Files that can be downloaded, placed here on an ad hoc basis . . .

Page last tidied on 26. October 2003 - The autumn spring clean.

Useful tutorials

There are some very useful tutorials at http://www.w3schools.com. The site includes a lot of reference material plus tutorials on CSS, XML, XSLT and more.

Build a thumbnail gallery file system

You might need to create a thumbnail gallery linked to images using only HTML pages - on a CD, maybe, where you can't exploit server-side scripting in VBScript or PHP for some other reason.

The thumbnail gallery builder creates the pages for you. This was originally written as a QAD fix to generate pages for a frequently-changing, CD-based catalog.

Global updates of alt tags in web pages

Sometimes it can be useful to ensure that every occurrence of a graphic carries the same alt text attribute. This program allows you to create/update alt text across a file system. This utility application is intended for Windows and was written in VB6.

Please note these points before downloading and using the application:

Unzip the attached package to, say, C:\Temp. This will give you the
installation package in C:\Temp\Package.

Run setup.exe to install the program. This will allow you to add the program
to your Start menu.

Before you do any mass updates please back up your files. Ideally, work on
your local copy of the site, then test and upload to the remote server.

Double-click on the program icon to start the application.

Use the drive list box to select the drive on which your web site is located
(C:\ for instance) then use the folders list to locate the root folder,
Inetpub if your site is at C:\Inetpub, like the Windows default.

Enter the name of the graphic file you want to process for alt text,
SiteLogo.gif, for instance, then enter the new alt text: The site logo,
maybe.

Click on Update. The big list box tells you which folders have been
processed, the files that have been reviewed and which have been skipped or
processed. Every instance of SiteLogo.gif will be attributed the alt text
The site logo (in this instance): It is added if there is no existing alt
text or changed if there is.

The program was written to do mass updates on a couple of sites developed in
DW - The program expects image tags to begin with <img or <IMG and end with
/>. Any spaces in these tag texts (as in < img) will cause the tag to be skipped. Similarly, the
source attribute must be src=" (or SRC=", or src=', or SRC=') with no
spaces (src = "SiteLogo.gif" will be skipped because of the spaces aound the = character, src="SiteLogo.gif" won't). The file name is case-sensitive, too. If DW 4 or DWMX wrote the tags in the first place you should have no trouble.

The program processes the most common file types: .htm .html .php .asp .aspx
.jsp and skips everything else.

Download the zipped application package: altzip01.zip - 2.7MB. Please contact me by email if you'd like a copy of the source.