St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Archive for the ‘Learning’ Category

This video helps explain what a firewall is. (By request)

A two way firewall is absolutely necessary.

Zonelabs has the best on in the business and it’s free.

Writing about the Coleman data leak is going to be tough to do without sounding like a paranoid extreme left winger or an extreme right winger. Let me assure I’ve alway been disappointed with both parties and I am a confirmed independent.

With that out of the way, lets get on with the paranoia:

The Main stream media is definitely reporting untruths about this story. They are saying that the data leak was the result of a hacker and that federal crime has been committed. This is entirely untrue. the only person that’s even saying this is Colemans attorney, well I’m sure some extreme supporters are saying this too.

What really happened.
The developers running colemans site asking for donations to his legal fund screwed up the site. It left the website down for an extended period of time.
While investigating Adria Richards stumbled across the websites database completley unsecured. she did this with a web browser and nothing else. This is not hacking. This is “surfing the internet”.

links:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/19912.html

http://www.google.com/search?q=Adria+Richards&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

http://butyoureagirl.com/2009/01/28/did-norm-coleman-fake-his-own-website-death/

http://washingtonindependent.com/33674/norm-colemans-donor-database-exposed-campaign-claims-political-motives

Here’s a rather dry but informative video that tackles the oft subtle differences between White Hat, Grey Hat and Black Hat link building methods:

Fewer young Americans have Internet access than their peers in the Czech Republic, Canada, Macao and Britain, a survey of 13 countries around the world showed.

Among 12 to 14 year olds, 100 percent of British youth use the Internet, followed by Israel at 98 percent, the Czech Republic and Macao and 96 percent and Canada at 95 percent, according to the World Internet report by the Center for the Digital Future.

By contrast, only 88 percent of Americans of the same age had access, trailed by Hungary and Singapore, where more than seven in 10 young people use the Internet.

source: Yahoo Tech

Here’s a little video of an interview with someone from IBM that is supposed to be about how they manage their content. If you’ll watch the video you’ll notice he doesn’t speak on that directly he answers the question from a SEO point of view.

Please note that unless you company is IBM, Microsoft, or some other large multi-national mega-corporation this isn’t going to work for you. How can I tell? Well by the things Mr. Hunt doesn’t say and by the state of the mess that is large mega-sites like ibm.com and microsoft.com.

There is gold in his words, but when it comes to actually managing the content in a search engine and human friendly manner, Mr Hunt (and his clients websites) totally drop the ball.

The very first time I bought a domain name (in 1995) I knew this would happen eventually. Domain name registrar, Network Solutions LLC, is now locking domain names after people type them in their webform to see if they are available.

Here’s how their scam works:

• someone visits a site in their network of affiliates or their main site looking for a domain name.
• You type the domain name in their form to see if it’s available for purchase.
• If it’s available they show you the price and you realize (after you fill in all kinds of info on several pages), it costs more than a domain name should so you leave their site and go to or somewhere else.
• Network Solutions LLC “locks” that domain name making it unavailable for purchase through anyone else but them and also triples the price for the domain name.

Network solutions LLC is trying to say this is a public service. That’s like Dick Cheney trying to say we went to Iraq to fight terrorism (hint – their was no terrorism in Iraq before we came). This servers the public in no way and in fact just lines Network Solutions pockets by guaranteeing you buy from them and at 3 times the already overpriced price.