I’m here at BigSeminar X in Atlanta with Armand Morin, and he just launched his web hosting company, Hostorix. It looks pretty compelling: the promise of no downtime, CPanel with all the features– including Fantastico, and unlimited domains and databases, for the rather reasonable price of $27 per month.
Archive for the 'Web Hosting' Category
As a Firefox Campus Rep, I get a box of Firefox goodies to use while promoting Firefox on the USC campus. A few days ago, I received a box for this year. It contains a book called Firefox for Dummies, by Blake Ross.
I have to be honest. I’ve always been a little hesitant to pick up “for Dummies” books because they’re a huge series, which reeks of mass media and brainless fluff. With a title including the word “Dummies”, who can take it seriously? As usual, I was wrong. These books are often full of good stuff.
Firefox for Dummies is no exception. It’s written by the main man himself, Blake Ross, co-creator of Firefox. There’s no better person to write a book on this topic, and he’s fully equipped and a heck of a lot more knowledgeable than me.
Despite his stunning credentials, he comes across as humble and down-to-earth, at least in my opinion. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction: Continue reading ‘Blake Ross is an inspiration’
Here’s an interesting blog post about a website which was hacked to distribute malware. This has also happened to me on my sites, and it’s a really insidious problem. More and more websites on the internet are dynamic. This typically means that they’re user collaborative. Social sites like Facebook and others are quickly expanding and becoming huge, open platforms. While this can be good, it also means a lot of potential attack points and a lot of serious risks, especially when personal information is involved. In the case of Facebook, there’s actually little protection for the users regarding what application developers can do. This is great because this gives developers a lot of flexibility to do truly innovative things. But the downside is pretty bad. Facebook has already taken steps against this by instituting spamminess filters, though these are not perfectly accurate. And as we try to protect users more and more, developers are going to lose the freedoms they once had.
Continue reading ‘Unintentionally distributed badware “may harm your computer”’
Someone somehow modified some downloads of WordPress 2.1.1, so Matt announced that they’re calling the entire version dangerous. I used to wonder why the 2.0 branch is still maintained at all, considering that 2.1 is out. Perhaps this is part of the reason. The story behind this exploit is rather interesting. Continue reading ‘WordPress 2.1.1 modified from original’
Is there any way to mass-edit these three fields for all forums?
- Default View Age (Default date cut-off for thread display)
- Default Sort Field
- Default Sort Order
Continue reading ‘vBulletin Mass-Edit View Age, Sort Field, Sort Order?’
When you edit the first post of a topic in vBulletin, it doesn’t update the topic title, even if you update counters in the Maintenance section.
I’ve been struck by the stupidity of the spam I’m seeing. I see tons and tons of spam everyday, from comments on my blog, to posts on Google Community, to your typical email spam. The spam that’s hitting forums today includes plenty of your typical trashy, obvious spam. But buried deeply I find lots of other tricks spammers are trying to pull, especially ones who try to pass off as real users. Yes, they’re not using an automated bot, but they are posting self-promotional topics where it’s not allowed. Here are a few examples for your amusement. I’ve seen better and worse. Continue reading ‘Spammers are crafty, but silly too’
When I fired up Firefox this evening, it installed a new update and brought me to this page. It was a very good and problem-free upgrade experience. It’s nice to see Firefox keeping on top of things, where Internet Explorer doesn’t.
I just upgraded Google Community vBulletin. I thought they had better ways to fight spam, but not so: they use image verification, no matter how complex it is. The more weird-looking the images get, the harder it is for real humans to read them. Sometimes, computers can even read images (using OCR) better than humans can. So that’s not the way to go. Computers can crack images better than humans can, so we really need to focus on what computers cannot do. I think the next logical step is to ask a question, like a test you might have taken at school.
It’s simple, easy to implement, and very effective at defeating bots. I think it should be at least as effective as image verification.
What’s the best way to move a website to a new server? Here’s the method I used, requiring SSH on both servers (which I have).
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