Website Tips and Marketing

"Microsoft is tracking incompatible Web sites for its upcoming Internet Explorer 8 browser and has posted a list that now contains about 2,400 names — including Microsoft.com.

Apparently, even though Microsoft's IE8 team is doing the 'right' thing by finally making IE more standards-compliant, they are risking 'breaking the Web' because the vast majority of Web sites are still written to work correctly with previous, non-standards-compliant versions of IE."

OK, I'm a geek and I get a great chuckle out of this.

Resident Shield and/or Web Shield is not active

It seems a recent update for either Vista or AVG altered something with AVG being recognized by Windows Security Center. There is a mention of it on AVG website:  http://www.avg.com/faq.num-1642#faq_1642

For those too lazy to follow the link for the FAQ, here is a copy of the info:

Just copy/paste content into a website. Easy, right?
Should just take 2 minutes, right?

Wrong.
Yes, it can be quick and simple to copy and paste into a web page, whether you are using Joomla, Wordpress, Dreamweaver or FrontPage/Expression. But how will it look?   I noticed this after adding a simple copy of the Readme for RootKit Hunter the other day. A simple copy/paste of plain text took about a half-hour to properly format, which should remind Web Designers to consider that time in their expenses.

As I went to upgrade RootKit Hunter to it's latest version (for the web servers), I found it interesting that none of the announcements of the update gave installation instructions.  Instead, they rely on the ReadMe file in the package.

That gave me an extra step to first download the package and review the ReadMe, instead of just quickly running the proper commands. (sorry, I don't memorize all instructions for all updates/patches).

So, for the sake of those needing a reminder of how to install RKH, here is the readme file from release 1.3.4.
The package is available for download at https://sourceforge.net/projects/rkhunter/

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Users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer are being urged by experts to switch to a rival until a serious security flaw has been fixed. [alternatives: Firefox (highly recommended), Google Chrome, Safari]

The flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer could allow criminals to take control of people's computers and steal their passwords, internet experts say.

Microsoft urged people to be vigilant while it investigated and prepared an emergency patch to resolve it.

"Microsoft is continuing its investigation of public reports of attacks against a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer," said the firm in a security advisory alert about the flaw. Microsoft says it has detected attacks against IE 7.0 but said the "underlying vulnerability" was present in all versions of the browser.

Other browsers, such as Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, are not vulnerable to the flaw Microsoft has identified.

SimplWeb makes it even more affordable to host your Joomla website. They have now lowered their prices to $19.95/mo, with a first month free trial.

When it comes to hosting for Joomla, the average web host server is not usually optimized for Joomla. The low-cost  web host usually is a one-size-fits-all setup, where they go for the lowest common denominator of optimization. PHP5? mySQL 5?  Maybe not on those $5/mo hosts, because the thousands of websites they are hosting might break, since how many people keep their scripts up-to-date? (Unfortunately, too many don't upgrade and risk getting hacked.).

Then getting help for your Joomla questions can be difficult, if not impossible. Big hosting companies are not going to know your specific needs for Joomla. They usually just make sure you have access to your site and email.

What about security?