Backup Program – Full Retail Version Free Until July 1

Just a quick one to point you to a terrific freebie I found on Gizmo Richards’ Tech Support Alert site:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/neobyte.htm

This is the full $40 retail value Titan Backup program available for free if you download and register it before July 1st, 2008. Get all the details at the Tech Support Alert site:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/neobyte.htm

Enjoy!

John The Geek

Best Blog Site To Create A Community?

Davine asked:

Can you refer me to the best Blog site where I can set up a good & responsive community to share my telecommunications product offering online?

You can set up a free blog on WordPress.com or Blogger.com, however, you have a limited amount of control over what you can do to those blogs to customize them. Either one will have good search engine traffic after your blog has been established for a while and you’ve added lots of good quality content.

If you wish to set up your own WordPress blog and have complete control over themes, plugins, etc., you can do so on any web host that runs PHP. Most Linux-based hosts have CPanel for administering your hosting account and Fantastico, a utility that will let you install a WordPress blog in a few mouse clicks.

No matter which way you go, the key to blogging effectively is to provide your readers with content that is good enough that they want to keep coming back. If you can accomplish that, you’ll be able to use the site as a platform for your telecommunications offering.

John The Geek

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Firefox 3 – XP vs. Vista and CYA

My laptop at work runs Windows XP. My laptop at home runs Windows Vista Home Premium edition. I didn’t have a choice with the latter machine so I’ve been trying to reach some sort of truce with Vista since I bought the machine back in February.

My wife’s laptop also runs Vista, so if nothing else when she has a problem I have some clue how to deal with it. Usually, I’ve already been there on mine.

The reason I bring up that dreary subject is that I installed Firefox 3 on my work laptop first. As related in my previous post there was some consternation with add-ons that were no longer functional under Firefox 3. Other than that, Firefox 3 installed just fine and runs great now that the add-ons situation is straightened out.

Because things were going swimmingly on the work laptop, I decided to upgrade Firefox on my home laptop, as well. I expected the same heartburn with add-ons and felt like I had a pretty good handle on how to deal with it.

Silly me.

I ran the Firefox 3 installer and did not get the expected dialog listing the add-ons that no longer worked and the helpful “May I look for updates?” button. Instead, Firefox simply started up as usual and I was looking at the blank Firefox 3 interface.

I went to the Tools menu and click Add-ons to bring up the Add-ons dialog. I was greeted with a list of add-ons, most of which displayed the message “Incompatible with Firefox 3.” Some of them had the Uninstall button active, others didn’t. All had the Disable button greyed out along with the Options button.

I clicked the Uninstall button on one of the now-defunct add-ons. Firefox did its thing then displayed the familiar message “Add-on XYZ will be uninstalled when Firefox is restarted.”

I restarted Firefox. The browser came back up. I went to the Tools menu and clicked Add-ons. There at the top of the dialog was the add-on I’d previously uninstalled, its Uninstall button now greyed out, happily displaying the message “Add-on XYZ will be uninstalled when Firefox is restarted.”

Huh? I’d have sworn I just did that. Okay, restart Firefox again. Check the Add-ons dialog again. Same result. This is beginning to look suspiciously like an infinite loop.

After trying a few things and getting nowhere, I decided the better part of valor was to simply uninstall Firefox 3 and go back to Firefox 2 which had been working just fine previously. The result of that exercise was Firefox 2 coming up looking as expected.

Since I knew Google Browser Sync was dead, and I’d been impressed with Foxmarks, I figured I’d go ahead and install Foxmarks and make the switch now. I visited the Foxmarks site, clicked the Install button and got an “unexpected error -203″.

Mind you, this is the first time I’ve ever had an add-on install fail for any reason. Obviously, something was amiss. After some research, the consensus seemed to be that my profile was trashed.

Thinking that perhaps this was one of those Vista-isms where something should have been run in Administrator mode, I re-ran the Firefox 3 install as Administrator. Firefox 3 came up okay. The install of Foxmarks failed again with the same error message.

By now, it’s apparent that the only way to get Firefox 3 and its add-ons sorted out is to create a new profile. Now, mind you, had I thought to BACK UP my existing profile before starting this odyssey, I probably could have simply restored it and been good to go.

Ya gotta love 20-20 hindsight.

Creating a new profile solved the problem, but of course, I had to reinstall all the add-ons I wanted, not to mention redoing all my preferences since I couldn’t find a way to copy them from the old profile to the new one. I wasn’t real confident that it would have worked anyway since I don’t know what part of the old profile is still good and which is corrupted.

The moral of the story is, of course, to back up important things like your Firefox profile before upgrading things that might affect it. I get lazy just like everybody else, even though I know better, and in this case it bit me in the keister.

Was it Vista that caused the corruption? Who knows? It really doesn’t matter, it’s my bad for not properly covering my aforementioned keister and making sure I had a backup to fall back on in case things went awry. That seems to happen a lot more often in Vista than in XP, at least in my experience, so if you’re thinking of upgrading Firefox or any other software, for that matter, do yourself a huge favor and make sure you’re backed up before you start!

John The Geek

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Firefox 3 – Browser Sync is Dead, Long Live Foxmarks!

I downloaded Firefox 3 the other day along with approximately 8 million of my closest friends. I installed it on my laptop at work a couple of days ago. My first impression was a dialog box that came up and said that most of the add-ons I’d been using with Firefox 2 no longer worked.

The dialog very helpfully offered to go look for updates for the outdated add-ons and I clicked the button to have it do that. It found a few updates, but not nearly all of them. Once Firefox launched, I went to the Add-ons dialog and found that there were a number of add-ons simply marked “Incompatible with Firefox 3″. My only available option was to uninstall the affected add-ons.

Several of the affected add-ons were ones I’d mentioned earlier in my post on my favorite add-ons for Firefox. The most important one was the Google Browser Sync add-on. This is the add-on I used most since it ran literally every time I ran Firefox on any of my three machines. It was also the most important to me because I didn’t want to have to keep the three machines’ bookmarks synchronized manually!

I went to Google to see what was up with Browser Sync and found after a bit of research that Google has stopped supporting Browser Sync! There will be no Browser Sync for Firefox 3. In the same article, however, was the good news: there’s a bookmark sync tool available for Firefox 3 that actually gets better reviews than GBS.

It’s called Foxmarks and it flat out rocks! You go to http://foxmarks.com, sign up for a free account and install the add-on in Firefox. When setting up your new account, Foxmarks copies your existing bookmarks to your account and keeps any new ones synchronized with the online site.

Now that you have your Foxmarks account, you can set up additional machines quickly and easily. Go to the Firefox add-ons site or Foxmarks and install the Foxmarks add-on. Log in to your account and you’ll be prompted to do one of three things:

• Merge the bookmarks with those on your machine
• Replace the bookmarks on your machine with those on the server
• Replace the server bookmarks with those on your machine

That pretty much covers what you’d want to do, so pick one and go. When Foxmarks is done updating, it goes off into the background and pretty much leaves you alone from then on. Any new or modified bookmarks get updated to the server silently.

When you start up Firefox, the Foxmarks add-on goes out to the Foxmarks server and updates the bookmarks on your machine silently. You don’t get the popup list of the tabs you previously had open as you used to with GBS because Foxmarks doesn’t handle that. Firefox 3 has the ability to “remember” which tabs you had open and just open them again when you start up without asking, if you choose that option.

Obviously, I’m a Foxmarks fan and I highly recommend it to replace Google Browser Sync. You’ll have to anyway when you upgrade to Firefox 3, also recommended, but more on that later.

John The Geek

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Find The Best Freeware

I’m a long-time subscriber of Gizmo Richards’ Tech Support Alert newsletter. The reason is that Gizmo provides great general computing information plus he maintains a list of the best freeware available at any given time. If you need software that’s free and works well, check out the Freeware wiki:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/

Basically, if you’re looking for “the best free <insert application of your choice>” this is the first place to look. If you can’t find it here, it probably doesn’t exist yet.

While you’re at it, subscribe to Gizmo’s RSS feed to get notified when this site gets updated. Subscribe to his Tech Support Alert newsletter, as well. I’m a premium subscriber and it’s well worth the few bucks a year that he asks for it.

John The Geek

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FrontPage Tip – Nested Layers

Here’s another answer to a newsletter reader’s question. Curt asks:

I am creating a header for a web sales page using Front Page. I put the blank pre-made header on front page and add 3 layers of text on to that header with proper placement.

How do I keep the 3 layers fixed on the header so that when I move the header they remain attached and intact?

This is actually straightforward and can be easily accomplished with what are called “nested” layers in FrontPage. You create a layer for the background graphic first. Then, with that layer selected, use the Insert Layer function to create a child layer within the background, or parent, layer. Insert the other two layers into the background layer the same way. Put the text or graphics you want into the respective child layers and position them as you want.

When you want to move the header, which now consists of the parent (background) layer and the three nested child layers, all you need to do is move the parent layer and the child layers will move right along with it.

This is a handy feature of FrontPage as it allows you to create complex headers without a separate graphics program. You can modify the header anytime right in FrontPage. Just remember to nest the layers so they are treated as a unit.

John The Geek

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My Current Favorite Firefox Add-ons

I currently use 20 Firefox add-ons, or plugins, if you prefer. Some of them are for specialized purposes, but there are 8 that I use virtually every day that I would rather not live without. In alphabetical order, they are:

• Autocopy – a cool utility that saves keystrokes when you want to copy and paste text within a document, blog post, or whatever. Simply highlight the text you want to copy, wait a second or two and it’s automatically copied to the clipboard ready to paste. You do have to be careful not to highlight text you don’t want copied, but once you get used to it, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. It can be turned off, if desired, for special circumstances.
• Colorzilla – if you do any web design, or other work where you need to match colors, this is very handy. Colorzilla puts a small eyedropper icon in the lower left corner of the browser window. Click on that icon and the cursor becomes a cross. Click on any area of the browser window and the color under the cursor is copied and displayed as its RGB and hex values. Right click the icon and you get a whole menu of things you can do with the color you captured. The cursor picks up the pixel directly underneath it so areas with non-solid graphics can be a bit tricky.
• DownThemAll! – I very often download multiple files from a single web page. Until I found this tool, it was tedious to do them one at a time. Now, I right click on the page, click DownThemAll!, select which files I want to download from the page, select the directory to which I want to save them, and click Start. DTA downloads up to four files simultaneously and continues until all the selected files are downloaded successfully. DTA is a download manager so if the download gets interrupted, the download can be resumed (sometimes automatically) without having to start over. This is very nice for large files. I use this capability often with single files that are larger than a couple of MB.
• FireFTP – a basic FTP client that works in a separate tab within Firefox. If you need to up- or download something to your web site quickly, you can do it right from Firefox without having to open your FTP client. Very slick.
• Google Browser Sync – another lifesaver for those of us with multiple computers. I use three computers on a regular basis and I have GBS on all three of them. GBS keeps track of my bookmarks and history so that I only have to bookmark a site once. The bookmark is then duplicated on the other machines. GBS also remembers what tabs I had open when I closed Firefox and reopens the same ones on another machine when I start Firefox.
• Google Notebook – another killer little application from Google. Make notes, gather clips or URLs of web pages and more right from within Firefox while you’re browsing. Make multiple notebooks to keep different subjects separated.
• McAfee SiteAdvisor – I’ve been using SiteAdvisor since before McAfee acquired it. So far they haven’t managed to screw it up, which was a concern of mine at the time. This application puts a dropdown on the status bar at the bottom of the browser window that changes color based on the relative safety rating of the site you’re currently visiting. Green is safe. Any other color indicates either that the site has not been evaluated or there are warnings about it. SiteAdvisor also puts ratings next to sites found during Google searches so you can see at a glance whether you should visit a site or be cautious about doing so.
• NoScript – the bad guys keep finding more ways to drop nasties on our machines through so-called “drive-by” methods. Simply by surfing a “toxic” web site it is possible for malware to be placed on your machine. This is usually done via Javascript or Flash or other scripting tools that have unpatched exploits. NoScript turns all these off by default. You tell it which sites are okay to turn scripting on to see the full dynamic wonderfulness of your favorite sites. There seems to be an update at least once or twice a week as the developers keep on top of the ever changing scripting technologies. A word of caution: NoScript will be a bit annoying until you have it “trained” to know which sites are allowed to run script. This will be especially apparent with e-commerce sites that you haven’t visited before, and with sites that use PayPal for their payment processor. If you don’t okay the sales site first, the link to PayPal won’t work properly. Fortunately, this is easy to fix by simply clicking the Back button, okaying the sales site, then clicking the Order button again. IMO, NoScript is well worth the small inconvenience for the added safety.
• SearchStatus – this is an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tool for marketers and others who want to see how a given web page ranks in Google’s PageRank and Alexa’s ratings. Very unobtrusive, it puts these two values at the bottom center of the browser window where you can see them at a glance.

I’m sure this list will change in the future and as I find others that I add to my must-have toolbox, I’ll let you know.

John The Geek

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Writing Widgets

One of my newsletter readers asked about getting a widget created for a particular purpose he has in mind. He wants to know what resources he would need to get a widget written.

The short answer is that widgets are written in PHP or some other web-friendly programming language. I’ve seen Javascript widgets, too, although the typical WordPress widget is written in PHP. There are tutorials available on the web (see below), but if you want the widget to do much more than display “Hello, world”, you either need to learn to program or hire a programmer to write your widget for you. There are numerous resources for finding contract programmers online. Some of those are listed below, as well.

By the way, I located these tutorials using a fantastic search tool called “How-To Seeker”. I find this tool saves me a ton of time when I’m looking for how-to info on the web. I never realized how much stuff is out there on virtually any subject you can think of and How-To Seeker makes it a snap to find what you’re looking for quickly. Highly recommended.

Here are several tutorials on writing widgets:

How to Create WordPress Widgets – This tutorial covers creating a Widget, creating a plugin widget, adding sidebars to a theme, and upgrading a non-widget plugin. Plugins are pieces of addon code that extend the functionality of WordPress, either behind-the-scenes or …

Create A WordPress 2.5 Widget – Create a plugin widget in WordPress 2.5. Covers settings up and using sidebars in your template, activating your widget, and displaying your widget. This tutorial is best suited for people familiar with both PHP and WordPress themes and …

simple wordpress sidebar widget step-by-step development – Sidebar – is an area that take place on the left or on the right from main area. Usually on sidebar placed blog common or quick access elements. This elements called widgets. Common examples: authors, tags, categories, etc. In the world of WordPress widget is a plugin subtype. That is activation/deactivation of widgets realized thru the control panel of plug-ins…

Here is a comprehensive list of sites on which to find contract programmers:

Freelance Job Sites Directory – Contract and part-time projects listed daily. ScriptLance Outsource your projects to freelance programmers and designers at cheap prices. Freelancers will compete for your business. Get programming done for your site in php, mysql, xml, …

John The Geek

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Protect Your Email Address

Protecting your email address from spammers is something about which everyone should be fairly proactive. Most people don’t protect their email address, either because they don’t understand how to protect their email address or they’re too lazy to bother protecting their email address.

I learned the hard way that having my email address posted on my web sites simply invited spammers to come along and add it to their lists. I’ve had to discontinue using at least four different email addresses because the ratio of spam to useful content got too great.

It’s not difficult to “hide” your email address from the bad guys as long as you’re not aiming for 100% protection. Let’s face it, like locking your car, taking the basic precautions will only keep the amateurs and spambots honest. If somebody really wants to rip off your email address they’re going to and there’s nothing you can do about it short of not using the email address at all!

Many people believe that only using an email address for friends and family is sufficient to keep it private. That might work if you’re an only child and fairly unpopular. The larger your circle of friends and/or family, the greater the odds that one of them is going to have malware on their computer that swipes their entire address book.

Okay, so here are a few rules for protecting your email address:

Rule #1: don’t post it on public sites! This should be pretty obvious, but non-technical people often don’t know that the spambots that collect email addresses from public pages on the web can read email addresses posted in plain text. Yes, Virginia, they can read HTML text and grab anything that looks like a legitimate email address, e.g. webgenius@mywebsite.com. If you have to put your address out there in front of God and everybody, at least obfuscate it a little, as in the following example:

webgenius @ mywebsite dot com

Human beings can read that and figure out how to piece it back together correctly, but spambots aren’t typically that smart.

Rule #2: don’t use mailto: tags. If your link looks like this:

<a href=”mailto:webgenius@mywebsite.com”>My Email Address</a>

you may think you’ve cleverly hidden your email address under the displayed link text. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong. Spambots can read HTML, remember? One of the first things they’ll look for is the “mailto:” tag attribute. When they find one, they grab whatever text follows it. The odds are pretty good that it will be a legitimate and working email address, eh?

So, how do you protect your email address from the bad guys? There are a number of ways, some fairly simple, and some fairly complex. To a large degree it depends on how serious you are about it, and what the purpose of your web site is. I’ve tried a number of different things over the years, including writing my own Javascript utility that I had to include in every page I ever wrote that wanted to send email. It worked, but as it turned out, was overkill for the purpose for which I was using it.

The absolute simplest way to protect your email address is to simply display it in a non-standard way as mentioned above without using any sort of link tag with it. This is easy, but inconvenient for your web site visitors who have to not only translate your email address, but then type the correct version manually into their email client (hopefully, correctly!).

This next method involves some actual Javascript code, but despite the looks of it can be simply pasted into your web page wherever you want your email address to appear:

<script language=”JavaScript” />
<!– Begin
user = “webgenius”;
site = “mywebsite.com”;
document.write(‘<a href=\”mailto:’ + user + ‘@’ + site + ‘\” />’);
document.write(user + ‘@’ + site + ”);
// End –>

This will actually display your email address in standard format AND create a hyperlink so that people only need to click on it to send you an email. If you put this code into a page everyplace you want your email address to appear, when the page is displayed if you right-click and click View Source… you won’t see the mailto: tag attribute or the email address.

The advantage to this method is that your email address can be displayed correctly and linked for the convenience of your visitors. The disadvantage is that it’s a lot of code to have to paste in where your email address should be displayed. With that much code, it’s way too easy to goof something up that causes it not to work correctly. In fact, the person who sent me this code did exactly that and I had to find and fix the bug before I could get it to work!

If you have a business or professional site, the best way to handle this whole email address issue is to use a contact form. You’ve seen these on many web sites, I’m sure. There will typically be a Contact Us link that takes you to a page where there is a form you fill out with your question or problem, your name and email address, and submit to the customer service people for processing. This can be done fairly simply or with lots of bells and whistles. Either way requires some knowledge of HTML and a programming or scripting language such as Javascript or PHP.

If you’re not a programmer, but can install PHP scripts on your web site and add small amounts of Javascript code to your web pages, a really fine solution is My Contact Station. This is the script I use for the Contact Us on all my sites including this blog. My Contact Station is the script behind the Contact links at the top right of the sidebar. Go ahead and click on one of the links under Contact Us to see how My Contact Station works.

My Contact Station comes with complete installation instructions. If followed precisely, these instructions make installing My Contact Station easy for almost anyone. IMO, it’s the most elegant solution for a professional web site short of custom programming.

John The Geek

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