Here’s a nifty little online tool that you can use to discover if a website is down for everyone – or just you. Go to: isthisdown.com
Is your website down?
January 12, 2009 By 1 Comment
Merry Facebook-mas: Record Traffic on Christmas Eve
January 6, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Social networking site Facebook.com recorded a record number of people logging on Christmas Eve, grabbing a massive 2.18% of the US market share and 4.65% of the UK market share. For the Poms, that’s one Facebook visit in every 22 site visits anywhere on the Internet! [Src]
Update: Add the What The Duck comic strip to your website using PHP
December 18, 2008 By 1 Comment
I have just updated the What The Duck PHP code for including the comic strip into any web page.
Here’s a sample for those not already familiar with this hilarious photography-oriented comic strip.
Six ways to protect your email that don’t cost a cent
July 9, 2008 By Leave a Comment
I’m far from being a hysterical journalist who preaches that hackers will infiltrate your incredibly boring My Documents folder if you don’t install a Virus Buster and all manner of spyware and firewall applications. That said, identity theft, gaining access to online services and stealing your domain names and the like is easy if someone has your email password. If you can take only one step to protect yourself online, it should be to look after access to your email.
And there’s also the issue of backing up your email in the event of human error or a computer crash/glitch.
Here are six tips to quickly and easily get your email security and backup organised… without the hype or any expense. You’ll love the last two if you’ve never thought of it before!
1. Create a complex password and keep it to yourself
A basic password would be the name of your dog or any other word or combination of words that could be guessed. A complex password is, ideally, a random selection of letters and numbers. The truly paranoid will insist on some letters being capitalised. Even if you choose a couple of random words and throw a few numbers in between, that will be a step in the right direction!
Bad: rover Bad: success Bad: jamessmells Good: gh39dskj29 Good: apple253red Good: G39dEkj22
Also, make sure you always change any password provided to you upon creation of a new account.
2. When creating online accounts never use your email password
While most website developers and owners will do the right thing, others mightn’t and the opportunity for exploitation is there. When building an online forum, community website, or any other dynamic website or web-based application, a web developer will usually be careful to store your password using an encryption technique that will prevent anyone reading it.
Less honourable, or competent, web developers might store your password as plain text, allowing it to be read by them and/or anyone who gains unauthorised access to their database.
Avoid the worry and only use your email password for email.
3. Password-protect your email application
If you use Outlook, Outlook Express or any other desktop email application, and your computer is potentially accessible to others whom you don’t trust, make sure you put a password on your account so that noone sitting at your computer, other than you, can read your email.
Even if your email is boring, the greater concern is someone using an automated “Forgotten my password” service and having your passwords to your various online accounts sent to your email account.
4. Don’t open “funnies” and other suspicious attachments
I uninstalled my virus buster. It was slowing down my computer and I really don’t need it. Viruses, trojan horses and other nasties are introduced to computer systems by running software that has some malicious code in it.
Downloading and installing software from reputable software companies is safe. Opening “funnies” (even from people you know and trust) and attachments from anyone you don’t know is taking a big risk. Some types of attachments are quite safe, but unless you know how to make the distinction, it’s better to throw on Liar, Liar or Love Actually instead.
5. Automatically backup your incoming email, the easy way!
I have a separate Google Mail (GMail) account to which I have all my email automatically copied. This means that if I accidentally delete an email (it’s happened!) or I want to read my email at an Internet Cafe, I can login to GMail.com and do that.
Ask your web/email hosting provider how to set this up. Webnerd hosting clients can login to the Control Panel and use “Mail Forwarding” which will forward a copy of incoming email to the email address you specify while leaving a copy on the server.
If you have a Blackberry you can use this method to have your email go both to your computer and to your Blackberry.
6. Easily backup your outgoing email
I generally don’t do this myself but you can quite easily backup your outgoing email by Blind Carbon Copying (BCC’ing) your outbound email to your GMail account. Outlook Express users can enable BCC by clicking the “Create Mail” button; then selecting “View” from the menu; and making sure that “All Headers” is ticked.
If you’ve got any other thoughts or tips, feel free to send them my way. Many thanks to those of you who reply to my mail-outs with comments – it’s great to know who is reading them and which topics are most useful/interesting.
Wishing you happiness, health and success!
How I saved my reputation with one click (a useful tip for the future)
July 9, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Sometimes I’m a proper idiot and do something truly stupid. A few days ago I was doing a routine update to a new client’s website and I edited a critical file with new software.
I’m going to share this story with you because I learned something that might be useful to you one day.
Without me realising, until it was too late, the application had stripped half the code and replaced it with gobble-de-gook. By the time I had realised, the original file on both my computer and the web server had been replaced with the corrupted one.
And I had no backup.
To replace this one file would have required either a whole lot of non-billable hours, on my part re-developing it, or grovelling to the client’s previous developers. To make it worse, it was a Sunday and noone was answering their phones or emails.
After half an hour, however, I got a brainwave: If I were Microsoft, I would allow flawed humans like me to recover previous versions of files.
Sure enough, right-clicking on the file in question revealled the properties of the file, along with a tab that I’d never noticed before: “Previous Versions”. I clicked on the only previous version that Windows had kept for me and recovered the file.
Kudos to Bill.
You can bet that from now on I’ll be backing up even when making small changes but I’m sharing this with you because it might be useful to you one day. We’re all human and one day you might make a similar mistake – and now you’ll know how to fix it! How’s your online reputation?
Every once in a while I search for my name and trading name on Google to see what people can find about me. In addition to this I use a service called Google Alerts that sends me regular emails whenever those results change.
To set up your own alert, visit: http://www.google.com.au/alerts?hl=en
Add the What The Duck comic strip to your website using PHP
July 9, 2008 By 2 Comments
If you’d like to add the hilarious comic strip What The Duck to your website, here is a quick and easy solution using PHP.
First, we need a function that will fetch the What The Duck RSS feed and parse it into an array from which we can extract what data we want. This function, below, is called getWhatTheDuck() .
Second, we need another function that will take that array of data and format it. We can display just the latest comic strip or any number up to the total featured in the RSS feed.
For the purposes of this sharing of knowledge, the code will loop through the array and output everything that’s available. It should be a simple matter to change the loop to go through only once if you only want to display the latest strip.
