We used to use PayPal to take payments for our own-brand products. It was cheap and worked pretty well. However, we decided that we would rather use a payment processor that did more of the work for us, so we switched to Plimus. Unfortunately we had links to a PayPal order form hard coded in the setup program. That was a bad idea. Read more...
The holy grail of web development for me has been to find a system that puts paid to the business of hand coding and uploading individual pages without losing the flexibility and control over search engine optimization (SEO) that hand coding gives you. Content management systems (CMS) have been around a long time, but they always seemed to have a steep learning curve. It was hard to figure out how to make the pages look how I wanted, or incorporate features that were not built into the package. And it seemed impossible, if the aim was to convert an existing site, to keep the page URLs the same as the originals, something that is essential to retain any page rank the pages have already earned. I think I have finally found the holy grail, and it's name is CMS Made Simple. Read more...
Recently, the contact forms on my websites have begun attracting the attention of idiots who use them to send me spam. Why they bother, I do not know. The emails consist of HTML text containing links to sites with gobbledygook names. Whether these sites exist I have no idea. I have no intention of trying to visit them even if the names looked real. It is a complete waste of their time and mine. So to eliminate the need to look at, and then delete these emails, I have implemented a captcha check on all of my contact forms. Read more...
For a while, it seemed like Linux was going to claim as its own the budget PC niche, with its adoption in products like the very successful Asus Eee PC. But newer Eee models are going to be offered with Windows as well. More worryingly, Windows is going to be used on the One Laptop Per Child, the so-called "$100 PC." Windows has apparently been demanded by some countries interested in buying the machine, on the grounds that it will enable students to learn marketable technology skills. I think it is a short-sighted move. Read more...
Two items on yesterday's TV news both shocked me and made me ashamed to live in England. Football fans leaving an UEFA Cup match in Manchester went on the rampage and attacked police, nearly kicking one policeman to death. And an item on girl crime showed young women in states of near total inebriation fighting and kicking almost as viciously as the football hooligans. Why are the British such violent drunks and why is nothing being done to stop it? Read more...
Last Friday morning our ADSL broadband connection stopped working with the usual authentication failure messages. Being reluctant to phone up and be referred to the Indian call center to be talked through a script checking things I had already checked, I left it for a few hours in the hope that the fault would be detected and fixed. It wasn't, so I had to call. Nothing worked, the problem was "escalated" and I faced a weekend (at least) without Internet. So I decided to get a mobile data connection to use as a backup. Read more...
The consensus view of the mass media today seems to be that if we don't cut our energy use now and reduce CO2 emissions, global disaster could be no more than a couple of decades off. I'm sorry but I don't believe it. And neither does former British Chancellor Nigel Lawson, whose book "An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming" has recently been published. In it, he expresses skepticism at many of the claims made by global warming believers, and argues that the proposed solutions are absurd or inadequate. Read more...
We have just opened a hosting account with Hawk Host, and will be migrating the sites that we currently have hosted at iVhosting.com over to it during the couple of months that our subscription with the old host has left to run. Those sites include The PC Guru and our URL shortener site xaddr.com, as well as my personal ham radio hobby site g4ilo.com, but not tech-pro.net itself. Read more...
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