Category: Web dev

Website development issues including both semantic, presentational and programming languages

Something new for google to chew on

On By westiIn General, Web dev, WordPress


A screen shot of the new site

I’ve spent a long time today trying to create a simple website to replicate the content in a 3 page handout describing a fundraising bike ride being organised by a charity I help. I got involved in the development of this site after volunteering to become the webmaster for the “The Pompe’s Disease Page” – which at present is not easy to maintain and is back in the dark ages of table based layout.

I have great plans for updating the main site to use wordpress and make it easier to add new information and get people able to comment on the information and maybe setup bbPress as a forum. However the development of a theme for the main site has been lagging a bit and waiting on v1.5 of wordpress to be released.

Now that photomatt has done the deed and 1.5 is released in a fit of energy today I sat down and started on a theme for the Bike Ride site. After a few hours of work I now have a layout that I am happy with and I’ve started uploading the content from the leaflet – but as I’m having to type this all out by hand this is taking some time!

Anyway the new site for google to chew on is here – The Costa Rica Bike Ride

Googling for Security Vulnerabilities

On By westiIn Web dev

Nitesh Dhanjani, gives some good examples on how you can use google to search for security vulnerabilities in your website.

He shows how to use the different searching strategies provided by google to hone in quite easily on vulnerabilities like indexable admin directories and exposed vnc servers.

The technique is a usefull addition to a site designers armoury to ensure that they have not left open any easily exploitable vulnerabilities – you can be sure that all the hackers out there will be using it as a way of finding sites to deface!

A new colour scheme!

On By westiIn General, Useful Links, Web dev

I finally got round to updating the colour scheme today. Moving away from the default WordPress green to a nice soft blue. The colour was picked using wellstyled’s colourscheme generator which I heard about in Richard’s Blog ([ws] Color Scheme Generator 2).

The colour scheme generator looks good, and interestingly it can display the different colour schemes as viewed with different types of colour blindness to help you ensure that you don’t pick a scheme which could be ambiguous for some users.