Tuesday 29 July 2008 13:07
I'm a firm believer in backing up websites. Of course, we use good quality web hosts that back up their servers. But it is not unknown for web hosts to go out of business leaving users with no way to get at their site content in order to move it to a new server. It's also useful to be able to restore files from your own backups instead of having to trouble your web host's tech support (and possibly pay for it.) So I like to keep my own backups. Read more...
Web development no trackbacks § ¶
Tuesday 29 July 2008 10:12
Yesterday saw the launch of a new search engine. Cuil (pronounced "cool", and named after the Gaelic word for "knowledge") has been developed by former Google employees. It claims to have indexed more than three times the number of pages as Google, and to base its results purely on content and relevance, not link popularity. If true, it could make the entire search engine optimization (SEO) "profession" redundant. Hooray! But how well does it work in practise? Read more...
Internet no trackbacks § ¶
Thursday 10 July 2008 23:01
It seems that persistence pays off in the end. McAfee has finally restored our green rating. Yahoo! Read more...
Internet no trackbacks § ¶
Wednesday 09 July 2008 23:49
One week has passed since I informed McAfee that SiteAdvisor was defaming my website by stating that it contained dangerous downloads when the virus it claimed to have found was in fact a false positive. And nothing has happened. Read more...
Internet no trackbacks § ¶
Tuesday 08 July 2008 14:11
Web safety tools like McAfee SiteAdvisor and Yahoo! SearchScan create a false sense of security. Quite apart from wrongly accusing safe websites like mine as being harmful, they encourage users to believe that sites marked as safe are safe. But that is simply not the case, because there are many bad sites that don't get a bad rating at all. Read more...
Internet no trackbacks § ¶
Monday 07 July 2008 15:59
When does the cure become worse than the sickness? Webmasters don't just run the risk of having their sites labelled "harmful" by badly designed spyware scanners. They are also having their website visitor statistics skewed in the name of web safety. In February, Czech anti-virus developer Grisoft added a component called LinkScanner to its product AVG. This pre-scans every link on a page of search results so as to inform the user whether the site contains malware. And webmasters are furious about it. Read more...
Internet no trackbacks § ¶
Monday 07 July 2008 10:53
The computer industry must be the worst on the planet for poor standards of customer service. Ask any computer user who has suffered a problem and most will tell you tales of being shunted from pillar to post and back again. The hardware manufacturer blames the software. The software developer blames the hardware, or someone else's software. It's always someone else's fault. It's a nightmare. Read more...
Internet no trackbacks § ¶
Sunday 06 July 2008 17:45
The logic behind McAfee's SiteAdvisor web safety product is so flawed I am starting to wonder whether the company's lawyers have even looked at it. Do they understand how exposed to litigation their company is, because of this product? The potential for webmasters to take McAfee for a lot of money in a class action for defamation and loss of business seems immense. I think the only reason this hasn't happened yet is that many webmasters and online business owners don't even know that SiteAdvisor is defaming their site because they haven't installed the browser plug-in and can't see it. Read more...
Internet no trackbacks § ¶
Sunday 06 July 2008 12:32
I am a big fan of Google's web mail service Gmail but I always hated its insistence on placing my signature at the end of any reply, below any quoted text. If typed my reply at the top of the message it looked wrong without my signature below it. If I added my reply below the quoted text, where the signature was, people would reply saying that they didn't see my response, and ask if I'd hit "Send" by mistake before typing anything. It was very annoying. Read more...
Tips and tricks no trackbacks § ¶
Saturday 05 July 2008 19:41
Now the search engine Yahoo! is defaming Tech-Pro.net and destroying our reputation by describing our site as a "potentially harmful website" and marking every search result from any of our domains with a red notice that says: "Warning: Dangerous Downloads." This is destroying our business and causing serious permanent harm to our reputation as a trusted site. And all because of a false detection of malware by McAfee's SiteAdvisor malware scanner, as I described in my previous blog posting. Read more...
Internet no trackbacks § ¶
Wednesday 02 July 2008 22:52
Anyone who knows me or is familiar with my sites will know how important I consider it to be that Tech-Pro.net appears to be a trustworthy source of software downloads and information. I belong to the Organization of Independent Software Vendors (OISV) and the Software Industry Professionals (SIP) and display their logos on the front page of the site. We have also joined the Comodo UserTrust scheme, which allows users to rate a site for its trustworthiness. So you can imagine my dismay when I launched Firefox today and found McAfee Site Advisor showing a red warning alert when viewing Tech-Pro.net pages. Read more...
Internet no trackbacks § ¶
Wednesday 02 July 2008 16:59
I started up the computer this morning to find a bunch of emails in the Webmaster's inbox telling me in no uncertain terms to stop sending unwanted mail. The language used provided an eye-opening insight into the stress caused by spam - something I'd forgotten since I started using Gmail, which reliably diverts all the unsolicited mail into a spam folder so I never see it. We don't send out bulk email, apart from the Daily Software Deals opt-in newsletter which contains clear instructions on how to unsubscribe, so I'd never experienced this before. Then I realized that some lowlife had used our URL shortener xaddr.com to cloak a link to his site, and then sent this out to thousands of unfortunate recipients. Read more...
Internet no trackbacks § ¶
Tuesday 01 July 2008 18:06
When I created our URL shortener site xaddr.com a year or so ago, one of my reasons for doing so was that I did not like the way other short URL sites like TinyUrl hid the destination link, so you didn't know where it would take you until it was too late. TinyURL added the option of a preview page, but it is just that, an option, which is turned off by default and most people who click on one of their links don't know about anyway. Read more...
Internet no trackbacks § ¶
