Why you should upgrade to Firefox 3

06/17/08 2:53:22 PM
Posted by Joel Learner, CEO

The latest version of Firefox was recently released . You may already be using a pre-installed web browser on your computer, so why would you want to start using this browser? Here are several reasons why we recommend switching (or, if you have a previous version of Firefox, upgrading).

First, it incorporates many security features . Internet Explorer, which has advanced in recent years, is still not considered safe. Firefox incorporates several security features, like anti-malware, anti-phishing, and parental controls.

Second, it’s fast. They—and in this case “they” is a worldwide army of volunteer programs that have worked to develop Firefox—have made several improvements to the way the browser works with your computer, giving it a boost in speed. Learn more at the Firefox website.

Third, use across platforms. In many industries you will find users are primarily working on PC’s or on Mac’s. With our business being so web-oriented, that means that usually we’ll need to test projects in Internet Explorer (version 7, then version 6), Safari, and Firefox. Firefox is the same on PC’s and Mac’s (granted, Safari is available on PC’s as well, but not widely used), but as more users move to Firefox, more of the online experience can be standardized.

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Setting up your email account with your email software

09/04/07 11:43:02 AM
Posted by Joel Learner, CEO

Need help setting up your email account on your computer instead of using Webmail? Find out more about how to set up your email account on our Email Software Setup page .

http://www.miriamtech.com/page/ClientSetup

If you need additional help, feel free to send an email on our Contact Us page or give us a call during regular business hours at (866) 652-2040.

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Integrating Google Analytics into your website

08/10/07 12:08:48 PM (Edited 08/10/07 12:19:55 PM)
Posted by Joel Learner, CEO

A new powerful tool that we have been testing recently on one of our websites is Google Analytics

Google Analytics is primarily designed to help advertisers analyze their Adwords advertising and to help maximize their keywords. What we’ve found, though, is that Google Analytics is also a powerful tool for analyzing traffic on your website.

Analytics has numerous reports, charts, and graphs available. In fact, you can drill-down and analyze the data in so many ways, you could spend as much time as you like analyzing your website’s traffic. It gives you a great deal of information and data.

Google Analytics is a free service of Google—you just need an account set up with them. In order to link the analytics, they give you several lines of code that need to be embedded within your website. We would be glad to insert the code into your website.

After we’ve embedded the code for you, you can start analyzing the traffic on your website as much as benefits you!

Contact Us if you are interested in setting this up on your website. We’d be happy to give you more details on how to set up your Google account as well as how to send us the lines of code to insert.

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Personal Blogs

08/07/07 8:49:09 AM
Posted by Joel Learner, CEO

Recently, several Miriam Technologies Team Members have started personal blogs. The topics range from technical in nature to general thoughts about life and business.

Check out Ken Treis’ blog

Check out Joel Learner’s blog

Feel free to leave your comments!

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Drowning in email?

04/09/07 11:48:04 AM (Edited 09/04/07 11:44:54 AM)
Posted by Joel Learner, CEO

We recently came across a great ten-part blog post on how to reclaim control of your email life:

http://www.43folders.com/2006/03/13/inbox-zero/

Let us know how you were able to achieve your “inbox zero”.

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One Benefit of our Managed Domain Service: Avoid Domain Slamming

02/22/07 2:06:20 PM (Edited 02/22/07 2:12:58 PM)
Posted by Joel Learner, CEO

Has this ever happened to you?

Your fax machine starts receiving a fax and once it’s done printing you’re left with a notice that either your domain will be expiring soon and you must take urgent action to save your domain or even this is your last chance to secure the rights to a domain that you don’t even have. And to top it off, it’s from some organization that you’ve never heard of, yet sounds official (“it’s got ‘domain’ or ‘registry’ in the name, so it must be legitimate”).

or

You open your mail one morning only to find that you have to take urgent action to avoid losing your domain. Only the company sending you the notice is not the company that you have registered your domain with.

or

You receive a phone call from a person wanting to verify the address and fax number associated with the domain, yet when you check the caller ID, the number is “Unknown”.

Domain Slamming

All of the above scenarios could mean that you are the target of a scam know as domain slamming. According to Wikipedia, Domain slamming “is a form of scam in which an ISP or domain name registrar attempts to trick customers of different companies into switching from their own ISP/registrar to the scamming ISP/registrar, under the pretense that the customer is simply renewing their subscription to their old ISP/registrar.”

The main reason you could become a target of domain slamming is because your personal information may be listed on the “Who Is” information for your domain. You can check the information associated with your domain on one of the many Who is websites to see what the entire world can see about your domain.

This may not be happening to you because you have taken advantage of Miriam Technologies’ Managed Domain Service or another similar service that helps shield your identity and contact information while assuring you of a continuously renewed domain name. If you haven’t taken advantage of our service, feel free to contact us to find out more.

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Understanding Webalizer Statistical Reports

11/02/06 4:50:40 PM (Edited 11/02/06 5:56:45 PM)
Posted by Ken Treis, President

Every time another computer requests something from our servers, information about that request is saved to a log. Almost all web servers maintain these sorts of logs. Logged information usually includes:

• the Internet address of the computer that made the request
• the type of request that was made
• the URL from the request
• The type of response (e.g. OK or Not Found) that was given, if any

Our technicians read these logs periodically, especially if they are working to diagnose a problem in your web application code.

The Webalizer is a program that we run to help make it easier to understand your logs. The reports generated by The Webalizer can help you understand traffic patterns on your site.

Viewing Reports

To view the reports generated by The Webalizer, simply navigate to the link we provided to you when we configured your site statistics package. If your site doesn’t have a statistics package or if you have lost the link for any reason, please contact us.

The first page you see will be a summary of the last 12 months of activity. This summary is updated every night, and includes links to detailed reports for each of those months.

Older Reports

As time goes on, reports from more than a year ago will start to disappear from this list. But even though they’re not listed, they’re still present on our servers. Here’s how to view them:

First, click on any of the current monthly reports. Notice how the URL in the address bar of your web browser looks something like this:

http://www.your-site.com/.../usage_200611.html

The last part of that URL (200611) is an indicator of the month for the report (200611 = 11/2006, November of 2006). To view a report from a different month, simply change the year and month numbers in the URL accordingly and press Enter.

Hits, Pages, Files, and Visitors

Each time any computer requests anything from our servers, a “hit” is registered. People like to count these and brag about the massive number of hits their site receives, but by themselves hit counts mean very little.

Counting hits alone is sort of like counting the boards in your house. You’d get a high number, to be sure, but there are too many varying things that influence the final outcome. How many rooms does the house have? Was it built using solid construction or just the minimum requirements of the building code? In short, it depends on how the house was constructed.

Web page hits are even more complicated than that. A normal visitor using a web browser to view your site usually makes an initial request, asking for a single page. But then it makes several more requests after that, because the page includes pictures, backgrounds, or other components that have to be fetched separately. A single visitor who navigates to our homepage, for example, registers 31 hits. Other pages on our site may register more or fewer hits, depending on how they’re built.

Search engines, on the other hand, don’t usually bother to request images or other parts of the page that they consider to be irrelevant. That means that a search engine visiting a page might only register 1 hit. But the search engine will likely follow all of the links it finds, which means it’ll eventually visit every page it can find on your site. This also skews the hit counts.

To try to make some more meaningful sense out of these numbers, The Webalizer reports a broken-down total in addition to raw hit counts. The categories reported are:

• Files: This is a count of how many times the server actually sent data back to the computer that made the request. Most hits fall into this category, though some systems (mostly search engines) will ask the server for information about the page without asking for the page itself to be sent.

• Pages: The Webalizer tries to determine how many times a response represented a “page” on your site, to weed out pictures and other components that aren’t really a request for a page from your site. If you have a simple site, this number is probably a good indicator of how many page views your site has gotten. In a complicated web application, however, The Webalizer isn’t always able to determine whether a particular hit represented a page view without some fine-tuning. If your “pages” numbers are almost as high as your “files” numbers, then your site probably falls into this category—let us know if you would like us to fine-tune The Webalizer to report more meaningful page counts for your site.

• Sites: Every computer on the Internet has a unique number assigned to it, called its IP(Internet Protocol) address. This count represents the number of unique machines that have visited your site. Firewall devices can skew this number, since they can hide several computers behind a single IP address.

• Visits: The Webalizer tries to determine how many times your site has been visited by clustering hits together. If lots of hits came from the same address, with not much time between them, then they probably represented a single visit. If the same address was seen hitting your site again later, The Webalizer counts that as a second visit. In some situations, some large firewalls (like those used at AOL) can skew these counts too.

More Information

As you can see, web statistics can be complicated. If you’d like more information about the logs on your site, please contact us. You can also visit http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer for more information.

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Textile Reference

09/13/06 3:51:00 PM (Edited 09/19/06 3:32:14 PM)
Posted by Joel Learner, CEO

Do you have a custom management console that allows update content in Textile? Use our textile quick reference guide below to easily update and format your content:

A single paragraph.

Followed by another.

I am <b>very</b> serious.
<pre>
  I am <b>very</b> serious.
</pre>

  I am <b>very</b> serious.

I spoke.
And none replied.

"Observe!"

Observe -- very nice!

Observe - tiny and brief.

Observe...

Observe: 2 x 2.

one(TM), two(R), three(C).

h1. Header 1

h2. Header 2

h3. Header 3

This is covered elsewhere[1].

fn1. Down here, in fact.

I _believe_ every word.

And then? She *fell*!

I __know__.
I **really** __know__.

??Cat's Cradle?? by Vonnegut

Convert with @r.to_html@

I'm -sure- not sure.

You are a +pleasant+ child.

a ^2^ + b ^2^ = c ^2^

log ~2~ x

I'm %unaware% of most soft drinks.

I'm %{color:red}unaware%
of most soft drinks.

p(example1). An example

p(#big-red). Red here

p(example1#big-red2). Red here

p{color:blue;margin:30px}. Spacey blue

p[fr]. rouge

I seriously *{color:red}blushed*
when I _(big)sprouted_ that
corn stalk from my
%[es]cabeza%.

p<. align left

p>. align right

p=. centered

p<>. justified

p(. left ident 1em

p((. left ident 2em

p))). right ident 3em

h2()>. Bingo.

h3()>[no]{color:red}. Bingo

<pre>
<code>
  a.gsub!( />/, '' )
</code>
< /pre>

<code>
  a.gsub!( />/, '' )
</code>

<div style="float:right;">

h3. Sidebar

"Miriam Tech":http://miriamtech.com/
"Ruby":http://ruby-lang.org/

</div>

The main text of the
page goes here and will 
stay to the left of the 
sidebar.

# A first item
# A second item
# A third

# Fuel could be:
## Coal
## Gasoline
## Electricity
# Humans need only:
## Water
## Protein

* A first item
* A second item
* A third

* Fuel could be:
** Coal
** Gasoline
** Electricity
* Humans need only:
** Water
** Protein

I searched "Google":http://google.com.

I am crazy about "Miriam Tech":miriam
and "it's":miriam "all":miriam I ever
"link to":miriam!

[miriam]http://miriamtech.com

!http://miriamtech.com/journey.jpg!

!rails.png(Rails.)!

!rails.png!:http://rubyonrails.org/

!>Ajax.png!

Ajax is a web development technique
that...

We use CSS(Cascading Style Sheets).

| name | age | sex |
| joan | 24 | f |
| archie | 29 | m |
| bella | 45 | f |

|_. name |_. age |_. sex |
| joan | 24 | f |
| archie | 29 | m |
| bella | 45 | f |

|_. attribute list |
|<. align left |
|>. align right|
|=. center |
|<>. justify |
|^. valign top |
|~. bottom |

|\2. spans two cols |
| col 1 | col 2 |

|/3. spans 3 rows | a |
| b |
| c |

|{background:#ddd}. Grey cell|

table{border:1px solid black}.
|This|is|a|row|
|This|is|a|row|

|This|is|a|row|
{background:#ddd}. |This|is|grey|row|

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Security: Your Site Is At Risk

08/04/06 10:02:24 AM (Edited 08/28/06 12:08:14 PM)
Posted by Joel Learner,

Be Paranoid

Your site is on a huge network, whose users include some of the most cunning, most intelligent, and, in some cases, most malicious people in the world. You might think (and you wouldn’t be the first person to do so) that your site is of no interest to bad people. You’d be wrong. Assume your site is a target. If you’re wrong, no harm done. If you’re right, you’ll be glad you did.

Your web developer has worked hard to ensure that your site is, at the moment, as secure as it can be. Now that your developer’s job is done, it is up to you to keep your site secure.

Warnings and Email

There are a great many developers on the web who are aware of wecurity concerns, and if they spot a security problem on your site, there is a good chance they will email the contact address on your site – and that could very well mean you receive an occasional email from someone telling you there is a problem on your site.

Some of these emails will be part of a sales tactic. Some people will think there is a problem but will not have sufficient knowledge of realize that they are wrong. Some people might be right, and there might be a risk. If you receive an email about a security problem, do not ignore it – forward it to your developer and ask them about it. If there is a problem, your developer will fix it, and if not they will tell you. Either way, they are the only one in a position to determine whether or not the problem in the email is a genuine one.

Making Changes

If you want changes made, you should contact the person who built your site. Would you take an Aston Martin DB9 to a Skoda dealer to have work done? No, you’d take it to the place that will ensure you get the best job done, even if it is a little more expensive. It is the same with a website – your developemr knows his way around the site. He knows every little detail about it. He, most importantly, knows how to make changes while keeping your site secure. Another, cheaper developer may not – and in the long run may cost you far more as a result.

Social Engineering

“Good morning, XYZ Trading.”
“Hi. I’m calling from ABC Web Design. We designed your site, but we’ve lost your FTP details. Do you have them handy?”
“Sure. Give me a minute.”

Congratulations, you’ve just given your FTP details to a random stranger, who now has access to your files, your database – maybe even your customers’ credit card numbers. This is called “social engineering”, and it is very common and very dangerous. Should anyone call asking for site details, you should always, without fail, call the company back at the number you have on file. Never, ever, give any details to anyone unless you are absolutely certain of who you are speaking to. Even then, be cautious.

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