Useful tips and tricks


Checking links and HTML syntax

LinuxFocus pages should be readable in any browser and definitely on all platforms where Linux is available. The more people can read the pages the better. They should also be designed such that the user can already read text while images are still loading. The later is mostly a html design issue and you don't have to worry about it if you use lfparser to generate the pages. What you should check is:

  1. Correct html syntax. Very good tools for that are e.g:
    -validator from http://validator.w3.org/check/referer/
    -tidy from: http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/.
    Run "tidy -e articleXXX.meta.html" to see errors correct them manually where needed. You don't have to correct the warnings but they can also indicate error. Look twice.
    With "tidy -im -raw articleXXX.meta.html" you can indent the html and make it look pretty.
  2. No broken links:
    -Run for every article that you get "tr_llnk -A " and check what links are available in the article. Often you can already now spot errors. (tr_llnk is part of HTML::TagReader)

Especially older issues of LinuxFocus are rather bad with regards to html syntax.

 
Access statistics

LinuxFocus has no longer just one Web server and it is really difficult to get accurate statistics these days. The load is basically spread between:

  • http://www.tldp.org/linuxfocus/ , This site is linked from the Linux documentation project and seems to get as many hits as www.linuxfocus.org. You can get stats from http://www.ibiblio.org/stats (enter /linuxfocus as directory for http://www.tldp.org)
  • http://www.linuxfocus.org , statistics are available for this server at http://www.linuxfocus.org/stats/
  • http://main.linuxfocus.org , statistics are available for this server at http://cgi.linuxfocus.org/cgi-bin/analog
Then there are a number of other mirrors which probably get some hits but not as much as the ones above.
 
Dictionaries

Here is a list of dictionaries and translation programs. Automatic translation programs are mostly useless but they can help if you translate from a language that you just understand (but not speak) to your mother tongue.
Dictionaries:


Translation programs:
Spellchecker online:



Page Maintained by: guido.socher[at]linuxfocus.org