Check out The Surprising Truth about Ugly Websites for a informative article on web design. The whole site-reference.com website looks like a good one for the favorites list for those of us designing and working on the web.

Speaking of updates, we're currently running Ensim Weppliance 4.0.x I believe 4.2 is available. No major changes so I've been going slow with the update but it would probably be a good thing to do before the end of the year. I'll announce any plans for system changes here and on the Domains mail reflector.

The Email Slowdown.

Several weeks ago, the server was rebooted for a configuration change at our hosting site. That clean reset resulted in the SPAMD processes starting fromscratch. I've been keeping an eye on them and on the system load. Everything was working fine up until last night. Then the system got behind and the CPU load skyrocked. I countered by killing the running SPAMD processes which should have released our stuck and delayed Email. Hopefully an update from Ensim in the near future will resolve this issue and we will get spamassassin functionality without bringing the system to its knees.

Folks on the web do have too much time and too many ideas. Here's a cute one for marketing blogs:

http://www.blogshares.com/blogs.php?blog=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jnos.org%2Findex.html

Paypal is one of those incredible network resources that make all of this possible. I've just added the first, of probably many, links to third party resources for paypal and others on the links section of this page.

http://www.paypaldev.org/default.asp

One of the features of Compumont Web Hosting is easy access to the Power Tools suite provided as part of the Ensim Pro WebAppliance.

While all tools are, in general, available to all web host clients, we've had the opportunity to install and use only a few locally. For those we're tested, some support is available and comments will be posted here.

Note that the installed version of WebAppliance may trail the current version documented at the Ensim web site. Thus the tools available and versions of the tools may not exactly match.

Also please note that due to the WebAppliance scheme of installing tools, many show up in the control panel more then once with different version numbers. In general, please choose to install the latest unless you have additional knowledge or needs.

Other common Unix packages have not been "Ensimized" and their installation is tricky to say the least. Mailman is one example. A HOWTO was found on the EV1 forum and used successfully. More on Mailman will be presented in a specific posting.

Tools installed locally are:

• Gallery - see http://www.vodall.com/gallery
• phpBB - see http://www.napra.net/forums
• phpLinks - see http://www.napra.net/links
• WebCalendar - see http://www.napra.net/calendar

Notes on installation.

Gallery - set the initial admin password to a single character and then change it. This is a workaround for a bug

phpLinks - The admin page is not obvious. I guessed and found it as a subdirectory from the main URL. IE. http://www.napra.net/links/admin. Enter Categories before adding any links.

This is from the default home page of the Ensim Web Appliance. It's presented here to preserve and enhance the information.

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The easiest way to create a Web page is to use a Web authoring-tool, also called an HTML-authoring tool. Some of the more common authoring tools are Composer, which is free and available from Netscape, FrontPage, which is available for purchase from Microsoft, and Dreamweaver, which is available for purchase from Macromedia. These tools write the HTML code for you as you compose your page. Using them is similar to using a word processor such as Microsoft Word.

As an alternative, you can create Web pages by writing the HTML code yourself in a text editor program such as Notepad. Pointers to learning HTML include Writing HTML: A tutorial for creating Web pages, Web Monkey, CNET Web Builder, HTML Goodies, Yale Web Style Guide, and W3C HTML Homepage.

Using PINE instead of Outlook Express has revealed a small additional setting that is necessary due to the Ensim configuration. From the PINE help page:

OPTION: User-Domain
This value specifies the domain part (right-hand side) of your returnaddress on outgoing email and is also used as the default domain foremail composed to a local user. If unset, Unix Pine will obtain thedomain from the system.

Since the user domain isn't set on our system, it uses the default domain which is srv01.compumont.com. The users are not defined @srv01.compumont.com.

The solution is to go to the PINE configuration, Setup screen, and put in the domain name for the user domain field. As an example, for my vodall AT jnos.org account, I had to enter a user domain value of jnos.org.

Is your web page properly coded?

Check it at: http://validator.w3.org/

Our site, http://www.compumont.com, doesn't fiar too well on the W3C Validation:: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.compumont.com

Any recommendations for other good website test tools?