Sarasota Web Design, 3d Animation, Video, Audio

POP3 (Post Office Protocol) email is the most popular email method on the Internet. If you connect with POP3, via Outlook for example, Outlook will download all of the email on the mail server to your local computer, storing the email within the Outlook software. In turn, the mail on the server is typically deleted by default. Although there is an option in Outlook that allows you to leave email copies on the server, in today’s mobile world, POP3 is no longer an optimal method.

IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) is the second most common email method, and IMAP is much more suited for modern email users who often access their email from multiple devices. Instead of downloading your emails, IMAP keeps your email and directory structure on the mail server so you can access it from anywhere, your work desktop, your home desktop, your laptop, your mobile phone, or a public connection.

Here is how to change from a POP3 email account to an IMAP email account in Outlook.

1. Open Outlook.

2. From the Outlook menu choose Tools -> Email Accounts.

3. Make sure the option to “View or change existing e-mail accounts” is selected and then click on Next.

4. Select the POP account and then click on the Change button.

5. Remove the check mark next to “Remember password.”

6. Click on Next and then on Finish.

7. Choose Tools -> Options -> Mail Setup and click on Send/Receive.

8. Click on Edit, select the POP account and deselect the option for “Include the selected account in this group”. Then click on OK, Close and OK.

9. Close Outlook.

10. Open Outlook again and if you are prompted for a password for that account (you shouldn’t be) don’t give it — instead click on Cancel. If you are prompted for a password, ensure you have followed the steps above correctly.

11. Now the POP account has been disabled, setup the new IMAP account via Tools -> Email Accounts.

12. You can now either drag the email from the POP account folders to the IMAP account folders or use the File -> Import/Export utility to import the POP based PST file into the IMAP account.

13. Once you’ve confirmed all the POP based email has been moved, delete the POP account from Tools -> Email Accounts.

When performing a web design production, or a website design rework, there may be situations where both index.html and index.php are active in your root website directory. During a website transition, you may need to keep these files active until youv’e completed the web design production. Your webserver will default to one or the other, and it may not default to the one you want it to.

You can force the file you want with your .htaccess file.

For instance, to force index.html:

DirectoryIndex  index.html index.php

To force index.php:

DirectoryIndex  index.php index.html

That will make your web design transition a little bit easier.

CSS Reset or Reset CSS  are one of the best ways to ensure you have a consistent web layout and design across all browsers. In this post we discuss the different ways and the advantages or disadvantages of using them.

What is CSS Reset and Why use it?

CSS Reset has been around for quite some time now (thanks to Eric Meyer)and the means to achieve the same are numerous.

Smashing Magazine says

Global Reset is needed to ensure the more or less identical cross-browser presentation of your web-sites. By default different browsers use different values for margin, padding or line-height. Global Reset makes sure all (or probably most) browsers render sites identically.

Let me try to explain why the it is important. Let us assume that a browser decides to change the way the visited links are displayed in violet to black. Now imagine you had been using a non resetting CSS.  Once the page is viewed in the new browser, what used to violet links will now be black. The problem is not with the fact whether the link should be violet or black, but with the fact that it will not be what you would have wanted them to be. To add to it, the same element could be different in different browsers leading to confused users. read more…

Software developers commonly use generic naming conventions that provide a large number of unique name sets to allow for simplified version identification. Razworks utilizes such a method with web design theme production. This list of scientific tree names provides an simple, objective means of assigning easily identifiable names to independent web design themes.

Abies balsamea, Balsam fir
Abies cilicica, Cilicica fir
Abies concolor, White fir; Colorado fir read more…

Google’s Chrome browser will no longer include http:// as part of the URL field.  In October of 2009, the creator of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, admitted that the double slash we see in every website address was a mistake, and that if he could go back and do it again, he would remove this double punctuation. Google has apparently acknowledged this revelation by retiring the http://.

When you think about it, you rarely hear the use of ‘http://’  in television, radio, or print media. That’s because it’s basically unnecessary. Search engines like Google and Yahoo usually insert the http:// for you by default.  I haven’t typed http:// for years, as using ctrl+enter, shift+enter or ctrl+shift+enter will automatically encapsulate the domain name with the http://and .com, .net, or .org respectively.

Secure or non-standard protocol is where problems could arise. Sceptics of this retirement raise the issue of what if a user needs to specify a secure protocol such as https or ftp. Some users claim they verify a secure connection by visually confirming the https in the browser’s address bar, while others say that practice is a legacy habit, as the Padlock icon confirms a secure connection.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

On approximately April 9, 2010, improperly configured web hosting servers at Network Solutions allowed virtually all of the Wordpress websites hosted with Network Solutions to be infected by a massive, server-wide malicious attack. This is another example of why Razworks recommends against using budget quality website hosting from vendors such as Network Solutions, Godaddy, and the hundreds of other budget hosting clones.

“A web host had a crappy server configuration that allowed people on the same box to read each others’ configuration files”, wrote Matt Mullenweg, founding developer or WordPress. “A properly configured web server will not allow users to access the files of another user, regardless of file permissions”, Matt explains. “The web server is the responsibility of the hosting provider. The methods for doing this (suexec, et al) have been around for 5+ years”.

Godaddy and Network Solutions are primarily domain registrar companies, where a consumer can register a website domain name, often called a website address, for a minimal fee. These companies also offer low cost budget website hosting services to compliment the domain name registrations. Uninformed consumers often see only one difference between this budget website hosting and standard high quality website hosting: budget website hosting has an extremely low cost. However, as this mass breach of Network Solutions hosted websites demonstrates, the cost of using budget hosting can be huge.

“Some of our clients spoke with Network Solutions and they confirmed that all their Wordpress sites are having issues”, states a blog post at Sucuri Security.

The culprit of this attack was improperly secured database connection credentials, which almost all web applications store in the same way, a plain text file secured by a decryption key. Numerous blogs, from ZDNet to the Washington Post, pointed out that this was not a WordPress-specific problem, as the attacker could have targeted any website CMS such as Joomla, Drupal, Magento, etc., in the same way it affected WordPress. It just happens that WordPress is the most popular website CMS in the industry, so once the attacker discovered the security hole on Network Solutions’ servers, WordPress was obviously the best target for a mass malicious attack.

A Forbes.com blog post stated, “Network Solutions…blamed  the WordPress community. But it turned out not to be….The security problem was simple: Files that weren’t locked down with the proper permissions were visible by other users on the same server. In subsequent blog posts,…the company didn’t say outrightly what the problem was and whether the company had a role in it. Instead, they euphemistically described the incident and didn’t mention previous, wild recommendations…” the Forbes.com post clarified.

On April 9, 2010, Network Solutions issued this statement:

Network Solutions Customers:

Although this issue is not with our hosting servers, we can help you clean this issue up and restore your site to a previous backup. However, this may not guarantee that the issue will not occur again. We are working with the WordPress community and affected Network Solutions customers to help determine which WordPress theme or plugin that may be causing this issue and we will update this post as we learn more.

We continue to look out for our customers and our security team is reviewing logs to determine which WordPress instance or plugin may need to be fixed. We have also been working with experts in the WordPress community on this issue.

Network Solutions updated it’s blog on April 12, 2010, admitting responsibility for the breach by simply stating, “the root cause for this issue has been addressed.”

The lesson to be learned from this incident? Don’t use budget hosting!

To disable the rss feed and redirect to the home page in wpmu:

Add this code to functions.php

/**
 * Disable Our Feed Urls
 */
function disable_our_feeds() {
 wp_redirect(get_option('siteurl'));
}

add_action('do_feed', 'disable_our_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rdf', 'disable_our_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss', 'disable_our_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_rss2', 'disable_our_feeds', 1);
add_action('do_feed_atom', 'disable_our_feeds', 1);

and/or
open wp-feed.php, wp-rss.php, and wp-rss2.php and change the following line:

wp_redirect( get_bloginfo( 'rss2_url' ), 301 );

to

wp_redirect(get_option('siteurl'));

Another method is to create a folder in the Wordpress root directory called ‘feed’ and post a custom index.php page.  When accessing  feed this page will be displayed instead of a feed.

Are you or someone you know still using Internet Explorer 6?

The first decade of the 21st century has witnessed monumental advancements in technology. The latter half of this decade has specifically seen incredible improvements to Internet and mobile communications. 2009 is to the Internet what 1969 was to space exploration.

In with the new, out with the old.

As with any technology advances, the old tecnology becomes obsolete and is discarded in favor of the new technology. This is especially relevant to the Internet technological evolution.  Most modern Web 2.0 applications are not compatible with obsolete browsers like Internet Explorer 6.  Microsoft issued mandatory updates to Internet Explorer 8 to resolve this issue. Many popular Web 2.0 websites such as Gmail, Facebook, and MySpace (among others) require Internet Explorer 6 users to upgrade to a Web 2.0 compatible browser.

The latest update for Internet Explorer 6 is dated June 29 2006. The Internet has changed drastically over the last 4 years. A CSS web style standard has been adopted. Web 2.0 blog applications such as Wordpress are used religously by millions of users worldwide. Mobile Internet devices simplify our lives by providing on-demand access to the Internet. Web 2.0 software modernization is at the core of these advances. And these modernizations are typically made readily available to the public for free, with easy download and simplified,  step by step installation instructions.

So web developers are often surprised to still receive requests from web design customers to downgrade their website in order to support  the obsolete web browser Internet Explorer 6. The excuses most often come down to two mindsets:

1. The client simple does not want to upgrade due to fear or lack of motivation.
2. The client has outdated proprietary software that only works with Internet Explorer 6.

The first reason is easily solved. Upgrade to a modern browser.

The second reason is convoluted. The client can’t ugrade their web browser due to the client’s internal proprietary software systems that are dated and thus, not compatible with the newer web browsers. It all comes down to money. The client doesn’t want to spend the money to upgrade or replace their outdated proprietary software. There is nothing wrong with that decision and it is completely understandable. However, this choice has uncompromising circumstances. The client must accept the fact that they will be operating in an obsolete environment. They will not be able to take advantage of the new features and applications that modern day Internet users have become accustomed to.

It’s very simple. The Internet cannot be downgraded in order to support Internet Explorer 6. That is why new software releases are created and why browser updates are free. Keep your software up to date and you won’t have any problems. If you choose to not upgrade due to proprietary software incompatibilites, you must accept the fact that you will not have access to the ever growing landscape of tools and experiences that Web. 20 has to offer.

Internet Ecommerce shipping transactions typically require tax only if the product sold is being shipped to the merchant’s state of residence. Here is how to set up tax by state in Magento.

System>Configuration>Sales>Tax>Tax Classes> Tax Class for Shipping> select ‘Taxable Goods’ from dropdown menu

- Default Tax Destination Calculation>Default State> select the Merchant’s state of residence from dropdown menu
- Default Tax Destination Calculation>Default Post Code> wildcard asterisk will include all postal codes in the state

- Shopping Cart Display settings>Display Prices> set to Excluding Tax
- Shopping Cart Display settings>Display Subtotal> set to Excluding Tax
- Shopping Cart Display settings>Display Shipping Amount> set to Excluding Tax
- Shopping Cart Display settings>Include Tax In Grand Total> set to No
- Shopping Cart Display settings>Display full tax summary> set to No
- Shopping Cart Display settings>Display Zero Tax Subtotal> set to Yes

- Orders, Invoices, Creditmemos Display Settings> same as Shopping Cart Display Settings

- Sales>Tax>Manage Tax Zones & Rates> add new tax rate or edit the current tax rate>Tax Rate information> set to the Merchant’s state criteria, use wildcard asterisk for Zip/Post Code

- Catalog>Manage Products>[edit product]>Prices>Tax Class> set to Taxable Goods

The ability to import existing blogroll links from one Wordrpess website  into another could be a big timesaver. Manually recreating Blogroll links in Wordrpess can be a tiresome task, especially if you have many links. Fortunately, Wordpress has an easy way to automate this task.

First, export the links:

OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is an XML format for outlines. In wordpress, OPML is already created for you. You can access it using the below mentioned URL:

http://yourdomain.com/wp-links-opml.php

You can save this file for storage

Second, export the links:

Import the existing blogroll from the OPML URL or the file you saved to your local system.

1)     Login to your Wordpress dashboard.

2)     Click on Tools>Import.

3)     Select Blogroll.

4)     Enter the OPML URL of your blog or select the file from your local system.

5)     Click on Import.

The Blogroll links have now imported to the new Wordrpess website