Following the fake news of its partnership with Litecoin, Walmart Inc. says it is looking into how the fraudulent press release was issued. The Litecoin Foundation and Charlie Lee are also investigating the matter. In addition, Globenewswire says it will also work with authorities “to request – and facilitate – a full investigation, including into any criminal activity associated with this matter.” Walmart Responds to Fake News of Its Partnership With Litecoin The retail giant issued a press release in response to the fake news of its partnership with Litecoin Monday. “Walmart was the subject of a fake news release issued on Monday, Sept. 13, that falsely stated Walmart announced a partnership with Litecoin (LTC),” the company wrote, adding: Walmart had no knowledge of the press release issued by Globenewswire, and it is incorrect. Walmart has no relationship with Litecoin. Walmart spokesman Randy Hargrove told CNBC that the retailer has been in touch with the newswire company to investigate how the false press release got posted. Globenewswire took down the fake press release late Monday and issued a “notice to disregard” across its service. The company also said that it has put in place enhanced authentication steps to prevent a similar incident from occurring in the future. The press release distribution company declared: We will work with the appropriate authorities to request – and facilitate – a full investigation, including into any criminal activity associated with this matter. Many major news outlets ran the fake story, including Reuters and CNBC. This led to an instant spike in the price of litecoin (LTC). However, the gains were quickly wiped out when Walmart denied the news. Meanwhile, the Litecoin Foundation, a non-profit organization that promotes the cryptocurrency, issued a statement on the matter. The foundation is run by litecoin creator Charlie Lee, who serves as its managing director. “We have no information as to where this idea or the release to the press originated,” the foundation wrote, confirming that it “has not entered into a partnership with Walmart of any kind.” It further noted that the quotes in the press release did not come from Lee. Lee told Reuters in an email that the hoax was being investigated but little headway had been made. The Litecoin creator added that he currently owned only five LTC and had little incentive to issue the fake announcement himself. He also commented on Litecoin’s verified Twitter handle (@litecoin) sharing the fake announcement. The tweet was deleted a few hours after Walmart denied the news. Lee admitted

Voltage Holdings LLC, a company well known for tracking down pirates worldwide and demanding cash settlements for alleged movie piracy, has officially begun work in the UK. After obtaining at least one High Court order, customers of ISPs including Virgin Media are now being contacted by a law firm demanding cash settlements to make possible lawsuits go away. Companies that own copyrighted works have the option to monetize them in any way they see fit. For movies this can include releasing them in theaters, licensing to streaming services, or releasing on physical formats such as blu-ray. None of these avenues are inherently controversial but for some companies another option is attractive; track down people who allegedly downloaded and shared movies online and warn them that they could soon be facing a lawsuit. In some cases, people will opt to pay a settlement fee, which over hundreds or even many thousands of threats, can amount to a significant new revenue stream for the movie company. This type of scheme (often labeled ‘copyright trolling’ due to the generation of revenue through strategic litigation) exists in many countries around the world. In the UK, for example, many copyright holders have tested the waters in the past, sometimes with significant controversy. However, those earlier mishaps aren’t deterring US company Voltage Holdings, which recently obtained permission from the High Court to contact alleged pirates in the UK. Warning Signs Appeared a Few Months Ago As we reported back in July, various movie companies known for demanding cash settlements have been massing under a legal partnership called FACT Administration LLP, which has direct connections to the Federation Against Copyright Theft. Several of the movie companies are Voltage affiliates and in our second report on the topic, we wondered whether members of this coalition intended to go after alleged pirates in the UK. That now appears to be the case. Voltage Holdings Obtains High Court Order Back in July, Voltage Holdings obtained a High Court order against ISP Virgin Media which requires the ISP to hand over the personal information of subscribers alleged to have downloaded and shared Voltage’s movies without permission. The handover of customer data took place and Virgin customers are now receiving correspondence relating to their allegedly infringing behavior. TorrentFreak has obtained documents that show commercial law firm Lewis Silkin LLP writing to Virgin customers claiming that they have been identified as people who pirated ‘Ava’, a movie that achieved a score of just 16% on Rotten Tomatoes’ ‘tomatometer’. The Voltage Letter to Virgin Customers The letter sent to Virgin customers states that Voltage engaged a “forensic computer analyst” who specializes in tracking piracy on peer-to-peer networks, in this case BitTorrent. After receiving the user’s IP address from the analyst, Voltage obtained an order compelling Virgin to hand over the subscriber’s personal details relating to a specific IP at a specific time. “This letter assumes that you, as the account holder for the infringing IP Address, were the user of the relevant device on the dates and times at which Ava was shared without the consent of VOLTAGE. The purpose of this letter is therefore to give you an opportunity to admit or deny that your broadband account was used via BitTorrent in relation to Ava on the occasion specified above,” the letter reads. Voltage’s letter states that the alleged infringement represents breaches of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act (CDPA) in respect of the copying of the work (downloading) and distributing of the work (uploading). “Since the file-sharing is unlawful, VOLTAGE is entitled to bring court proceedings against you if it can show on the balance of probabilities that you are the person who engaged in the file-sharing or if you authorized or allowed someone else to do so using your broadband connection,” the letter continues. “This claim would be brought in a specialist civil court called the Intellectual Property Enterprise court, where liability is determined on the balance of probabilities. The onus would be on VOLATGE to prove these allegations of infringement.” In the event of a successful claim, Voltage says it would be entitled to recover compensation to reflect any losses suffered. The defendant would also incur legal costs if they choose to instruct lawyers. Was it The Subscriber Or Someone Else? While in the first instance Voltage is assuming that the bill payer is the infringer, the movie company also leaves the door open for an explanation to the contrary. Voltage says that if the letter recipient can convince the company that they were not using the IP address on the specified time and date to download/share the movie Ava (and/or did not authorize someone else to do so), then no further action will be taken. However, if the recipient does want to admit to the claims that they (or someone authorized by them) downloaded/shared the movie, Voltage is prepared to enter into a settlement that would involve a promise not to infringe its rights moving forward and the payment of compensation. The precise amount is not detailed but it is likely to be many hundreds of pounds and possibly more. Letter recipients are being given 14 days to respond to Lewis Silkin with their proposals but are also advised to seek legal advice from a solicitor or Citizen’s Advice. Virgin Media Confirms Subscriber Data Handover Speaking with TorrentFreak, a Virgin Media spokesperson confirmed that the company had indeed handed over subscriber information to Voltage Holdings. “We take the privacy and security of our customers’ data very seriously. Virgin Media will only ever disclose customer information to third parties if required by law to do so through a valid Court order,” the company explained. “In this case a Court order was successfully granted to Voltage Pictures which means a very small number of Virgin Media customers may now receive correspondence from this organization. Any customer who receives a letter should note that the Court has not yet made any findings of copyright infringement against them. This would be a matter to be determined by the Court in any subsequent claim.” TorrentFreak asked Virgin Media precisely how many customers are affected since the usual modus operandi of companies seeking cash settlements rarely involves “a very small number” of subscribers. Virgin did not provide this information but we are aware that Virgin is not the only ISP required to hand over information. While yet to be officially confirmed by those companies, we believe that other major ISPs in the UK are also required to hand subscriber data to Voltage and may have already done so. We have contacted the press offices of the more likely candidates and will report back here when the companies respond. TorrentFreak also contacted Michael Coyle of Lawdit Solicitors who has acted for hundreds of individuals in similar cases since they first appeared in the UK back in 2006. “I’m very surprised that these speculative campaigns have resurfaced, especially when you factor in the history. I thought everyone had learned their lesson but apparently not.”

The central bank of Russia has advised commercial banks on how to identify and block cards and wallet accounts used by shady businesses. Along with illegal forex dealers and financial pyramids, the regulator has also listed crypto exchangers as suspicious entities. New AML Recommendations by Bank of Russia Target Cryptocurrency Exchangers Russia’s central bank has issued a set of criteria that banks can use to identify cards and e-wallets used by companies operating in the shadow economy, Forklog reported. According to the monetary authority, these include not only illegal forex dealers and financial pyramids, but also cryptocurrency exchangers. The bank turns particular attention to transactions between private persons as the regulator claims such entities often use accounts registered under false names to make and receive payments. Russian banks are expected to analyze and identify suspicious transactions as part of their anti-money laundering (AML) efforts and terminate services. Among the operations considered a cause of concern, Bank of Russia lists deposits and withdrawals of cash when they are more than 30 a day. A large number of individual payers or recipients, over 10 per day or 50 per month, should also trigger action on the part of financial institutions. The same applies to frequent transactions when the total amounts to at least 100,000 Russian rubles (close to $1,400) daily or 1 million rubles ($14,000) a month, the report details. Small intervals — of less than a minute — between deposits and withdrawals should also alarm bank officials. Accounts Not Used to Pay Utility Bills to Be Deemed Suspicious The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) advises commercial banks to also examine cases where the average remaining balance at the end of each day does not exceed 10% of the average daily transaction volume in the course of a week. Accounts that are not used to cover utility bills or pay for goods and services can be blacklisted as well. A bank’s client may be considered suspicious if their transactions correspond to two or more of the described criteria. To identify such individuals, Bank of Russia further instructs banks to track digital fingerprints left by account holders including information identifying devices used to access and transfer the funds remotely. Bank of Russia has been opposing the legalization of cryptocurrencies and related activities while other Russian authorities have been going after websites spreading information about crypto trading and platforms providing access to exchange services. In July, the financial authority issued a recommendation against the listing of securities tied to crypto assets on Russian stock exchanges.

Americans are still very concerned about inflation as the latest Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) report from August indicates that U.S. consumers expect inflation to be 5.2% a year from now. The SCE response data hasn’t been this high since 2013, and it’s increased since the month prior, when U.S. residents expected 4.9% at the time. Month After Month, Consumer Inflation Expectations Continue to Climb Higher The cost of services and goods in the United States has risen a great deal and Americans have been worried about rising inflation. Citizens have good reason to worry about inflation as the U.S. central bank has fueled an extreme expansion of the monetary supply since February 2020. While there have been many protests in American history after the Fed bailed out the megabanks on more than one occasion, this time the Fed was excused for at least a year. The U.S. central bank of course leveraged the coronavirus outbreak (covid-19) as the main reason quantitative easing tactics took the stage in such big fashion. This time around, the entire American economy needed saving, and after a year or so, complaints about inflation began to haunt the central bank’s leaders. The outlooks stemming from the New York Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) report have been growing worse month-over-month since May. In July, the SCE report tapped an all-time high (ATH) as far as America’s inflation expectations. Essentially, what the New York Fed does is leverage a revolving panel of roughly 1,300 American households in order to come up with the SCE data. After July, the following month’s SCE metrics were even worse as the findings suggested worry over the loss of purchasing power was growing. NY Fed: ‘Inflation Expectations Rose to New Series Highs’ This worry has not subsided and the latest SCE report indicates that American households are still concerned and expect inflation to rise higher. “The August 2021 Survey of Consumer Expectations shows that short- and medium-term inflation expectations rose to new series highs of 5.2 percent and 4.0 percent, respectively,” the New York Fed’s SCE report discloses. “Home price growth expectations continued to moderate in August but remain elevated.” The central bank’s stats now show that respondents envision one-year inflation to jump to 5.2% and three-year expectations will be around 4%. Not only did the one-year metric increase, but the three-year data was only 3.7% in the last SCE report. In all of the reports, month-over-month, it has been said that an ATH was surpassed and this is because the SCE readings only stretch back to 2013. August’s SCE findings show both the one-year and three-year consumer inflation expectations tapped yet another series of ATHs.

Welcome and Enjoy the board

Welcome and Enjoy the board

Welcome and Enjoy the board

Welcome and Enjoy the board

Welcome and Enjoy the board

Welcome and Enjoy the board

Welcome and Enjoy the board

Welcome and Enjoy the board

Welcome and Enjoy the board

Welcome and Enjoy the board

Welcome and Enjoy the board

Welcome and Enjoy the board

Welcome and Enjoy the board

Welcome and Enjoy the board

Welcome and Enjoy the board

Have you heard? Blogs are old news. I hope you didn’t jump on that particular bandwagon. Yep, static sites are the all the rage now; who wants dynamic and fresh content when you can keep the same set of pages up forever? I’m joking, of course. There has always been the need for various kinds of sites, but the blog format doesn’t fit every requirement. However, Wordpress is more than happy to be moulded into whatever you want - blog or otherwise - and today we’ll be talking about making a basically static Wordpress website. You might also want to read these past articles where Joel talked about Wordpress theme frameworks, and I showed you some of the more unique kinds of sites you can make with Wordpress. Use Pages When creating a static website, your usage will focus on Pages, rather than Posts. Unlike a traditional blog post, pages have no associated date and aren’t placed into a date archive. They are designed for static content - things which rarely change, such as "About Me", or "Contact". Pages can also be made hierarchical, meaning each page can have one or more child pages. Whereas blog posts are unstructured but can be sorted according to date, tags, and category, pages are structured arbitrarily by you - the developer. If you want to represent the products you sell for instance, pages may be more suitable in that you can create a parent page for a particular product subtype which gives the customer an overview of all those products, then give each individual product a child page of that. Trying to achieve the same with posts alone would require the use of a custom category template; and even then you’d be hacking around with product templates to remove the date or re-order them how you want; or you might even have chosen to go down the route of a custom post type - an even more uneccessary complication. Think carefully about how you want to structure information on your website, and you may find Pages are the better solution. There are SEO concerns too - posts in Wordpress have a lot of baggage associated with them. Even a few dated, categorised, and tagged posts create additional URLs on your site in the form of various archives. These are indexed too and may appear in search results. If you have just a few posts, these incur a negative SEO penalty for duplicate content - basically your category archive will look a lot like your index page, for instance. On the flipside, Google gives points for fresh content. When doing SEO for various companies in the past, I always suggested they try to maintain some semblance of a blog on their corporate site, because producing fresh content on an appropriate topic will always help you rank better. So even if the core content of your site is done with static Pages, I’d still encourage you to keep blog posts somewhere. Not all content on the web needs a date; some remains relevant. Avoid putting people off old content by simply removing the date. Pages have no date associated; they simply exist. Adding Comments to Pages Unlike posts, pages don’t have comments. Not because they can’t, but just because most themes don’t have the code to display the comment template. To solve that, open up page.php (or your custom page-slugname.php template if you only want comments on a particular page), and add the following: <?php comments_template(); ?> That’s all it takes really. You may find comments are disabled on the actual page though; edit the page and look for the meta section Discussion. Change your "homepage" By default, Wordpress is going to list your latest blog posts as the homepage on your site, but this is quite easy to change. Make sure you have another page already created that you’d like to use instead. Then open up Settings - Reading. Change the homepage to be the static page you’d like; and if you want to keep a blog style listing somewhere, set that in the Posts option (this isn’t required though). Contact Form It’s quite likely you’re going to want a contact form on a static Wordpress website. Often people will try to contact you through the comments, but if you haven’t enabled those on Pages then I’d strongly suggest putting up a contact form somewhere. Start by creating a new Contact page. Pro-tip: A page named "Contact" is built into Wordpress. If you’ve previously deleted it, and now find you’re being given a permalink slug like "/contact–2/" then be sure to empty the trash first - deleted pages remain there with their previous slugs. Fast Secure Contact Form is a fantastic free plugin - featured on our Best Wordpress Plugins page no less - and includes Captcha abilities out of the box. It has a huge range of features and enables you to maintain a number of different contact forms. The options can be found under Plugins - FS Contact Form Options. Configuring the plugin can be a little daunting as the admin interface isn’t exactly intuitive, but read through the options slowly and all will be well; then embed the form on your contact page using the shortcode: [si-contact-form form=’1’]. You can also set up auto-responders, additional fields, AJAX posting, and even video confering requests via the premium vCita meeting scheduler plugin. So as you can see, Wordpress can literally power any kind of website you want to create. Do you have any more ideas on how to use Pages only to power a static Wordpress website? Let us know in the comments!

Web designers have an almost impossible job. They need to come up with one design that pleases everyone. When talking about a service like Gmail, used by countless millions of people all over the world, you can really drop the "almost" part – it’s just impossible. Even if a redesign is well liked by most people, there will always be users who really don’t like the new look. Sometimes there are enough of these users to force a company to backtrack, like Google recently did with the Gmail icon buttons. But what if there’s something you really hate, and the company doesn’t change it back? Are you stuck with it forever? Thanks to user styles, you can fix such problems yourself. Introducing Stylish Stylish is a free add-on available both for Firefox and Chrome, and it lets you do something pretty magical - apply your own styles to webpage elements. Even if you’re not a web developer and you’ve never written a bit of CSS in your life, this is much easier than it sounds. You can use Stylish to transform websites completely (as I will show you in the next section), but even more importantly, you can use Stylish to fix small annoyances in minutes. For example, I had a problem with the default font size in Gmail. The interface was fine – I didn’t want to zoom in (Ctrl +) with my browser, because that would increase the size of all interface elements and be really ugly. I just wanted a way to make the message font slightly bigger. With Stylish, it was really simple, and I’ll show you how. But before we look at creating your own user styles, let’s talk about leveraging other people’s work. UserStyles.org If something is getting on your nerves, it is entirely possible you are not alone. UserStyles.org is a website that lets users share styles they’ve created. Above you can see a style (Add labels to toolbar icons) recommended by MakeUseOf commenter RandyN in reply to our story about the Gmail icon buttons. This style lets you keep the icons, but add in text labels – something Google won’t let you do. UserStyles.org is great, but it is not perfect. Some of the designs try to do too much (change the appearance of a website entirely), and some are for old versions of websites and are now broken. If you’re trying to fix something small and can’t find it on UserStyles.org, perhaps your best course of action is to do it on your own. Creating Your Own Simple User Style To create your own user style, you first need to know what element of the page you’re trying to change, and then what change you want to make. So, to get started, right-click whatever it is you want to change, and pick Inspect Element. You should see something like this: Firefox darkens the rest of the page, and draws a very clear frame around the element you’ve selected. Above that element, the text that says div#2d6.ii.gt.adP.adO, is a bunch of CSS classes, along with one ID (the part that starts with #). This is the selector that affects the styling for this element. Along the bottom of the screen there’s a navigation bar that lets you "traverse the DOM tree", or in simpler words, go up and down in the hierarchy of elements leading to the element you’ve picked. The name of the game here is to pick the element you wish to style, and make the selection not so narrow that it won’t affect everything you want to affect, nor so broad that it would mess up other things. I clicked one element higher, div.gs, just because I like its name (seems like something that won’t change too soon, but that’s a complete guess on my part). It affects the entire message area. Once the area you wish to style is selected, click the Style button on the bottom-right corner, to open the Rules pane: I know, it’s scary at first. But this is where you see the different CSS rules that affect the element you selected, and this is where you can make your own temporary modifications and see their impact on the page in real-time, without reloading it. But what should you change? Click the Properties button and uncheck “Only user styles”: Here you can see a complete list of all CSS rules. You can scroll down the list until you find a rule that makes sense for what you need (font-size in our case), and even click the question mark next to it to open an explanation page. So, now we know we want to tweak the font-size property for all div elements that have a class of "gs" (written in shorthand as div.gs). The only question that remains is what we want its value to be. For that, we go back to the Rules pane and start playing around: 40 pixels may be a bit crazy, but you get the general idea. Play around with this, and feel free to add any other properties, until you get the look you were going for. Be sure not to close the page, because your changes are not saved anywhere. Saving Your New Style Once you’ve got this part of the site to look just like you want it, it’s time to save it. Click the Stylish icon in the add-on bar, and select “Write new style”. Stylish would then want to know on what pages it should apply the new style – in our case, pick the second option, “mail.google.com”. Next, you will see this dialog: I have already filled it on. Obviously, I picked a name and some tags for the style. But the real stuff happens within the code: Line 3 was already there – Stylish put it in place so that it knows on what pages the style applies. But line 5-7 are mine. Let’s analyze them: Line 5: div.gs { – this part you should recognize. This is the element we’ve decided to style. The opening brace means we’re now going to write some CSS rules.Line 6: font-size: 20px !important; – that’s the rule we wish to change (font-size), followed by its new definition (20 pixels), and then by an “!important” declaration, which means Firefox would obey this rule even if an element “closer” to the text tries to set the font size to something different.Line 7: } – closing the style definition. Next, click Preview and marvel at your work:

With an obsession with all web-based "things", it should come as no surprise that I am obsessed with lightweight, yet highly-functional Windows web servers. Not long ago, I covered XAMPP mostly because I was searching for a portable web server that I could use to develop and test changes for the design of my blog. I came across XAMPP after reading Dave's article describing how to set it up on a PC. Since the blog has developed a fair level of traffic, the last thing I want to do is mess with the design, accidentally take the site down, and then damage the reputation of the site. For the most part, XAMPP has served me well, but I'm always on the lookout for a competitor service that will do everything XAMPP does even better. I'm happy to say that I've discovered yet another lightweight web server application that fits that bill - called the Uniform Server. Running The Uniform Web Server Before I jump into telling you about the Uniform Server software, I should explain why I didn't just stop looking when I found XAMPP. The reason is that, while it installed a PHP/MySQL-based web server that could mirror my blog well - setting it up, configuring and maintaining the service wasn't quite as streamlined as I would have liked. While it does come with the Admin PHP app for setting up MySQL, it is not quite as easy to configure the PHP install if you want to. Uniform Server, on the other hand, does everything XAMPP can do, plus it gives you much easier access to configure and tweak settings as you see fit. It also allows you to enable Perl scripting if you so desire. To set up Uniform Server, just download the ZIP file and place it on the USB device or PC directory where you want to store your web server files. In that root folder, you'll find Start_as_program.exe and Start_as_service.exe. Running the program will launch the server configuration app. It'll also prompt you to immediately change your root MySQL password for better security. Once you're done this, you'll find yourself back on the main server setup screen of the program. Just like XAMPP, when you want to activate your web server, just click "Start Both" and both the Apache web server and your MySQL database will activate on http://localhost. If you go to http://localhost/index.php before placing your own files in the /www subdirectory, you'll see the following page. This is how you know the server is functioning properly the first time. On the Uniform Server app, click on the "Server Configuration" button to see all aspects of the web server that you can modify from within this app. This is a bit different than previous releases of The Uniform Server, which used to use a web-based admin page for all of these configuration settings. Now it's all done through this locally run, non-browser based app. As you can see, from this app you can configure a list of server settings, without ever having to mess around with trying to track down the right config files on the web server. This app will find them all for you. For example, click on the "Apache" button to see all of the Apache web server settings you can access and change, as well as the log files you can view all from here. Click on PHP to access PHP settings you can alter on this server. This is really nice, especially after the experience I had trying to modify PHP settings on my XAMPP server. Never having done it before, it was a pretty frustrating experience. With The Uniform Server, it's all laid out here for you. You'll still need to know how to make the changes, but at least you won't have to waste time hunting down the right ini and config files.

Today we're going to take a look at the various web programming languages that power the Internet. This is the fourth part in a beginners programming series. In part 1, we learnt the basic of variables and datatypes. In part 2, we moved onto functions and control structures. In part 3, we had a look at some of the numerous software programming languages. Like last time, I've included screenshots of what typical code in the language looks like, which I believe is a good at-a-glance indicator of whether you're going to be comfortable programming it or not. PHP PHP is the undisputed king of server-side languages in use on the Internet today - running on 75% of all web servers - and is the power behind Wordpress, Wikipedia, and even the user-facing part of Facebook. As a server side language, the code is processed before it reaches the user's browser, so all they see is the final page and none of the original PHP code. PHP is mainly used in conjunction with MySQL to pull information from a database, manipulate it and present it to the user. PHP is general-purpose and comes as standard with most web servers - if you’ve ever heard the term MAMP/WAMP/LAMP, the P generally stands for PHP (the rest is Windows/Mac/Linux, Apache, and MySQL). MySQL Another component of standard web server installations, MySQL is a free, open source database server. It’s not a programming language as such, but it is a new language to learn if you want to talk to databases so it's a key component of modern websites. Although MySQL is actually a command-line language, there are common GUI tools available such as PHPMyAdmin for managing databases more easily. Again, MySQL is what powers Wordpress - so all your posts and content are actually stored inside a MySQL database. Javascript Not to be confused with Java, the full object oriented software programming language we introduced last week, Javascript is the daddy of interactive webpages. It’s a scripting language that’s run locally on the user's browser, allowing webpages to respond to user interactions such as clicking on elements and timing events. To cover everything Javascript is capable of would be impossible - suffice to say if there's something interactive on a site, and it isn’t Flash - it’s more than likely Javascript. It’s worth mentioning JQuery at this point too. JQuery is a Javascript-framework which lets you write less code and gives you greater browser compatibility, and is quickly becoming the standard for modern webpages. It’s particularly useful for targeting specific parts of a webpage using familiar CSS terms and doing something with them, such as showing or hiding them. Although JQuery is made from Javascript, it introduces its own unique language components too, so just because you know Javascript doesn’t mean you can automatically use JQuery (you could also argue that you don't need to know much Javascript to be able to use jQuery). We’ll definitely be looking at this one at some point. Perl Perl used to be a major force in web programming but has since been relegated to mostly just text-processing applications. It’s incredibly fast at processing text, but not of much use on the modern Internet. It's something that all hackers have in the box of tricks though, so it's worth checking out at some point. To give you an idea of the power of Perl, here's the complete code that was created to crack DVD encryption. Yes, it is rather cryptic: Ruby Ruby, and its web application framework Ruby On Rails, powers some pretty major websites such as Groupon, Shopify (a commerce platform), and the front-end of Twitter. It’s a full object oriented language that’s interpreted by the server and then sent as a finished HTML page to the browser - much like PHP (yet also completely different, *sigh*). It has a number of key advantages though, namely in rapid development, less code repetition, and speed. Unfortunately, most web servers do not support Ruby out of the box, so unless you’re able to configure your own server as you wish, you need to use a hosting service such as Heroku. Python Python is another full object-oriented high-level strongly-typed language. Adjectives used to describe Python typically include fun, easy to use, and a good learning tool - but ultimately there's very few real-world Python web applications. It certainly sounds like a good place to start though, especially if you're the kind of person who's into Linux and open source / community-driven projects. Just don’t expect to be making any actual webpages with this, and there appears to be a rivalry with the Ruby community. ASP.net This is Microsoft's contribution to the web language arena, predictably popular in corporate environments and nowhere else. It's closely integrated into the .Net family, and you need specific Windows hosting to run ASP.net web applications, which in my experience is far more effort than it's worth. Stay away from this one unless you have a really good reason not to. So, Which Should You Learn? If you want to create a modern, interactive website, I suggest a combination of PHP, MySQL, and possibly JQuery/Javascript for interactivity. That’s not to say the languages such as Ruby and Python aren’t worth investigating as a learning exercise - which we certainly will be doing at some point - but if your time is limited and you seriously want to start learning useful real-world skills then the PHP/MySQL combo is the best place to start.

Whatever the reason is, you may at some point want to get a web server going. Whether you want to give yourself remote access to certain pages or services, you want to get a community group going, or anything else, you'll need to have the right software installed and configured for that to happen. So how exactly can you do that? It's actually quite simple. My operating system of choice for this article will be Fedora Linux, as Linux in general is known for getting servers up and running quickly, and easily. In addition, Fedora is well supported by both a community and a corporation, has great security, and offers graphical configuration tools for multiple servers. Step One: Installation New Install of Fedora If you don't have Fedora installed on your system yet, you can do so with the DVD because you can also choose to install Apache at the same time. If you take this route, while installing from the DVD you'll be able to choose which packages you want to install with the "Customize Now" switch. Choose it and then under the Servers tab, you can select "Web Server". Go ahead with the installation until you can boot into your new system. From there, you can install the graphical configuration tool by choosing the package system-config-httpd from your package manager, or run sudo yum install system-config-http. Fedora Already Installed If you already have Fedora installed, you can install both the web server and the graphical configuration tool. You can install the httpd and system-config-httpd packages from the package manager, or run sudo yum install httpd system-config-httpd. Step Two: Configuration You can now start the graphical configuration tool from System Tools --> HTTP. The first tab you'll see is the Main tab, where you can configure the server name, administrator email address, and under which addresses the server is available under. I recommend that you add an address right now, and choose "All available addresses" on port 80 for simplicity. The second tab contains the different virtual hosts, or the number of different websites on the same server, that are configured. The server can differentiate what domain name was entered into the browser and therefore choose the correct virtual host when displaying a page. There are plenty of different settings that you can choose for each virtual host, including the necessary components as well as hard-to-configure ones such as SSL (HTTPS). For a majority of items, the graphical configuration tool should be able to take care of your needs. The final tab has everything to do with performance and the amount of connections that are allowed. There are no recommended settings as each server has different capabilities, so if you have a larger website you'll need to play around with these numbers and see what works (provided that you have enough traffic to test out the settings correctly). Additional Needed Configuration Before you can actually access your new web server, you'll need to open your terminal and then run sudo service httpd start to actually start Apache and sudo chkconfig httpd on to make Apache start at every boot. Step Three: Testing Step 3 in our process is simply to test out whether you can access your page or not. On the same machine, open up Firefox and type in localhost or 127.0.0.1 to see if you get this test page (provided that you didn't change the document root): If not, you may have done something wrong in your configuration or not started Apache yet. Conclusion It's pretty cool to have Apache up and running on your very system, considering that it's the same technology being used by most of the websites you visit every single day (including MakeUseOf). If you want other machines to have access, you'll need to go into Fedora's firewall configuration utility (installed by default) and make sure that HTTP (Port 80) is open. Also, if you want to run more complicated web frameworks such as forums or WordPress, you'll have to install MySQL and PHP as well, but I'll leave that for another article

There are two main stages involved in the website design process. The first is designing the look of the pages and the second is translating the design into the actual product - the webpages. The first stage requires design skill while the second stage needs coding expertise. The problem is, finding an individual who has both skills is difficult. For those who have better eyes for design (and no interest in coding), there's Muse from Adobe. The company claims that this multi-platform AIR application can help anybody to design and publish HTML websites without having to write any code whatsoever. Start Planning Your Personal Landing Page One question before we begin. Why would anyone use a web building tool like Muse when you can use Wordpress and its themes instead? The answer is "customization". Even though there are literally thousands of Wordpress themes out there, customizing the theme to really fit our needs is difficult. Another reason is that using a Wordpress advanced database system for a simple and linear site would be overkill. You can download Muse from the website. It's available for free until the v.1.0 release in early 2012. The application works under Windows and Mac, but it requires that your system has AIR installed. To better understand how Muse works, let's try to use it to create a simple personal landing page, something along the lines of Flavors.me or About.me. Start by choosing "Create New Site" from the startup window or from the File menu. Then you will be asked to customize your site by choosing the page width, the number of columns, margins, etc. The first step in building a website is deciding how many pages it will have and what the relation is between the pages. You can easily add, delete, and rearrange pages in the "Plan" window. Click the "+ (plus)" button to add, and the "X" button to close. Click on the page name to rename, then drag and drop to rearrange. At the bottom of the page, you can see the A-Master page. This is the template that will be used throughout your site. So if there are elements you want to keep on all your pages, it would be so much easier if you define the elements at A-Master instead of repeating them over and over. Start Building If you double click one of the pages, it will be opened in a new tab. You can start building and designing the pages using the tools at the top toolbar. Other tools that will help you along in the design process are the "Panels" on the right. You can show or hide these panels via the Window menu. To build our personal landing page, let's change the background by inserting an image. You can customize the image by changing the scale and position. Next, let's add a navigation menu by choosing it from the Widget panel, then dragging and dropping it into the webpage. You can customize the navigation menu using the "Options". Click the small blue arrow to summon the Options window. You can also change the text appearance (type, color, size) using the "Text" tab in the right panels. Then you can add Texts and Rectangles using the tools on the toolbar. Drag these elements to the position that you want, and customize them via the right panels. To add external links (or other HTML elements), use the "Insert HTML" menu under "Object". Write down the HTML code of the links in the pop-up window and click OK to add it to the site. Similar to the other elements, the inserted HTML code is highly customizable. Unfortunately, we still can't change the link color. Hopefully this feature will appear in a future version of the app. After everything is set, you can see the result by clicking on the "Preview" link. The Last Step After everything is set, you are ready to put your site out on the web. To do that, use the "export as HTML" menu under "File". Decide on the location to save the project, and click "Export" . If you want to attach your personal landing page to a URL you already own, use any decent FTP client to upload everything inside the folder to your web hosting account. Since different hosting providers use different settings, please consult your hosting provider about this.