Jason Parlour

Jason of many trades : Maker & Fabricator, Engineer, Massage Therapist, Presenter, Photographer, Web Developer, …

Category: tech blog

  • New ‘written contract’ now available through our website

    To help keep things clear to our clients, we’ve just added a new plain English written contract, to our website.

    This was very kindly provided, under the creative commons licence, by Andy Clark of Transcending CSS.  We’ve subsequently modified his version to fit more appropriately within our own policies and procedures, but are very grateful to Andy for his excellent direction in this, and of course his inspirational book: ‘Transcending CSS, the fine art of web design’.

    Many thanks Andy.

  • .co domain names are nearly ready for purchase

    If you’re not a regular purchaser of domain names, you may have missed that .co domain names are about to go on to public release, so anyone will soon be able to buy their own .co domain name (ie www.my-new-domain.co).

    .co is the new domain extension, that’s been released from Columbia.Columbian nationals have the rights to www.my-domain.com.co however, you’ll soon be able to purchase your own domain, ending in .co

    There are of course many other domain extensions you can buy, such as the most famous .com, and .co.uk, as well as .net, .org, and slightly more recently .info and .biz.  This newer range of domain extensions (such as .me, .tv, .us) are related to countries that have decided to allow open purchase of their second level domain names (ie the bit, just before their country abbreviation).

    There have been four phases to the launch of .co:

    1. The first round that allowed registered Columbian brands to buy their name in the first round ,
    2. The second round allowed national trademarks to buy their domain,
    3. The third round was an auction style landrush (ie customers interested in domains with a high global value, to bid against each other)
    4. And now the fourth round, where any person or company, anywhere in the world, can purchase their own domain on a first-come first-served basis, from 7pm British Summer Time (6pm GMT).

    We’ve had a number of pre-purchase requests made with our domain registrars, so hopefully we may be successful in purchasing a few domains.

    According to the official .co website www.cointernet.co, 87,489 domains were registered in the first 15 minutes of the domain name extension going live on the public market!

  • Microsoft Tag, for your mobile, on Parlour Design

    You may now have seen the multicoloured triangular shaped as one of the contact numbers on our contact us page. This is part of a new free application for your mobile, called Microsoft TAG.

    The idea being, you download and install the free application via your mobile, from http://gettag.mobi, and when you scan the bar code above, it will automatically offer to dial our main contact phone number to reach us at Parlour Design. The barcode can be designed to do other things too, such as:

    • Open a URL suitable for your mobile, in your mobile internet browser.
    • Have a text automatically sent to your phone, with further information about whatever you’ve just seen
    • Open a new contact card, with the relevant company details, names, numbers, email, etc. onto your phone.

    Microsoft are expecting this tag to take off in a big way. (other applications have already been developed to read standard bar codes from products, and then compare prices with local stores automatically, this system however should offer quite a lot more)

    Official launch day was yesterday, and over a million posters have already had this kind of tag printed on them.  Mobiles are of course a part of every day life for most people now (recent research shows that a 7 year old is more likely to own a mobile than a book in the UK!). So having a simple way for people to walk around with their mobiles, see a tag, and get the relevant information directly onto their mobiles could well be the future of things to come.

    If you’ve got a ‘new generation’ phone (ie one with a built in camera, internet access, and the opportunity to install applications), then just visit http://gettag.mobi on your mobile.

    To learn more about it in your normal web browser, just visit http://tag.microsoft.com

  • Spam is getting more selective – Annual Design Awards

    Spam emails are certainly getting more selective.

    The email harvesting robots which trawl the web are now (on a strangely positive side) aligning harvested email addresses and targeting them at specific groups (ie email addresses that have not been opted in, but just collected in plain text from different websites it finds).

    I’m sure my email address has now just been ‘sold’ (for a very small price no doubt), to lists claiming I’ve been opted in.

    One of the hidden email addresses on the Parlour Design website (one that a typical human browser would have no reason to find), has just been invited to the ‘Annual Design Awards’, whereby for a fee, we can enter into a competition and submit our best design.

    Using their special promotional code sent via email, we can also get a discount!

    So if we were genuinely being invited by a human, they would have used one of the publicised email addresses on the main website.

    Similarly, my belief is that if this was a genuine industry award, we wouldn’t pay to enter, but that the cost of looking through my entry would be covered by their advertising and sponsorship of the event.

    I will of course be keeping clear of it.

    That particular email address has now been blocked from further spam indefinitely, and the area it was used for, has now been updated to a new email address again.

    I wonder how long it’ll be before this new email gets spammed again!

  • PayPal Virus Email – “Urgent Notice: PayPal Limited”

    Just had a classic virus attachment email:

    We recently have determined that different computers have logged into your account, and multiple password failures were present before the login. Therefore your account has been limited.

    Please download the form attached to this email and open it in a web browser.

    Once opened, you will be provided with steps to restore your access.

    We appreciate your understanding as we work to ensure account safety.

    Copyright © 1999-2010 PayPal, Inc. All rights reserved.

    PayPal Pty Limited ABN 93 111 195 389 (AFSL 304962). Any general financial product advice provided in this site has not taken into account your objectives, financial situations or needs.

    [Attached of course, is a file “Profile Update – PayPal.mht (144KB)”, and an html email, likely infected too]

    So how do I know so quickly it’s not real?

    1. This is a classic threat of ‘act now or you’ll loose access to your account’, under the guise of your safety.
    2. PayPal would not send attachments via email.
    3. If there was an issue, at most, they’d ask me to visit the genuine PayPal.com website by going there directly, (ie not using a hidden link on the email) and then view something from there.
    4. PayPal would not send programs to help your computer. That’s down to Microsoft, Apple, Linux, etc.
    5. The email address this was sent to, was harvested from one of my websites, not the email address I use for PayPal.
    6. The ‘To:’ field was empty within the message body (it should have my PayPal email only)
    7. They did not use my full name, or my PayPal name in their message
    8. The message layout doesn’t even contain the normal things PayPal send (although having them, does not make it genuine either, but at least not having them flags up more warnings)

    For more information about greater safety with PayPal, please view the mail PayPal website:
    https://www.paypal-marketing.co.uk/safetyadvice/safetytools.htm

    And of course, don’t open anything or forward on anything, that is sent to you via email, apparently for ‘security’ or ‘safety’.  Virtually 100% of the time it’s a complete fake and will do more harm than good.

  • Microsoft Browser Choice Screen Update for EEA Users of Windows Vista (KB976002)

    Many of the browsers to the internet are using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and for most people, the default option within Windows is the one people stick with.

    However, for so many web designers, they first design websites to ‘W3C accessibility standards’ for browsers like Mozilla, Safari, etc, and then they work out how to make things to display properly in Explorer (although the introduction of IE 8 has helped a little with this particular challenge for many designers).

    A quick check on the last month’s 9,500 unique visitors to a couple of sites (that we’ve designed) brings up statistics over the last 28 days:

    • Between 61-75% of unique visitors to the sites are still using Internet Explorer,
    • Between 15-21% are using Mozilla/Firefox.
    • Google Chrome are averaging just 2.5-5% of unique visitors (although they are compartively ‘new’ to the market).  This significant share however, has been helped by advertising heavily on their Google Search homepage to Explorer users, as well as large billboards, etc.

    This recent ‘important’ update by Microsoft however should help rebalance these statistics a little more.

    Thankfully though, with all new websites designed by ourselves at Parlour Design, because of the way we make websites, they’re not only compatible across all the major browsers (even when javascript or images are turned off), but they can display on mobile phones too!

  • Blogger has extended it’s ftp support until the 1st May

    I’m very pleased to say that Blogger has extended it’s end of support of ftp by about 5 weeks to the 1st May 2010

    http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/2010/02/migration-deadline-extended-to-may-1.html

    It’s good news on some regards (gives us extra time to sort out a viable solution for our clients, before it’s cut completely)

    However, based on the increasingly slow service of publishing photos, videos, and even plain text blogs, changing to a self-hosted system like WordPress, does seem to be the most appropriate option for most of our clients.

  • The Blogger IP address to help circumvent the ftp lock

    I was very pleasantly surprised to receive a personal email from Rick Klau, the Business Product Manager for Blogger today, after my recent blog post below.

    He was kind enough to let me know the fixed IP address of ‘Blogger’, so that I may whitelist the blogger server, so that it can interact with our own servers, and continue to update the various blogs hosted on each of our clients websites.

    74.125.66.132
    74.125.112.132

    You can also confirm these addresses by viewing the following page on Google:
    http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?answer=41485&cbid=4qunbeknm8kq&src=cb&lev=answer

    Unfortunately though, this will only be a temporary solution for some of our clients, as from March 26th, Blogger will be totally withdrawing it’s support of ftp publishing (ie typing your blog on the blogger platform, and then hitting ‘publish’ so that it appears on your own website):
    http://blogger-ftp.blogspot.com/2010/01/deprecating-ftp.html

    (An email to this effect, should also be going out to all the email addresses associated with a blogger account using FTP to update their blog on the published server.  I’ve already received about 10 copies this evening at various times during the evening).

    They should be releasing a ‘migration tool‘ in the next few weeks, which should help with some of our clients (after a certain amount of reworking).  Unfortunately though, those blogs within a password protected members area, are unlikely to be supported by the new migration tool, so those parts of people’s websites will need to be recoded, and will be interacted with differently in the future.

  • FTP Lock for our customers (also affecting Cushy CMS & Blogger)

    We wanted to let you know in advance of a new development that we will be rolling out to the ‘manage’ control panel from the 15th February 2010.

    Over the last year there has been a substantial increase in the number of sites on the internet that have been hacked due to viruses that steal FTP credentials from user’s home computers. The hackers then use these credentials to insert hidden code within your website.

    Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumblar for more information on this type of attack.

    To reduce the significant threat from these viruses, our server hosts have been working with a focus group of administrators and direct customers to come up with a solution that protects websites. The solution is to lock FTP when it’s not in use, making it extremely difficult for the hackers to infect your site via this route.

    To unlock FTP, customers will simply log into their ‘manage’ control panel and click one button to unlock FTP for a period of time. FTP will then automatically lock again after the time period has expired.

    Customers will also be able to nominate an IP address that has permanent FTP access, customers FTPing from that IP address will not have to unlock FTP. Resellers will also be able to add an IP which will give them access to all their FTP accounts without having to unlock. Nor will you have to unlock FTP if you use the File Manager within the ‘manage’ control panel.

    These security measures will ensure that the majority of sites have FTP locked, greatly reducing the risk of having your websites infected.

    Please remember that this change will go live on the 15th February 2010.  Of course to help further reduce the chances of these types of attacks, always ensure your computer is kept up-to-date with anti-virus, malware, and spyware protection.  Similarly, try to ensure that you have the most up-to-date software from the different manufacturers.

    There’s a good chance our customers using ‘Cushy CMS’ to manage their websites will also need to log into the ‘manage’ control panel to release the FTP access, prior to making updates through cushy. 
    We expect the same will also be true for those trying to make updates to their blog through ‘Blogger’.

    We’re sorry for the inconvenience this may cause you, and are looking for a way to work around this particular problem as soon as possible.

  • What Content to Include

    What to put on your website will of course depend very much on what you’re planning to do with your website. There are a few ‘standard’ uses for a website:

    • The Online Brochure – Essentially a digital version of the sort of brochure 15 years ago you may send out to prospective customers / clients. Containing general text and images (and maybe a few videos or audio files) related to promoting your business. The sort of website content that doesn’t need to be updated too often, but still gives a reasonable overview of what you / your company does.
    • The Online Shop – A digital version of all a high street shop, or postal catalogue shop, whereby all your stock / services are arranged in a logical way by category / type, with search facilities built in, online payment options, instant stock levels linked into your main database, etc.
    • The News Portal – Updated hourly / daily / weekly / whenever, with changes to your business and updates your customers / clients / followers may be interested in. Visitors can view the most recent news items, browse previous items, look back through the archives, etc. These services may also broadcast other items that may not be directly relevant to the broadcaster, but that may be of interest to the visitors (thus helping drive visitors to the website regularly).
    • The members’ area / subscription based services – The sort websites often attributed to ‘adult’ services (although it’s also useful for many other business models too), ie monthly subscription gives unlimited access to various photos / videos / documents, that users can then view or download, or subscribe to updates and similar. A good way to maintain a regular revenue, if you can provide content that users for that sector are interested in.
    • The link farm – An all too familiar site these days, whereby often ‘good’ domain names (purchased by domain name squatters and similar, or who brought up a popular website domain when it expired), who rather than having any useful content on, are simply a page of links, often computer generated (so not necessarily appropriate to the actual domain name), which link through to other websites who’ve paid to be on there (and who ‘pay per click’ for every user who travels through one of those links). Some ‘domain name registrars’ (ie GoDaddy) now use a link farm as their ‘free holding page’ when you buy a domain name through them at ‘x’ amount per year, and they then get paid for anyone who clicks on a link through their holding page, to competitor websites!

    In general though, the following pages are normally a good guide to the basic minimum:

    • Main Index Page / Homepage – This will normally be the ‘front atrium’ for visitors to your website. Don’t just put a glossy intro on there (that’s sooo 2003), but contain all the main basic information about your business/company/profession that will encourage users to go further into your website (and provide the links for them to do so). Not all users will come via this page though, so make sure the rest of your website has links back to the main parts too.
    • Contact Us – a link to your main contact details (such as telephone number, postal mailing address, fax number, contact email address, online form). It’s REALLY important to put a contact link on every page of your website. You can never be sure when someone will decide they want to get in contact, and if you don’t make it easy for them, they may well go elsewhere.
    • Sitemap – This is a simply coded page, that provides a text link to all the main parts of your website (normally to about two levels down). It used to be this would help search engines find there way around, and similarly if your navigation wasn’t as intuitive as it could be, this was a good way users could go to where they wanted, directly. There is a new sitemap.xml document however, that’s designed primarily for Google, that helps a lot more with Google finding it’s way to all your main web pages. (As you may see from the link, it’s a little different to normal html, but thankfully there are free programs out there now that should generate this all for you, especially if you have your website hosted with Parlour Design).
    • About Us – If a new user visits your website but knows nothing about you, the ‘about us’ page or section should provide them with an overview, and reassurance that they wish to continue browsing through your website, and of course buying your products/services.
    • Terms & Conditions – Get some professional legal advice on this one. In general, the basic terms and conditions about the use of your website / products / services should be linked to on each page (normally at the base of the page). But don’t just copy and paste someone else’s: firstly it’s illegal (breach of copyright), and secondly most of the terms and conditions I’ve read on SME websites (Small and Medium Enterprises) are actually invalid under UK law because of various unfair/unreasonable terms they include!