Copy-and-Paste Your Way to Fame and Fortune

By Susan Ives

Copying and pasting are the lazy Webmaster's salvation. No, I'm not talking about stealing content. Everything on the Internet is copyrighted because it is saved permanently. If you write a poem or draw a picture and scribble it on a piece of paper, attach it to an e-mail, put in on a Web page or save it on a floppy, it's copyrighted. And so is the other guy's stuff. So don't go grabbing other people's intellectual property.

What I'm talking about is copying-and-pasting to save time and energy.

If you're basic Windows skills have atrophied:

  • Copy text by highlighting it (drag the mouse across it while clicking the left mouse button) and then pressing Ctrl+C. Or, all Windows programs have a menu bar at the top of the screen - you can select edit-copy.

  • Paste text somewhere else - even into another program - by positioning your cursor where you want to drop the text and press Ctrl+V. That V is meant to represent a copy editor's caret, which means insert, but you can think of it as vomiting it back onto the screen if that makes life easier for you. Edit-paste also works.

I've found that some of my students don't realize that they can copy and paste between applications. The copy command places the copied data into RAM, random access memory. It's floating in computer memory, available to use in any program until you copy something else, which writes over it. You can copy something from your browser, for example, and then paste it into your HTML editor.

Yes, you can copy right off of the browser screen! If you want to be mean, you can prevent others from doing this to your site. Just put this line of code in the <BODY> tag:

<BODY ondragstart="return false" onselectstart="return false">
This is JavaScript, so it won't deter those who turn their scripting off or use browsers that don't support Java. People can also view the page source and get the marked up text. However, it does make it harder for people to "borrow" your text.

When I am creating links to other sites, I always, always copy and paste the URL from the address box to make sure I get it exactly right. O and 0 look alike. So do l and 1.

Copying and pasting text sometimes creates weird line breaks. If you are copying from e-mail you will get those >>> that indicate quoted text. I use a free utility called "the Cleaner" to get rid of both the line breaks and the >>>. You can download it from ronbrandon.com/lukeminnie/email_cleaner.htm

You probably know that you can save most graphics from the Internet to your hard drive by right-clicking your mouse on the graphic and then choosing "save picture as. ." In Internet Explorer, make sure to add the file extension to the graphic when you save it. If you don't want people taking your graphics, you can disable the right-click with another JavaScript (put this anywhere on your page):

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript1.1">
<!-- Begin
function stopthief(ie) { var warning = "Right clicking this page is not allowed.";
if (navigator.appName == 'Netscape' && ie.which == 3) {
alert(warning);
return false;
} else
if (navigator.appName == 'Microsoft Internet Explorer' &&
event.button==2) {
alert(warning);
return false;
}
return true;
}
document.onmousedown = stopthief;
// End -->
</SCRIPT>
They will get a dialogue box that says, "Right clicking this page is not allowed." You can see where those words are in the script. Change them to something nastier if you prefer.

Background images, often seamless tiles, can also be copied and saved. Place the cursor somewhere on the background, but not over another image. Right-click your mouse, and from the dropdown menu select "save background as.."

View source: You do know about view-source, don't you? This is the best tip I got when I was a new Webmaster. You can look at the source code for just about any HTML document by going to view-page source from the menu bar. This is a useful way of seeing how another Webmaster created a certain effect, or where a script originated, or even, sometimes, what program was used to create the page. You can copy code snippets directly from the source. Copying an entire design would be immoral, if not illegal.

Lorem ipsum: When designing a site, I work on the structure first, then the colors and design, and add the content last. I do need text as a placeholder, however, to see how a site will look. Since the 16th century, the convention is to use "lorem ipsum," paragraphs of garbled Latin, as placeholders. It keeps me - and clients - from being distracted by specific words in sample content. I found a handy lorem ipsum generator on the Internet - it will create as much as you want. You can even select a specific word count, so if your content is always 650 or 900 words, you can get exactly that. It's at www.lipsum.com/. Copying and pasting is critical to everything I have talked about for the last six months. It's a minor skill, but one that you will use every day.

Susan Ives is a former president of Alamo PC. She archives these columns on her Web site, www.susanives.com/lazy. If you visit, you can cut-and-paste the code instead of retyping it from the magazine - the ultimate in lazy Webmastering!

©2003, Susan Ives