Today I have two tips for the web designer/programmer. The first is basic, the second advanced, but they both have to do with Microsoft's tendency to protect us from anything that might confuse and/or distress us, which results in making things worse instead of better.
Basic tip:
If you are going to be making webpages, you are going to be dealing with files. Filenames have two parts: the part before the dot, and the part after the dot. If you are asking yourself, "What dot?" this tip is for you.
Windows loves to hide the dot in the filenames, as well as the part after the dot, which is called the extension. The extension is usually three characters long, though it can be four, and it tells the computer what kind of program to open the file with. Therefore, if the main page of your site is named 'index', it's going to behave much differently than if it were named 'index.htm' or 'index.html'.
You have to be able to see the file extensions if you are going to be dealing with files. In order to make the extensions visible, doubleclick 'My Computer'. You need the Tools menu, then Folder Options. Then you need the View tab. There's a choice there for "Hide file extensions for known file types". Turn that off. Click Apply and then OK. The next time you browse at file names, you'll see all the bits you've been missing. That will help you enormously while making links, forming image tags, all kinds of good things.
Advanced tip:
If you are going to be programming in ASP, and you use Internet Explorer, you really need to turn off what are known as "friendly HTTP error messages". What happens is that if you view a broken ASP page, IE will just show you a 500 Internal Server Error. This is friendly, but utterly uninformative. It would be more helpful to see exactly what went wrong so you can check your code.
What you do is click Tools, then Internet Options, then the Advanced tab. About halfway through the Browse section is a setting for "Show friendly HTTP error messages". Turn that off, click Apply and then OK. Now go visit that broken ASP page again, and you'll get information about what script broke on what line, and maybe even just how it broke. Great for troubleshooting.
It makes me cry how many "advanced" ASP jockeys I get to speak with who don't know about this. This should be on the first page of every book about coding in ASP. It's important, if you use IE.
Ok, now, go do it!
