wordpress

I am picky.  I like substance rather than sensationalistic drivel. I get irritated by bad prose.  I’ve been known to correct people’s grammar.  And I actually spell out “you” and “our” when I text.  As thus, I rarely find a blog post I’m willing to pass on.  (Oh, the foreshadowing!) голова болит секс

голова болит секс

Of course, now I’m going to tell you that I did find a blog post worth passing on.  It’s from Matt, over at wordpress.org, on how to keep wordpress secure.  But don’t just stay on the first paragraph.  This is more about wordpress.  If you’ve ever been online, if you are now online, or if you intend to be online ever, you owe it to yourself to read that, and take it to heart.  This applies to car maintenance as much as it applies to wordpress or to any other online thing you do.  Matt doesn’t sew (I dabble at it), but the premise is ageless:  an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

I’ve expounded on this before.  Coincidentally, I just read some examples in a magazine that continue to car analogy.  Tales of a forgotten oil change costing the owner the price tag of a new engine; ignored brake pads that ended up ruining the rotors; ruined transmissions; the list goes on.

• голова болит секс

This post brings it down to earth: regular maintenance is a known cost. Budget for it. Lack of regular maintenance (leading to a hacked site, for example) can cost many thousands of dollars.  I was looking at a hacked site just this week:  Over eight hours at emergency rates just to investigate.  The site may require tens of thousands of dollars worth of work to make sure that all vulnerabilities are closed.

голова болит секс

I guess routine maintenance is your “business decision”.  Just call me when you get hacked. I may even be nice and not add the “I told you so” tax.

More info here and a neat video here.

Update: crews are expected to dig up the streets over the next few days to fix the main.

фото оральное порно

IT for small businesses

It’s that time again!  We are giving another workshop at the DC chapter of SBA/Score.  If you plan on attending, save some dough and sign up now; it’s $10 more at the door.  We will cover the full gamut of IT essentials for small businesses and startups.  I mean all of it: from website design to green business practices.

Speaking of green, we’ve uploaded our slides this time, rather than print them out (SBA only has single-sided printers).  So check them out and send us questions in advance.  Or comment here.

Here are some thoughts from the last one we did, back cold, cold February.

]]> http://www.webconsultingdc.com/2009/it-essentials-for-startups-2/feed/ 1 http://www.webconsultingdc.com/2008/make-your-iphone-and-your-microsoft-exchange-account-play-together/ http://www.webconsultingdc.com/2008/make-your-iphone-and-your-microsoft-exchange-account-play-together/#comments Wed, 21 May 2008 19:28:11 +0000 Ernesto Gluecksmann http://www.webconsultingdc.com/?p=151

iPhone

Recently, some of our clients that love their iPhones have been having some difficulties making them sync up with Microsoft Exchange so here is a simple step-by-step to configure their devices.

We provide an excellent Microsoft Exchange Hosting & Wireless Synching service for small businesses. It is a fully enabled Microsoft Exchange Shared Hosting service that allows small business owners to purchase only what they need (per account), avoid the hassles and expense of managing their own Microsoft Exchange server locally.

How to configure your iPhone to work with your Microsoft Exchange account

Before you begin

Add Account

1. Enable ActiveSync on the mailbox on your Exchange server
   IGT customers, just log into your Control Panel, select Wireless Email and Active Sync, or give us a call for assistance, 301.996.4646
   For everyone else, you will need to contact your Exchange administrator.
2. Download iPhone V.2.0 Update via iTunes
   You can view your current version by selecting Settings on your Home screen, then select General and then About.
3. Add any Contacts you have on your iPhone to your Outlook/Exchange
4. Add any Calendar events you have on your iPhone to your Outlook/Exchange

Now your need to configure your iPhone

iPhone Configuration

1. On your iPhone, select Settings, then ‘Mail, Contacts, Calendars’ and then select Add Account
2. Enter Email: type in your complete email address
3. Enter Username: type in your username in the following format: domain\username

   
   For IGT customers, you can find this information in Control Panel, Mailboxes, select your email address then the Advanced tab.
   For everyone else, your Exchange administrator needs to provide this information.

4. Enter Password: type in your password for your Exchange account
5. Enter Description: type in a description for this account (i.e. office)
6. Done! iPhone uses Microsoft’s Autodiscovery service to figure out further server details.

But occasionally, it doesn’t!

No worries, in the event that it doesn’t, your iPhone is going to ask for it. For IGT customers, it’s located in your Control Panel, under Get Started. Select Advanced Settings, listed under Exchange Proxy Server.

Mine, looks like something like this: owa012.msoutlookonline.net

Everyone else, yes, you guessed it, contact your Exchange administrator.

After you configured your iPhone

Once everything is in place, your iPhone is going to ask you to immediately sync up with the server. All existing calendar and contact information on the device is going to be overwritten! nirdosh This is why you went through the trouble of adding your Contacts and Calendar to your Outlook/Exchange account.

That’s it!

OpenID

21 October 2008

As of 1400 EDT, AOL’s openID provider, openid.aol.com, is down.

For better or worse, I use openID.  For worse or better, I use aol.com.  The reason is simple: When I started checking out openID, AOL had an openID provider that gave every AIM account an openID account. (If you have an AIM account your openID URL is http://openid.aol.com/aimusername ).

Things have been peachy.  I have a single way to log in to many places, including all the 37Signals products, many blogs, Wikis, etc.

Except for today.  It seems my openID provider is down, as is presumably every other AOL openid account.  DNS does not resolve.  Which means now I can’t log into any of these sites. 

Well, that’s not entirely true.  I could bypass openID, wait for my non-openID account pasword to get emailed to me, etc.  But the bottom line is I can’t log in.  

This brings up some questions about relying on openID.  Admittedly, I’ve not had an issue with this so far.  However, it may be nice to have some work-around.  For now I’ll wait and see.  More as this develops.

Impact

In pure numbers, this potentially affects the more than 63 million AIM users, assuming they all use openID. If only 10% use this feature, that’s still over 6 million users. The frustrating thing here is that there is no “status” page or other way to find out the current status of the provider.

So my hard drive was dead.  Sixty Gigabytes of data gone in the span of a few short “clicks”.  Catastrophe?  Not at all.  I had started backing up with Time Machine a few weeks ago, and just last week I attached my backup drive to the network (using Airdisk on an AEBS).  I knew I had a full backup, and more importantly a recent full backup.  How recent?  I didn’t know yet.  But I slept well.  

Fast forward to Sunday.  My options were to take the whole kit to the Mac store or to get a new drive and go to town.  I dismissed the former option: first, I was out of warranty.  Second, there’s a tiny hairline crack …

which Apple would almost certainly claim voids my warranty.  Third, it would take 3 days to get the thing back.  A ring to Micro Center verified that they had compatible drives in stock.  At a 45 minute drive, it’s a bit of a fetch for us city-dwellers, but my friend Sage lives nearby and I heard they had a beer tasting scheduled for the evening.  Now that’s what I call a win-win situation.  So…I get a hard drive ($70), taste a couple of Belgian ales, play some Wii, and head home.  Replaced the drive, booted from CD. 

Time: about 1830 EDT.

Under the Utilities menu, there’s a very hopeful-sounding option: “restore from backup”. I select that, go through a few screens, and I end up with this screen.  Well, almost this screen.  The “Destination” area was empty.  It took about a half hour to calculate the size, and when it was done, the Destinations area was _still_ empty.  *grumble*  Go back. Open Disk Utility.  Format the drive.  Wait another half hour.  In the meantime, I took the old drive apart. then I got that screen.  A few more clicks and the restore process has started.

Time: about 1930 EDT.  It now tells me it will take about 23 hours to restore.  Actually around this time the longest it said was about 25 hours! Yipes.  Shower, Shave, Eat.  Move the computer closer to the wireless router.  Time estimate by about 10pm was down to 5-6 hours.   A little more respectable.  Time to go grab a beer.  Ride down to the local, get back around 0130 EDT Monday.  Lo and Behold: It’s done!

All in all, not a very painful process at all.   

Summary

The good

The process was simple, effective, and efficient.  The latest backup I had was from 1205 EDT Sunday—only an hour or two before the crash.  That means I lost practically no data.  Also, Time Machine backups up the entire drive…which means it’s pretty much restore-and-go. If I had to do it myself I’d have backed up only my home directory, which means I would have had to reinstall the OS, all the updates, all software, all software updates, and then restore my home directory.   I was able to replace the hard drive, restore in a few hours, and be back up and running without skipping a beat the next day. Who can argue with that?  Kudos to Apple and Time Machine for making the backup process practically invisible to the user, and the restore process intuitive.  Most importantly, my billable-hours log didn’t miss a thing!

The bad

I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth here, but…why didn’t the “restore from backup” option recognize a new, unformatted drive?  Sure I”m a geek, and I know how to Disk Utility and check the drive, format it, etc.  But this is the only sticking point where the “intuitive” nature of the backup fails.  Of course, one would assume that if you’re opening up the machine to replace the hard drive, you would also have the expertise to format before you do anything else.  Still and all…

The ugly

And now I’m nitpicking.  A few things were weird after the restore.  Sure, no data was lost.  But Caches and temporary files were, of course, not backed up.  Why backup the cache? Right?  

Well, let’s start with the first image post-restore: my desktop background.  Gone.  I keep my media files on a network drive.  The desktop background was selected through my photo library.  My iPhoto cache or whatever was gone so iPhoto did not know where I kept my library now.   Next, all my RSS feeds’ Read/Unread counts were wrong.  Similarly, all my web browser cache was gone, but the history was not.

Perhaps more annoying is that my Spotlight index was gone so I had to wait for the system re-index everything from scratch.  Also gone, strangely,  seemed to be the time machine index.  Although I could see my old backups, the next scheduled backup was a full, not differential.  Although both of these tasks are minor nuisances and were done in the background, they still affect system performance and could easily have been avoided by…oh yea…

So why back up the cache?  A better question would be, why not?  Sure you can recreate it, re-download stuff, etc. But you can re-install applications and the OS, so why back u the OS and applications?  You can quite easily backup the cache without taking up any extra space: just don’t archive it.  Every time you back it up, overwrite or erase any old files.

Also annoying was that Micro Center carried a variety of drive sizes (120GB – 250GB I believe) but all the same 5400 speed.  I would have liked to upgrade to 7200 or better while I was at it.

Speaking of ugly,

How are your

 backups doing lately?  How would you fare if your hard disk went bad today?  My computer, just barely over a year old, gave me no indication that the hard drive was failing.  Not more than two weeks earlier I had checked the SMART status and all was fine as frog hair.  If you have a mac, get yourself a backup drive: my WD 500GB drive was about $120 at Best Buy.  Time Machine comes free with 10.5.  So what’s keeping you?  If you’re on a PC, I’m sure good backup solutions exist for that market as well.  

Well, that’s all I got.  Check out almost-all the pictures, including the old drive taken apart, from the adventure and leave any questions or comments!

As always, happy to be your guinea pig,

mickey

testing the “press this!” bookmarklet. wow.

Wordpress 2.6 easter egg. on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

update

the “press this” simply adds a link…it does not embed.

Jott.com is one of the best new services I have come across recently. If you’re a web marketing or technology consultant like me, you probably find yourself driving to and from client locations a good deal part of your working week. The time I have then lets me collect my thoughts about the meeting I just had or the next steps on a project that I am working on. For whatever reason, it tends to be a particularly productive time to brainstorm for SEO phrases and content ideas.

Unfortunately, these productive brainstorming sessions leave me with thoughts that I need to annotate somewhere, but wait a second, what am I crazy, I’m driving! I need to keep both hands on the wheel. Oh and how temping it is to grab my Moto Q, usually charging in the seat over. It almost seems too easy to just pick it up and attempt to type a note to myself.

Yeah, I know, bad idea.

Thankfully, Jott can save my ideas and my life, by transcribing my voice instructs into my email, while I keep my hands on the wheel.

What’s Jott about?

“Jott™ is a revolutionary new service that automatically converts your voice into e-mail and text messages—anytime, anywhere, with any cell phone. Jott™ makes you more productive and efficient by capturing your ideas, notes to self, tasks, and more without using your keypad.”

- Jott.com

For road warriors, here’s four easy steps to setup Jott on your phone.

Step 1
First, sign up with an account on Jott.com. They will send you a typical email with a link to verify your account. Then fill out a couple of questions to let them know what type of cell phone service you have and whether or not you want Jott to email you, text message you, or both.

Step 2
What you to do next is add 1866-Jott-123 in your contacts list and then save it as one of your quick dial numbers. Mine is #5. If I press and hold 5 on my cell phone, it automatically dials and connects to Jott’s service. By reading the caller id, Jott knows I’m the one calling, and presto, you get the pleasant,”Who do you want to jott?” question. Setting up quick dial depends what type of phone you have, but most modern cell phones work roughly the same.

“Ok, but your still picking up your cell phone while your driving to press 5, that’s not quiet safe is it?”

Step 3
The next step is to get familiarize yourself with your voice-activation services. Again, this depends in large part to the type of phone and/or type of service you may have. Moto Q’s have built in voice-activation in the phone itself. My hands free device allows me to voice-activate Jott’s service with a quick press of button, nothing more complicated than turning the radio in your car.

Step 4
Use it. I have all my voice notes sent to my inbox for future reference and processing. But I also like getting them sent to my cell phone via SMS. By asking Jott for a “Reminder”, I can set Jott to send me a note at a future time and date. If I happen to be in a meeting or in an environment where I can’t leave my cell phone ringer on, I will be get a transcribed version of my note via SMS Text*.

There are a number of uses for Jott but collecting my thoughts on the go and sending myself reminders, I have found to be what I use it for most frequently. It’s quiet remarkable how easy it is to use and how sophisticated it’s transcribing technology has to be to make this magic happen so accurately. I haven’t tried blogging with it, but I am told it does a pretty good job as well. I will have to try that sometime soon.

Right now Jott.com is free, in beta, I suspect it will have some nominal fee associated with it when it’s ready for primetime.

*Note: Make sure you have an adequate plan for SMS. Overage charges are very expansive so keep an eye on your phone bill and make sure you have enough service cover your typical usage.

Today’s article in the post featured the high profile arrest of spammer Robert A. Soloway. This is good sign that legislatively some are trying to criminalize spam.

A couple of facts are needed to put this in context:

1) His arrest is in no way going to stop spam, it’s a drop in a bucket, oh size of Lake Michigan

2) We don’t sweat spam.

We recently launched a hosted email Outlook/Exchange solution that brings the glorious benefit of seriously curbing spam, so your Inbox doesn’t flood with messages.

Have a personal email address for over 8 years, so trust that I get a lot of spam. Approximately 300+ spam messages a day. Ever since switching over to our new email system, I have seen perhaps one or two sneak into my inbox, the rest junked into a folder to be trashed a couple of weeks later. This is one of the several nice benefits of this hosted Outlook/Exchange service (i.e. my Blackberry, which wirelessly synches to with my Outlook/Exchange hasn’t downloaded one spam message).

Here’s a screenshot of my Junk folder where all my spam gets thrown in with no problem.

For one of our clients, we started to see the characters “/NaN” as one fo the pages of significant traffic, located in the Content reports. There’s no page called /NaN, it is actually a JavaScript error that means “Not a Number”.

Well, it turns out that this is usually an indication that there’s some other JavaScript on the web page that interfering with the JavaScript that is download from Google. The way to fix this, is to move Google’s code up into the <head> tag of your web page.

We usually add the Google Urchin code at the bottom as indicated by Google, but in this case, the second recommendation it above all other JavaScripts.

Once we did that, Google Urchin code was run first and that fixed our odd /NaN problem.