A test post

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nunc mattis arcu sed quam tincidunt et lobortis nunc volutpat. Phasellus lacinia nulla quis lectus molestie in commodo mauris blandit. Nullam in vestibulum velit. Donec libero est, volutpat non accumsan ac, rutrum vitae odio. Curabitur pretium mauris non nisi vestibulum tincidunt. Aenean tristique quam sapien, vel dapibus ligula. Maecenas commodo faucibus pulvinar. Donec eleifend ante eget purus luctus ultrices. Nulla quis sem magna, eget feugiat dui. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Etiam sodales enim in dui ultrices in dapibus ligula porta. Aenean adipiscing ipsum id massa luctus vel suscipit metus elementum. Morbi venenatis mauris eget metus tincidunt luctus eget quis elit. Cras eget ligula quis diam pharetra luctus vel ut tortor.

 

Suspendisse feugiat nibh ut augue pellentesque pellentesque. Nam tristique semper ligula, vitae tempus nisi dignissim et. Pellentesque vitae nunc lacus, eget tempor leo. Pellentesque sit amet enim ac erat porttitor ultricies id condimentum magna. Praesent sed orci aliquet sem luctus cursus. Nullam imperdiet tincidunt enim, id imperdiet eros dignissim vitae. Vivamus a urna nisi, ac vehicula nunc. Praesent a magna tortor. Sed non augue mi. Maecenas accumsan nisl a risus accumsan auctor. Maecenas euismod eros scelerisque nibh blandit nec varius elit vulputate. Pellentesque ac tempor mi. Curabitur tempor feugiat ultricies. Sed fringilla, leo vitae viverra auctor, eros ligula commodo orci, eget convallis est magna quis felis. In ut auctor elit.

Google Chrome: a quick look and how to block ads with Privoxy

photo credit: Randy Zhang

Google Chrome is no Firefox (yet).

For the last week and a bit, off and on,  I’ve been using Google Chrome (Google’s new entry into the browser wars). On the 3 XP-based systems I’ve used it on, I’ve found it to be very fast, very efficient, and stable. Pretty good performance for a ‘beta’.

I do have concerns about the way Chrome appears to ‘monitor’ my surfing activity (by using Google Gears functionality), but then again, I use Gmail and other Google Apps so I’m sure the Big G knows all about me at this point.

But, without plugin extensibility, Chrome is currently a curiosity. I won’t be using it for my daily work.

One major annoyance is the lack of Adblock. The web is a very marketing-heavy place, and I prefer to selectively view my advertising. The Adblock extension for Firefox allows this.

To achieve an advertising-reduced surfing experience with Chrome, I need to use Privoxy, a local privacy managing Proxy server. It’s a quick install and seems to work flawlessly.

A solution to this for now is http://www.privoxy.org/

1.) Install Privoxy
2.) Click on the Wrench icon in Chrome in the upper right corner
3.) Choose options>Under The Hood>Change proxy settings
4.) A windows box pops up, choose LAN settings (at least this is what it’s called in Vista)
5.) Check off “Proxy settings” and in the address setting add127.0.0.1 and in the port 8118
6.) If you have the option, you can also check off “Bypass proxy for local settings”
7.) Click “Ok”, close chrome and restart it. 

Tada. Enjoy.

Geekzone provided the process (thanks guys!)

I love mashing technology! (freebies)

Moo + LinkedIn = Free Business Cards

I’ve written before about Moo (cards & stickers) and LinkedIn (the business social network), but this is the first time I’ve written about both in the same post.

Short story.
Moo is letting you make 50 of their beautiful photo-enhanced business cards for free!

It’s really mashup²
Moo itself is a mashup of the traditional business card printing business, an online card creation and billing model, and an ability to import images from Flickr and other sources. The new mashup component is that you can import parts of your LinkedIn profile into the card creation process.

And 50 free Moo cards is always cool.

Technorati Tags: mashup, social media, business, printing, cards, moo, LinkedIn, cool, technology

Bag Open. Cat Out. Internet in danger! OpenDNS to the rescue?

photo credit: Jef Poskanzer

One little secret that your ISP (Internet Service Provider) has likely been involved with is the Internet-wide patching of the Multi-vendor DNS Issue.

Simply, this issue could allow malicious evil-doers to redirect your surfing to websites that they control, intercepting important and private information (such as passwords, banking info, etc).

Frequent Black Hat Speaker Dan Kaminsky today announced a massive, multi-vendor issue with DNS that could allow attackers to compromise any name server – clients, too. Kaminsky also announced that he had been working for months with a large number of major vendors to create and coordinate today’s release of a patch to deal with the vulnerability.

News of this industry-wide vulnerability and the collaboration (to fix the flaw) was originally scheduled to be announced at the Black Hat Security Conference in August, but due to the vulnerability being published elsewhere, the presenter thought it best to release the information so that people can take the appropriate actions.

What can you do?
Basically, this is a complex issue, but it boils down to a simple test and a very simple fix.

The test:
To find out if you are vulnerable to this issue, you can use the DNS checker link on Kaminsky’s webpage here (in the upper right corner).

The fix:
If you are vulnurable, then you can either A) wait until your ISP fixes their DNS servers, or B) set your own computer’s DNS strings to point to OpenDNS servers.

I highly recommend option B.

The OpenDNS website has friendly, easy to implement instructions on converting your DNS settings and also offer a whole host of additional features your current ISP may not have:

Features

• Features Overview
• Content Filtering
• Adult Site Blocking
• Domain Blocking
• Domain Whitelist
• Phishing Protection
• Statistics
• OpenDNS Guide
• Customization
• Large Cache
• Ultra-Reliable Network
• Shortcuts

I’ve written about OpenDNS before, so feel free to check out these previous articles and then help save the Internet.

• OpenDNS: Safer, smarter, speedier surfing
• One year of OpenDNS

And if you do test your ISP using Dan’s web page, please post your results in the comment section! I’ll start things off by adding mine.

Technorati Tags: Black Hat, DNS, OpenDNS, Security, Flaw, Vulnurability, Privacy

Merging domains — important things to consider when you feel the urge to merge

photo credit: Kevin Steele

A friend recently asked me for a bit of advice regarding merging two corporate domains. Two organizations, with similar or complimentary lines of business are now one. What to do about the left-over websites. A quandary.

Below I’ve outlined 6 areas to consider, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I guess the only reasonable quick-answer is to first understand the business goal for the merged business. Once you understand that, you can begin to ask questions about the goals for the new website.

Let me create a fictional example to help illustrate the situation, then dive into the six points, and then I’ll outline a couple of things to think about for each of these points.

Obviously there are many more things to consider, but this is a blog post and not a downloadable eBook 🙂

Please leave your thoughts on what I’ve missed! I want to learn from you…now on to the example:

Ben’s Bikes (a local mountain bike retailer) has merged with Sammy’s ski and sports shop. Ben’s Bikes is a market leader in this region, with over 40% of the annual sales volume in new mountain bikes. They also have exclusive dealership agreements with a number of the premier mountain bike manufacturers in Europe. They have a very loyal and select clientele and are considered the ‘go-to’ shop for all regional mountain biking aficionados.

Sammy’s cycle shop is a general bicycle retailer. They don’t really specialize, but they do have a wide selection of mid-priced bikes in all categories (road, mountain, touring, cruising, kids, etc). They also have multiple locations in the local geographic region.

The businesses have merged and are operating as Ben & Sammy’s cycle therapy. They have a small internal team tasked to manage the website integration.

Now that we understand the landscape, we go back to the quandary of the website. Let’s get to some important questions:

photo credit: casey atchley

Audience
These are the visitors to your site; your potential or past customers. Questions you should be asking your team include:

• Who are you servicing and what are their goals for using your website? This is basic and should be asked before any website is designed (or redesigned).
• What’s the business purpose? Is your website there to book appointments, to take orders, or to provide a catalogue of information? Your new site will depend on how well you answer that questions, and how well your audience understands that purpose.

photo credit: marcbel

Content
This is what your audience is looking for. Audiences conduct research and order online.

• Inventory — both sites likely have similar content, so which do you keep and which do you ditch? You can’t make content decisions until you’ve evaluated all the content assets.
• What about content unique to one business…is it still relevant in the new business landscape?
• Keep only content that supports the audience’s ability to fulfill the business goals of the site. Everything else is distraction.

photo credit: inju

Google Juice
Both sites have some search engine pagerank value. This is the value of
the page to a particular set of search keywords or search term. It determines how high the page appears in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) when a particular phrase or keywords are searched upon.

• Determine if pagerank is really important to your business needs, or not, and consider appropriate Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques in your merge process.
• 301 Redirects — if you’re creating a new domain, you’ll need to set these up to ensure that the search engines know that the previous businesses haven’t vanished, just merged. Setting them up can be a bit technical but is very important to ensure that visitors who’ve bookmarked the old business pages are appropriately redirected to the new site.

photo credit: perreira

Ancillary touchpoints
Over the development of the two previous websites, you’ll find that there may be some communication touchpoints including RSS feeds, tag feeds or even
regular email newsletters. You’re going to have to consider migrating
all these to the new site.

• Now’s a good time to evaluate the integration of your entire communication process. Where does web fit? How about RSS feeds of particular content streams…or newsletters? This is where your marketing team will have some valuable input too…really!
• If you’ve had a website, you’ve likely been measuring traffic to that site. Well, since you’re merging sites, now is the perfect time to re-evaluate your website measurement strategy. Will you continue using the free utilities or consider purchasing a service contract with a service provider? What kind of reporting do you need? What kind of decisions are you going to be making based on what kind of data?

photo credit: robholland

Changing external linking
Both websites have been around for a while, and have a fair number of inbound links from other sites and online articles.

• These help build pagerank (Google Juice). Yes, they’ll automagically flow through when they hit the 301 redirects, but it’s also good to contact the sites directly and ask them to update their links. This is a great time to (re)establish communication with your website network…work the social side of the medium 🙂

photo credit: alq666

Promotion on your old sites
Regardless of all the work you do, your old websites will still be bookmarked or linked in old email etc. If, perchance, that someone does click on an old link, help them find your new location.

• Keep your old sites live for a year or two. Domain names are pretty cheap these days. After you’ve merged them into the new site, kill the old content on the old sites (to reduce the size of the sites you’ll need to maintain) and leave helpful messages on the appropriate landing pages. Use your analytics and server logs to determine heavily visited pages.

I’m not the expert…what do you think!
As I mentioned, this is not a book, just a blog post. So, there are many more things to consder in the merge process. I’ve listed a few above, but what do you think? What have I missed that I shouldn’t have? Leave your thoughts below.