March 15, 2008 at 8:29 pm · Filed under Web Design, Web Development
If you build websites for a living, or if you have dabbled in website design and production than you may be aware of the two products known as Dreamweaver and Fireworks which are made by Adobe. I have only used these two products to build and design websites and they are great pieces of software. I have not heard of another web design software that works as good as these. You can purchase Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Fireworks right on the Adobe.com website. They can be purchased for $399 for Dreamweaver and $299 for Fireworks. You can also download trial versions so you can give these products a try before you buy. You will not be let down, they work great and I have been using them for over 8 years now.
March 14, 2008 at 9:29 pm · Filed under Web Design, Web Development
COLEwebdev offers great website hosting at a great price. For an entire year of hosting COLEwebdev charges a mere $180 and if you get other people to sign up for the COLEwebdev hosting you can save money off of your hosting for the year. you can even potentially get your hosting down to $0 if you sign up enough people to get COLEwebdev hosting. All you have to do to get yourself signed up for COLEwebdev website hosting is to go to COLEwebdev.com and email Josiah or Desiree and they will get you signed up right away. Visit COLEwebdev today and read up all about the company and the products they offer.
November 21, 2007 at 7:56 pm · Filed under Internet Applications, Technology, Web Development
I stumbled across the ALARMd.com Internet Alarm Clock a few months back, possibly via del.icio.us or Stumble Upon. I think the idea is great, and very well executed. With a large red font, and all black backdrop, the Internet Alarm clock is the perfect web based clock application I have found. The “Naken” mode makes it even better, eliminating the already minimal options and titles. For people that live with their computer, and try to eliminate all other necessities (like a cheap alarm clock) this clock is perfect.
The coolest feature I saw was the Alarm sound customization (pick an alarm), which allows you to open Pandora in a new window, which for most people with stored cookies should start playing your favorite music right away.
September 13, 2007 at 9:06 am · Filed under Editorials, Humor, Web Design, Web Development
I don’t know if you’ve been to Yahoo! Shopping lately, but it’s a complete disaster of a shopping portal and Yahoo should be ashamed … ASHAMED! of having that atrocity in their mature web portfolio.
First some history …
I happened across Shopping.Yahoo.com not because I was ’shopping’ but rather I was following the story on Woot! about a new “partnership” they rolled out with Y! Shopping (anyone else find it weird that Woot! and Yahoo! both end! with! exclamations?! Jason Toon is hilarious by the way, and his blog announcement of the “selling out” is a good read.\
Getting back to Y! Shopping, if anyone hasn’t seen the home page, it’s a disaster of banner ads, links that look like banner ads, and poorly structured navigation and changing page layouts … it’s that bad.
Here’s a screenshot, see the large version at Flickr.
Here’s a screenshot with my commentary, and the larger version at Flickr.
The Problems as I See Them:
1. The main store navigation looks like a poorly disguised ad placement, more commonly seen on spammy landing pages setup by domain prospectors.
2. There are ads, everywhere. Too many ads and not enough product highlights and shopping tools. Amazon makes Yahoo! Shopping look downright silly.
3. Wasted space. Not only do the ads take up valuable real estate, the spacing is bad and Yahoo uses an entire section to tell me I’m not logged in that could be devoted to … selling? (what a concept)
4. Woot! Their best feature is halfway down this depressing page, and offers the only glimmer of hope (and slim chance that someone still has a pulse) over at Yahoo! Shopping.
Look, I’m sure Yahoo! makes an assload of money from this portal, and probably sells a crap load of ads and makes a tidy profit. But it’s just downright horrible, and they could make a lot more if they’d devote a little attention (and some expensive Stanford PHD brain time) on devising a better shopping experience, and in turn better ROI for their advertisers.
August 30, 2007 at 10:42 am · Filed under Internet Applications, Web Development
Whilst reading Hacker News at ycombinator dot com I came across the following piece from an experience Amazon FPS user. I have to say I’m not surprised, and mentioned briefly in a previous blog posting about how Amazon’s success is still in limbo (at least in this category dominated by Auth.net and others)
The requirement of an Amazon account is crazy, talk about a hurdle pre-checkout!
| Just wanted to share (I know this topic is all time popular) about our experinece with Amazon FPS. |
| First of all, we charge a small subscription fee each month. This severely limited our abilities to cherry pick payment processors. Second, we did not want to deal with (store on our servers) sensitive data such as credit card numbers. |
| From a technical point of view FPS is a bit too complicated. Definitely more so than other gateways we looked at. That is because it’s too generic: instead of 2 perties there are always 3. “Build your own PayPal!” is their idea. For people who aren’t building their own paypal it is a bit annoying. |
| Secondly, your users must have Amazon accounts. That may be good and bad, depending on how you look at it. To us it was bad: we did not want people to see “Amazon” stuff during sign up process - we had some unpleasant experience with similar approach taken by PayPal. |
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August 7, 2007 at 7:56 am · Filed under Press, Web 2.0, Web Development
I came accross KillerStartups today via CenterNetworks and generally liked what I saw. I will add this to my short list of Web 2.0 PR sites for upcoming projects.
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KillerStartups.com is a user driven internet startups community. Entrepreneurs, investors, and bloggers are staying informed on up-and-coming internet startups using our blog platform, where internet entrepreneurs submit their startup to see what others think about it.
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Our vision:
“Tapping the wisdom of crowds to find the next internet big thing.”
We deeply believe in the power of crowds, and we want to put it to good use by detecting in an early stage what’s going to be big.
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After acquisitions such as the ones of MySpace and YouTube, and success stories such as Kayak, PriceGrabber, Facebook and many others, everybody started looking for “the next big thing” on the internet.
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July 11, 2007 at 7:41 am · Filed under Privacy & Security, Web Development
If you manage and edit your own website or run a blog with it’s own domain then you are probably aware of a type of file called the .htaccess file. You may or may not know what this file actually does, or how to create and edit one but fret not, I’m here to help.
Josiah Cole dot com runs a slightly out of date WordPress 2.1 install (the horror I know), and a fairly standard one at that, with a couple select plugins like Askimet and wp-cache to help me possibly survive another Digging. The one item that is lacking is a complete and robust .htaccess file that sufficiently protects and aids my site in handling traffic and visitors.
This quick tutorial will provide you with an htaccess file that does the following:
1. Protects itself (security)
2. Turns the digital signature off (security)
3. Limits upload size (security)
4. Protects wp-config.php (security)
5. Gives access permission to all visitors with exceptions (security, usability)
6. Specifies custom error documents (usability)
7. Disables directory browsing (security)
8. Redirect old pages to new (optional)
9. Disables image hotlinking (bandwidth)
10. Enables PHP compression (bandwidth)
11. Sets the canonical or “standard” url for your site (seo, usability)
1. Step 1, create a blank .htaccess file. This can be done in Notepad or a comparable simple text editor of your choice (no MS Word does not count although it’s possible). Open Notepad and Click Save, name this file htaccess.txt. If you’re using Windows XP the OS won’t allow you to name a file e .htaccess but don’t worry, you can rename it once it’s been uploaded to your server (no idea how Linux, Vista or OSX handle this).
2. Add content to htaccess.txt. Now that you have htaccess.txt saved, you can start to edit the file and use it to better manage your site without relying on complex PHP or bloated JavaScript code.
The example htaccess file below is one that can be used for a website like this one (running WordPress and nothing else), simply un-comment the sections you’d like to use by removing the # at the beginning of the line and copy+paste the contents into your own .htaccess file.
# protect the htaccess file
<files .htaccess>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>
# disable the server signature
ServerSignature Off
# limit file uploads to 10mb
LimitRequestBody 10240000
# protect wpconfig.php
<files wp-config.php>
order allow,deny
deny from all
</files>
#who has access who doesnt
order allow,deny
#deny from 000.000.000.000
allow from all
#custom error docs
ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.php
ErrorDocument 403 /forbidden.php
ErrorDocument 500 /error.php
# disable directory browsing
Options All -Indexes
#redirect old to new
Redirect 301 /old.php http://www.yourdomain.com/new.php
#block referring domains
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} digg\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]
#disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yourdomain.com/.*$ [NC]
#RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ - [F]
#RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/stealingisbad.gif [R,L]
# php compression - use with caution
<ifmodule mod_php4.c>
php_value zlib.output_compression 16386
</ifmodule>
# set the canonical url
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
# protect from spam comments
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*yourdomain.com.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) ^http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/$ [R=301,L]
3. Upload htaccess.txt. Once you’ve created your master piece of an .htaccess file upload the htaccess.txt file to your web server via ftp (in ASCII mode) and rename the file to .htaccess. Once it’s been renamed change the file permissions of the .htaccess file to 644 to further protect it from malicious hacker types.
4. Test, Test, Test. Go to your site, is it still up? Good, now check to see if you can access files you protected, or try and see a directory listing. Not all variables are testable but do your best to make sure your file is working.
Lastly Josiah Cole dot com is now running a variation of the htaccess file above with no hotlink protection (I only host a couple images) and no redirects or custom errors docs (yet). No problems *yet* but I’m still running tests to make sure there are no problems. Maybe my visitors can help me do this by commenting? If I like it I’ll add your suggestion to the article and give you some URL lovin’.
Note: If you are already using a custom permalink structure to format page names, you’ll need to keep that code in the htaccess file in order for that to continue functioning. To see your htaccess file in WordPress click Manage>Files>.htaccess (for rewrite rules).
