The  Compass

My current vocation is that of tech support manager for an ISP. As such, I spend a good portion of my days retrieving or resetting passwords for customers for their email, for FTP access to their websites, for admin access to their hosting control panel…

Frequently, the responses for desired passwords are astounding.

"How about '12345'", I'm asked. Or "just set it to password for now, and I'll change it later", I hear. Neither request gets honored. Nor do requests for "qwerty", "fido", "success", or something like "sept1953", at least not in those forms.

In today's online world, the sanctity of your data and your personal information is often no more secure than the strength of your passwords. Yes, that's plural. A single password for your banking, your news, your email and your computer logon is akin to leaving a key to your front door under the welcome mat and a list of your valuables taped to it.

Why the emphasis on multiple, strong passwords? Suppose, someone whose integrity is somewhat tarnished, or more likely, an automated piece of software written by that person, were to discover that your email password was "letmein." No worries, right? After all, it's only email.

What kind of information could someone get from reading your email? Well, possibly the name of the bank you use. So, armed with your email address, and the password to your email, the obvious next step is to call up the homepage of your bank and attempt to log in with your email address and the compromised password. Would they get in? In too many instances, the answer is yes. And to the sites you pay your utilities on, the lists you subscribe to, the domains you may own or manage, your mortgage company…

For an interesting look at how secure your passwords might be (or might not be), check out the neat little app I found at http://onlinepasswordgenerator.net/test-your-password.php. I have a couple that scored in the 6-7 million year range and, unfortunately, a couple that scored in the 6-7 month range. Test yours and see how you do.

I found this chart extremely englightening:

Most common passwords and the time it would take to brute force them :

1. password—1 minute, 13 seconds


2. letmein—2 seconds


3. 12345678—less than one second


4. qwerty—less than one second


5. charlie—2 seconds


6. monkey—less than one second


7. 123abc—less than one second

—onlinepasswordgenerator.net

If nothing else, visit their home page the next time you need a password and let their random generator create one for you. Keep your info and your data secure.

Yet to come, a review on various password managers.

-- Michael Raymond

How much space do you need for your website?

As a rough calculation a novel of 150,000 words, at an average of 6 letters per word will equal about a megabyte of space. In other words, unless the text on your site is as prolific as Isaac Asimov or William Shakespeare, you will probably never need more than 1Gb of storage for just text.

Obviously though, websites today, especially corporate and ecommerce sites are not just text. They have PDF files, pictures, databases, online catalogs, video and much, much more. Each of these types of files will require more space than just text, with video and sometimes databases being the largest gobblers of disk space.

In addition, if you use a webmail or browser based interface to your email, those emails that you leave on the server will be figured into your total disk space used. A bigger impact from email is usually in terms of traffic, or bandwidth used, and you may find, if not now, in the near future, that the bandwidth cost you more to maintain than the hard drive space.

The best advice I can offer is this: if you're not doing ecommerce, start with whatever entry level site your chosen hosting company provides, but avoid the free ones. These are generally cluttered with ads that you have little or no control over. If you find this is too small for either your content or traffic, move up to the next level.

If you are doing ecommerce, you should be more concerned with traffic and bandwidth usage than disk space. You need whatever size hosting package will allow you to install an SSL Certificate, a shopping cart, all the images and descriptions of your products, etc., plus give you some room to grow. Most likely, something mid-tier range from your host will be sufficient. And if not, good news for you!

Ask your host about uptime of their machines and their network. Ask them about backups for data. Ask them about frequency of updates to their systems and their software. All of these questions -- and their answers -- will mean more to your ecommerce venture than the size of your disk.

-- Michael Raymond

Once upon a time in a land called "Internet", there were few inhabitants and only a handful of places for those few inhabitants to visit. In this strange and mysterious land, most information was shared in a relatively new language called HTML.

Whole libraries of information, called websites, were delivered to your computer faster than any of the big three delivery guys can deliver packages, even now.

There were a few bastions of wizards fluent in HTML located throughout this land and the number of wizards, for a time, was greater than the number of mortal inhabitants.

One of the strongest enclaves of wizards in Internet was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. These wizards listened to the discontent of the inhabitants around them and decided to assist if they could. Internet, it seems, prior to the wizards getting involved, was a land all but devoid of pictures—with only text, which proved to be rather boring and monotonous. This group of wizards … …More….

-- Michael Raymond

One of the hats I wear is tech support for an ISP. I normally telecommute for them on Friday until late afternoon and someone else minds the store the rest of the weekend.

This weekend, the boss is out of town and I am on call for emergencies. As you all know, Mr. Murphy—he of the "anything that can go wrong, will..." fame—never takes a vacation.

Sure enough, I get a page on my phone Friday night around 10 p.m. that the temperature is very high and climbing, and something there requires my immediate attention. So, I drive 20 miles, fiddle with some A/C controls and wait for two hours watching the temperature slowly crawl its way down to reasonable. It was 12:30 a.m. when I walked in the door at home.

This server room has had heat issues in the past and there are generally fans running in addition to the A/C. There are two fans behind each row of server racks and they are generally pointed at each other, which never made sense to me from an air circulation perspective, but what do I know about A/C and fans? Right, enough to write a very short paragraph.

Saturday, I get the same page notice about overheating. On a summer day in Phoenix, when the ambient temperature outside is hovering around 110F, that constitutes an emergency. So, another twenty mile trek to see what is wrong.

The three air conditioners that serve that room are all blowing cool air -- about 72F according to his neat little infrared temperature sensing gun. The fans are still running, too, but it is almost 100F in there. Not good.

After doing some extensive online research, I found some information that offered a possible solution. It indicated that the current placement of his fans - blowing at each other, and some open spaces in the server racks allowing the heated air to be sucked back in where he was trying to cool were overriding all attempts at cooling the air.

So, some rerouting of the fan directions, and an additional fan placed to blow the hot air out of the server room appeared to be the solution. Plug some of the open areas in the server racks to further separate the hot from the cold air and Voila! It took a couple hours to notice a difference, but the temperature was down by 10 degrees when I left.

The point being, some things you should not attempt yourself. Had an expert been consulted on the HVAC and venting needs for that room when it was built, the fans would probably never have been necessary.

Your website is like that server room. Do you have the time and the expertise to build it, maintain it and make it work at its optimum efficiency? That's what The Compass does.

Get your business where it's going on the web.

-- Michael Raymond

Mozilla Firefox is a web browser for all occasions. You can configure it to work in the manner that is most convenient for you.

Favorite FireFox Extensions to make FireFox more convenient:

1. ScribeFire
2. PasteNGo
3. Bookmark All
4. FEBE along with CLEO
5. All-in-One Sidebar
6. Link Pad

And if you use it to work from the development side:

1. FireShot
2. ColorZilla
   
3. MeasureIt
   
4. Copy Link Text
   
5. Total Validator

More information and a comparison of some of the different browsers available is available here

-- Michael Raymond

You've decided it's time to upgrade or update your website, so you spend 3 or 4 days calling around to all the local web design firms you can find. The first guy or gal gives you a price with 5 numbers to the left of the decimal point. If you paid only a few hundred dollars for your website the last time you had it done, that new, hefty price tag is probably enough to make you choke on your "thanks, but no thanks."

You move on to the next number on your list. This conversation is much more pleasant than the first one, and this designer sounds like someone you could work with. The price is fair, the timeframe is acceptable and the overall process sounds easy. Just to be sure, you call one more web designer.

Price is about the same, timeframe is about the same, but the conversation is not the same as with the previous designer. You call the other firm back and arrange a sit down with their web team.

Potential hazards lurk here. Beware.

If this is a redesign, you do not have to transfer or renew your registration or change your hosting company. The only reason to renew your domain is if the name is coming up on its current expiration date. You can check that for free the Compass domain name site. Just put in your domain name and you'll get a ton of useful information. You can even renew your domain or register a new one there if you choose too.

As for your hosting company, if you've been with them for awhile, and you've been happy with them, most times there is no need to change. In the web hosting world, the lowest price is not necessarily a good reason to change.

-- Michael Raymond

How secure are your passwords? You do use more than one don't you? By the way, "12345" and p@ssw0rd are not passwords. They are invitations to have whatever you're using them on compromised. Email, FTP access to your site, your bank records.

The more frequently a password is used, the less secure it becomes. More so if that same password is used to guard multiple access points. For instance, if I learn that your email password is "sanity"— or virtually any other word in the dictionary&8212;, what do you think I'm going to try as a password if I know where you bank?

Password don'ts:

• DON'T use all numbers


• DON'T use a word as it appears in a dictionary or names


• DON'T just tack a 1 (one) onto the end of a dictionary word


• DON'T use "password" or "changeme" in ANY form
  

Password do's

• Most experts suggest 8-14 characters for passwords.


• Use a combination of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers and symbols from the top row above the numbers on your keyboard.


• Change them frequently

— Michael Raymond

If you are a small business owner, chances are you have a website that you paid several thousand dollars or more to have built. You followed your webdesigner's advice about how it should look and how it should function. They are, or were, the expert in that field, after all, and you, as a small business owner had far too many other matters of importance requiring your attention; extremely important things like actually running your business.

Maybe your traditional business has grown, but your web business has languished and you feel that your website could generate more traffic, and thus, more revenue for your business. So, how do you achieve that?

Content is king, and queen, and duke and lord—all the social networking sites bear unfailing witness to this fact. Good, specific content will keep your visitors coming back and will help draw their friends as well. If your site is the guru, the penultimate source of all things related to your business, your visitors will know it and they will become some of your best marketers.

— Michael Raymond

Website software has a short shelf life. Because of this, your website can stop working overnight for no apparent reason.

First and foremost, the software that runs the web server where your site is hosted is continuously being updated. At least it should be.

Server software updates are designed to protect your site, your business and customer data, and the network of your hosting company. Those same updates can, on occasion, cause your site to stop working.

Every few years, new versions of most scripting languages are released. New features are added, old bugs—undocumented features in the programmer's lingo—are attended to and the potential to break something is greatly enhanced.

Either of these scenarios can be time consuming to track down and you will most likely be charged for the time spent in doing so. This does not fall into the category of "paying for somebody to learn" the software. Tracking down issues with errors related to software upgrades requires someone already familiar with that language, and the expertise to know not only the solution when they find it, but how and where to implement it.

Sometimes, you really should reinvent the wheel.

[You can read the full article here].