SoCal Websites

If you haven’t explored Google Apps for Your Domain or just plain old GMail, now is the time.

GMail and Google Apps for Your Domain capacity is now 6 GB. That’s per user.

Using GMail and GA holds many benefits. If you configure it from your domain’s registrar console, your email will work even if your hosting provider is having troubles. It means less downtime for your emails.

Also, emails do not take up space on your server or hosting account. If a user does not download messages off the server, spam will quickly multiply. I’ve seen over a gig of spam in one user account before! Depending on your hosting package, you could be scratching your head wondering why you can’t upload your 200k picture to your website.

The GMail interface for webmail is second to none. Searching emails, organizing emails, sending/receiving, anything you want from a webmail client… GMail powers it better than any other free alternative I’ve used (and I’ve used most, if not all, of the major ones).

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I can’t really remember the time before tabbed browsing and Firefox’s session restore feature. On average, I probably have 5-7 tabs open at a time, and I often close Firefox with that many tabs open. It has become part of my workflow.

The other day, I learned - quite by accident - that I can rearrange the tabs on Firefox just by clicking and dragging them to another position. It’s a simple trick, and it has helped with my workflow.

Now, my tabs can reflect groupings in my workflow. When I come back to the tab in the third position, I may want to open additional tabs related to the website contained therein. Rather than just opening new tabs at the end, I can now group them all together and bring a little more organization to my tabbed browsing.

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Possibly thousands of bloggers were thrown into a panic by being locked out of their own blogs the last couple of days. The popular “Bad Behavior” plug-in started banning nearly all IP’s and in many cases locking individual users out of their own blogs.

A friend could not even access his wp-admin page, because of the glitch in the plug-in!

To the Bad Behavior author’s credit, he did issue a patched upgrade rather quickly. This is quite disturbing, however.

We noticed that this blog did not block us out of the main content or the admin, but it did prohibit MarsEdit from posting or retrieving posts. Very interesting. I’m not sure why the plug-in would only block certain types of access coming from the same IP. Because it was through MarsEdit, we did not see the standard Bad Behavior message. This makes it even more disturbing as we would have had no idea what was causing this failure in our offline blog editor.

WebGeek posts on “Bad Behavior Behaving Badly“:

This was no minor glitch, and something like this could have serious consequences for websites and businesses. If left unattended in this state for a long time, a site could lose valuable search engine rankings, after the spiders of the Big 3 (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) find that they are locked out repeatedly with 403 errors. It’s most likely that these losses would be temporary, but there’s no guarantee, and by that point the damage is done.

And the explanation comes from the Bad Behavior blog:

Update: Some people have asked for more details on what exactly happened. In brief, yesterday I moved all of my sites to a new dedicated server. In the process, I decommissioned an old blacklist I was running which I thought wasn’t being used, not realizing that Bad Behavior was still set to use it. Shortly afterward, I found myself locked out of my own blog, just as you all did. So therefore, this release.

WebGeek has recommended the removal of Bad Behavior from all blogs until stability can be assured. We agree, but suggest if you want to keep the updated version of Bad Behavior going on personal blogs you monitor closely, it will help to see if this plug-in has truly stabilized.

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