Qassia is an interesting social bookmarking/tagging site. What they’re trying to do is have their members tag and organize websites, in return you get unlimited backlinks to YOUR websites. A very interesting way to be in a participating in a social networking site, promoting your website and perhaps getting traffic back from it. Currently they’re in a closed beta. New signups by invitation only, consider yourself invited!
I’ve seen a couple of these emails today and wanted to give a post just to warn people that these are bogus and you should NOT follow the link suggested in the email. I HOPE no one reading this falls for it, but the “tax software update” that they are pushing is a virus. (SHOCK!) Only a little over half the antivirus vendors currently detect it.
Read on for details on the message body…
Last week we talked about creating strong passwords, but should we use different passwords for every site? It’s best practice to do just that. Do they all have to be really hard passwords? Again ideally, yes. So, how can we keep up password spreadsheet? Big sheet of paper? Password management program. Some advantages of password management programs are that many are equipped with encryption. In other words one password locks the whole list away. The bad news is if you lose or forget that password you are locked out of everything. Lists are generally bad because with access to your pc, your list is easy to get at.
Making up passwords is something we have to do almost everyday it seems. Banking web sites, forums, email accounts, webhosting accounts, mail lists, etc. But it seems that making passwords is one of the things that some people have the hardest time doing. Maybe it’s not that it’s hard to make a password, but hard to make a GOOD password. First off, what’s a good password and what’s a bad password? Anything that is a dictionary word (even in another language) is a BAD password. Personal names are usually very bad choices. Why?
There’s a lot of buzz these days about “cloud computing”. You may be asking yourself just what IS cloud computing? The concept is that you are not as reliant on your personal computer, but your applications and data are kept somewhere in the internet “cloud”. So for instance, I use google calendars and gmail for several things. All my calendar data is stored with Google. There are several backup services that work on the concept of online backups. This is a variation in a sense, for all of them you are relying on a server somewhere online to be where your applications or data are stored. Of course, I can hear it now, “I don’t know if I like that idea”. Yes, there are a lot of risks. Recently Charter Communications has been in the news for losing the contents of 14,000 email accounts. That should…
When I first started building web sites I seemed to have very good “google luck”. I designed pages, published and then submitted to 4-5 search engines and a couple directories and the traffic started coming in. The search engines were altavista, google, hotbot and a couple others and the directories were yahoo and dmoz. Lot’s of things have changed though. Recently submissions have been down to Google, MSN (Live), Yahoo and the Yahoo directory and the DMOZ. The DMOZ has been more and more frustrating in recent years as it seems to take several years to get added. So is that all you can do to get traffic for your site?
This is just a glimpse of the kinds of things I get to do day to day… A week or so ago I had a client that had received a used scanner from a friend. The scanner was a Microtek Scanmaker 4800. I was a bit concerned as her pc still has Windows 98 and I recall very many long hours of hair pulling making USB scanners and Windows 98 work years ago. Fortunately though, the driver cd was included in the bag their friend had passed along. The install process went smoothly, but there was one little detail missing.
Internet Explorer 7 is going to be an automatic upgrade through WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) on February 12. This was announced last fall, but is now about to become reality. According to Microsoft there will no longer be a requirement to prove the copy of Windows installing IE7 is legitimate. Windows Genuine Validation would have prevented the install on copies of Windows that were not officially licensed. Many of those “not officially licensed” copies are pirated, but there have been problems with the reliability of Windows Genuine Validation. Some users have reported legitimate copies of Windows failing the test in the past. So how do you avoid Internet Explorer 7?
I saw an interesting question over at slashdot on the topic of how many companies actually had their employees power down their PC’s overnight. The site in question had about 8000 PCs about half of which stayed powered on overnight. There’s a lot of talk these days about “going green”. I’ve always been interested in the idea of conservation because it just makes sense to not be wasteful where it’s possible. So, as many of you know already I have somewhere around as many hobbies as there have been Presidential debates this last year…. At one point in time I’ve spent a lot of time working with off-grid power ideas (built a small somewhat portable emergency power system with solar/car recharge capabilities.) And if you’ve ever seriously looked at alternative energy you know that you need to learn about power consumption…. so based on what I learned here are some things to think about…
Everything seems to be back to normal now after the server upgrade and the migration of one of the “child” domains out of the account. I do have several other “child” domains that will be migrating off of this server in the near future, so we may have a few blips, but overall I’ve got some things planned that should see performance on this site improve. (Perhaps dramatically in higher load situations.) I also wanted to let you know the article series is still on schedule and I’ve got a long list of posts lined up. (A little bit of windows, a little bit of linux, a little bit of hardware reviews, a little bit of web-related stuff…) See you Monday if not before then.
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