Power of Document Object Model (DOM) is often overlooked in web interface design, DOM could be lifesaver for developers if correctly used.


We will be writing series of articles from basics to advanced usage of DOM, this part of article will introduce basis of DOM/Javascript.

Basics of elements, attributes and events
In simple words, a web page acts as containers of different elements like links, divs, images etc.  You can related element to object, if you have worked in OOP, just like object each element is contained in its parent elements and can have some child elements, as well as some properties.

For example, we have login form named as loginFrm in our document, with text field for user name named ‘user_name’ and password field. To access the user name field we have to write:

document.loginFrm.user_name , where document is main container document that holds form and form holds all fields as its child tags.

As mentioned above, each element has its own attributes, like fields elements has attribute of “value”, that is used to change the value of field. Similarly Divs has attribute “innerHTML”, which is used to update text in particular div.

For a complete introduction about DOM please refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Object_Model.

Events
Javascript is capable to detect and associate user interactivity with document elements, these events can be used to perform different operations for example changing image when mouse moves over, calling validation function when form is submitted. Showing some alert when certain element is clicked.
Some events are listed below:

1. OnMouseOver
2. OnMouseOut
3. OnBlur
4. OnFocus
5. OnClick

Methods to access elements :

1. getElementsByTagName

Writing document.getElementsByTagNames('table') will return all tables in document as an array. Then we can loop to interact with returned elements.

1. getElementById

document.getElementById()  will return one single element  that has id value, passed as parameter. For example we can access user name field through :

document.getElementById('user_name');


How to debug
First thing we tell our developers is to use FireFox while working with javascript. Its error console helps detecting errors with ease. Identifying the error is first step to find a cure.
Some of most common mistakes while working with DOM are :

1. Duplicate ID or Name, this is very important to uniquely identify your elements if you are using document.getElementById.
2. Javascript is case sensitive, make sure you call functions and ids in correct case. Best practice is to follow some naming conventions, two common conventions are either use underscore or capitalize new letter. For example in case of field name, label it as ‘user_name’ or ‘userName’. Following some conventions will help you reduce debugging time.

Next page has basic example that will help you get started.

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Servers were always covering major portion of internet. We need servers for everything Gaming, Websites, businesses, Shopping online etc. Most of the people would be considering a server machine as some super machine which it is not. Let’s start with what servers are:

1. They are computers just like we use at our home but with good specifications.
2. They are on high speed internet (Here our home computers differ from servers).
3. They are used for specific reasons could be a gaming server or a web server.
4. The server is optimized to perform services for other computers or clients.

Let’s talk about the web servers, which are used to run a single or several websites on them. First of all you going to choose a server which is on a good internet connection and has a good bandwidth limits too. Now days you can see servers with unlimited bandwidth meters. We are going to use any “nix” operation system since the nix servers are more secured as compared to a windows server and it’s more realizable and fast. There could be many reasons of using nix servers as compared to windows servers. The configuration of a nix (Linux or UNIX) based server are almost same. I am sure many of you must have heard the name of FreeBSD ( www.freebsd.org ) which is a UNIX ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix ) based operating system and is being used for most of the hosting servers around the globe because it is in the most secure form of UNIX. So we know what operating system we are going to install, FreeBSD is a free of cost Operating system so you don’t have to pay big charges like you have to for a windows based server. Many companies which are selling dedicated server machines offer to install nix based operating system on your server for free however there could be some setup costs which vary from provider to provider. After the operating system has been installed on your machine you first of all need an http server. There are few http servers available on the internet and Apache ( http://apache.org/ ) is the most popular http ( http://httpd.apache.org/ ) server around and moreover it’s free of cost. Remember we are going to use all the free of cost and most secured (as updated) software’s to be installed on our server machine. Apache is there made a part of a nix based operating system and most of the nix based OS already have apache server in them but you need to run it. In FreeBSD you can run apache by providing the following command “httpd”. However you need to setup a server name and basic configuration of apache server and the website you are going to run on it. You need to edit the httpd.conf file to run the http process. On my machine the httpd.conf file is located in “/usr/local/etc/apache22/” folder and I am using the latest version of apache that is 2.x.
( http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/network-apache.html )
You need to install name servers after that to make your website work; however you can check if apache is running on your machine by giving the IP of your server machine in the browser window. Setting up name servers is a core step of a web server because you are going to host websites. Most of the domain selling websites give you option to “Register Name server” chose that option and it will require a name for your name server and an IP address. Let’s say you are going to setup the name servers for genexbs.com, I’d chose ns1.genexbs.com and ns2.genexbs.com (at least two name servers are required) and I forwarded them to the main IP of my machine for example its 1.2.3.4 (just an imaginary IP address not possible in reality) considering 1.2.3.4 is my server machine’s IP which has already running apache on it.
It’s time to get back to our server configurations; we are going to move to the following folder “/etc/namedb” where my named.conf (name server configuration file) file is saved. A basic pattern is already defined in named.conf; you can read it and make changes to named.conf ( http://www.freebsddiary.org/zones.php ). After that named.conf is set to work, we need to move forward to some more steps. Till now our basic website will work. If we upload our website to our server at the specified path it will be appearing on the browser but a web server needs more stuff to be added such as databases and programming languages.

We are going use MySQL ( http://www.mysql.com ) database server on our server machine. Reason of using MySQL is that it’s the most popular database server almost 90% of the people on internet use MySQL database servers. In FreeBSD you can find MySQL database server in ports folder but if you are not familiar with FreeBSD that much it won’t be a problem as well just type “pkg_add –r mysql” and it will automatically install the latest MySQL server on your machine. You need to setup the sysadmin password. The easiest way to do is with the following command
mysqladmin -u root password newpassword
http://www.freebsddiary.org/mysql.php

After that MySQL server Is running you can create databases and work with them but for that you need a programming language. I would recommend PHP ( http://www.php.net/ ), again its free and open source.
You can find PHP again in the ports folder “/usr/ports/lang/” and install it by:
1. cd /usr/ports/lang/phpx (x is the version I recommend 5.x)
2. make config
3. make install
And you are done installing PHP the alternative way to install php is “pkg_add –r php5”
http://www.freebsdmadeeasy.com/tutorials/web-server/install-php-5-for-web-hosting.php
There could be many programming languages you can install depends on your interest and know how about the particular language. I will list a few which are used for web servers.
a. TCL ( www.tcl.tk )
b. Perl ( www.perl.org )
c. Ruby ( www.ruby-lang.org )
d. Python ( www.python.org )

So how we will upload the files on our server? Of course it will require an FTP server.
There are plenty of FTP servers on the web for example:
a. IglooFTP ( http://iglooftp.com )
b. py-curl ( http://pycurl.sourceforge.net/ )
c. cftp ( http://www.cftp.org )

There are so many of them the list goes on. Since we are on FreeBSD you can check them in “/usr/ports/ftp” Folder.
However while we are on FreeBSD we are going to run a process called inetd which will also allow us to connect to FTP server named “ftpd”. The configuration file for inetd is in “/etc/inetd.conf” we will just alter it to run our ftp server. We will add just a single line at the end of inetd.conf file, that is:
ftp stream tcp nowait root /usr/libexec/ftpd ftpd –l

After that you can add a user to the server by using the “adduser” ( http://nixdoc.net/man-pages/FreeBSD/adduser.8.html ) command and check if ftp works with the specified login/password.
That’s all you need to run your own web server as you go through you will be getting expert in all the fields and you can install different supporting tools such as control panels for maintaining your web servers.

There is still not one standard In HTML, which is a reason certain HTML elements behave differently in different browsers. There are so many HTML producing software, Microsoft word, Front page, Dreamweaver, and many more. Every software has its own standards to write the HTML code. Professional software like Dreamweaver has multiple standards. So we understand there are issues with HTML encoding of different software and they may behave differently when transferred from one software to another. For example a HTML formatted in front page appear differently in Dreamweaver or Word.

We use html WYSIWYG editors on web which are open source and available to anyone. While these editors are powerful enough to not only generate HTML but work with external HTML, it still has limitations and problems come when you transfer content from any other text processor to these editors.

Some famous WYSIWYG editors are as follows, we are giving direct demo links.

http://www.spaweditor.com/en/disp.php/en_products/en_spaw/en_spaw_demo
http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/example_full.php?example=true
http://www.fckeditor.net/demo

It takes a little experience working with HTML to best work with these editors. If you are going to look after your website, add content and pages. You must get some basic HTML tags knowledge. They will help you best and you will be able to format the pages to your desire.

Another good approach is that you build pages in professional HTML software like Dreamweaver and then copy/paste the HTML code (not the content from preview). The actual HTML pasted will work alot better.

If you do not have time to get into this hassle of resolving HTML issues, you can hire an offshore worker from genexbs.com to format your pages professionally. It will not cost you much, resulting in a lot of ease and perfection in your HTML publishing.

If you folks out there know any better Web based HTML editors, do make a comment and share with us. Best of luck!

Most of the internet scams are designed and worked upon new Internet surfers who are growing in millions every year. The cyber life is even more decisive than real, where you can’t even see reality behind the pages. In this post we educate Internet people how to evaluate any website they want to read, buy from, or trust for their private information.

I am going to give you example of our own website, genexbs.com

First Way To Know
Go to Google.com and search for “genexbs.com”. You will find links of the website which has any kind of reference about our website, good or bad. If you do not find any links about a website, you can also know that this does not have any relationships on Internet. Searching through the first page results will give you a comprehensive idea of the company.

More Authenticity
You can check information of the domain owner information, hosting server location, & other much useful information. Visit following link
http://whois.domaintools.com/

Making a Payment Online
Small & Medium scale businesses do not process transactions on their web servers; the payments are made with the payment processing companies they are a member of. For example PayPal is one of the most famous online payment processor company. While you are paying with any authenticated payment processor you should not worry about your financial information security.

http://www.verisign.com/
http://worldpay.com/
https://www.paypal.com/
http://www.2checkout.com/

There are many more to this list, also regional online payment processors are in all IT enabled countries.

Sites those who ask for your credit card information on their website should have SSL installed. To know if a site has SSL enabled, you can notice the URL will start with https:// and not http://. SSL certificate actually encrypt the sensitive information while it travels from your computer to the web server.

Completeness of Information
See the company is providing easy access of all important information. They must have contact information, company location, business details, their policies and privacy statement. A responsible website will have a privacy and policy statement available. Most websites keep the policy links on the page footer.

Website Popularity
You can check how many websites have links of genexbs.com. The best way to do so is by Yahoo.com and searching for “link: genexbs.com”. The results will be the web pages which have link to our site. That’s how you can see how much relationship of a website is with other websites.

Escrow Services
Many payment services and Internet vendors these days support Escrow payment services, which ads even more to your online buying experience.

Most Trusted Websites
The websites containing seals of certain high level Internet authorities add a lot more reliability to the .com business. Some major authentication companies are as follows:

http://www.bbbonline.org/
http://www.truste.org/
http://www.scanalert.com/

There are regional organizations as well, in Pakistan PSEB:
http://www.pseb.org.pk

Internet Business
is surely the best and most economical way to work today, our target is to secure you from scams and guide to distinguish between right and wrong. If you require further clarification or have any questions feel free to contact us at info(a)genexbs.com

The reason for this post is to help our website users take the maximum advantage from Genexbs.com site. We have categorized our website into three major areas, Showroom, Visitor Lounge & Customer Center. These three links are available on the top of the page. I will explain them one by one.

Showroom: is our area where you can see the detailed list of our services, offerings and our process to perform certain services. Although we are a custom development company, but we have formulated certain fixed services to help our customers find a suitable service for themselves. For example under Brand Design category we have different types of brand design services. This is for helping customers understand the difference between different kinds of corporate branding services, pricing, and their timelines. This helps our customers plan their budget, approach and know what exactly suit their cause better. Showroom has options for consultation, getting help from your friends and more.

Visitor Lounge: this area is for giving you information about the company, clients, philosophy and policies. If you are new to the company, you can find about the company from the area. Other important sections in this area are news, careers and partnerships. Our delivery model and other important information is also in the same section.

Customer Center: is the area for our customers and members. Members can get consultation by logging into their control panel. We have a complete project management system in place to help you communicate with us swiftly and effectively. This area also includes payment pages, accounts history, affiliate commission history and more. Member signup is Free for anyone to test our consultancy and free guidance.

One good page to visit is, Site Map, it can be found on the top of the page in first row. From site map you can find and access all pages created on the website. If you have any problems, feel free to write to support@genexbs.com