Website Design

Archive for December, 2009

Does your website use blogging software such as WordPress, Joomla or Drupal? Does your website use a shopping cart such as OS Commerce, ZenCart or CubeCart? Are you an artist using image management software? If you answered yes to any of these questions then you are a prime target of hackers.

Hacker is one a terms that has a different meaning depending on who uses it. Among computer programmers, those geeks that forge the software we use, to be a hacker is to be a rock star of the computer world. Hackers are programming code jockeys that can weave together bits of high power code and scripts, inventing new purpose as they go. They are gurus, the Maharishi of the internet.

Why people hack is its own subject. I expect many hack just for the sake of hacking. They explore the possibilities with no malevolence. These are the digital hooligans, or digital graffiti artists of the internet. Others are the sadists who derive pleasure from creating havoc among the unsuspecting, wiping out entire websites. Finally, the more prevalent and easily the more burdensome are those who are paid to hack. Most hackers would like to get in to your shopping cart software to steal the credit card numbers and other personal data that may reside there. They want into your Blogging software in order to commander its emailing capabilities, thereby using your server to send out reams of spam, instead of there own.

Software developers are well aware of hackers and take precautions to thwart them. As hackers find a way  to exploit software, developers release patches to fix the ‘holes’, it is an unending, ongoing process.

Bottom line: Keep your software up to date! Who’s responsibility is it to keep website software up to date? It is the end user’s responsibility to keep software up to date. That is the simple factual truth, However,  I think in a perfect world the software would be smart enough to upgrade itself. WordPress comes closest to this with dashboard upgrade notification and one click upgrade process.

One of the big challenges that lies before any software platform, will be to put in place a distributed infrastructure that allows users to have their installations automatically upgraded as often as necessary. This would, of course, be a truly complex developer/development problem and I have no idea what the ultimate solution might look like but, sadly, it will have to be done at some point. Hackers never rest and are getting better. Therefore, no matter how important it is for users to upgrade, the reality is that a significant number of them will not.

Wait, there is more to the equation. Consider the underlying software that power these programs. What of a MySQL vulnerability or one within PHP itself to allow your site to be compromised? Obviously this is an impossibility.

I won’t rip you off!
I charge generally a modest $25.00 to upgrade software, unless there are unusual complexities such as customizations that would need to be preserved. If you have questions about your website software, I urge you to contact me for upgrade counseling and advice.

Current Versions

• WordPress: 2.8.6
• ZenCart: 1.3.8a
• OS Commerce: 2.2MS2
• Joomla: 1.5.51
• Drupal: 6.14
• Easy PHP Calendar: 6.0

When twitter first became the rage I found myself tweeting quite frequently throughout the day. Today, I find myself tweeting several times a week; I’ve slowed down substantially.  Realistically, even though I have hundreds of followers, I don’t think many of them read my tweets. It is far more likely that one of my  tweets using a hashtag gets read. If I stick #fortcollins or #jayleno or better yet, #tigerwoods into one of my tweets; thousands of people who follow those subjects will see my entry in their list.

Twitter Desktop Applications
I don’t go to http://twitter.com to read tweets, that would take too much time. Instead I use Seesmic. Seesmic is a deskktop twitter application that runs in the tray on my Vista computer. It allows me to have several twitter accounts and to send tweets to any or all of them. It also allows me to organize whom I follow and thereby filter incoming tweets into sensible categories. There are plenty of other twitter applications that do some or all of this. I’ve tried most of them and settled on Seesmic.

Seesmic Desktop Twitter Application

If you intend to use twitter and be able to leverage its social power then a desktop twitter application is highly recommended. You may want to consider TweetDeck, TwitterFox, Twhirl (Windows & Mac), and plenty more.