I received one of those "how do you do that" inquiries this month with respect to the virus warnings that appear on Page 1 of the newletter and on the GEC Computers in the Classroom homepage.

The content is provided free by Sophos antivirus.

Its purpose is to remind visitors to the website of the need to be aware of these nasty things floating around the Internet. It's a requirement of having access to this feed that a link be provided to visitors to take them to the Sophos site. Not a problem; and there are actually a number of links that come through with the feed.

Each of the viruses that are identified appear as their own link and when you click on it, detailed information about the virus, how it propagates, and importantly how to remove it are provided.

By going to the Sophos website, you have the opportunity to determine just what kind of feed that you wish. There are lots of options, unfortunately. You must review the legal requirements and then a quick registration with your name and email address and you're in.

Once submitted, Sophos through an automated process will generate and send you and email message with further instructions. The code that appears on your page must be copied and pasted accurately into the source code of your webpage. That's that. Post it to your website and every visitor to your page will get the effect.

But I don't like their colours!

The colours can be adjusted to compliment your site. You'll notice that the newsletter listing on my site is in blue and on the GEC Computers in the Classroom site, it is our district's shade of teal.

With the hands of a surgeon, look through the code. Near the top, you'll find the following text.

var bgcolour_main = '#cccccc'
var bgcolour_heading = '#99cccc'
var text_colour = '#000000'
var link_colour = '#000099'

These values may be changed to match the colours on your website. Dig into a hexidecimal colour wheel (argh) or pick the colour in the Properties dialogue box inside Dreamweaver MX. The actual colour codes appear next to the colour picker.

Make the changes, save your page and you're got great, matching coloured content for your site.

Viruses should be a big concern for everyone these days. Even though we've been told over and over and over and over not to open attachments to messages, people continue to do so and that's where the problems begin.

Perhaps if enough websites posted this information up front and in the face of all visitors, things will change.

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