Secure your life, secure your email : Locking down Gmail.
I use Gmail for 80% of my email needs, wait, nope it’s 100% when you count Goole Apps. I use Gmail and Google Apps for many reasons but the biggest reason has to be accessibility. The fact that I can check my email from anywhere that has an Internet connection makes my life much easier but there is one major drawback to this; when you login to an unsecured website you’re sending all of your login information in free text.
Basically this means that your information(username & password) is sent over the network in the same way you entered it, aka plain text. If there is someone on that same network with the appropriate tools they can easily “sniff” your information and then use that to gain access to your email. How do you stop this? The easiest way is to not use open networks. An open network is any network that other people have access to(usually without a password but not always) and wireless networks are the biggest culprits of this. For example, if you go in Starbucks and login to their network theoretically if someone in that shop wanted to they could see your naked data bits of data and steal your info. So, the simple way to keep your data safe is to not use these networks, but that’s not very practical consider these networks were put in place to make our lives more convenient.
The second more practical way to keep your data safe is to make sure you’re using a secure connection. This can easily be done my accessing your email using their secure site(https) verses their unsecured site(http). For example if you usually access Gmail via http://www.gmail.com simply add an s after the http and you’re now on their secure site(https://www.gmail.com). This trick will work with most online email services, Hotmail, Yahoo mail and many others and it’s an important step when you’re accessing your email from a non-secure location.
You might be wondering why they don’t force their users to use their secure connections if it’s safer. Well, the simple answer is when you use a secure connection you put more strain on the server thus making the server work harder slowing everything down. When you use a secure site you will notice a small speed decrease because your data is being encrypted and decrypted on the fly to make sure if someone does get a hold of it they can’t read it. Not only does it take computer power to encrypt and decrypt the data but encrypted data is also larger in size(bytes) so it takes more time to send and receive it as well. So, if you’re on a safe networking it might be more efficient to use the unsecured connection but if you don’t care about speed or you’re in a location that might not be secure(Starbucks, library, train) you should use the secure connection when possible.
Tip: This works for many commercial applications out there not just email ones. Next time you login to you favorite online application check to see if they have a secure connection.
How to setup ads for users with JavaScript disabled.
If I had to guess I would say 80% of advertising services today display their ads using JavaScript. This makes sense considering JavaScript is lightweight, easy to install and it’s dynamic so ads can be changed on the fly without the need to update the code. However JavaScript is not perfect. In my previous post on JavaScript I mentioned how there are some 75 million users browsing the Internet with JavaScript disabled. With these numbers, only serving JavaScript ads could mean a potential revenue loss of 6%. This is 6% that with 30 minutes of your time you can get back, here’s how.
You need to find an alternative advertising source that does not use JavaScript exclusively. AdSense for example only uses JavaScript so if you’re currently using AdSense for all of your ads you will need to find an alternative ad provider for this to work. I, for example use a combination of personal ads (ads I setup), AdSense ads, and Commission Junction ads. The ads I install are HTML only, the AdSense are JavaScript only and the Commission Junction ads are a combination of both HTML and JavaScript. Using these three sources I’m able to setup my sites so there are always ads being displayed even when the user has JavaScript disabled. Most advertising services offer HTML ads but you will want to check with them to make sure they do. If they don’t currently support HTML ads there are plenty of other services out there that do, search around until you find one that fits your website.
Before you start installing your HTML ads you want to setup everything so it works and looks good for users with JavaScript enabled. The majority (94%) of Internet users have JavaScript enabled so this will be your primary source of ad revenue, making sure these ads look good should be top priority. Once your ads are setup and looking good you will now want to turn off JavaScript in your browser so you can see what you site looks like when your ads do not appear.
Since there are so many different browsers and versions I will not list the steps to disable JavaScript in this post. If you’re unsure how to enabled/disabled JavaScript in your browser please refer to my good friend Google.
Once you have JavaScript disabled in your browser go ahead and look at your site again. Since you only have the JavaScript ads installed you should not see any ads on your site at all. If you do then you either have HTML ads installed already or you didn’t disable JavaScript correctly. Now open up your web page source code and find where you installed you JavaScript ads. Directly below that ad code enter this code.
<noscript>
<!-- Your HTML ad code here –>
</noscript>
And replace the <!-- Your HTML ad code here –> line with the HTML code you got from you ad provider. Copy and paste the code between the noscript tags as shown above, save your page and reload it in your browser. If you installed it correctly you should now see ads even though you have JavaScript disabled. If necessary tweak these ads so they look good. Now, turn JavaScript back on in your browser and your HTML ads should disappear and your JavaScript ads should appear in their place. Congratulations, you now have both JavaScript and HTML ads installed on your pages and you’ve regained that potential lost revenue by allowing visitors with JavaScript disabled to see ads.
Example:
Below is an example of how I have it setup on my site. You will see my AdSense code and then right under it my HTML code within the noscript tags. In this case I have a static banner from Commission Junction but I use a combination of image and text ads through my sites.
<script type=“text/javascript”><!– google_ad_client = “pub-4938035643291815″; google_ad_slot = “8219515238″; google_ad_width = 468; google_ad_height = 60; //–> </script> <script type=“text/javascript” src=“http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”></script> <noscript> <a href=”http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-2829149-10386906″ target=”_top”><img src=”http://www.tqlkg.com/image-2829149-10386906″ width=”468″ height=”60″ alt=”GoDaddy.com Hosting & Servers” border=”0″/></a> </noscript>
Feel free to post any questions in the comments section below.
How does your site look/act with JavaScript turned off?
Such a simple question yet most people I speak with don’t know the answer. Have you ever tried it? It’s a good thing to do every now and then, fire up your favoriate browser(it better be FireFox!) and go into the options(preferences) section to turn of JavaScript. Now, visit your page. Here are some things to check while you have JavaScript turnned off.
- Does your site look good?
Does anything happen with JavaScript off? Do menu’s not work, do images not load? - Can you get to all of your pages?
Make sure your links work. Sometimes without knowing it we install a plugin or script that requires JavaScript and this can hurt you site not only because your users can’t follow along but either can spiders. - Do your ads show?
This is probably a No for most people…and there is a problem with that. With some quick Google searches I found that around 6% of Internet users don’t have JavaScript enabled. Doesn’t sound like a huge number but when you take that there are over 1.2 Billion Internet users that translates to around 75 Million users who can’t see your ads!
This is such a simple task and it can be done in under ten minutes. I suggest you do this every few months just to make sure everything is still looking and acting the way it should. The ad issues it hard to solve because most ad companies only release JavaScript code, I plan on writing an article soon on how to avoid this problem.
Entrecard.com Review
I’ve seen this site advertised on blogs I frequently visit but I didn’t really take notice until today. I was on a very popular blog and I noticed that he has a entrecard section, well; if he thinks its worth having on his site where he easily gets $10,000 a month in advertising then maybe it’s something I should look into. I wandered on over to the site, read about what they do and decided I would give it a shot. Signup was a breeze and within a few minutes I was logged in ready to go.
The idea is you swap blog ads, or that’s what I got out of it anyways. You add this little 125×125ish ad on your site and people then visit your site and are able to drop their entrecard’s on it. By doing this you get an ec point and they get an ec point. These points can then be spent on advertising on other sites within the entrecard network. This little ad on your site also acts as a space for others to advertise. When you first start off your site is pretty cheap, when my account was created people could advertise on it for as little as 2 ec points. Since my site was so cheap I was getting tons of advertisement requests, and so began my problems with the site.
First, every site could afford my ad space so my email quickly filled up with requests. My dashboard was filled with ads that wanted to be placed on my blog. At first it was exciting but it soon wore off when I learned I had to reject each one I didn’t want by clicking on a Reject link and then entering in a reason why I’m rejecting them. Normally with one or two ads this is no big deal but within the first 1/2 an hour I had over 20 requests and they kept coming in. They really need to add either a mass reject feature or an easy AJAX reject button for each one. Secondly, 95% of the sites that wanted to advertise on my site had nothing to do with my blog. I got advertisement offers for photo sites, drawing sites, food sites and of course the all important adult sites. Since anyone can request to be on your site you get all kinds of offers especially when you’re low on the price totem poll. I’m assuming that once my price goes up these offers with subside but only time will tell.
At the time of writing this I have 30 ec points which is enough to advertise on a few small sites or on one decent site for a day. The more popular sites (the one I mentioned at the beginning of this review) require hundreds if not thousands of ec points. This is my goal; I want enough to advertise on a major site for one day, I want to see what kind of traffic this can drive in to my blog. If I can get enough traffic on my site from this one day then it might be worth saving up my points, otherwise I don’t see myself continuing to use this site…to me their business model is a little flawed.
For the short time I was on the site it seems most of it is overrun by spam sites or money making schemes. Since it’s easy to earn points (by clicking on other peoples blog ads) anyone with half a brain can simply click on tons of blogs and earn enough points to advertise on tons of sites. I don’t like this; I think people should earn their status and not gain it by simply browsing blogs. I even found a few sites which make it very simple to earn points, basically it rotates the sites you can earn points on and all you have to do is click every 10 seconds. This to me is just asking for problems, plus there are sites already popping up offering to buy and sell ec points (they’re on eBay already). Entrecard is new so maybe they have not worked out all of the kinks yet but I think they really need to rethink this before the legit blogs figure this out and leave them with spam, money making schemes and adult sites…none of which I care to advertise on my blog. I like the idea but I don’t like the execution. I will continue to host the ad on my site for a little while longer and see how it turns out but I don’t have high hopes. Look for an update in a month or so.
Update: Well I learned that if you don’t reject the ads then you ‘queue’ gets full and no one else can request to advertise on your site. This is another flaw. Although this stops in influx of site requests it creates a new problem. As I mentioned in my main review I’m getting request from sites I don’t want to advertise for, currently I have offers for a truck site, a site on lions, a nursing site and a sports site…all of which have nothing to do with my blog. If I want more offers(hopefully more relevant sites) I have to first reject all of these(one by one) and then hope that the relevant sites request ad space before more non-relevant sites do. What a pain. It’s gotten to the point that after only two days I’m sick of logging in and rejecting the non-related sites in hopes to get a related one.
Update: Traffic is up…well, kind of. I will admit that using the entrecard service brings in traffic but it’s not the traffic that you want. Looking over my stats I can see a surge in people only hitting the homepage, staying for 10 or so seconds and leaving. This means they are entrecard users coming just to drop their card and run. I don’t spend time on my blog to have people come, click a button and leave. I was reading the entrecard forums and I noticed that a lot of people drop hundreds of cards a day; one woman admits she just goes to the sites and clicks the drop link for the max 300 sites a day. Another guy gave his secret of how he uses a firefox plugin to open all the sites in tabs and he just goes through them clicking the drop button. For some reason I don’t think this is what the creators of entrecard had in mind.
Software Review :: SlimTimer
SlimTimer, right from the start I like this program because it’s free. Free is important, especially when you’re a small business. The homepage gives you the feel of a very professional application, it’s laid out much like most web 2.0 applications now a days with some screen shots and some basic information. For me, this is where the professional look and feel stopped.
Read the full review on SlimTimer
Backup your files for free using Gmail.
This is a very basic, very cheap (free in fact) way to back up your files off-site. This is not the best method and if you have the money you should probably invest in a better solution but for people just starting or for anyone that needs a simple backup method this way works great(I’ve been using it for three years).
First you need a Gmail account. If you don’t already have one shoot over to www.gmail.com and signup for one, they’re free. Once you have an account we’re going to create a new filter. A filter allows you to perform certain actions on email messages as they come in to your mailbox. For example, if you get a daily update from you bank and don’t need to read it every time you can have a filter set the message as read and archive it so you don’t see it in your inbox. We’re going to do something similar with our backup emails that come in so we don’t have to see them unless we want to plus they’re easy to find when we need them.
1.) Create a label.
Log into your gmail account. In the top right corner you will see Settings, click this. Now click on the Labels section. At the bottom under ‘Create a new label’ enter a new label name that will represent you backups. Mine is ‘Backup Files’ but you can name it anything as long as you remember what you called it. Click Create and your label should appear.
2.) Create the filter.
After you have your label setup you need to create a filter. At the top click on the Filters section(next to Labels). At the bottom click on Create a new Filter. Okay, now comes the fun part. In the From: and To: boxes you want to enter your email address. I’m assuming for this that you’re going to be sending from this gmail account, if you’re sending the backup files from another email address you will want to enter that email address in the From box but the To field should always be this gmail address. In the Subject field enter a subject that will let gmail now this is a backup. For instance, I send my messages with the Subject ‘Backup’, original, I know. As with the Label this can be anything but you will have to send all the files with this subject for the filter to work. Last but not least check the ‘Has attachment’ checkbox to the right.
Click Next Step. Now we have to tell gmail what to do with the messages. In my case I have it Skip the Inbox, Mark as read, and Apply the label ‘Backup Files’. I would suggest you do the same. By using these options you will never see the backup files as new email messages but instead they will go right to you email archive. If for some reason you don’t want them to do this don’t select the first two options but you will want to apply the label so you can easily find you backups later.
3.) Test the filter
Before you start to rely on it, test it. Send yourself a message now with Backup File(or what ever subject you used), attach a file and if you followed my rules above Gmail should get the message, mark it as read and archive it. To find the file you can search for the subject or you can click the Backup Files label in the lower left of the gmail interface.
You’re all set…to make the this is better I’ve included some tips that I currently use.
Tip: You can make more filters and have more control over your backups. For instance, say you want to label all backed up word documents with a certain label ‘Word Documents’. Create a new filter to scan the subject for the word ‘word’ and apply that new label. Now when you send word documents put ‘word’ in the subject and that tag will be applied(e.g. Backup word) When searching you backup files you can sort by the label ‘word’ to just see word documents. I do this for images, documents, pdfs, and zip files.
Tip: If you have lots of files it can be hard to find the one you’re looking for. Try adding more information about the file to the subject and body. For instance, when I backup an image my subject line looks like ‘Backup Image :: Birthday party 2008 :: Me, Ange, and mom’ that way when I’m scanning over the image files I can easily see what this image is of.
Tip: Setup multiple email addresses for you filters. Just duplicate step 2 above with different From address. I have it setup so I can backup files from three different email accounts but they all work the same.
Wordpress Plugin :: Bot Visits
Well since the site is really new I wanted a way to see if it was getting the attention it should from the Internet spiders. I searched for a simple plugin to do this but found nothing that looked to exciting and I figured this was a good time to figure out how to write my own wordpress plugins. It’s pretty easy, in under an hour I was able to figure everything out and have a working plugin to test with. This bot plugin took about 30 minutes after I had the basics…and it shows. This is a very basic plugin, it has no fancy options screen or any options for that matter. You just activate it like any other plugin and you will see new stats on your dashboard under the Latest Activity section. It will update anytime one of the major bots visits your site so you can see the last time they were there. Enjoy, feel free to post questions or comments…I’m sure I will make updates to this but there is not that much more than can be added.
Download the latest version here.
http://www.thevacantcubicle.com/content/plugins/bot_visits.zip
Do I need to secure my website with an SSL certificate?
Short answer, probably not, longer answer, possibly. Through my daily web journey I often see sites that need it that don’t have and sites that have it that don’t really need it(as far as I can tell). Most blogs don’t need them. All e-commerce sites need them. Here is a quick test to see if you should secure you website. If you answer yes to any of these questions you should probably look into getting an SSL certificate and securing your website.
- Do you collect and/or store any personal information from your visitors?
- Do you plan to or do you currently process credit cards? If you currently do you better have SSL!
- Do you sell anything off your website?
- Is there sensitive information on your website that you would not want people to see? (e.g. Company secrets, documents)
If you didn’t answer yes to any of these questions then you probably don’t need to secure your website but of course you always can if you choose to. Remember though, since everything has to be encrypted going to and from you web server not only will the server have to work harder but it will take longer for your guests to view the site too. If you do decide to secure your site with an SSL certificate you should try to only apply it to the sections of the site that need it so you’re not slowing down the rest of your site with useless security.
If you have any questions about this or want me to look over your site shoot me an email or post a comment below.
Software Review :: Microsoft Office Live Workspace
Overall, I’m not too impressed with Microsoft Office Live Workspace. For a company that size and with great products such as Word and Excel you would think they could turn out something better than this. I’m assuming(and hoping) that most of these issues will be worked out with time, it is beta after all and maybe I will give it another look at then but for now I will stick with my Google Docs.
Read Full Review For Microsoft Office Live Workspace
From a concept to a fully working website in under 24 hours.
I must be getting better at this, from the time I decided I wanted to create this site to the time it was available to the public was under 24 hours! I finally decided the other night while I was bored at home that I needed to start putting all my thoughts and ideas on paper (or in writing). Then, I spent a few hours thinking of a name and deciding where and what I plan on using to create the site. I proceeded to register the domain name and setup the DNS records. Moving on I downloaded and installed WordPress, customized a theme and installed some plugins. By the time the night was done I had a fully working site and I was just waiting for the domain name registration to finish and my DNS records to propagate. I decided to check this afternoon and the site is up…so if anyone ever tells you that you can’t setup a website in a day they’re lying.
