You have to have been living under a rock to not realize that more and more of our life and work is happening online — online bill paying and banking, online socializing and networking, online radio and TV, online applications like Google docs. All within a Web browser, I can edit videos — my...
Wolfram Alpha, Bing and Deep Research Tools Made Easy
Search is back in the news again. Long dominated by Google (and for now, still dominated by Google), some new tools are emerging. Microsoft is throwing a lot of ad dollars into Bing, which to me is Google with random header photos. Yawn. Meanwhile, Wolfram Alpha is fascinating, even to a mathematics noob like...
Monitoring Your Web Site
A few weeks ago, a client Web site disappeared. It happens: in the past, other clients have occasionally lost their sites, for reasons ranging from hosting hard disk failures to various human errors. (In this client’s case, they hadn’t renewed the domain name, so the site was still there, but the URL pointing to...
WYSI(not)WYG
I’m in WYSIWYG hell… and I’m not alone. (For those who don’t know, What You See Is What You Get — the acronym is pronounced whizzy-wig — is a term for any visual HTML editor such as the ones in Web-based email editors, blogs or content management systems. It’s supposed to let you do...
Good Passwords Matter
Thirty-six seconds. That’s how long it took to crack my password a few years ago. Years back, the IT guys at a company where I worked called me to ask if they could use my account passwords to run a test. They wanted to try to hack an account on the system, to test...
Managing Web Content: Tech skills needed, but also verbal, written and organizational skills
I’m the so-called “Webmaster” for a couple of large nonprofit organizations, which has me either managing the content of the site or coordinating with other content managers. It turns out that being a Web Content Manager requires a pretty diverse set of skills. Tech Knowledge: Sure, a pretty good knowledge of HTML and CSS...
Migration to a Different Host or Server: What You Need to Know
First, this isn’t a process tutorial; more a warning: If you move your Web site to a new host or a different server within a hosting company’s server farm, you might break some things… Here’s a hint: hosts will always tell you what technologies they run (or, as they say, “we support”). But they...
Documentation: No Big Deal… Until It Becomes a Big Deal
A few weeks ago, I was working with two separate clients to track down their various passwords and access notes. Took a long time… Meantime, a friend of mine started a new job where the outgoing guy didn’t leave any documentation, so he was trying to figure out procedures, and in a few cases...
Web Stats & Error Logs
If you haven’t looked at your Web stats lately, perhaps you should. There are useful things to learn there. I’ve written about Web stats before (see Web Stats: Useful and Dangerous and Hit Counters and Other Bush League Giveaways), so this is just a quick reminder to check your stats periodically. Now let’s talk...
Using Google's Cached Pages to Restore Lost Content
Earlier today, I deleted something I shouldn’t have. It was on a client site, and they had asked to have a promo removed. Easy, thinks I, and without much additional thought, I logged in removed the promo, and saved the page. Oops! In my haste I removed the wrong promo. And since it seemed...