Blog

My blog is a recording of my experiences, observations, opinions, and occasional ramblings. I write about things that are useful, interesting, educational, and sometimes just done badly. It allows my clients to see how passionate, caring and enthusiastic I am about what I do for a living.

Reasons to choose Aussie web hosting

1 day ago

Are you running an Aussie business? Are your customers also located in this country? If so, here's why your website should be hosted in Australia, not overseas:

How to find free photos on the web

Aug 23rd

While there are lots of places on the web where you can find photos, you need to remember that they're often copyrighted and protected by law, whether they carry a notice or not. That being the case, you have a couple of practical and legal alternatives. One is to use a specialist site like Stock.XCHNG, who offer a large range of stock photos for registered members.

Random stuff you probably don't know about me

Aug 8th

Over the years that I've written stuff online, I haven't really revealed a great deal of my personality. While I've previously documented my professional values, here's your chance to get to know the personal side of me a little bit better.

Why your sales pitch sucks

Jul 25th

Like a number of other website owners, I get a lot of email offers from search engine optimisation experts who try to pitch their cheap services.

Tasteful simplicity

Jul 10th

Website design is moving towards a minimalist approach, where tasteful simplicity and the absence of clutter is the essential goal.

The secret to effective online forms

Jun 29th

People are busy and easily get frustrated. Don't annoy them by asking for too many things in your online forms. Nobody has the time or the patience to fill in a dozen fields, just to join your email newsletter.

Is your shopping cart killing your sales?

Jun 17th

Does your website offer a shopping cart? If so, how's it working out for you? Are people buying your stuff as much as you expected? Are they buying anything at all?

Why I offer simple template based design

Jun 13th

I've received several enquiries from small business people lately, asking why I only seem to offer template customisation in the small business packages that I promote.

Why speed is more important than ever

May 30th

Now that Google considers page load speed to be an important quality score indicator, how will your small business be affected?

I fix $500 websites

May 15th

There's an old story about some bloke in Boston, who used to cut people's hair for a living. His business did well for many years, until one day, one of those cheap franchise operations muscled in on his turf, offering haircuts for less than half of what he was charging.

Your website is hurting your profits

May 6th

Is your website losing you customers? If you thought maybe, then you're probably just like most other small business owners who got their website on the cheap, only to discover that it wasn't money well spent.

A brief introduction to Google Places

Apr 27th

Recently I was asked by a mate of mine why I thought submitting his business to Google was worth doing. Watch this two minute promo to find out why every small business should register their online profile right now: Google places used to be known as local business center, but irrespective of the recent name change, it offers tremendous marketing value to all small businesses looking to attract more customers. If you haven't registered your business yet, then you need to get a move on.

Using fake images shrinks your credibility

Apr 12th

It's disappointing to see so many companies still using those royalty-free people photos on their website.

Google improvements for home based businesses

Apr 1st

Here's some great news if you're a service based business and working from home.

Things that matter in small business web design

Mar 22nd

Things have changed lots around here in the last couple of weeks. If you're one of a minority of regular visitors to this website, you would have noticed that immediately.

Exit popups harm your reputation

Mar 8th

It's hard to understand why some business owners still think that implementing exit popups on their website actually benefit their readers in some way.

Industry jargon and real people

Mar 1st

Our customers are largely technologically unsophisticated as this video shows: Less that 8% of users who were interviewed on this occasion knew what a browser was. As website designers and builders, it's worth remembering this when we talk to normal people who often have no idea what our industry jargon means.

How to drive business away

Feb 22nd

A few weeks back, I asked a good friend of mine about how he thought his business website was working for him in the couple of years since he had it built.

Your trendy search boxes are not useful

Feb 15th

It's disappointing to see an increase of these new trendy search boxes on websites.

No advertising

Feb 8th

Over the last couple of years, I've been getting a steady stream of proposals from various entrepreneurs who want to advertise their stuff on this website.

The worst password choices

Feb 1st

The folks over at Imperva have recently conducted a detailed analysis of a truckload of weak and compromised passwords.

Amazon still fails for Australians

Jan 25th

Amazon has spent a good number of years building their brand. They apparently pride themselves on providing great service, and apart from some idiotic policy decisions, they probably haven't lost too many customers.

Blogging without comments

Jan 18th

Is a blog without comments still a blog? I guess it depends on who you ask. While most blogs have comments enabled, there are some very prominent bloggers who don't offer this feature to their readers. People like Alex Payne, Dave Winer, Douglas Bowman, Jason Kottke, Joel Spolsky, Brian Cray, John Gruber, Russell Beattie, and Seth Godin readily come to mind.

Honeypot spam statistics

Dec 21st

Around ten months ago, I talked about the effectiveness of the project honeypot blacklisting system on this website.

Why notebooks are so cheap

Dec 14th

Now I know why brand new laptop computers have become so cheap over the last couple of years.

No support for IE6

Dec 7th

EDIT: As of January 29, 2010 Google no longer supports IE6 either. What does that tell you?

Real mission statements

Nov 30th

Corporate mission statements don't have to be dumb. They don't have to consist of warm, fuzzy but meaningless promises. Here's how to create real mission statements that make sense to real people.

The Ultimate VoIP Offer?

Nov 23rd

I recently got spammed by Vixtel, a new startup in the VOIP arena, whose incredible offer seemed to indiscriminately extend to anybody who loves a good bargain:

Vendor client relationships in the real world

Nov 16th

In the service industry, negotiating a price with a client can sometimes be a little delicate: Has this ever happened to you or anyone you know?

Customer focus calculator

Nov 9th

As a website owner, are you focusing on the customer or on yourself? Today, I discovered a free analysis tool to test the effectiveness of your website.

Helping small businesses use social media

Nov 2nd

A recent survey on Smartblog shows that 75% of small businesses still don't use social media for marketing.

How not to promote your services

Oct 26th

Around a week ago, I got spammed by a dodgy outfit called Logistetica, who claim to re-design web sites and create new ones. Even though they used Lyris Listmanager to spruke their wares, they made the careless mistake of targeting common business-related mailbox names.

Offshore development spam

Oct 19th

Like probably most of my competitors, I get unsolicited offers of cheap software development services on a regular basis. But this recent email stood out like a sore thumb. And not because of typos and grammatical inadequacies either:

Do small businesses use digital agencies?

Oct 12th

Website design is still very much a cottage industry right around the world and Australia is certainly no exception.

Social media misconceptions

Oct 5th

Ayelet Noff, over at Blonde 2.0, makes some very good points on the typical misconceptions that exist about social media.

The keywords meta tag is dead

Sep 28th

As some of us have been trying to tell folks for a number of years now, Google does not pay any attention to the keywords meta tag. Now you can hear it straight from Matt Cutts himself: Hopefully that settles it once and for all. So please stop stuffing your page headers with keywords just in case someone writes a brand new search engines which takes them into account.

If architects had to work like web designers

Sep 21st

I got the following sent to me via email last week and I thought I'd share it with you. I've since found out that it's been doing the rounds for a couple of years at least but it's only just caught up with me:

Money well spent

Sep 14th

After around four years, Ebay have finally worked out that Skype is not a good fit for their ecommerce and online payment businesses after all.

Improving business communication

Sep 7th, 2009

While I was sceptical at first, I'm increasingly thinking that Twitter can be a tremendously effective business application.

Please budget for findability too

Aug 31st, 2009

I've just read the latest ebusiness report from Sensis and apparently only 54% of small businesses in Australia have a website.

Geolocation lookups

Aug 24th, 2009

As a website owner, have you ever wanted to know where your users are coming from? Which country? Which state? Which postcode? Which city? Then you probably want a geolocation lookup facility.

Windows explorer thumbnails

Aug 17th, 2009

Windows XP has a tendency to sprinkle lots of hidden thumbs.db files all over your hard drive, specifically in folders that have images of any kind. Windows uses these cache files to store preview thumbnails of your images, so they don't have to be created each time you open the folder the images are in.

Paying for "quality" journalism?

Aug 10th, 2009

Apparently, the major media moguls in this country are preparing to start charging for online access to their websites.

Why your newsletter is useless

Aug 3rd, 2009

There seems to be an increasing trend by businesses who send out email newsletters to their customers to assume that everyone who subscribed to their newsletter prefers to receive messages in HTML-only format.

Grammar and spelling are still important

Jul 27th, 2009

I recently spotted this little gem in the jobs section at Gumtree, posted by some bloke who wanted (presumably paid) work as a website content editor:

Eclipse goes FUBAR

Jul 20th, 2009

While not my preferred development platform, I've recently had to use Eclipse once again while working on a collaborative project. While Eclipse is pretty popular with web development shops, I've never been in love with it because I just found too many things about it which are annoying.

Good advice for tough times

Jul 13th, 2009

One of the great visionaries of our time, Steve Jobs, said something to a bunch of university students a few years back. Something I've never forgotten:

Users, not visitors

Jul 6th, 2009

In my line of work, it's common practice to use the word visitors, when referring to humans who come to a website.

Simple content management

Jun 29th, 2009

In the open source arena, is there a content management system for small businesses which meets the following criteria?

The ICE campaign

Jun 22nd, 2009

I got this in my mailbox a few days back, and just for a change, the message was actually useful, practical and very sensible:

XAMPP directory missmatch

Jun 15th, 2009

If you get a directory missmatch warning when you launch the XAMPP control panel, it's almost certainly because you've installed XAMPP without an installer.

Coles broken giveway

Jun 8th, 2009

Coles are currently running a giant gift card giveway promotion but this is what happens when you try to register online:

Microsoft improved typefaces

Jun 1st, 2009

With the release of Microsoft Vista a couple of years ago, Microsoft introduced six new cleartype typefaces. The new font collection was also distributed with Office 2007, but if (like me) you're still persisting with Windows XP, you may be missing out on some fine examples of typographical work:

The irony of Mojavi

May 25th, 2009

How ironic that the folks behind Mojavi, one of the oldest object-oriented PHP development frameworks, don't use their own toolkit to build their website.

On illogical naming conventions

May 18th, 2009

I spent a couple of days looking under the bonnet of Codeigniter, one of the most popular of the PHP frameworks out there.

My professional values

May 11th, 2009

Recently, and for the first time in my life, I was asked to compile a personal list of professional values. After around a week, here's what I came up with.

Online questions to Tourism Australia

May 4th, 2009

This one's been circling the globe lately but since I love it so much, I'm sharing it with all you folks who may not have had it dropped in your mail inbox.

The death of MySQL?

Apr 27th, 2009

Around fifteen months ago, the open source community was very happy to hear that Sun Microsystems had just purchased MySQL, and the worlds most popular database was in very good hands.

A new design

Apr 20th, 2009

If you've been here before, you'll probably notice a complete change of design. With a greater focus on clarity and essential features, our content now stands out much more, with fewer distractions. We make much better use of whitespace and, apart from content-related images, have almost eliminated all graphics.

Naming procedure line labels

Apr 13th, 2009

I recently worked on improving a VB6 application, and as part of the task, I decided to clean up the way procedures used line labels.

Google, as it was once

Apr 6th, 2009

The original Google beta home page, as of December 1998, and captured by the Wayback Machine snapshot:

Is IE doomed?

Mar 30th, 2009

Looking at the latest browser stats shows us that Firefox has recently overtaken Internet Explorer as the preferred browser for the majority of web users. The last four years indicate a steady decline in market share for Microsoft's once-dominant but mediocre gift to the world:

Common usability blunders

Mar 23rd, 2009

The folks over at Smashing Magazine have put together a list of some very common usability blunders in web design. In no particular order, these are the problems designers still create for their customers:

What Joomla can learn from Wordpress

Mar 16th, 2009

Over at playingwithwire.com, Viktor Petersson explains why Wordpress is a better platform than Joomla, from a usability perspective.

Don't hide common file extensions

Mar 9th, 2009

By default, Windows XP doesn't display common filename extensions like .exe, .doc, .xls and others. While you may not be aware of this, malware writers certainly are, and they use this knowledge to trick you into opening dangerous files.

Cheapskate job offers

Mar 2nd, 2009

A local outfit who apparently specialise in transforming ideas into results, were recently seen advertising for fresh staff. What do you suppose this particular senior web development role would be paying?

The honeypot works

Feb 23rd, 2009

Since we implemented the project honeypot blacklisting system, it's already becoming a very effective tool for us. Their simple API enables us to quickly check whether any given visitor to our website is an email harvester, comment spammer or one of a number of malicious bots circulating the globe.

How not to use meta refresh

Feb 16th, 2009

Point your browser to one of the most popular websites in Australia, click on any one of their articles and you might just be unpleasantly surprised to find the page refresh automatically, even while you're reading it.

So, you want me to sit for a four hour test?

Feb 9th, 2009

Recently, I sent off my professional resume to a company who shall remain nameless, although their slogan might give you a hint.

Putin spanks Dell

Feb 2nd, 2009

Michael Dell makes the mistake of offering IT help to the Russians and apparently gets this scolding reply from Vladimir Putin:

Zamzar to the rescue

Jan 26th, 2009

I've recently had to convert a Word 2007 document, sent to me by someone who wasn't savvy enough to realise that docx documents are incompatible with earlier versions of Microsoft products.

Dodgy listings on realestate.com.au

Jan 19th, 2009

There's plenty of evidence that real estate agents continue to engage in dodgy practices. Shonky agents like David McFarlane, for instance.

Linkedin groups spam

Jan 12th, 2009

Linkedin groups was designed to be a place for members to form communities around professional interests.

Core values? Yeah, right.

Dec 22nd, 2008

Many companies claim as part of their core values that their most valuable asset are the humans who work for them. Why is it that when many of those same companies get into financial strife, the first thing that is slashed is this same most valuable asset?

Why you don't want that new web project

Dec 15th, 2008

Zeldman offers some humourous, yet frighteningly real, signs you don't want that new web project.

Automatic tabindex with PHP

Dec 8th, 2008

As most of us who've created HTML forms know, the tabindex attribute is a nice way to force text fields, checkboxes, dropdowns and buttons to be in a predefined order, so the user can utilise the tab key to navigate between them.

Sanitising uploaded filenames

Dec 1st, 2008

Because of the differences in the way Linux and Windows systems handle filenames, and because users often upload files which have spaces, quotes, and other punctuation characters in the name, it's important that you strip out these characters from the filename before saving the file on the webserver.

Multiple versions of IE

Nov 24th, 2008

A clever bloke by the name of Yousif Al Saif has come up with a way of having multiple versions of IE running on your windows workstation. Handy for us poor sods who still have to support what is probably the worst standards-compliant browser ever made.

Don't be lazy when configuring security certificates

Nov 17th, 2008

If you're going to offer a secure protocol to your users, don't do what CSA Australia did, as I indicated in an earlier post.

Dumb dialogues from Intel

Nov 10th, 2008

After upgrading my Intel wireless driver and management software from Dell, and having launched the management software, I was greeted by one of the dumbest dialogues I have seen in a long time:

Why bother with development frameworks?

Nov 3rd, 2008

Having worked with a couple of web application frameworks over the last couple of years, I got thinking.

Spamming people doesn't do your campaign much good

Oct 27th, 2008

I got this spam from the American Hunters & Shooters Association today, asking me to become a member, even though I live in Australia, and even though I hate guns:

Sucky web design for beginners

Oct 20th, 2008

If you've visited here before, I guess you already know by now that I'm a bit of a critic of sucky web design. Well, I just got spammed by some bloke from a recruiting agency by the name of Techgen, proudly telling me to check out their brand new snazzy whiz-bang website.

The most ridiculous captchas of all time

Oct 13th, 2008

If you search the web for what people think of the dreaded webform captchas, you'll see that there are plenty of us who think they largely suck because they irritate the very people they're supposedly designed to protect.

Don't mislead your customers

Oct 6th, 2008

While using a misleading keyword phrase in your adwords campaign may get your website more traffic, it's also very likely to backfire because your potential customers won't buy from you when they find out you lied.

The vagueness of "about us" pages

Sep 29th, 2008

Jokob Nielsen concludes that the usability of website about us pages has actually decreased over the last five years, asserting that many organisations prefer to spin weasel words and marketing bullshit instead of offering an honest and concise summary of what they actually do.

Spam still thriving

Sep 22nd, 2008

Here's a scary statistic. According to a recent survey by Marshal, almost 30% of internet users have purchased the following from spam, which manages to find its way into their inboxes:

Still partying like it's 1999

Sep 15th, 2008

Q: Who gives you a clear picture of what's going on in the business community by helping you instantly visualize and understand the relationships that drive decisions and create opportunities?

Spamming the search engines with deliberate typos

Sep 8th, 2008

With so many websites competing for the same keywords, it's possible to attract some visitors by deliberately spelling keywords badly. While this will make you look pretty silly in most peoples eyes, the minority who can't spell may still get to your website via a search engine.

Is your router's UPNP still enabled?

Sep 1st, 2008

We've known for several years that almost all internet routers which support universal plug and play have some nasty security issues, including the one you probably use at home.

Real people, real opinions

Aug 25th, 2008

When you prefer genuine user reviews to advertising campaigns. When you prefer to see what actual consumers think, instead of what the marketing bullshit artists want you to believe.

Worldsoft easy money scam

Aug 18th, 2008

Here's a pretty obtuse way to fish for legitimate email addresses. Pretend you're a real company, send out a job offer, guaranteeing $6000/month for part-time work and see how many knuckleheads take the bait:

How not to configure security certificates

Aug 11th, 2008

This is what happens when you don't know how to configure the security certificate on your website. The folks over at CSA Australia provide a feedback link, which when clicked, rewards the customer with this:

Get your mum to test it

Aug 4th, 2008

Here's some great advice on how to cheaply but effectively test a website for usability: I've used a subtle variation of this on a number of occasions, and I can tell you that it really works.

Bank of America phishing scam

Jul 28th, 2008

Got this phishing scam from some knuckleheads in the USA who must have been hoping that (1) I'm a Bank of America customer and (2) that I'm even dumber than they are:

Oztion's biggest obstacle?

Jul 21st, 2008

Oztion, the Aussie alternative to Ebay, have been spending lots of money on radio advertising lately. While appearing to try and cash in on the very bad publicity Ebay have been copping lately, Oztion have been building brand awareness with the phrase:

Yellowpages search still sucks

Jul 14th, 2008

Here's why the yellowpages search still sucks from the point of view of those who matter: their users.

Microsoft gives away fake prizes

Jul 7th, 2008

I got spammed by the giant of Redmond a couple of weeks ago, offering me cool prizes, just to search the web using their struggling search engine.

Spam harvester tracking

Jun 30th, 2008

Stumbled on this today, while investigating dodgy user agent strings: Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site.

Our top 40 local searches

Jun 23rd, 2008

A few months ago I wrote about how most of our visitors come here via a Google search. A small percentage of those even use the search box on the top-right, once they get here.

Trust the Midas touch?

Jun 16th, 2008

I received this mainsleaze spam a few days ago from Midas. Now this is supposed to be a reputable, mainstream company but stupid actions such as this are likely to damage their reputation for quite a while:

Dell phishing scam

Jun 9th, 2008

I received this email, claiming to be from Dell, and offering to give me a free laptop, just for answering a short survey:

Microsoft's cashback and Yahoo

Jun 2nd, 2008

Microsoft recently announced that it's willing to pay people money for using their crappy search engine, provided the people buy something, and provided the people live in America.

Australian dictionary for Firefox

May 26th, 2008

As most of you Firefox users are probably aware, the latest version has a built-in spell checker which is really useful in web forms. But if you prefer a proper spell checker (rather than the default American one), you should download the Australian Dictionary extension from Cameron Roy instead.

Forget Adobe, Foxit instead

May 19th, 2008

For those of you who are still using the over-bloated Adobe Reader to view and print your PDF documents, seriously consider uninstalling it and replacing it with Foxit Reader instead.

The scams are getting dumber

May 12th, 2008

Some knuckleheads from the other side of the world tried scamming me (along with a few million other people) a couple of weeks ago.

Saving web pages as images

May 5th, 2008

Recently, I needed to write some documentation for a web application and I needed a way to create screenshots of web pages which are longer than one screen.

Bruce Servicepack and the Vista Street Band

Apr 28th, 2008

A fake band with its own fake groupie in an embarrassing internal video promo which aims to get a corporation to eat its own dog food: You'll love the lyrics, I promise. Not to mention the enthusiastic jumps into the air, complete with freeze-frames.

The dangers of blogging

Apr 21st, 2008

An interesting piece in The Melbourne Age on the health hazards stemming from pressures of blogging for money.

Our broken home page is now fixed

Apr 18th, 2008

Apologies to all our readers for experiencing a broken home page at this website over the last 12 hours.

Testing your website on a tight budget

Apr 14th, 2008

Steve Krug, author of the excellent Don't make me think offers a great website usability tip for those on a tight budget:

More dodgy deals on Ebay

Apr 7th, 2008

Quite a while back I outlined from personal experience one way dodgy sellers continue to scam buyers on Ebay. Well here's another one, except even the Ebay support people can't explain how this particular scam works.

Working with people

Mar 31st, 2008

There's a good article over at The CEO Refresher about the things they don't teach you in management training which outlines why working with other people is often the most difficult aspect of any office worker's job.

VMware design stupidity

Mar 24th, 2008

Here's proof that sometimes software designers make really, really stupid decisions.

Live advertising on Google

Mar 17th, 2008

I just noticed that Live now advertise on Google. How peculiar that a Google's competitor would pay money to Google, just to have a user redirected back to its own search engine results page.

Stupid browser no more?

Mar 10th, 2008

Good news for standards based developers. Microsoft have now decided that IE8 will comply with web standards by default.

Southwest Airlines booking form

Mar 3rd, 2008

Here's a portion of the reservation form at Southwest Airlines. Can you spot what's wrong with it?

Shame on you, Toshiba

Feb 25th, 2008

A big thumbs down to Toshiba for their negligent decision to not offer any refunds to people who trusted them enough in the last couple of years to buy one of their HD DVD players.

Our visitors sure prefer Google

Feb 18th, 2008

Like almost all websites, the overwhelming majority of our visitors come to us via a search engine. Knowing that Google dominates, I was nevertheless curious to look at our own statistics, just to see to what extent.

Sensis: from bad to worse

Feb 11th, 2008

A few days ago the folks over at the SMH Mashup Blog asked does whitepages search suck?. The overwhelming reply was along the lines of yes, it does suck.

Reject those nosy email messages

Feb 4th, 2008

MS Outlook uses a tracking option which enables the sender of an email to determine when the recipient has actually read it. If, like me, you find this feature an intrusion of privacy, you can do something about it.

How not to display images

Jan 28th, 2008

This is how not to display images in your online store or product catalogue: If you're going to offer a clickable link entitled larger image, then you should actually offer a larger image of the product you're trying to flog. Otherwise you're running the risk of wasting your customers time and increasing their aggravation.

Shop smart and save?

Jan 21st, 2008

So says the slogan on most of the product pages at Getprice, the Aussie online comparison shopping resource. Their contact page event tells us that:

JB Hi-Fi: Australia or New Zealand?

Jan 14th, 2008

JB Hi-Fi have a pretty strange way of serving web pages to their customers. If you omit the (silly) dubya-dubya-dubya from their Australian website address, you get their New Zealand website instead:

Jacob's gift

Dec 24th, 2007

Jacob Nielsen has a free gift for all web designers, business analysts, information architects and usability evangelists. Finally, something interesting to read at the beach.

What do Dimmeys sell?

Dec 21st, 2007

This is what happens when you get your website builders to make your brand new website and they forget to change the content meta tags:

Scamming the scammers

Dec 17th, 2007

Warning: This post contains concepts and phraseology which may be offensive to some of our readers.

Hey stupid, click here!

Dec 10th, 2007

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the stupidity of using click here when hyperlinking. Fast forward to the current times and I can tell you that the stupidity still prevails. Now, Brian Clark at Copyblogger tells us how that stupidity is actually a good thing:

The free rice game

Dec 3rd, 2007

How do you improve your vocabulary playing a fun game and at the same time help the thousands of people who desperately need food? Click on the banner and find out.

A somewhat eclectic mix

Nov 27th, 2007

One of our readers asked me to elaborate a little on the artists who contributed to my enjoyment of music from the 70's. Well, here's the list, alphabetically:

We sell America for the ruble!

Nov 13th, 2007

I've been copping a spate of Cyrillic spam in the last few weeks, which my mailfilter has been happily dumping into the garbage, where it belongs. Here's a recent example:

Internet speed test

Nov 7th, 2007

These folks have the best web-based tool which measures the actual speed of your internet connection, for downloads and uploads. Although it's restricted to connecting to only a handful of servers in the US, it should be sufficient to get an accurate and reliable estimate of your actual internet connection, as opposed to what your ISP charges you for.

Converting PHP arrays to XML

Nov 1st, 2007

I thought I'd share with you a PHP class I found useful lately. I had to take a comma-delimited text file and turn it into an XML text stream. With the ubiquity of XML these days, you might find it useful too, if you dabble in PHP software development.

Ebay and the Skype hype - deux

Oct 26th, 2007

A couple of years ago I wandered if the Ebay executives made some bad decisions while under the influence of alcohol. Now, Australian IT reports that:

The anti-piracy parody

Oct 20th, 2007

Anyone else spotted the irony in The IT Crowd's parody of anti-piracy advertisements? Yep, the bloke who ripped it and then uploaded it to Youtube was committing piracy.

20 usability tips for bloggers

Oct 14th, 2007

Do you have a blog but need some ideas on how to make it work better? If so, make sure you read Tom Johnson's fantastic usability tips for bloggers. Here's the gist of what Tom's saying:

CSS reference guide

Oct 8th, 2007

The folks at xhtml.com have put together a first-rate CSS reference guide with lots of useful examples and illustrations.

Don't send HTML-only newsletters

Oct 2nd, 2007

Does your organisation send out email newsletters to your customers or prospects? If so, here's a tip.

Stupid browser, V7

Sep 26th, 2007

I'd like you to hover your mouse pointer over the mugshot on the left. What does the tooltip text say?

Captcha images shut out people too

Sep 20th, 2007

If you currently use captcha images on your website, you should watch this video and find out just how difficult you're making it for some of your users to interact with your webforms.

Building accessible websites

Sep 14th, 2007

For anyone who's fair dinkum about web accessibility, make sure you read Joe Clark's highly informative book Building Accessible Websites. Although Joe is kind enough to offer an electronic version on his website, the paper edition is still a very good buy for those who prefer the feel of paper.

Westpac's website woes continue

Sep 8th, 2007

The SMH Blog reports on Westpac's continuing problems: Thousands of Westpac customers went without their internet banking and online broking services for most of yesterday following a website glitch which, as of this morning, has still not been completely fixed.

Fancy formatting mistakes

Sep 5th, 2007

Jakob Nielsen illustrates why fancy formatting using a big red type for important information, even though it's at the top of a website homepage, is a mistake.

Looking for a new text editor

Aug 28th, 2007

Over the last eight years I've been exclusively using Notetab for all my text editing needs in the Windows environment. Simple to use, really intuitive and very powerful. Great for editing multiple files too.

Web trend map 2.0

Aug 22nd, 2007

Here's the 200 most successfull websites on the internet, according to the folks over at Information Architects, Japan:

Picasa XML template for Simpleton

Aug 18th, 2007

I have created a lightweight XML template for those of you using the Simpleton image viewer in conjunction with Picasa.

Lessons in website design

Aug 16th, 2007

Some things I've learnt about website users over the years: Users don't care about your website and can't be bothered learning how to use it.

Ebay phishing scam

Aug 10th, 2007

Last weekend, I got one of those unpaid item reminder emails from what looked on the surface to be the automated Ebay system. Here's how I immediately recognised it as a phishing scam:

Advice is now chargeable

Aug 4th, 2007

Even though I specialise in software development, people regularly ask me for advice on a whole range of computer-related issues. Hardware upgrades, home networks, virus removal. Anything to do with computers, really.

The Devil's Dictionary

Jul 28th, 2007

A small sample of American wit and humour from the folks behind Project Gutenberg, the largest single collection of free electronic books on the planet:

Here's Johnny

Jul 22nd, 2007

Now here's a man we can all trust folks. He published his very first video on Youtube, telling us just how committed his government is to the global issue of climate change, despite the perception to the contrary.

Word navigator

Jul 16th, 2007

If you're into solving crosswords or word puzzles, you may be interested in word navigator. Their versatile wildcard engine allows a multitude of search options, including:

I'm going to be rich

Jul 10th, 2007

I got five copies of this over the weekend. It must be important if Madam Cole went to the trouble of sending it five times, right?

The most useful PHP function?

Jul 4th, 2007

I know that PHP has a lot of functions built right in, some of which are used frequently and

The strawberry meth hoax

Jun 28th, 2007

A few days ago I got one of those this is not a joke, warn the kids chainmails from someone who should have known better than to just blindly and carelessly forward this type of rubbish:

Kooky, quirky Safari

Jun 22nd, 2007

I tried the brand new Safari browser for Windows last week. While I'm still a little puzzled why Apple would even bother entering the Windows market, I've noticed a couple of things which I don't particularly care for:

Simple HTML chart

Jun 16th, 2007

One of our readers recently observed that we don't seem to be using any images to draw our barcharts and wondered how it was done.

Google moves into top gear

Jun 11th, 2007

Will Google's collection of business office tools, combined with their brand new offline web application technology, make the operating systems on our PC's irrelevant?

Getting the client IP address

Jun 5th, 2007

We've seen plenty of PHP scripts that rely on the $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] variable when trying to establish the IP address of the client computer. The problem with this approach is that if your visitor is behind a corporate firewall or proxy, then the above will actually be the IP of the firewall or proxy, not the visitors computer.

Easy printer friendly pages

May 31st, 2007

You don't need to muck around with JavaScript, page redirection or PDF integration just to make your XHTML web pages printer friendly.

Structuring the page title tag

May 25th, 2007

While it's quite normal for website page titles to incorporate the site name, there are a couple of differing opinions on how this should be structured. One school of thought suggests that the site name should have prominence, like this:

Simpleton image viewer

May 23rd, 2007

Simpleton is an open source PHP application which enables you to view Picasa image galleries on the web, using nothing more than the Picasa XML web export feature and an FTP client.

Stupid defaults in web forms

May 21st, 2007

One of the more important decisions in software application design is that user choices in forms should have default values, where possible, and those default values should be the most likely ones that most users would want chosen.

PHP last day of the month calculation

May 15th, 2007

Here's the easiest way to output the last day of any month using PHP: function lastday($month = '', $year = '') {

Email pet peeves

May 9th, 2007

Peggy Duncan over at Fastpitch writes about email pet peeves that cause stress in the workplace. If you found our post on email etiquette a little disdainful, have a read of Peggy's article.

VB.NET inifile class

May 3rd, 2007

If you're a VB.NET developer who's also programmed in the various Visual Basic flavours which preceded it, you would have noticed that the new standard for custom program settings storage is XML files.

Lame corporate proxies exposed

Apr 29th, 2007

A few weeks ago I wrote about lame corporate proxy servers which mangle the HTTP request headers on behalf of their employees and customers and therefore cause them to be denied access to websites such as this one.

Testing browser compatibility

Apr 24th, 2007

Unless our clients can give us a compelling reason to do otherwise, this is our preferred methodology for testing browser compatibility with CSS:

More spam than legit email? You betcha!

Apr 20th, 2007

Nate Anderson over at Ars Technica quotes an IDC report that predicts this is the year where spam will for the first time outnumber real email. I have no idea how the folks at IDC came to that conclusion but looking at our own ISP's internal statistics, that's already happened well before this year.

Email subject lines are important

Apr 16th, 2007

It's not that I'm the only person in the world who is busy. We're all busy. But far too often, I get an email which struggles to get my attention due to the subject line being either a single short word, too ambiguous, irrelevant or simply missing.

MySQL database housekeeping

Apr 11th, 2007

As part of regular ongoing database housekeeping, you should repair and optimise your MySQL tables on a regular basis.

CSS selector order

Apr 7th, 2007

Given the stylesheet declaration outlined below: .uno {

Social engineering victims or just a crap bank?

Apr 3rd, 2007

In the past few weeks, I've had three cold calls from three different people, all from blocked numbers, and all claiming to be from the National Australia Bank.

Lame corporate proxies

Mar 29th, 2007

Like a lot of weblogs out there, we use filtering technology to detect and block spambots, dodgy referrers and automated link spam specialists.

Don't waste my bandwidth

Mar 25th, 2007

I got spammed recently by some knuckleheads who curiously must have thought I'd somehow be interested in their cheesy and unsolicited newsletter. The email consisted of a whopping 415Kb embedded JPEG image and a short text intro:

PHP leap year calculation

Mar 24th, 2007

A simple little function to calculate whether a specified year is a leap year or not:

Deleting history in Firefox

Mar 20th, 2007

Have you ever made a typo when entering a URL in Firefox? Firefox remembers any entered URL's, so it can match them against what you type, whether they're valid or not.

Click on the logo and break the website

Mar 16th, 2007

On the web, it's standard practice to have your logo a clickable link which takes the visitor to your home page. Although I have seen the occasional business website which doesn't allow you to click on the logo, I haven't seen any that break the website when the logo is clickable.

Flashturbation hall of shame

Mar 12th, 2007

It's no secret what I think of Adobe Flash. It seems that most commercial applications of Flash on the web either tend to be intrusive, annoying ads or over-designed websites that only detract from their own usefulness. Our industry has even coined a special term for it.

A website for under $500?

Mar 8th, 2007

I still occasionally get asked by prospects if I can help them build a website on a sub $500 budget. These days I just tell them to ask their favourite nephew (who dabbles in HTML) to start right here.

Wordpress themes with style

Mar 4th, 2007

For those folks who complain that even though Wordpress has hundreds of free themes they just can't seem to find one that suits them, our very good friends over at Dr. Web Magazin have a very nice collection of some eighty-odd themes you may not have seen yet.

Comodo personal firewall

Feb 28th, 2007

While Kerio V2.15 has always been our favourite personal firewall, a number of people we know have complained that it's rule-based architecture can be little hard to muster.

Nobody cares about your stupid cat

Feb 24th, 2007

If you're writing for an audience (as opposed to for yourself) Ronald Huereca at Weblog Tools Collection offers some tips on topics not to blog about:

How to download videos from Youtube

Feb 19th, 2007

With our woeful broadband speeds here in the lucky country, no wonder lots of us see Youtube as only conceptually useful.

Wallpaper to knock your socks off

Feb 11th, 2007

Is this the most amazing collection of free desktop stock photo wallpaper on the internet? I think so.

Internet country codes

Feb 8th, 2007

We recently worked on a geocoding project which required a lookup table of all the ISO country codes and their names:

Magnificent Markdown

Jan 30th, 2007

Many websites, ours included, use a lightweight markup language to dynamically serve structurally valid XHTML to the visitors browser.

HTML colours by category

Jan 25th, 2007

By popular demand, the original list of 140 HTML colours, grouped by category: red, pink, orange, yellow, purple, green, blue, brown, white and gray.

Adobe kuler ain't so flash

Jan 19th, 2007

Adobe have been promoting Kuler as their first web-hosted application whose reason for existing is to create, and share color themes online. But try actually getting Kuler to work on their website, if you use Firefox.

More secure admin logins

Jan 15th, 2007

A good way to improve the security of your website administration login is to restrict the input field length for the username and password to something reasonable. This is commonly done with the maxlength attribute in HTML:

Fabulous Firebug

Jan 10th, 2007

Is this the future of web debugging? I think so.

Windows explorer view settings

Jan 6th, 2007

Has any other Windows XP user had their file explorer stubbornly refuse to remember their custom folder settings and revert to pretty icon view instead? One thing which has bugged me was that even when I change my current folder view to details and then click on the apply to all folders button, Windows XP still continues to open some folders in icons view.

Search engine referrals

Jan 2nd, 2007

The other day I was looking at our website's stats to get an idea of search engine referral ratios. While I fully expected Google to win comprehensively, the actual figures based on the last 10,000 page views were certainly an eye-opener:

Pitfalls of third-party controls

Dec 27th, 2006

Quite some time ago, I documented how manifest files can be used to make VB6 applications look like they were designed for Windows XP. Having recently worked on a project which liberally used third-party ActiveX controls, I experienced one major pitfall of this approach.

Hyperlinking to 'members only' pages

Dec 21st, 2006

I've been asked a question similar to this one a number of times over the last few years:

Hacking XP Themes

Dec 16th, 2006

If your corporate standard operating environment precludes you from changing the default (blue) Windows XP desktop theme and your system administrators have disabled your registry editor, here's an alternative way of doing it:

Control your finances with AceMoney

Dec 12th, 2006

Having recently decided to get serious about managing my personal finances, I started to look around for something which had all the important features but didn't require an accounting degree to use. Essentially, I was after a simple application which would enable me to track my spending habits to see where all the money goes.

Better screen cursor management in VB

Dec 8th, 2006

One of the more subtle aspects of traditional VB application development is controlling the screen cursor when you're performing some lengthy operation which might involve multiple functions or subroutines. The polite thing to do is obviously set the screen cursor to an hourglass just before you commence a processing task which is likely to take more than second or so. The polite thing is to also switch it back to an arrow, once you're finished.

Is your mobile diverting to voicemail too quickly?

Dec 4th, 2006

I finally learnt how to extend the time my mobile phone rings before going to voicemail.

Merchants of Deception

Nov 30th, 2006

Just finished reading Merchants of Deception by Eric Scheibeler and I'd highly recommend it to anyone who has suspected that there might be dodgy goings on at Amway, one of the largest privately held companies in the world.

Replacing stupid laws with moronic ones

Nov 25th, 2006

Has anyone read the Australian Government's proposed new copyright laws? The new reforms on Philip Ruddock's website defy logic and common sense. From their Q&A section:

The perfect HTML markup guide

Nov 21st, 2006

While there are lots of HTML primers out there, there's one which every web designer should read and understand. It's 37 Steps to Perfect Markup by Tommy Olsson. Strictly speaking, this is not for beginners but rather for those folks who think they know enough HTML to get by. Because, it's often these same folks who lack the understanding of the repercussions of getting it even slightly wrong.

Checking for Office applications in Visual Basic

Nov 16th, 2006

I recently got an email from one of our readers who found our Spellchecking from Visual Basic article useful but wanted to know if there was a way to ensure that Microsoft Word was installed before attempting to invoke the spellchecking function.

MySQL query cache to the rescue

Nov 11th, 2006

Dynamic database driven websites are great. You just add your content and the website software grabs that content from the database, applies all the necessary formatting and displays it nicely and consistently to the user.

100 million websites

Nov 5th, 2006

The latest survey from Netcraft shows that there are now more than 100 million websites on the internet, noting that:

Is IE ready to take on Firefox?

Nov 1st, 2006

While the popularity race between the new major versions of Firefox and IE is on (and Firefox winning), we can honestly say from personal experience that while the IE team has done a very good job in bringing their browser into the current century, it has managed to do so mainly at the expense of performance.

Is your website used for relay spam?

Oct 28th, 2006

Most websites have contact forms, which allow customers to get in touch with the website owners, without the owners necessarily having to reveal their contact email address. The customer typically fills in their name, email address and some message text. When the customer submits the contact form for processing, the server software then constructs an email message and sends it to the website administrator or owner.

Google loves blogs

Oct 23rd, 2006

If you want any proof that Google loves blogs, have a look at some specifics for our own website below:

Image spam is back

Oct 18th, 2006

Image spam seems to be back, bigger and more annoying than ever. What's even more annoying is that this type of rubbish is also difficult for spam filters to catch due to its nature. For instance, looking at the following sample image clearly shows us that if we have our email client configured to show HTML images, we'll see something like this:

Parsing comma-separated data in PHP

Oct 14th, 2006

It's only recently that I discovered the PHP function fgetcsv(), which offers a quick and powerful way of handling CSV data, such as that exported by Excel and other spreadsheets.

API Guide

Oct 10th, 2006

Sooner or later, every VB programmer needs to be able to plugin to the native Windows framework to perform some task which isn't possible with their development platform. The KPD-Team from Belgium, offers a nicely documented and searchable database of over 900 useful functions which make up the API-Guide:

Sensis relevancy - deux

Oct 6th, 2006

Recently I documented the poor communication skills of the people behind Sensis, the yellowpages and whitepages company, now also promoting themselves as The search engine for Australians.

JavaScript with XHTML

Oct 4th, 2006

Having recently ported some HTML pages to XHTML, we were a little surprised that our favourite validator continued to warn us that our very simple one-line javascript code was no longer correct:

Sharpreader RSS aggregator

Oct 1st, 2006

After trying a bunch of RSS readers, we finally settled on Sharpreader from a clever bloke by the name of Luke Hutteman.

The problem with Linux

Sep 27th, 2006

Over at ZDNet Australia, Steven Deare asks a very pertinent question about why the decision by Kennards Hire to switch from Windows to Linux on all of it's desktops has sadly remained inconspicuous:

Sensis ignoring your business? Sure, but why?

Sep 23rd, 2006

Do you operate a small business, here in Australia? If so, is it listed in the online versions of the yellowpages and whitepages directories?

Stripping whitespace in PHP

Sep 20th, 2006

Here's a simple way to strip all whitespace from a string in PHP, which is useful for properly trimming any user input:

Searching for search engines?

Sep 16th, 2006

If you want proof that there's still a significant percentage of internet users who haven't bothered to learn even the basics of how to use their browser, look no further than the Wordtracker top keywords list:

Spellchecking from Visual Basic

Sep 13th, 2006

Here's a quick way to run a spellcheck on any data stream from within your VB6 application:

Ebay shill bidding

Sep 8th, 2006

In the online auction marketplace, shill bidding is the corrupt practise of bidding on your own items or having friends (or other corrupt associates) bid on your items, purely to artificially inflate the final price and make the legitimate buyers pay more for the item you're selling.

Programmers excuses

Sep 5th, 2006

Recently, I stumbled on this amusing list of things developers have said, when their software doesn't quite work as intended:

Office and backup files

Sep 1st, 2006

One of our readers commented on a negative side-effect of our disk cleaning tip we posted last week. It seems that if you use our batch file to clean your hard disk, your Microsoft Office applications may no longer work correctly.

Undelivered mail returned to sender

Aug 29th, 2006

The clever little spammers must be desperate. Lately they've been using the old undelivered mail returned to sender as the mail subject, in order to get our attention.

Quick disk cleanup

Aug 25th, 2006

Every few months, I like to do a little spring cleaning and remove the hundreds of temporary and backup files which get left behind by various applications.

How to lose a customer, Amazon style

Aug 22nd, 2006

Having been assigned the job of transferring some 20-odd kilograms of VHS-C and Video8 tapes to DVD, I set upon the task of researching video capturing, editing and authoring software.

Office personalised menus

Aug 18th, 2006

Microsoft have done a number of counter-intuitive things over the years in the quest of improved usability and after the pesky office assistant and the distracting auto spelling and grammar checker, the personalized menus introduced in Office 2000 are often the very next thing many advanced users turn off before they use any of it's components.

Finding duplicate records with SQL

Aug 15th, 2006

Although I don't spend a lot of time doing any type of relational database administration, occasionally I get asked to find duplicate records in tables. Here's the easiest way to do it, assuming your database supports subqueries:

Satisfied with wannabe broadband

Aug 10th, 2006

Apparently, according to our very own Senator Coonan, most Australians are perfectly satisfied with what I referred to as wannabe broadband, some twelve months ago.

Nielsen study endorses fluid design

Aug 8th, 2006

Jakob Nielsen adds weight to our theory that fluid design makes sense for public websites, claiming that the users with high resolution monitors almost never maximise their browser windows to the full screen.

Schedule Organizer

Aug 4th, 2006

I stumbled across this one while doing some research on a totally unrelated topic. Having been sufficiently impressed with it's simultaneous simplicity and affability, I thought I might share my findings.

The 1 percent rule of spam?

Aug 1st, 2006

A recent New York Times article proves just why spam is still so effective: the world contains enough computer-using knuckeheads to make it profitable.

Westpac ranked the worst for website presentation

Jul 28th, 2006

One of our most popular articles is my rant on the Westpac crippled feedback page which attempted to explain that the banking giant not only had a poor grasp of web standards and design, but was also very difficult to communicate with.

Document your PHP projects with PHPXRef

Jul 25th, 2006

PHPXref is a handy developer tool, written by Gareth Watts, which cross-references the source code in PHP projects and creates readable HTML documentation which can be viewed with any web browser. The main features of PHPXref are:

Analysing software license agreements

Jul 21st, 2006

Do you know of anyone who actually reads the license agreement when they install a piece of software?

Deleting files with bad names in Linux

Jul 18th, 2006

In an earlier post I talked about the usefulness of the Linux find command to delete old files. Another, perhaps less common, use is to delete files with bad characters in the name. For instance, the famous tar archiver allows you to exclude certain files by specifying the --exclude=filename option.

Better web security with SiteAdvisor

Jul 14th, 2006

Everyone who's used the web has at some point encountered spyware attacks, online scams and spamming sites which earn their profits by taking advantage of user ignorance. While Ad-Aware and Spybot S & D are two must-have tools that no Windows user should be without, there's an excellent and free browser plugin from McAfee which warns you before you interact with any of the millions of dangerous websites out there.

Google is now officially a verb

Jul 11th, 2006

According to the folks behind Merriam-Webster, google is now officially a verb, after having been submitted for consideration some three months ago. It's approved meaning is:

Why every business needs a CMS

Jul 7th, 2006

According to Melbourne IT, while more than 90% of internet users get to websites via search engines, more than 50% of all Australian businesses who have a website cannot easily be found in a major search engine like Google.

Windows Live? Hardly.

Jul 4th, 2006

It's been over three months since the launch of Windows Live, Microsoft's klutzy Google killer project. Like Google, Windows Live is offering personalisation of your homepage, with news, weather, mail, and (apparently) more.

Fancy HTML tables with CSS

Jun 30th, 2006

I got an email from an anonymous reader a few days ago who, after presumably reading my recent article on pretty tables, wanted to know if there was a way to extend the idea:

Why fluid design works

Jun 27th, 2006

As part of a web redesign project, a colleague of mine wanted to redo the pages to fit 1024x768 resolution but he also wanted an alternative design to accommodate the relatively small percentage of users still stuck with 800x600 pixels. He wanted to know how to go about determening the users browser resolution, so he could present the content using the appropriate template which matches that resolution.

Award winners fail the website accessibility test

Jun 23rd, 2006

One of the most important aspects of public website design is to ensure that online information and services are accessible by all people, including those with disabilities. In Australia, the Disability Discrimination Act (1992), for instance, requires that all websites that receive federal funding be accessible to users with a disability.

Pretty HTML tables with CSS

Jun 20th, 2006

Back in old days of web design, making pretty tables was usually achieved by nesting one table within another. By setting the background colour of the outer table a few shades darker than the inner one, you could achieve a nice bordered look. With the move to XHTML, this is generally considered to be poor design as it contravenes the principle that you should use CSS for the presentation and the HTML only for markup.

Your boss is spying on you

Jun 16th, 2006

Do you work for a large company? If so, did you know that they probably already pay people to read your outgoing email?

Google maps Australia, finally.

Jun 13th, 2006

Some fifteen months after it's announcement, Google Maps have finally got Australia covered. The new version of the API makes it a snap to add a customised interactive image map, such as this one, to your website.

Lies, damn lies and (web) statistics

Jun 9th, 2006

Like most webmasters, we record website statistical information to help us determine who our regular readers are and what they're reading. As of last week, this is a summary of the ratio of browsers used to access our website:

A year of blogging

Jun 6th, 2006

It's been exactly one year since we obliterated our traditional website and joined the blogosphere.

Hottest search engine optimization software?

Jun 2nd, 2006

That's what the people behind the RankAttack SEO Technology website claim anyway. Apparently, their aggressive technology (whatever that means) enables the overwhelming majority of webmasters to enjoy improved rankings with the search engines in a matter of just days. Yes, that's right, days. Not weeks, not months but days.

Why do people hate Microsoft?

May 30th, 2006

I've admired the work of Danny Katz for quite a while now. Amongst other things, he writes some wonderfully quirky and humorous columns for The Age, here in Melbourne.

Blog usability mistakes

May 26th, 2006

Since they first appeared on the scene towards the end of the last century, blogs have emerged as one of the most effective and popular means of communication. So much so, that lots and lots of businesses use them as a means of establishing and maintaining their reputation or brand.

Quality content matters more than ever

May 19th, 2006

A few weeks ago, the search engine marketing firm iProspect published the findings of their study in search engine user behaviour which revealed a definite increase in the importance of websites getting top natural search results.

Computing, the Hollywood way

May 16th, 2006

On a lighter note, I read this article on The Wall Street Journal about Hollywood and their often absurd portrayal of computing and the internet on the big screen.

Spamming search engines with invisible text

May 11th, 2006

Got some SMS spam from my current spouse telling me she found the chaise lounge she was (apparently) looking for and could she buy it while it was a bargain of a lifetime?.

Chain letter response

May 8th, 2006

A couple of day ago, I got another one of those chain letters which promises much money, just for forwarding the stupid email to as many people as you know. Even though this particular email has been circulating around the internet for at least a couple of years, it seems that there's plenty of greedy suckers out there who seemingly continue to take the bait.

Show stolen web content with Autoblogger

May 4th, 2006

The RSS syndication format is gaining rapid acceptance in the computing community. While blogs such as this one have always provided RSS content, the mainstream media are finally starting to catch on to the benefits RSS offers to the consumer.

Is SEO overrated?

Apr 29th, 2006

For those who visit here regularly, my views on search engine optimisation techniques are pretty much known. Recently, I engaged in an online discussion in a forum thread which attempted to get different opinions on whether SEO was in fact overrated.

Sony's stupid email patent

Apr 25th, 2006

I have to admit that I do enjoy getting stuck into Sony and their inferior software. According to US patent 7016940, Sony now own the exclusive right to make a piece of software which will:

Form loading trap in VB.NET

Apr 21st, 2006

One of the first problems a VB6 developer encounters when migrating to VB.NET is that the way forms are loaded has changed completely. Although this (typical) VB6 method of loading the main application form is syntactically correct, it will definitely not produce the desired result:

Firefox extensions for web developers

Apr 17th, 2006

We all know just what a great browser Firefox is. It has an intuitive interface. It blocks viruses, spyware, and popup advertising. It delivers web pages fast. It conforms to web standards. It uses tabbed browsing. It was built with security in mind, not as an after-thought.

Holy meat navigation

Apr 11th, 2006

I know that Pope John Paul II has only been dead for a year now, and what I'm about to say could be interpreted as blasphemy, but did he get ripped off by his web designers or what? Take a look at his website and see for yourself.

Preventing image theft

Apr 7th, 2006

We're getting a little annoyed with some webmasters out there who continue to link directly to some of the images on our website. As far as we're concerned, this practise equates to theft because they're using the bandwidth we pay for. By adding these four lines to our .htaccess file, we have now put a stop to the pilfering:

Infosys from the inside

Apr 3rd, 2006

I got a weblink sent to me by a friend, who suggested it would make a very good read, considering it appeared to be written by someone who either dislikes the infamous Indian outsourcing giant Infosys and still works there or dislikes the infamous Indian outsourcing giant Infosys and no longer works there.

Secure web pages with PHP/MySQL

Mar 30th, 2006

While there are numerous examples of poorly implemented web applications causing all sorts of security problems, the first step to take when developing in a PHP/Apache environment is to make sure your application always works with register_globals switched off.

Automatic MySQL Backup

Mar 27th, 2006

If you need to archive your MySQL databases in a Linux environment, there's no better tool than Harley's AutoMySQLBackup.

PC Inspector File Recovery

Mar 22nd, 2006

Have you ever had to recover deleted files on your Windows XP/2000 computer? Not the ones in your recycle bin but the ones you've permanently deleted?

Looks and smells like comment spam

Mar 18th, 2006

Lately we've been getting a few of these types of comments, which seem to slip through the cracks, even though we're using one of the best anti-spam applications there is:

Are Bitacle blog thieves too?

Mar 14th, 2006

I have previously talked about websites which offer stolen content in the guise of some sort of service and now we're been forced to ban Bitacle from accessing our server.

SQL string formatting in VBScript

Mar 10th, 2006

If you're a software developer, string concatenation is something you do regularly, irrespective of the programming language you use. While languages such as C, C++, Perl and PHP all support the very useful sprintf() function, the VB/VBScript developers have traditionally had to resort to using a combination of single and double quotes, escape characters, text, line continuation characters and ampersands (&) to get the job done.

"Our Dale" gets gold but loses some respect

Mar 6th, 2006

It now appears that Dale Begg-Smith is quite a bit more than the spam man he was initially labelled by some sections of the media. According to this article from The Age, it seems that a number of people have been busy trying to uncover Dale's shady business practices.

Sensis relevancy

Mar 2nd, 2006

About 18 months ago, Sensis launched its new multi-content search engine to much fanfare. According to the ZDNet article Telstra launches search heavyweight, the Sensis management had high expectations that their new search engine would be the one others would eventually be compared to, because apparently:

Deleting old files in Linux

Feb 27th, 2006

While the Linux find command has a number of uses, the most obvious being looking for files matching full or partial names, the one often underused option is to use it to locate old files. To show all files in /tmp/ivan/ older than 7 days:

Where's your home page?

Feb 23rd, 2006

I got an email from a friend of mine who occasionally reads this blog. His comments about one aspect of this website, and my subsequent reply, were interesting enough for me want to use them as the basis for this blog entry.

Email obfuscator

Feb 20th, 2006

Displaying mailto links in web pages is much less widespread than it used to be in the good old days, largely thanks to the proliferation of web scraping spam harvesters.

The (broken) Da Vinci code challenge

Feb 16th, 2006

Sony are at it again. This time it's Sony Pictures contributing to the web monkeys of the year awards.

Google death sentence

Feb 13th, 2006

Now that BMW and Ricoh have been caught spamming the search engines and their German websites have been removed from the Google index, I hope that BMW and Ricoh sack those idiots who obviously thought that trying to fool the world's biggest search engine was a good idea.

Is ZoneAlarm Spyware?

Feb 8th, 2006

According to our friends at InfoWorld, ZoneAlarm, one of the most popular (if not over-hyped) personal firewall, anti-spyware and security pieces of software, appears to be spyware. Apparently, ZoneAlarm V6.0 is in the habit of:

Commonwealth Games, Outlook and Daylight Savings

Feb 3rd, 2006

As you're probably aware, the Australian Federal and State governments have decided to extend daylight savings by an extra week, due to the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne.

The local hosts file trick

Jan 30th, 2006

There's a old but effective trick to block those annoying ads, banners. cookies and hijackers. When your computer makes a TCP/IP request, it first attempts to use your local hosts file before it looks at any public DNS servers, so it can translate the nice (human readable) domain names to numeric IP addresses.

Coke Zero (Out of Ten)

Jan 25th, 2006

Apparently, Coke are pumping in some $18 million on the new Coke Zero campaign in the hope of getting lots of yuppies switching across to the new no real sugar, just artificial sweeteners (but we guarantee that it's good for you) fizzy drink.

Wi-Fi security for dummies

Jan 21st, 2006

Wi-Fi is fast becoming the preferred way to network a small office or the home. The hardware is cheap and readily available and the setup and configuration is so easy that even a dummy can do it.

Westpac security improvements

Jan 17th, 2006

A couple of months ago, Charles Wright, the IT blogger for The Age, questioned why virtually none of the Australian banks used dual authentication, to improve security for their customers.

Blog thieves

Jan 12th, 2006

Q: When is a blog not a blog? A: When the content is simply stolen, verbatim.

The best 404 page

Jan 9th, 2006

From time to time we all get the dreaded 404 not found error on the web. I copped one earlier today and I reckon this is the best one I've ever seen.

Dumbest moments

Jan 4th, 2006

Q: Who said this? I don't care if people think I'm a dumb blond or stupid or an overage actress or over the hill. I don't care because I'm gonna have a very successful Internet company, and I'm gonna have $100 million in the bank and I don't really give a shit what anybody thinks!

Guess who's blogging?

Dec 24th, 2005

If you can read this, then you've got Tim Berners-Lee to thank. This is the bloke who invented the World Wide Web from a random thought:

Sony software: dumb, dodgy and dishonest?

Dec 20th, 2005

For as long as the their executives continue to attend stupidity classes, Sony will continue to cop a battering from the consumers. Their Star Wars Galaxies online game has earned comments like:

Ticketmaster: useful, unless you want to buy tickets

Dec 16th, 2005

A couple of days ago I attempted to purchase some tickets for the second U2 concert at Telstra Dome, next March.

Registry mechanic dialogue

Dec 13th, 2005

If you're running one of the many flavours of Windows, you would have noticed that the more software you install, the slower your computer seems to get. A good system registry cleaner is an indispensable tool to keep your system running as it should.

How much is a website?

Dec 9th, 2005

After some six years of web development, I still get the I want a website, how much will it cost question on a regular basis. Over the years, I have learnt to reply with:

Firefox 1.5 released

Dec 5th, 2005

The award-winning Firefox browser has just had a major upgrade. There are a number of good reasons to update. Apart from the bugfixes, here's what's new in version 1.5:

HTML colours

Nov 30th, 2005

The following list of 140 HTML colours stems from the original X11 colour names and is our preferred choice of defining colours in web content. While not recognised by some of the older browsers, all modern general-purpose browsers support the full list:

PHP upgrade woes

Nov 27th, 2005

There's been lots of noise about PHP 5.0.5 breaking application code which had been happily running for quite some time under previous versions.

Sony software: dumb, defective and dangerous

Nov 23rd, 2005

Sony have embarrassed themselves recently with their dumb, defective and dangerous attempt at copy protecting some CD releases under their Sony BMG label.

Email etiquette

Nov 19th, 2005

Dealing with junk mail from spammers is one thing. But junk mail I personally get from people I know is another. Chain letters, stupid attachments, pointless replies and virus hoaxes are not only a waste of bandwidth but they're a waste of time as well.

Wordpress is secure, Sam

Nov 15th, 2005

In his article for The Age from a few days ago, entitled Linux worm attacks PHP flaw, Sam Varghese asserts:

Zombie hunting

Nov 12th, 2005

Our federal government has finally decided to do something about the scourge that is spam by launching an initiative which has been designed to identify all virus-infected computers in this country.

Pricenoia

Nov 9th, 2005

If you've ever bought any books (or other stuff) from Amazon, you might find Pricenoia a useful service. According to their website:

Does SAP work under Linux?

Nov 4th, 2005

Linux has copped a bit of bad press just recently. Well, Red Hat Australia have, anyway.

Hungarian notation - deux

Nov 1st, 2005

It doesn't happen all that often but when it does, it's worth the wait. You see, I'm one of those insubordinate software developers who has for many years insisted that Hungarian notation is crap because not even Hungarians find it useful. I was one of the obnoxiously vocal minority who just refused to conform to variable naming conventions, Microsoft-style.

VB grows up

Oct 28th, 2005

For experienced VB.NET developers this isn't really anything new but having spent most of my time in the last five years writing web applications in PHP, I have to admit that I'm a bit of a late starter in this area. Having just recently worked on a new project using the .NET framework, I can tell you that as a former Visual Basic developer, I'm really impressed.

I want to sell things on the internet

Oct 25th, 2005

What follows is an actual recent conversation between a customer support representative at Net Solutions (our ISP/host) and a prospect. As a matter of good taste, the names have been changed to protect the innocently ignorant:

Westpac crippled feedback page

Oct 21st, 2005

Recently, while attempting to use the Westpac website for online banking, I experienced some problems. Not wanting to phone their hotline, I attempted to contact them via email. Like so many other larger organisations, Westpac don't publish their support email addresses, insisting you use their online feedback form instead.

Top design stupidities of 2005

Oct 19th, 2005

According to Jakob Nielsen's recent article, things haven't changed all that much in web design over the years. It seems that selfishness, ignorance and sometimes even downright stupidity still persist and are becoming a common pattern. In order of infamy:

As fresh as a Daisy

Oct 16th, 2005

If you're running one of the numerous flavours of the Windows operating system, you've no doubt experienced the continuous and systematic updates or hotfixes you're having to apply to your computer just to keep it secure. This is normally done via Internet Explorer, via the Tools > Windows Update menu or by pointing your browser directly to the Microsoft Windows Update website.

Mozilla autocomplete bug

Oct 12th, 2005

I recently came across an annoying little bug which seems to affect all Mozilla based browsers, including the current version (1.07) of Firefox. It seems to happen when you have a form text input field and you're using Javascript to validate whether the user has entered anything into that input field. So, for instance if you had a text input field like this:

Home pages are becoming redundant

Oct 9th, 2005

Recent usability testing conducted by Mark Hurst boldly asserts that Google has made home pages virtually

Free software

Oct 5th, 2005

With so much confusion about the free software and open source software models, I think it's important to reiterate what is meant by those terms, and specifically what is meant by the word free.

Is Amazon spying on you?

Sep 30th, 2005

Have you purchased a Dell computer recently? If you did, then you may have also copped the Alexa Toolbar for free, as part of the pre-configured Internet Explorer. This seemingly handy little utility offers a number of features to allegedly enhance your browsing experience and looks similar to this:

XP manifest files

Sep 27th, 2005

Even though Windows XP supports skinnable interfaces, Visual Basic 6 applications will not automatically inherit the new look and feel. This is not surprising, considering VB6 has been around long before Windows XP came out. What is surprising though, is that your VB.NET applications also will not automatically inherit the new look.

A browser hijacking experience

Sep 23rd, 2005

I would like to share my browser hijacking experience with you. As a web developer I still have to use Microsoft Internet Explorer from time to time to test web compatibility. On this particular day, I, like a million others got compromised somewhere down the track while visiting legitimate sites of interest.

Ebay and the Skype hype

Sep 20th, 2005

Ebay has just recently committed to coughing up $4.1 billion (US) for Skype, that wonderful example of VOIP technology, which is really, really cheap and works pretty well, most of the time, for most users.

Search engine meta tags - deux

Sep 16th, 2005

In my previous post about the relevance of search engine meta tags I claimed that the keywords meta tag was almost useless these days. As a follow up, I thought I'd show you a real-world example.

Dell is confused

Sep 12th, 2005

Hey Dell, Plastered at the top of your Australian website's pages is:

Lightweight ADO class

Sep 9th, 2005

When putting together dynamic web applications in an ASP environment, developers use ADO recordsets for the overwhelming majority of their database interfacing. Although most web applications will involve data entry forms, where the user will insert, update and delete database records, the biggest performance issues are in presenting recordset output to the client browser.

Search engine meta tags

Sep 6th, 2005

This is old news but perhaps it's worth mentioning again. Quite some time ago, Danny Sullivan from Search engine watch had written an excellent article, which ought to re-read by every so-called webmaster and anyone else claiming to understand search engine optimisation.

Beware of Microsoft AntiSpyware

Sep 2nd, 2005

Microsoft had a big hit on their hands earlier this year when they released a free version of the anti-spyware software they purchased from GIANT Company Software, Inc.

VBScript hashtable

Aug 30th, 2005

For quite some time now, the more vigilant Windows IIS administrators have typically been configuring their hosts to have the filesystem object removed, due to an inherent security flaw which permits a malicious user to gain access to the servers directories and files.

Microsoft move in on LAMP

Aug 26th, 2005

Microsoft is going to release Visual Studio 2005 Express in 2006. As much as I am tempted, I won't comment on that by the way. It will cost somewhere around AUD$89 and the word is that it may be released free as part of some promotions.

Readnotify. Spyware?

Aug 24th, 2005

When I first heard of this from a colleague of mine, and based on her enthusiastic explanation, I thought it was just another shonky internet venture. But I was only partially right, it's a little more sinister than that.

Weasel words

Aug 22nd, 2005

One of the less insidious repercussions of America's global business culture has caused such a degradation of our language that nobody is really sure what corporate sentences mean any more. But to make things even worse, slick corporate marketing language, littered with weasel words is infesting other aspects of our communication too.

Cook Islands business domains

Aug 20th, 2005

Google has a localised presence in most countries around the world. Yesterday, while looking at the extent of their dominance, I noticed that one of the places they do have a localised presence is in the Cook Islands, in the heart of the Pacific.

Flash blocker

Aug 18th, 2005

All advertising is annoying. But Macromedia have upped the annoyance factor by a couple notches with their irritating technology which allows websites to get around popup-blockers and ad-blockers. Since most browsers don't have the ability to turn off Flash on an individual website basis, many commercial websites have now adopted it as a means of advertising their wares.

Spam gangs

Aug 15th, 2005

According to Spamhaus, their ROKSO database is: The Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) database collates information and evidence on known professional spam operations that have been terminated by a minimum of 3 Internet Service Providers for spam offenses.

What business can learn from open-source

Aug 12th, 2005

Paul Graham, the renowned technical writer and programming language designer has an excellent essay entitled What business can learn from open source. Paul makes some interesting assertions:

Wannabe broadband

Aug 8th, 2005

According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), broadband is defined as a transmission capacity that is faster than 1.5 Mbps.

Why spam works

Aug 5th, 2005

Spammers are criminals, it's as simple as that. If no one responded to junk email, and didn't buy products and services sold in this manner, then spam would be as extinct as the dodo bird.

F-Prot update dialogue

Aug 2nd, 2005

Recently, while looking to replace my ailing Norton Antivirus, I installed F-Prot Antivirus V3.16c. As part of the installation procedure, F-Prot offered to check for updates and after a few minutes of trying without success, presented me with this dialogue box:

Don't emulate Amazon

Aug 1st, 2005

Even though Amazon is still the world's best ecommerce site, it's design should not be emulated. The major reason their design works is not due to good design principles but rather due to the fact that they are so well established.

Genuine advantage cracked

Jul 28th, 2005

A few days ago, Microsoft has implemented Genuine Advantage, a scheme which attempts to stamp out the use of pirated copies of Windows XP, by insisting that users must verify their serial number before they can run Windows Update.

Disk usage

Jul 24th, 2005

As a Linux developer, sometimes you need to know how much space is taken up by files in a directory. The following command shows all files in the current directory, ordered by descending file size:

Boosting your website ranking

Jul 20th, 2005

I received a phone call from a mate of mine who was approached by an internet marketing company claiming they can boost his business website's ranking in search engines. He wanted to know if it was a good investment.

SQL injection attacks

Jul 16th, 2005

As Steve Friedl's excellent article on SQL injection attacks shows, sloppy programming can lead to disasterous consequences for a database-driven website, especially if that database is Microsoft SQL Server.

Managing incoming email

Jul 11th, 2005

Mark Hurst, the good experience guy and customer experience consultant has a free downloadable whitepaper on managing incoming email.

Software patents

Jul 7th, 2005

According to the free online dictionary of computing a software patent is a patent intended to prevent others from using some programming technique.

Click here. No, click there!

Jul 2nd, 2005

If all interface designers bothered to read W3C's HTML Techniques for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines we wouldn't have the current state of link idiocy that seems to abound the web.

Optimise your internet connection

Jun 26th, 2005

Windows XP and 2000 are by default configured for Ethernet network usage rather than high-speed internet connections, which have a much larger latency when transmitting packets of data.

WWW should be abolished

Jun 20th, 2005

Provided the web server software for a domain is configured correctly, a web site can be accessed without entering the www. Try our own site, for instance.

MySQL backup

Jun 14th, 2005

For those of you lucky enough to have Linux shell access here's a quick tip for backing up and restoring your MySQL database:

Strong passwords

Jun 9th, 2005

The password generator from the Winguides Network allows you to create random passwords that are highly secure and extremely difficult to crack or guess due to an optional combination of lower and upper case letters, numbers and punctuation symbols.

Hungarian notation

Jun 6th, 2005

Hungarian notation is a naming convention in computer programming, in which the name of an object indicates its type and intended use. According to Charles Simonyi, the inventor of Hungarian notation and senior programmer (at the time) at Microsoft, it was invented so:

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About

I'm Ivan Lutrov and I'm an independent web consultant and owner of Lutrov Interactive.

I create cost effective business websites and provide sensible online marketing advice.

I have 25 years of real experience producing interactive work, so you can be comfortable knowing you're dealing with a trusted and skilled professional, and not some naive "design geek" who's trying to improve his portfolio at your expense.

Learn more about the reasons why you should hire me for your next web project.

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