Website development has changed a lot, even in the last 5 years, and there are two major ways you can save money on your website. The first is re-using existing tools to get some great results; the second is keeping your site safe. Let me expand on these in the following article. The first – […]
Crypto-locker, or how to save yourself from internet pirates
A new generation of internet virus has been generating growing industry alarm over the last few years and costing business owners enormous amounts of time, angst and money. Since late 2013, groups of internet pirates have been running a number of related scams where they hold all your business files to ransom. Just like a […]
Website encryption and the dawn of a new era
Some interesting developments have been emerging in the SSL space, so we wanted to spend a moment to introduce these. They pose some new options for business sites, but also some new potential requirements. This is particularly relevant to you if you’re a business-focused website owner as they can affect your Google ranking as well as […]
Google to use mobile readiness as a ranking measure
Google recently announced it is releasing a new version of it’s ranking system on April 21st which takes account of whether your site is mobile ready. In particular, if your site is mobile-ready it will rank higher on mobile devices. This is a significant acknowledgement from Google of the importance of mobile devices (both phones and […]
Rolling installations of security modules across servers
In recent months some of our servers have been suffering short outages related to mini-DDOS (“denial of service”) attempts. While it’s not clear whether these are aimed at specific sites or just generic random fallout, some servers have experienced short (10 min) outages at the rate of 1-2 per week. We have some software that […]
Checking whether your site is infected on our servers
Every few days we run virus scans on each account on our servers and save the output for you so you can check it. It’s very easy to check – simply visit the webpage www.domain.com/scan.txt where domain.com is your main domain.
Responsive design – useful or dangerous?
Responsive design is a relatively new concept, and very much a buzz word these days – the intention being to allow a site to work on both a normal desktop and to automatically resize and work on smaller devices such as iPads and iPhones.
The WordPress explosion, or, why is WordPress use growing so fast?
Back in Melbourne on a pleasant Sunday morning it seems appropriate to share some reflections on WordPress versus Joomla versus Drupal. These are the "self-maintainer" (easy to update your site) web platforms – well known and most common "CMS" systems freely available, and make up a huge proportion of the internet with organizations from the […]
Google is now penalizing for over-optimising sites
An interesting development in Google's ranking algorithms is that Google is now checking for Over Optimisation on sites! This means that if you have hired unscrupulous SEO people to optimise your site using unethical techniques (of which you might not even be aware!) you may end up getting penalized in the near future.
PHP Hash attack security issue through POST/GET variables
A number of security researchers have provided a way to craft HTTP requests which take down a PHP-based web server completely. The idea is that essentially a specially constructed set of POST variables can completely put any web server into a never-ending CPU spin. The newest version of PHP, PHP 5.3.9, has a patch for […]
Resizing Images for the web with right-click on Windows
It's important to remember that images uploaded for the web actually need to be resized – often an image from the camera will be something like 1.5 – 5mb – which can take up to a minute to download when viewing a web page. If you put these images on a webpage at full size, […]