Oct 012019
 

Let’s face it, your kids are going to be smarter than you when it comes to using technology and the web. They use it more often, their friends know more about it than your friends do and they have plenty of free time to learn more.

But you are right to be worried and do what you can to keep them safe.

There’s lots of software out there that can filter out web addresses, and many of them are bundled into security suites that you might already have loaded on your computer. OT and ICS cybersecurity is given a lot more importance these days as everything is digitized. 

But filtering software that blocks specific site addresses is not enough.

Web Proxies

Web proxies allow you to bypass your own Internet provider and browse through the proxy web site.  All that you have to do is find a web proxy site (easily found through a web search), type the web site address you would like to visit in the form they provide, and start browsing. Once you keep browsing using that form, you are protected and your real IP address is not being logged and your filtering software in unaware that this is happening.

Take Charge — the Better Alternative to Blocking

As you can see, there are a lot of workarounds if you decide to block sites with a filter to avoid retrohunting.  Like the Hydra in Greek mythology, each time you cut a head off two more grow in its place.  You will never ever get ahead of the curve if you try to put together a list of sites to block.  It’s just not possible.

So work the problem from the opposite end.  Decide what sites are acceptable and only allow those sites to be accessed.  This type of list, called a “white list” (I know, I know — I didn’t make up the name), is much more manageable and can be added to as needed.

You may already have the ability to set up a whitelist in your security software.  If not, here are recommended software you can try for 15 or 30 days free:

Sep 072019
 

Putting a site up on the Internet can be a very easy thing to do and yelements of web designou can do it unbelievably cheaply.  Most major web hosts have very simple do-it-yourself packages and during the early days of the Internet, those designs were acceptable. 

But users have become more sophisticated and as is the case with all marketing material, a poorly designed site will reflect badly on you and your business. 

If you are thinking about creating a web presence, I recommend that you view site like Twollow to have clear answers to these questions before you go forward. Whoever you decide to hire to design your site will appreciate the groundwork you have established.

Why Do I Want a Web Site?

There’s no wrong answer to this question.  Even “everybody’s doing it” is quite acceptable.  But you should think of your prospective web site as another tool and

What Do I Want This Site to Achieve?

  • Are you selling a product or service and want to promote it?
  • Is the website a communicate tool?
  • Do you want to increase membership in your organization?
  • Are you looking to provide a venue for people to communicate with one another?

How “Hands-On” Do I Want to Be During the Site Design? The On-Going Maintenance?

Whether you decide you have the skills to create a website, have someone in your office who can do the work, or hire an outside designer, you will still be responsible for:

  • providing the collateral and copy material
  • assisting the development of the web outline
  • providing input and approval to the overall web design and layout
  • and, of course, financing the design and the on-going maintenance costs

Once you are clear about your website’s purpose and have started organizing material to put on the web, it will become much easier to begin building the web structure, the foundation of your design.  It will save you — or the designer you hire to put together your — hours of time and plenty of $$$.

And that’s got to be a pretty good thing.
Nov 232018
 

Do you want a website you can edit yourself without needing extensive technical knowledge?  Wouldn’t it be great if you could make those changes with the same ease you create a Word document?

Relief is at hand.

What you need is a Content Management System and I recommend that you use (free) Open Source CMS applications such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal.  With a CMS, you go to your site, log in with admin privileges and then you can add, delete or modify content on your own.  Nothing to buy.  Very little extra training to become proficient.

Did I mention that it’s free ?

wordpress logoWordPress is one of the easiest CMS to use.  While it was originally developed for blogging, it can easily be configured to work in many other ways.  There are hundreds of beautiful – and free – templates that you can use and many of those templates have their own internal configurations, so that even with a template, your site will look unique.  You can blog, set up your site so that it looks like a magazine, or a photo journal, or a non-blog website.  Besides the templates that can start you off, there are a number of free tools (called plug-ins) that can help you set up a contact form, optimize for search engines, automatically back the site up, and much much more. I will say, though, that WordPress is really not set up for e-commerce — I’ve had little success making a shopping cart application work.

drupal logoDrupal is the perfect solution for the developer who would rather hand-code page content or tweak internal code to make the website do EXACTLY what is wished.  That’s not to say that only developers will be able to work in the Drupal environment, but I would say that it is not as user-friendly as other CMS.  However, many developers love Drupal because — with the correct knowledge and coding — it is a powerful platform.

joomla logoMy current favorite is Joomla.  While it may be a bit complicated for the someone who has absolutely no experience in web design — and for those people, I recommend WordPress — it is clean and simple to use for those of us who are not rank beginners.  It allows the user to create great looking websites for all kinds of communications or commerce.  It has a large capacity for customization and development, and the Joomla users have developed all kinds of tools to improve performance.

If you look at the logo, you will see four interlocking J’s — the name Joomla  is a phonetic spelling for the Swahili word “Jumla,” which means “all together” or “as a whole”.  That really is the beauty of all open source applications — a whole community of people designing tools and applications for each of us to use.

So which of these (or perhaps another CMS I have not mentioned) you choose will depend of the purpose of your site, your own knowledge of web design and development, and possibly the skill set of your designer(s).  But whatever open source CMS you choose, you will derive these benefits:

  • Significant reduction in design costs since most of the coding has already been done
  • A highly customizable  site through the use  of templates, plugins, extensions or modules that come with your CMS platform
  • A built-in SEO-friendly layout which may improve your page rankings
  • A large support forum that can answer almost any question
  • Total control of your website so that you do not have to wait for an “expert” to make changes
  • A platform that is easily configurable into your existing web hosting site
Need more information about choosing a CMS?

.

Nov 212016
 

The Wayback MachineThe Wayback Machine

Remember Peabody and his pet boy, Sherman, who used to time travel to historical events? I found a really cool site which allows users to look at web pages that are no longer online. There are literally billions of web pages, archived from 1996 to just a few months ago. Check out the historical archives of your old web site, or take a look to see how sites have evolved.
The best places to see how Internet design has changed are college sites. Check out your own alma mater and your school’s big rival. Found a good site that has undergone real changes? Drop me a line.

Public Domain Images

The Bureau of Land Management, butterflyunder the Department of the Interior has a searchable database of images from all across the United States. Beautiful landscapes, wild mustangs  running in the open, eagles flying high in the sky — all these images and more can be found at this site. There are a couple of caveats about the use of these images, but mostly the BLM asks that the images be credited. There are also links to other governmental photograph databases: Department of the Interior, US Fish and Wildlife, US Bureau of Reclamation, US Geological Survey, and National Park Service

Markup & Accessiblity Validation Tools (on one page)

I had a number of bookmarks to validate my pages, checkmarkbut then I found this page, which included:

    206

  • CSE HTML Validator
  • W3C HTML/XHTML Validator by URL and file upload
  • W3C CSS Validator
  • Web Content Accessibility Validation

I tossed my old bookmarks and now just go to this site and validate there.

Spamblock Your Email Address (email mung)

If you have post your email address on a web page, you will probably find that spam robots harvest the address and the spam flood begins. MUNG means “Mash Until No Good.” To mung your email means to conceal or obfuscate from these spambots.  Here are a few places to get mung help:

Icons Icons Icons

If you are like me you have spent countless hours looking through various sites for that particular icon image.  Here are a couple of links I use regularly:

The World is a Carousel of Colors

crayons

My favorite color help sites: