Making the Web Work for You – Part 5

Getting Social Now before you cast aside the idea of getting involved in any kind of social networking, take a minute to comprehend that what in one hand can be a time-waster and security nightmare you try so hard to keep your users away from, can on the other hand be a powerful business tool …

Making the Web Work for You – Part 4

Sprechen Zie Blog? Although your first reaction might be ‘Why would I want a blog on my website?’, a better question is likely ‘Why wouldn’t you?’.  You have yourself a well-designed and functioning site, you have done your due diligence with respect to Search Engine Optimization and you are keeping tabs on your site with …

GMail Security Checklist

The folks at Google have been nice enough to create a checklist to help you secure your system – it’s mostly a collection of best practices known to those in information security, but maybe less obvious to the general user populace.  Either way, it would be beneficial for any GMail user to work through the …

Making the Web Work For You – Part 3

Site Freebies Now that we have your site up and we have taken some baby steps toward getting some visitors to your site, it’s time to manage and analyze the site.  As luck would have it, there are plenty of tools for just these things and better yet, these tools are free. There is an …

Making the Web Work for You – Part 2

Bringing in the Traffic In part one of the series, I talked about getting a site and doing it right.  Now what?  Well if you have a site and you are content with the form and function, it is likely a good time to find ways to become noticed and drive traffic to your site.  …

Making the web work for you – Part 1

The Working Web I’m going to do a series on leveraging web technologies to compliment your marketing strategies, promote your products and services, and communicate with your clients. It all starts with your website – which for some is merely a billboard or worse yet, a business card – those days are far behind us …

Mind Your Tapes

Most businesses still rely on the venerable tape drive and tape media for backup and archiving, but what is your strategy for those tapes when not in the drive?  Bare minimum is to rotate tapes offsite to prevent a building fire or other disaster from wiping out all your data.  Some people will take them …

Does this file taste funny to you?

Reminds me of a joke – Q:  Why don’t cannibals eat clowns? A:  They taste funny. Of course, this entry is not about cannibals, clowns or peculiar appetites – it’s about what to do when you find a suspicious file on a machine, especially if that machine has been acting strangely and you think something …

APR and Apache upgrade

For the second time, I have run into a snag upgrading PHP, and Apache 2.x due to an Apache Portable Runtime dependency.  It’s a bit of an annoying snag, that on FreeBSD at least (if you are one who uses ports) requires some fancy footwork. According to /usr/ports/UPDATING you need to: pkg_delete -f apache-2.\* portupgrade …