Journal

Articles Filed Under "Press Articles"

GDPR principles and your web site

There’s a large amount of scaremongering about GDPR doing the rounds, especially by companies trying to sell expensive compliance ‘solutions’ Do you know what GDPR is? I’m pretty sure that many visitors to the CST website will at least have a vague idea. […]

Posted: 17 April 2018 | Filed under: Business, GDPR, Misc/Other, Press Articles, Technical

Facebook EdgeRank Scams

Those of you who use Facebook will no doubt have seen your friends and family posting all kinds of stupid and apparently pointless puzzles. […]

Posted: 25 March 2013 | Filed under: Press Articles, Social Media

Holding Amazon To Account

I thought I’d tell you about some silliness around Amazon and its customer accounts. […]

Posted: 10 September 2011 | Filed under: Press Articles

Touchy Feely Smartphones

Touch screens or physical QWERTY keyboards? Dabbing a sheet of glass or pressing proper buttons? These are the fundamental choices that any prospective smartphone buyer has to make. […]

Posted: 10 October 2010 | Filed under: Press Articles

Designing iPad Apps

I thought I’d write a bit about designing applications for Apple’s iPad. […]

Posted: 7 October 2010 | Filed under: Press Articles

Not All Touch-Screens Are Created Equal

If you look at the specifications of touch screen phones, tablets, and even some touch screen PCs you’ll notice the terms Capacitive and Resistive used. […]

Posted: 9 September 2010 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Mobile Virtual Networks

I overheard a conversation on the train last week – of the three people huddled around the small table, one was obviously the team's self-appointed technical expert. […]

Posted: 19 June 2010 | Filed under: Press Articles

How to Create a Web Presence for a Small Business

Paul Ockenden reveals the steps to success, and the hidden traps that could stop your site in its tracks Research shows that just under half of Britain’s smaller businesses still don’t have a website, and of those around half believe that a website wouldn’t deliver any real benefits. […]

Posted: 12 January 2010 | Filed under: Press Articles

The Man in the Yellow W’stct

Heading across London in a taxi yesterday evening, I spotted one of my pet hates. […]

Posted: 15 May 2008 | Filed under: Press Articles

Dating Game

One of the biggest hassles for any programmer in any language is working with date formats. […]

Posted: 1 July 2001 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Pros and Cons of Form Filling

A frequent query in the various scripting newsgroups concerns how to handle forms that are split over multiple pages. […]

Posted: 1 July 2001 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

PHP Query

Gary from Leatherhead emailed to say that he's an ASP programmer trying to learn PHP, and has run into a couple of problems with the equals sign. […]

Posted: 1 July 2001 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Scripting - Part 2

Last month we looked at Perl, the oldest Web scripting language, and Visual Basic Active Server Pages, one of the most common. […]

Posted: 1 June 2001 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Research on research

For those who spend their days, and often evenings, working on heavyweight Web projects, it becomes very easy to fall into the trap of becoming, well, an expert, especially if you work as part of a large team or visit on-line Web developer communities. […]

Posted: 1 June 2001 | Filed under: Press Articles

We are all going mad

Recently, an interesting email turned up from the folks who run mad. […]

Posted: 1 April 2001 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Scripting - Part 1

Welcome to a brand-new Real World column that isn't really new at all. […]

Posted: 1 April 2001 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Web Designer Books

Paul spotted a question on a new media mailing list which asked, 'Can anyone recommend an absolute beginners' guide to Web site design type of book?' Paul's advice was that if you want to become a great Web designer, then forget Web books for a while and first go out and read some general design books - books like Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek. […]

Posted: 1 April 2001 | Filed under: Press Articles

To Frame or not

'Should I use frames on my site?' A common question, and one where the answers usually range from 'You should never use frames,' through to, 'I quite like frames, actually'. […]

Posted: 1 April 2001 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Forums

A few months ago we explained how to add a newsfeed to your site to keep it fresh. […]

Posted: 1 March 2001 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Splish Splash

The other day, a friend asked for advice on how to set a time-out on the splash page on his site. […]

Posted: 1 February 2001 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Email slaves

There was a time, and it wasn't that long ago, when the average chief technical officer (CTO) spent his mornings reading emails, lunchtimes 'doing lunch' and the afternoons reading emails that had arrived during lunch. […]

Posted: 1 January 2001 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Setting up Home

Dave from Glasgow emailed to ask if there was some JavaScript which he could use to enable visitors to set his site as their home page. […]

Posted: 1 January 2001 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

More DOS Site Monitoring

Oh, the irony! We write about a really nasty task - something that, frankly, we'd like to forget about - and it generates a record volume of email. […]

Posted: 1 May 2000 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Is this site secure

As you might have read in the news a few months back, some credit card companies are amending their terms and conditions to insist that their cards may only be used on the Internet to make purchases from 'secure' sites. […]

Posted: 1 May 2000 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Chopping logs

We received an interesting email from Arturo of Bristol, asking if we could help explain the data in his NT4 IIS server log files. […]

Posted: 4 April 2000 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

E-Camerce?

If you follow the news from the world of e-commerce you can't fail to have noticed a little cock-up involving a camera listed on the Kodak Web site. […]

Posted: 1 April 2000 | Filed under: Press Articles

A hold up at the airport

Many of us have wireless networks in their homes and offices, and they are often built using Apple's wonderful little Airport base station. […]

Posted: 1 April 2000 | Filed under: Press Articles

Spam Tracing

It's been a month of email problems. […]

Posted: 1 March 2000 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

ASP email handling

It's a favourite trick of ours, which we've shown you before in this column, to send an email message from a Web page using just six lines of ASP code. […]

Posted: 1 February 2000 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

DOS Site Monitoring

All of our clients are lovely, but sometimes they can be difficult, and this month one lot in particular has been more difficult than most. […]

Posted: 1 January 2000 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Saving your Intranet

As promised last month, here's the second half of our advice on how to stop your company intranet becoming like an expensive kitchen gadget - fun at first, but then after while it just sits there with no-one using it. […]

Posted: 1 December 1999 | Filed under: Press Articles

When sites go bad

As we write this column, news has just come in about how the giant US-based on-line auction site, eBay (www. […]

Posted: 1 October 1999 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Fast Serve

As well as total failure, your armoury of useful tools should be able to address performance issues too. […]

Posted: 1 October 1999 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Speed Scripting

Barry Nile emailed us to say that he had recently upgraded his Web site, adding some of the ASP database techniques that we showed a few months ago, but now his site is a lot slower. […]

Posted: 1 September 1999 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Site Research

Would you buy a house without first having a full structural survey done? Probably not - unfortunately Paul once did exactly this and he still has the dry rot to prove it. […]

Posted: 1 September 1999 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

An inexact science

While we're on the subject of hits and page impressions, we've pointed out before that many of the tools used for analysing server log files are, how shall we put this politely, somewhat suspect in quality. […]

Posted: 1 July 1999 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Web Databases

Time and time again we get asked 'How do I connect my Web site to a database?', and like most good questions there's no single correct answer. […]

Posted: 1 June 1999 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Just a passing phrase

The buzzword of the past few months has been 'portal'. […]

Posted: 1 June 1999 | Filed under: Press Articles

Jumping Java Jive

Reader David Netter writes: 'I use a dropdown list for site navigation, but at the moment it requires the user to select a page and then press a Go! button. […]

Posted: 1 May 1999 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

You shall go to the web

A lot of companies have plenty of content suitable for a Web site, and many know they really should publish this content on-line but don't have the resources to do it. […]

Posted: 1 May 1999 | Filed under: Press Articles

Second Line, Second ISP?

If you host your Web sites in-house, it's a certain bet that at some stage your leased line will start to fill up and need to be upgraded. […]

Posted: 1 April 1999 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Java Navigation Frames

Last month we touched on frame navigation and how to refresh multiple frames with a single mouse click. […]

Posted: 1 January 1999 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

DIY Certificates

Last month we looked at securing your Web site with usernames and passwords, and now we move on to digital IDs and certificates. […]

Posted: 1 November 1998 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Security Matters

Let's talk security. […]

Posted: 1 July 1998 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Domain Dilemma

John Stewart, marketing director of a video firm, emailed us to ask, 'Where should I register my domains?' There are a number of domain registries around the world (for a reasonably complete list see www. […]

Posted: 1 June 1998 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Domain Pain

There's been much talk in the Internet press recently about the new Top Level Domains (aka TLD's): . […]

Posted: 1 June 1998 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Watching The Defectives

If you look after or host Web sites for clients, there's one certainty: if the site is ever unavailable, the client will be trying to view it at exactly that time. […]

Posted: 1 May 1998 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Art Attack

Let's leave servers aside for a moment and take a look at an issue which will affect anyone implementing a large Web site, especially if it's being created as a team effort. […]

Posted: 1 April 1998 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

Do you need a website?

Do you really need a Web site? It might sound like a strange question to ask in a column dedicated to help you build Web sites, but it's obvious if you look at many of the big company sites that their owners didn't start by asking this most fundamental of questions. […]

Posted: 1 March 1998 | Filed under: Press Articles

Black Forrest Gateaux

To misquote Forrest Gump: 'A Web site is like a box of chocolates'. […]

Posted: 1 March 1998 | Filed under: Press Articles

Scripting

Many people are rather afraid of scripting, which is hardly surprising as it's such a vast area with a lot to understand. […]

Posted: 1 February 1998 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical

An IIS Gotcha

We recently had a problem with a Web site hosted on an IIS server, and that makes heavy use of session variables to track what the user's doing. […]

Posted: 1 February 1998 | Filed under: Press Articles, Technical