Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: Authorize.NET dropped the ball again on July 3, 2009. Authorize.NET was down from approximately 03:15 EST, and they're still not 100% up @ 15:51 EST. That's pretty much 12 hours. 12 hours of downtime when you're dealing with money is really awful, and I won't even go into the details re: that. Here's the thing. Regardless of your eCommerce package, in the case that Authorize.NET returns no pulse, you can at least retrofit your web application — and send yourself an email with customer information. You can also store the credit card information encrypted (carefully) elsewhere. Granted,…

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: In your typical game of cat and mouse, the cat only wins sometimes. Unfortunately, for the cat — eventually he meets a pretty smart mouse. And then he loses. Debkafile, over here writes how the Iranian intelligence services began to turn technology on citizens using deep packet inspection. DEBKAfile's Iranian sources report that the day after the presidential poll and resulting street outbreaks, Iran's Internet control and tracking supervisors took over the 10 leading service providers in the country. Here's the thing — that technology is entirely useless against VPNs with even the lightest encryption. There just isn't enough…

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: You've done it. I've done it. We've all done it. PPC can be hazardous if it's not carefully watched. Sure, you can hire a PPC management firm and dispense the buck and responsibility to a third party. But that doesn't actually dispense with any of the liability … No. That's just an illusion. You can fire the firm, but Google won't give you your money back. They might like your money so much that they send you some Google swag — but that's about all you can expect to numb the pain. Wow,…

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: Getting hacked is a total bummer, right? Right. But you can stop it with this plugin — WordPress Firewall. It won't stop every determined hacker from zapping your blog — but it's definitely worth installing if you're maintaining more than a few blogs. After all, you simply can't upgrade every blog instantly every time a vulnerability is published for WordPress or any of the plugins you've got installed. So this plugin might buy you some much-needed time … and sanity. It investigates web requests with simple WordPress-specific heuristics to identify and stop most obvious attacks. Here is…

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: Circuit City was a terrible brick-and-mortar store, don't get me wrong — but is it just us that noticed they had one of the best online experiences of any electronics retailer? Great categorization. Search that worked. Faceted search that also worked (mostly). Checkout with pretty context-sensitive illustrations to let you know where your CVV code is — not a #@#$ link that bounces you out! It ran circles around BestBuy's online store for a long time. I think it was still better — but now it's dead. In fact, just last week when writing requirements for an eCommerce…

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: … for spammers, anyway. Upgrading WordPress often might just help! On the other hand, you could still wake up and find out your blog looks like this after a zero-day attack — That's probably a bad thing. But, in fact, many of us in the blogosphere have enjoyed this particular problem. And it's not quite as much fun as the blue pill. In the worst case, it's not just spam, it's badware or viruses. And then Google won't want to cohabit with you ever again. Well, you're still alive, and you're sick of getting attacked. We are, too. So, at least…

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: You thought cheap webhosting was a bargain. Maybe … but bad webhosting isn't just a bummer — it can get you delisted, added to badware lists, etc. And it doesn't have to be your fault (directly, anyway). Use IX Web Hosting | ixwebhosting.com web hosting at your own risk. One day you might just get hacked and/or defaced. Even worse, you might be — courtesy of some Turkish hacker — installing malware on users' computers by proxy. The hackers seem to be pretty good, if a little mean. Fix it, and then it just might happen the…

Archived; click post to view.
Excerpt: … or how to avoid needing this shirt.Your boss sucks, and so does this economy. I try to be a good boss, but realistically I probably suck too. Since I'm that guy … and I'm the guy who decides things, let me tell you 5 ways — at least in my mind — that will help you keep your job at a smaller IT firm. 0. Learn to be useful in another IT capacity If you stink at HTML, learn it better. Developers frequently won't know all of the pains of cutting HTML pixel-perfect or dealing with Photoshop; but…