Much of this page was written a while ago, for a different website. I'll update it soon to make it more correct and relevant to Byte.Yoga. Read the section under the green box below, if you haven't already seen it on another page here:

Games

If you're new to the website, the games I wrote that you can play online on this site (in your browser) are probably the most interesting things here. Click here to see the games.

The most interesting games so far are probably Conqueror, Fast Draw (the poker machine one), and Eel (an improved version of the classic "Snake" game, but with an undersea theme).

There's also the Bandit Wargame, which isn't hosted here, but you can play it online — and it's a great way to learn Linux and security skills within a game-oriented style of learning.

Coming Soon on Byte Yoga

Here's a few things I'll try to add, and also ideas for what might end up getting written about, depending on the level of interest there is for them:

• Introductory coding, including examples, and ways which might help make it interesting, and cut through the wall-of-complexity which can seem daunting and confusing (especially at first).
• Some security-related news, including current events in the world of Cybersecurity.
• How to get started with learning about Cybersecurity, including beginning Linux information.
• Kali Linux, including how to install Kali in a VM (virtual machine).
• Information about "how the internet works" at a top-down level.
• Examples of other websites and IT projects I've worked on in the past (especially if I can copy and paste them easily into new pages).
• Some other content from other websites which is at least somewhat relevant, that I can also copy and paste into web pages here quickly.
• If I can't think of anything new I can always write about how some part of this website itself works internally, with code and database/SQL examples.
• Anything else that seems like a good idea...

Quick Tips for Using this Website

Here are some tips for using this Website:

On many devices, press the F11 key on the keyboard to go into full screen mode, which will help reduce distractions. Press F11 again to return to the standard web browser view.

This site is quite new, and a few things don't work yet. Or are missing or incomplete.

I had been been calling it a "Web Magazine" because I'm thinking of the old-style printed magazines. Which in the old days of print media, you might notice on the shelf of a newsstand as you were walking past. And pick it up to have a look. Perhaps on the way to work, or at the shops, or anywhere really. Perhaps because the cover looked interesting... Perhaps because it seemed like easy reading. And then you'd flick through it and learn things from it.

I had in mind the old-style print magazines, which you could flick through and learn a lot from without much effort. They nearly always had lots of pictures to go along with the text. Photo by Ajax Great / flickr.

Much of what's been said and written about IT, and security especially, tends to be somewhat serious and dry. Which is only natural because it's a serious topic. But I think there's also a place for something that's less intense (at least in parts). And to approach it in a way that makes the idea of it seem like something normal and ordinary — and ideally even appealing — to normal, average people who are interested.

Currently the search form works in a basic way, the contact page doesn't work yet and the social media sharing links don't work yet. You can share the pages by pasting in the URL of the page. I'll try to fix these soon. Also some of the links at the very bottom of the page footer don't work yet.

Here is a list of some quick tips:

1. Pages can belong to more than one category. Each page shows the categories its in at the bottom of the main part of the page, and also in the sidebar (which appears underneath the rest of the page on narrow screens such as most phones).
2. The numbers in brackets on the main menus indicate how many articles are in each category.
3. Each article stores the date it was first published and the date it was last updated. You can see the most recently updated pages on the page updates.html, and the most recently published pages on the page latest.html. Both of these listings can be found on the main menu under the home page link.
4. The three most recently updated pages also appear at the bottom of every page, under the "Latest Page Edits" heading.
5. At some point I'll improve the search functionality to search within byte.yoga, which is currently working but only in a basic way.
6. JavaScript: Many people interested in security are (what a coincidence) more concerned than average people about online security. Unlike many websites, nearly everything on byte.yoga should still work if you have JavaScript disabled in your browser. The things I can think of right now that don't work without JavaScript are toggling the extra menu under the main menu (from shown to hidden), which is quite trivial and probably doesn't even apply to narrow screens like phones; the "sticky sidebar" functionality that allows the middle and right columns to vertically scroll independently of each other (again only on wide enough screens, and not many phones), which is only a cosmetic feature; and the Nuclear Explosion Simulator, which is entirely written in JavaScript and won't work at all without it. Also I think a few of the symbols used around the site, like the "eye" symbol for the number of pageviews, won't work without JavaScript. When the contact form is eventually done, it will look better with JavaScript but still work without it.
7. Cookies: The site uses "PHP session cookies", which are about as minimal as cookies can ever be in terms of what they store about you. Currently I think they only store whether the page-top submenu is on or off, and what version of the Bible is set currently. In future there will probably be some links to affiliate products (where I get a percentage of sales made from people following the links and then buying things). These sites will have their own cookies and privacy policies.
8. Information Tracking and Privacy: The general policy of byte.yoga is to have the most minimal amount of tracking and data collection that's possible. The page view counters (with the eye symbol) are run from a private database and only track the view counts for each page, and nothing else — not even your IP address. The web server temporarily stores some minimal statistics (including your IP address, the operating system and browser you view each page with, and not much more than that) as do all web servers. There are no behind-the-scenes deals with popular data-collection sites like Facebook or Doubleclick, etc. Though occasionally some pages may try to load scripts from these sites. Unfortunately it's very hard to completely avoid. I was looking at one of my own pages on this site and noticed it wanted to allow scripts from Doubleclick (one of the world's larges ad-sharing companies which was purchased by Google in 2008). I thought to myself "How the hell did that get there?" I looked at the page source (as seen by the browser), and there was no mention of doubleclick.net. Eventually I figured it out — that page had an embedded YouTube video, which loads in its own frame. Which was the cause, i.e. YouTube was trying to load it. (Incidentally when I then looked at youtube.com, their home page wanted to load scripts from six domains, all of them owned by Google including doubleclick.net.) You can block these scripts with certain browser plugins, such as NoScript on Firefox. Few people realise how many popular websites do send information to these kinds of sites that track you every time you view a web page. Most people know that tracking does happen, but I don't think most people realise how massive is extent of it. If you're interested, try installing the plugin called Lightbeam on Firefox — and you'll probably be amazed to discover exactly how many different websites are constantly sharing and storing (and selling) your private information as you browse the web. There may be more recent/modern equivalents of Lightbeam for other browsers available now.

Retrospective Editing

Most of the pages will be treated more like encyclopedia pages, and updated on an ongoing basis, and less like blog pages that stay the same forever once they're posted. This means that many of the existing pages will be fixed up more and improve over time.

External Links

Most websites adopt a strategy of only using internal links (i.e. they only link to other pages within the same website), with very few or no external links (to other sites). This strategy is actively taught in classes on how to make websites, especially ones with a marketing focus. I'm deliberately going against this strategy with byte.yoga, and will link to any page anywhere on the internet if I think it's got useful information that's relevant to the particular topic I'm writing about.

So one feature of this website will be to act as a directory and a roadmap to existing online Cybersecurity information. Since there already is so much information out there, it seems more useful overall to do it this way than to just try to repeat what's already there on other people's websites. This feature will be integrated with the rest of the website, along with each topic and each page, and not appear as if it's a separate directory or listing of other sites.

A feature of Byte.Yoga will be to act as a directory and a roadmap to existing online tech/IT info. Photo by Bidgee / Wikipedia.

(Important note for internet marketers / spammers / webmasters: This does not mean that when I get emailed by thousands of people saying, "Hey can you link to my site?" that I'm going to add a heap of links like an actual literal web directory or search engine would. That's what Google is for. It means that when I see something that I like, and use myself, on another website — I'll link to it without concern for it directing "my" readers away from my site to someone else's site. Nor concern for it "diluting my pagerank", or any of the other commonly mentioned internet marketing reasons to not link to other websites.)

Internal links (to other pages on byte.yoga) will open in the same browser window and tab.

External links (to different websites) will open in a new tab (assuming your browsing software supports this feature — most of them do). On Windows you should be able to press Ctrl-Tab to switch back to the original byte.yoga tab (even when using full screen mode with F11) without having to click on the tabs. I'm not sure what the equivalent key combination on a Mac is but there probably is one (Command-Tab perhaps?) Alternatively you can close the new external tab with Ctrl-W on Windows and Command-W on a Mac.

If you like, you can test it out by following this external link and then press Ctrl-Tab or Ctrl-W (etc.) and see if it works. Switching tabs, rather than closing them, is probably safer in the sense that you can't accidentally close the tab that you want to be reading.

Initial Website Creation Notes

I've used a "big" layout for this website, with a lot of menus, links, previews, and thumbnail images of other pages. Some of the links didn't work at first (and a few still don't), and some of the categories are still empty. I've tried to also make it easy for me to add new pages quickly. Ideally I'll be able to keep adding new content on a regular basis from now on... It's a complex layout with a lot of categories and subcategories. It's taken up a lot of time getting it all together. But as the number of pages increases, it should make it very easy to navigate and to find things.

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