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...
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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...
Spam + Too Many Tools = Problems
Okay, we all know that junk email is a problem. But today, within the space of about 15 minutes, three things happened, and they illustrate a problem… A Facebook friend has apparently picked up Koobface, the Facebook virus whose least-troublesome symptom is spamming all your friends with posts (which link to the virus file...
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...
Just Make It Look Pretty
I’ve had a few projects recently where an existing site need a lot of help in a lot of areas: poorly organized, ineffective design, hardware or programming problems, inconsistent integration of various services, etc. Problem is, design is visual, and clients get that. So they know they want a new design. The other things...
Hiring Freelancers — What's Most Important?
I’ll be brief here, but here’s the setup: this past fall I hired a bunch of freelancers for various things, which means they had various skill sets, and I paid them according to the market value for the services they provided. I got mixed results — some excellent, some really bad, and some mixed...
Hello world!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!...
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...