Ohlone College Web Team Blog

Spry is Adobe’s version of AJAX.  It is included in Dreamweaver CS3.

• Spry Team blog
  • Spry 1.6 Dreamweaver CS3 Update
• Spry 1.6 improvements and standards
• Spry Best Practices - documentation, standards, demo and samples

To make file readable by others (i.e., the “world”), set the directory containing the files to:

• drwxr-xr-x
  or
  755

and set the files in the directory to:

• -rwxr--r--
  or
  644

Explanation of file permissions

There are 3 classes of permissions:

1. User (sometimes referred to as “owner”)
2. Group
3. Others (sometimes referred to as “all” or “world”)

A common notation for permissions is a series of 10 characters, such as:

• drwxr-xr-x
• -rw-r--r--
• -rw-rw-rw-

The first character represents the file type:

• - regular file
• d directory

The remaining 9 characters represent 3 permissions for each of the 3 classes:

• r read on
• w write on
• x execute on
• - off

Directories must have execute permissions, such as:

• drwx------
• drwxr-xr-x (most common)
• drwxrwxr-x
• drwxrwxrwx

Executable program files, such as CGI scripts, must have execute permissions, such as:

• -rwxr-xr-x

Regular files must have read and/or write permissions, such as:

• -rw-r--r-- (most common)
• -rw-rw-rw-

Read, write, and execute permissions may also be represented in octal notation:

• 4 read on
• 2 write on
• 1 execute on
• - off

The octal values are added to result in desired read-write-execute permissions:

• 4 + 2 + 1 = 7 for read-write-execute permissions rwx
• 4 + 2 = 6 for read-write permissions rw-
• 4 + 1 = 5 for read-execute permissions r-x
• 4 = 4 for read permissions r--

Examples of common octal notations are:

• 755 is same as drwxr-xr-x
• 644 is same as -rw-r--r--

See File System Permissions in Wikipedia for more information.

There is interest in/concern about the accessibility of podcasts / audio / video / multimedia materials instructors post from classroom lectures, etc. Below are some links with related information.

Blog entries on the topic of Podcast Accessibility by Jeffrey Daniel Frey, the Web Services Manager for Enterprise Applications in the Information Technology Department at Rice University. He provides technology solutions for faculty, staff, and students on campus as well as teaches new technology courses at the School of Continuing Studies. He is available for podcasting consulting, is involved in the creation of podcasts for businesses and non-profits, and has owned a technical consulting company and an audio/video recording studio).

Thread from a WebAIM discussion board.

Web Captioning, WebAIM article.

WebAIM, Creating Accessible Macromedia Flash Content.

(WebAIM = Web Accessibility In Mind, an *excellent* resource for online
accessibility requirements, tutorials, how-tos!)

How-to info for Making Podcasts Accessible by the High Tech Center at
College of the Redwoods.

How to Make Your Blog Accessible to Blind Readers.

Accessites.org - The Art of Accessibility.

Ah ha! A server-based way to hide email addresses from harvesting robots! Uses Apache 2, mod_rewrite, PHP 4 or later.

Graceful E-Mail Obfuscation, by Roel Van Gils, A List Apart, November 6, 2007.

Contact your web server administrator or use .htaccess.

Common ASCII Text file extensions to set file transfer programs to use (yes, there are more but these are the extensions I use):

• .c
• .cfm
• .cgi
• .conf
• .config
• .css
• .dwt
• .htaaccess
• .htm
• .html
• .inc
• .js
• .lbi
• .log
• .php
• .pl
• .pm
• .shtm
• .shtml
• .tmpl
• .txt
• .xml

I’ve been using Xenu Link Sleuth (free) to check for broken links. I also use the output report to review web page titles (which are displayed as links in most search engines) and to produce a list of valid links for use with the batch mode of the WDG HTML Validator (100 URLs at a time).

I knew W3C had an Markup Validator and a CSS Validator, but was unaware of the W3C Link Checker until now.

S5 from Eric Meyer is:

a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well. The markup used for the slides is very simple, highly semantic, and completely accessible. Anyone with even a smidgen of familiarity with HTML or XHTML can look at the markup and figure out how to adapt it to their particular needs. Anyone familiar with CSS can create their own slide show theme. It’s totally simple, and it’s totally standards-driven.

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

JAlbum is free, is Java-based so it runs on Windows and Mac, and has many skins to choose from.