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This page provides tips that web developers sometimes encounter in the normal course of development. Since we frequently offer support to developers, we thought we would provide some solutions we have found to be helpful.

Is there something you would like to see here? Let us know.

Whether you are interested in fixing a broken link or something more serious, like correcting erroneous information published on a site, it helps to know how to track down the owner of a web site.

The most difficult sites to track down are those that have disappeared. The business that owns the site may have failed or decided that the site was unprofitable and so decided to shut it down. If you subscribe to a service provided through the defunct web site, then it is important to find out what happened before contracting with another provider. The site’s reappearance may present a problem for you that you thought was solved.

There are several reasons why a site may be unavailable. The owner of a web site may not be aware that their site is unavailable. The owner may have taken the site down temporarily to work on it. The owner may have published an alternate site to replace the one that is missing.

There also may be problems related to the country of the site’s origin. The host country may not have adequate infrastructure to maintain a steady supply of electricity, and so the condition may be temporary or intermittent.

To narrow down the search it helps to know some basics about the Internet. Internet web sites are hosted on computers (servers) configured to share content (web pages) with other computers over the global network. Computers are represented by numbers (IP addresses) mapped to human-friendly domain names through the services of a registrar. Registrars sometimes act as proxies for their clients. But in most cases you will find web site owner information listed in a collective database (WhoIs) available on most registrar web sites.

The first step in locating web site owner information is to look up the domain name in the WhoIs database. To do this, it helps to know what part of the site’s web address is the domain name.

To properly analyze a web site’s domain name or IP address, it is important to know where it begins and ends. Consider the following:

en. wikipedia.org /wiki/cgi/serve.pl

Does the two letter suffix in the address indicate that the site is being served out of Poland or that the address includes a file programmed using PERL?

Apart from “http://” know that a domain name ends where the slashes begin. Characters immediately preceding the first slash and before the first period (dot) represent the top level domain. This is where you will often see two letters which stand for the host country. You may also see a dot and three letters before that representing the generic top level domain (.com, .org, .net).

Immediately preceding that but before the next dot are characters that represent the domain name. Dots and characters that precede the domain name, for instance, the “en.” in the above example, represent sub-domains. Therefore the domain name never contains slashes. The important information in the above example is Wikipedia.org.

If you enter any information other than the domain name into a WhoIs database tool, a traceroute tool, or country code tool, you may get inaccurate information.

IP addresses are similar to postal codes and house numbers. With it computers from all over the world can send requested information to other computers as packets sent to the requestor’s country, region, and then finally to the requestor’s computer itself. We see this information displayed as web pages when we browse the Internet.

When we track a package through the postal system we trace the route of that package to the country, region, and then finally to the delivery point.

You can sometimes trace the route of information packets as they travel between your computer and the web site’s server. This is called performing a “traceroute”. If there is a problem with the site, then “hops” listed in a traceroute report may not include the web site’s server (it may no longer exist). But the web site’s Internet Service Provider (ISP) may be listed if it is still in business. If they are no longer in business, then at least you will have some idea about the region and country of the site’s origin.

... 9 ptcl.pos11-0.cr02.hkg04.pccwbtn.net (63.218.2.126)

10 khi77.pie.net.pk (202.125.128.133)

11 pos1-0.rwp44gsrc1.pie.net.pk (202.125.159.34) ...

Notice that the traceroute report above listed several hops, the closest to the site’s server being listed at the bottom.

Our packet requesting information on postbox1048.com entered the host country at line 10. We know this because of the two letter country code suffix listed there which is “.pk” for Pakistan.

Try the following site to view a list of Country Code Top Level Domains:

www.freesearching.com/domainnamecode.htm

1. Registrar

Try www.godaddy.com

Perform a Domain Name Search (for example, enter Wikipedia into the search field, and set the top level domain to .org). Is the domain name available? If it is, then you know the site you are researching no longer exists.

2. WhoIs

Try www.whois.net or better yet, try accessing the WhoIs database through a registrar web site (the results returned will probably be less technical).

The site owner information may not be listed here, but there should be contact information of some kind available (through a proxy, for example).

3. Traceroute

Try www.telstra.net/cgi-bin/trace

Read the report from bottom to top. You may be able to locate the ISP that hosts the site.

4. ISP

Use traceroute to locate the ISP and see if they have contact information listed on their web page.

5. Search

Use your favorite search engine. You may be able to find cached pages, or forums that talk about the site and what happened to it.

When pasting text in Dreamweaver MX 2004, two alerts would indicate a JavaScript error: "initialize is not defined". Errors would also occur when Dreamweaver was exited: "delTempFile is not defined".

The solution that worked for us was to locate the Dreamweaver MX 2004 configuration folder. This was found in C:\Documents and Settings\Your User Name\Application Data\Macromedia\Dreamweaver MX

We then renamed the Configuration folder. Dreamweaver cannot be running when renaming this folder. When Dreamweaver was restarted, the errors disappeared. Since Dreamweaver had been reinstalled previously, we noticed folders in the same location named Configuration-1 and Configuration-2. However, these are just automatic backups that Dreamweaver creates when reinstalled. The folder labeled Configuration is the one to rename. Once we restarted Dreamweaver, a new Configuration folder was created.

Adobe Acrobat Reader, Adobe Acrobat, and Adobe Illustrator would quit or freeze when launched. It would sometimes show the splash screen only and not launch. Additionally, Acrobat.exe would remain open in the background. This problem seems to have been due to Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0, which had previously been installed on the machine, not deleting temporary files after restarting.

The solution that resolved this problem was to delete these temporary files. This is accomplished by:

Going to Start and clicking Run, then typing "command" in the Open text box. Then click OK.

We then typed the following commands and pressed Enter after each command:

c:

cd\

del acr*.tmp /s

After that, we typed "exit" to close the command prompt.

Since this may be a bug with Acrobat Reader 6.0, it is a good idea to upgrade to Acrobat Reader 7.0 or later.  If you decide to upgrade, remember to remove your old version of Acrobat Reader before installing the upgrade.