Sunday, November 8, 2009

Connecting to TJ E-Mail via Desktop Client

TJHSST provides a free email service for all students and faculty. A former student, William Yang, wrote up directions to access TJ e-mail from a desktop client a few years back, but the mail system has changed since then, so the mail settings are a bit different. Should these directions not work, please feel free to contact me and we’ll try to get your problem sorted out.

TJ email uses IMAP to access email, and you can use the following directions to use either Thunderbird of Outlook.
-IMAP server: imap.tjhsst.edu
-SMTP server: your Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) outgoing mail client. For example, this is smtp.[east/west].cox.net for Cox Communications, but may be different depending on who your internet is provided by.
-Username: TJ Intranet/Windows username
-Password: TJ Intranet/Windows password
-SSL should be enabled for the IMAP connection to TJ’s mail servers.

Thunderbird

  • Open Thunderbird and go to Tools to Account Settings
  • Click Next here, as the default setting is correct.
  • Put your name and TJ email address here, and click Next.
  • Select IMAP instead of POP, and put in imap.tjhsst.edu as the Incoming Server.
  • Input your username, and click Next. Accept the rest of the notifications.
  • Afterwards, go into the Account Settings menu again, and select ‘SSL’ for where it says “Use secure connection:”; your mail will not work without this. This will tell Thunderbird to use port 993, which is required to access TJ mail.
  • For your outgoing mail server, you can use TJ or your Internet Service Provider (ISP). TJ’s mail server is smtp.tjhsst.edu, and you should use TLS on port 25 with authentication. Use your TJ username without the ‘@tjhsst.edu’ for the authentication.

Outlook

  • Open Outlook and go to Tools to Account Settings
  • Choose the ‘Manual configuration’ for this step
  • Just click next here
  • Put in your account information here. Incoming mail server is imap.tjhsst.edu, and outgoing mail server is smtp.tjhsst.edu. Afterwards, click the ‘More settings’ button
  • Check the box that says ‘My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication’. Your mail should not work without this
  • On the Advanced tab, make sure your incoming server uses SSL, and your outgoing server uses TLS. Click OK here, and you should be done!

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Links, 2009-11-03


Monday, November 2, 2009

Links, 2009-11-01


Sunday, November 1, 2009

JavaScript, and why it matters

Depending on your involvement with web development, you know of a thing called JavaScript. According to Wikipedia, “JavaScript is an object-oriented scripting language used to enable programmatic access to objects within both the client application and other applications.” In other words, it’s a programming language that lets you do fancy things. It’s used on pretty much every web page on the Internet, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter. Back in the old days before JavaScript, most pages were static HTML, and looked their age (see Geocities). Since around 1996 or whenever JavaScript was implemented, sites have dealt with people who have JavaScript enabled as well as disabled.

Well, the day that JavaScript-lacking browsers must be dead is here! The new http://tjhsst.edu website, the site of my high school, has apparently proclaimed that JavaScript is required to view the Internet correctly, and is the first one to remove support for non-JS’ed browsers. There is no notice saying that it needs to be enabled, just a nice, broken page. As shown in the images below, with the JavaScript-enabled browser on the left and the browser without JavaScript on the right, the appearance is pretty much horribly broken for the main website, and navigation to the secondary pages is completely broken, as those menus are done through JS. The secondary pages aren’t quite as bad, though. Just a bit of rendering difficulties, while the content (thankfully just text) displays fine.

http://tjhsst.edu with JavaScript enabled
http://tjhsst.edu with JavaScript disabled
http://tjhsst.edu/abouttj with JavaScript enabled
http://tjhsst.edu/abouttj with JavaScript disabled



















Webmasters: please keep in mind that not everybody is the same as you. Not everyone wants to use JavaScript, and there are even some that don’t have access to it.

TJ webmasters: your site has a little work needed