple HTML and XML coding); a serious Web developer who does database programming, ColdFusion, etc., and talks way over the heads of the rest of us; two designers who use Dreamweaver; the guy who created the original (and now badly broken) site in Front Page and wants to use Expression Web; and assorted other club members who are even less technically inclined.
What we need up first is some text and graphics (a gorgeous design has been created in Dreamweaver), some links (including to existing PDF newsletters for download), and maybe hooking up an existing Blogspot blog. Later (or earlier if it's not hard), we may add mouseover menus to the links, a gallery, a calendar, a few Mapquest hotlinks, and so on.
My question--First, is there any real problem with sticking with HTML and jpegs for the initial site? Second, for the "later" part of the site development, what's the simplest we can go with? Third, are there costs in doing this the simple way that will make us regret it down the road? Also, is there a good site/resource where I can learn more about this from a newbie perspective?
If you don't require any dynamic content, heck, if you don't plan on editing the content more than once a week, I'd say stick to basic HTML.
Later, you'd probably want a basic, no-fuss and easily installable CMS. The brand really depends on the platform (most likely PHP/Rails/ASP), but most of them can be found by typing " CMS" into Google. Try prefixing it with "free" or "open source" if you want.
I'm pretty sure you can do all this for absolutely free. Most PHP and Ruby CMS's are free and web hosting is free/extremely cheap if you're not demanding.
And last/best tip: Find someone who has done this before, preferably more than once. He'll probably set you up so you never have to look at anything more complicated than a WYSIWYG editor.
Plain old HTML is fine, just as long as you don't use tags like blink and marquee.
I personally love tools like CityDesk.
And I'm not just plugging Joel. (There are others out there in this class I'm sure.) The point is they make making a static website very easy:
The structure is just a filesystem structure
pages have templates to consolidate formatting
all resources are contained in one file
easy and fast Preview and Publish functions
For a dynamic collaborative site, I would just install one of many open source CMSs available on shared hosting sites.
If you're familiar with html/javascript basics I'd look into a CMS - wordpress, drupal, joomla, nuke, etc. All of these are free. Very often your web hosting company will install one of these by default which takes all of the hard part out of your hands. Next is just learning to customize the system and there's tons of docs out there for any of those systems.
All that being said there is noting wrong with good old fashioned html.
In addition to some of the great content management systems already mentioned, consider cms made simple.
It makes it very easy to turn a static site into a content managed site (which sounds like exactly what you might need to do in the future), and the admin area is very easy to use. Our clients have found it much simpler to use than the likes of Joomla.
It's also free and open source.
Good luck!
There's no reason to not go with plain old HTML and JPGs if you don't know any server side scripting languages. Also, once you want to get more advanced, most cheap hosting services have tools that can be installed with one click, and provide things like blogs, photo galleries, bulletin boards (PHPBB), and even content management tools like Joomla.
I had the same problem myself, I was just looking for something really easy to smash together a website quickly. First I went with just plain old HTML, but then I realised a simple CMS would be better.
I went for Wordpress. Wordpress is mostly known as a blogging platform, but in my opinion it is really great as a deadly simple CMS as well.
why not simply use Google pages?
Here is an example of a website I did, takes about 2 hours, easy to maintain (not that I do (-: ) and FREE.
I think that suggesting you mess with HTML for what you need is crazy!
Plain HTML is great, gives you the most control. If you want to make updating a bit easier though, you could use SSI. Most servers have this enabled. It basically let's you attach one file to many pages.
For example, you could have your menu in navigation.html and every page would include this file. That way you wouldn't have to update this one file on every page each time you need to update.
<!--#include virtual="navigation.html" -->
I agree with the other commenters that a CMS might be useful to you, however as I see it, probably a solution like Webby might do it for you. It generates plain HTML pages based on Templates. Think about it as a "webpage preprocessor" which outputs plain HTML files. It has most of the advantages of using a server-based CMS, but without a lot of load on the server, and making it easy for you to change stuff on any of the templates you might use.
It's fine
Rails (or purchase / use a CMS)
Not unless you start becoming crazy-popular
It really depends on what you go with for 2. Rails has a plethora of tutorials on the net and any product you go with will have its own community etc.
To be perfectly honest though, if the dynamic part is someone elses blog and you move the gallery out into flikr you may find that you can actually live with large parts of it being static HTML for a very long time.
If a to Implement a website With User Profiles/Logins, Extensions, Gallery's etc s a Newbi then a CMS like Joomla, Etc are good , but Else if you presently have only Static Content then Its good to go with Good Old HTML, About JPEG , I though Presently Its better to use PNG or GIF as its Less Bulky.
Also About you Query About Shifting to Server Scripts , When you have Database Driven Material or When you have Other Things that Require Advanced Prog Languages , Just use PHP Scripts inside PHP , and Rename teh File as a PHP, Thats IT, No Loss to you HTML Data.....
Do Go Ahead and Launch you Site ......
Dude, you're talking about HTML, obviously you'll be styling your content with CSS. Wait till you run into IE issues and god forbid your client wants ie6 compatibility.
Go with the HTML for now, I'm sure you guys will hack it through. Our prayers are with you.
Personally, I'd never use JPEG images on a website, mainly because of three reasons:
JPEGs often contains artifacts.
Quality is often proportional
with filesize.
Does not support
alpha transparency.
That said, I'd recommend you to use PNGs for images since it's lossless and a 24-bit palette (meaning full colors + alpha transparency). The only quirk is that IE6 and below does not support native alpha for PNGs, however this could be resolved by running a javascript which would fix this issue.
As for designing a website, there's both pros and cons for this. I suggest you read through:
37 Signal's Why We Skip Photoshop
Jeff Croft's Why We Don't Skip Photoshop
As for newbie resources, I'd recommend you flip through the pages at W3 Schools.