My HTML-building Toolkit

What I Use to Create my Web Pages

Tools and tips



UPDATE: I'd not updated this site since 2003. Much of the current content is outdated and I intend to make it more current in the next few days.

I've used a few books in the past as reference to HTML and CSS, for code examples and ideas:

This is a listing of the software I recommend using when creating and editing my webpages. Some are command-line clients and tools, while others are GUI tools:

My old but still operating sites are:

The sites I actively update are:

What I want to or am experimenting with:

** Links to the bullets will be created as I find the URLs for them **

As a quick update to what I've been doing the last 4 years, I've been involved in the IT word since 2003, when I becamed embedded in the IT Security world. I still am active in the *nix administration world, although I tend to not want to do much with computers when I go home. When I get the time to do what I like, I tend to update my webpages. I've been getting away from editing via GUIs and rely on basic editors (Notepad and VI), although I still will use an FTP GUI to upload the occasional page. Most of the time when I edit pages, I'm making changes via a *nix shell, which means that I don't have to rely on a

I've been playing with MySQL a bit, mainly on my laptop. I've only inputted all my logins and passwords for web accounts (which is alot), but doing it that way gives me an idea of how to establish a small database to experiment with. I spent good money on two very good MySQL books:

  • MySQL, Second Edition, by Paul DuBois
  • MySQL Reference Manual, by O'Reilly and the MySQL team
  • Apache, Administrator's Handbook, by Rich Bowen and SAMS

    • Regarding the topic of HTML thieves, I usually read the bCentral Daily Digest. Here's the post that caught my eye:

     Is it possible to do a search for certain HTML text
> strings in some of the search engines to determine
> if your HTML has been appropriated by another?
- Bryan Bailey, Webmeister

    Here was my response:

    From: Ron Sinclair
Subject: HTML thieves

> Is it possible to do a search for certain HTML text
> strings in some of the search engines to determine
> if your HTML has been appropriated by another?
- Bryan Bailey, Webmeister

I'm a novice webmaster and want to add my thoughts on this.

I thought that search engines mainly use meta and <.H1> tags (and 
maybe URL links) to collect their data and not collect whole page 
HTML source.

This may help your quest to catch thieves (this is what I 
did):  search for items that have similar themes to your sites then 
check the relevant hits. Some search hits may not be relevant but 
they are usually pretty obvious.  This can be grueling, especially 
if you are short on time or come up with an incredible amount of 
hits, but it's more reliable than searching for HTML code itself.

I found a thief using this method, an image thief.  I saw that some 
of his images were very similar to mine... cropped in the same 
places and angles.  When I made the image files, I'd embedded ID 
data into each using Adobe Photoshop.  I downloaded the files in 
question from his site and opened them with Photoshop to check if 
they had my ID data.  Sure enough, my name was on them.  I emailed 
him and asked him to at least source my files that were on his 
site.  He never did, I later emailed his web host (he had a free 
host) and they removed the whole site.

Of course I was proactive in my image protection, but every little 
bit helps.

Images are much easier to protect than HTML source.  You'll have a 
hard time proving that someone stole actual HTML code from your 
site and even if you do, you still may have to deal with the fact 
that U.S. internet laws may not protect you if the thief is in 
another country.

I hope some of this help.  I know you were looking for ways to look 
for stolen HTML by using search engines, but I don't think it's 
possible.

Ron Sinclair
http://www.unixfool.com

    Maybe the above will help someone if they find themself in the same situation. I thought I'd repost it here. Keep in mind that HTML code itself will be hard to protect. Think about it: there's only so many ways you can use HTML code. It's not a limitless language. Let me use the words the book, Build a Home Page, by Fastread (Chapter 10: Legal Issues on the Internet, page 104):

    As it stands now, stealing code (the softare that makes up an HTML document) is NOT considered theft. Why not? Because there are only so many things you can do in page layout, it would only make sense that several Web pages will resemble one another. There is nothing you can do about this; and there is really no way you can prove whether or not this information was "stolen."

    That's about it. The above doesn't actually have anything to do with my web toolkit, but it does have to do with webmastering.

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    Copyright 2003-2007, Ronald Sinclair (Substitute AT with @)
    Revised: 7 March 2007
    URL: http://www.unixfool.com

    This page generated by Screem v0.8.2, an HTML editor for Linux and last edited with Evrsoft First Page 2006.