Sarasota Web Design, 3d Animation, Video, Audio

Please sign a petition to the United States Congress to amend Sec 230 of the Communication Decency Act.

http://www.change.org/petitions/the-us-senate-amend-communications-decency-act-section-230

This will protect Americans from cyber bullies and Internet defamation mongers who profit from criminal libel.

Communications Decency Act Section 230 legalizes Internet Crime

A loophole in Communications Decency Act Section 230 allows criminal defamation to thrive on the Internet. Many website operators encourage, and sometimes manipulate the publishing of such malicious defamation, as it may result in significant revenue for the website operator. Website operators such as Yelp.com indirectly manipulate the content on their review website by disabling positive reviews while leaving defamatory reviews intact. The RipOffReport is alleged to perform more direct manipulation by editing defamatory content headlines to solicit better search engine placement. This freedom to commit criminal activity is a threat to the basic rights of all Americans. Defamatory websites are claimed to have been responsible for destroying the careers of reputable school teachers, forcing companies in good standing out of business, and inducing healthy children to suicide.

To protect the people of the United States from Cyber bullies and criminal defamation, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act must be amended to define the rights of victims of malicious defamation on the Internet. The legislation should declare that, upon a victim’s request, if an Internet posting is clearly malicious, the website operator must remove the post, or be liable under the criminal libel laws of the state with jurisdiction.

The same civil protections that apply to newspaper, radio and TV should also apply to the Internet. In some states, criminal libel is a felony carrying up to 18 months in prison and a fine up to $100,000 for the first offense.  These laws also state that the owner or editor of the publishing company (newspaper, radio, tv) is also liable.

However, the United States Communications Decency Act Section 230 dismisses the owner or editor from liability for  third party authored defamation that is published on a website. Section 230 was not intended to legalize such criminal activities when it was adopted in 1996. It’s purpose was to nuture the growth of the Internet by providing legal exemptions. However, fifteen years after the fact, the Internet has become the dominant communication resource. The protections provided by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act are not only antiquated and obsolete, but in contrary, they provide immunity to criminal enterprises who profit from committing illegal activities on the Internet in regards to libel and defamation.

To compare the United States Internet defamation laws to the rest of the civilized world, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, New Zealand, and Australia all have Internet publishing laws making the ‘website operater’ liable for defamatory content regardless of their ‘awareness’ of the content. The European Union, in the least, makes the ‘website operator’ liable for removing defamatory content when notified.

Any reputable American can become a victim of Internet defamation, the results of which often destroy that American’s reputation, career, and life. Please sign a petition to the United States Congress to amend Sec 230 of the Communication Decency Act.

http://www.change.org/petitions/the-us-senate-amend-communications-decency-act-section-230

Amending the Communication Decency Act Section 230 will protect Americans from cyber bullies and Internet defamation mongers who illicitly profit from criminal libel on the Internet.

Statistics released on June 21, 2011, show that WordPress is used in 63% of all websites using content management systems, commonly called CMS. Content management system distribution is calculated from the top million websites on the Internet. The CMS with the second place position among content management based websites is Joomla, but at a mere 10% it pales in comparison to the popularity of WordPress. This is a testament to the superiority of WordPress as an overall website CMS. WordPress has a simplicity that makes it very popular with end users, yet it’s potential for functional complexity is unlimited. WordPress web designers appreciate the straight forward templating system and the power to create virtually any web design from a WordPress website. Companies appreciate that WordPress is the most stable and up to date website CMS in the industry. And software developers reap the benefits of the WordPress open plugin architecture, allow anyone to program a custom website application that simply ‘plugs in’ to the WordPress core. WordPress was voted best website CMS in 2009 and 2010, and there is no doubt it will claim a Hat Trick in 2011.

Below is a chart displaying the current website CMS distribution ratios, with WordPress claiming the vast majority share of 63%.

Website CMS Distribution in Top Million Sites

Image courtesy of Built With Trends

Are you seeking a WordPress web designer? Razworks Sarasota Web Design has been developing professional websites with WordPress for five years. Visit Razworks Sarasota Web Design website at: http://razworks.com/web-design/ or call 941-685-8851

WordPress was voted Best Website CMS (content management system) for 2010, under the Hall of Fame category, which is reserved for software that has won the Open Source CMS Award at least once in the past. WordPress was voted Best CMS of 2009 as well. Two years in a row establishes a trend that much of the world’s web design community already knows, WordPress is the best website publishing system in the World. But don’t take a Sarasota website designer ‘s word for it. And don’t let the votes of the Open Source Awards sway your opinion, nor the other hundreds of thousands of website designers across the world who swear by WordPress web design. Instead, ask Yahoo why they use WordPress. Ask Sony why they use WordPress. Ask the New York Times, CBS, Pepsi, GM, GE, MIT, Intel, Best Buy, The U.S Army, The U.S. Air Force, Harvard University, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, Samsung, Ebay, Duke University, Delta Air Lines, Lexus, San Diego Zoo, Xerox, Fox News, The NFL, Nokia, Cornell University, The American Red Cross, Library of Congress, Forbes, Boston University, The Official Star Wars Blog, National Republican Senatorial Committee, University of Southern California, Network Solutions, MTV, McAfee, Fischer Price, Nikon, Blackberry, Nivea, University of Maine, Mozilla, Republican Governors Association, University of Arkansas,  Congressional Budget Office, Oregon State University, AMD, DC Comics, Wired, University of Toronto, Rackspace, ZDNet, University of Florida, Carnival Cruise Lines, Reuters, Anderson Cooper 360, University of Missouri, Larry King Live, Danielle Steel, University of Melbourne, Benjamin Netanyahu, Nancy Pelosi, University of Berlin, Charles Barkley, Ryan Seacrest, Sylvester Stallone, University of Calgary…. And that is just a small sample of the companies and institutions that are using WordPress web design to manage corporate, government and organization websites. So you can feel confident that WordPress web design will serve your website needs. Razworks Web Design Sarasota specializes in WordPress web design. Call Razworks today for a free Sarasota Web design consultation – 941-685-8851. Or click here to send Razworks a quick email.

WordPress web design customization can be a simple task for experienced WordPress developers. By simply adding function calls and filters to the active theme’s ‘functions.php’ file, you can perform just about any WordPress web design customization, to both the front end and backend of WordPress websites.

WordPress has a built in function for logging users in and out called ‘wp_loginout’. The default text displayed for this is ‘Log in’ and ‘Log out’ respectively. But what if you want your login link to display as ‘Sign in’ and ‘Sign off’ instead of the default ‘Log in’ and ‘Log out’? Add a filter to the active theme’s functions.php of course.

/**
 * Change login text
 */

add_filter('loginout','loginout_text_change');
function loginout_text_change($text) {
$login_text_before = 'Log in';
$login_text_after = 'Sign in';

$logout_text_before = 'Log out';
$logout_text_after = 'Sign off';

$text = str_replace($login_text_before, $login_text_after ,$text);
$text = str_replace($logout_text_before, $logout_text_after ,$text);
return $text;
}

Now upload the edited functions.php file, and when viewing the WordPress web design in a web browser, the ‘Log in’ text link will now display as ‘Sign in’.

To sell products or services on a website, you need an ecommerce website. The ecommerce website typically hosts yourwebsitename.com with a web design, content information web pages, a product catalog, a shopping cart where consumers save their product selections, a checkout interface where the consumer completes the purchase, and a backend administrative interface where the website owner/manager can add, remove or edit the product catalog and content web pages.

During the checkout process, the website needs to connect to a third party system to process the actual credit card payment transaction. For payment processing, Paypal is a great way to get started with no up front costs. If you want a more professional payment processor, Authorize.net is the most popular solution, however that includes startup and monthly costs, as well as banking applications and approvals. With a professional payment processor like Authorize.net, you also need a merchant account (business bank deposit account). You can startup with Paypal, then upgrade to Authorize.net at a future time. You can use both PayPal and Authorize.net together to provide a broader choice of payment transactions to your potential customers.

To setup your ecommerce website, production costs typically range from $2000 to $5000 depending upon the amount of products in the catalog and the website’s overall level of complexity. It is not uncommon for ecommerce web design productions to cost in excess of $15,000. Website hosting subscriptions will be between $300 and $600 per year, depending upon the quality of performance desired. Domain names (your-website-name.com) typically cost $10 per year.

You can setup a Paypal account by yourself right now. Go to Paypal.com, and create a paypal standard account. You then link the paypal account to your bank account, which usually takes 3-5 days to complete.

The primary advantages of an Internet Payment Gateway is ease of use and broad compatibility. Internet Payment Gateways account for almost 90% of all Internet payment transactions. A consumer can purchase your product or service right on your website with a major credit card like Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover, etc.

With a third party payment processor like PayPal, the consumer is re-directed from your website to the PayPal website where the payment transaction is completed. Some web savvy consumers use PayPal on a regular basis, however, many consumers are not comfortable paying via PayPal, which can account for a loss in the potential sale.

You can read more about the advantages of an Internet Payment Gateway vs PayPal here: https://www.authorize.net/advantage/

If you want more information about producing your own eccommerce website, contact Razworks at 941-685-8857, or email us here:

http://www.razworks.com/contact.php

With recent releases of the DroidX and the Apple Iphone 4, mobile device Internet functionality has evolved beyond that of a mere psuedo-web browser.  I just received a new DroidX, and after using the smartphone, it is quite obvious that mobile devices will eventually become a user’s primary Internet browsing device. And it appears that the popularity of the Apple Iphone may just fade away with a mainstream graduation of the entire mobile device industry.

Droid X blogs are hearing that a lot of iPhone users are moving to Droid X. Why? The Droid X blog writes that a mobile devices most important features is the network carrier, and they imply that the Apple Iphone’s AT&T network is prone to dropping calls, for which Verizon’s reliable network is not. I don’t use an Iphone, so I can’t quote from personal experience. But I was just talking to a colleague today regarding a project we are collaborating on, and his phone dropped out 3 times during a 20 minute call. He has Apple’s AT&T network. My neighbor has an Iphone and he swears by it. His only complaint: dropped calls. I have been a Verizon Wireless user since 2002. I can have a clear conversation going up and down in an elevator. From my experience, dropped calls are a rarity.

The Droid X .net blog claims Iphone users are switching to DroidX because, “if I wished to make voice calls anytime anywhere I want” states DroidX.net, “if I wished for the next best thing that did cool things like Skype Mobile and HDMI 720P streaming, and if I wished for wireless tethering of 5 devices on a smartphone, I’d get a Droid X.” DroidX.net adds that you can’t do any of those on the iPhone 4.

You can check out the full article here>

After one day, I like the DroidX, so far.

Mobile Device editorial by Michael Rassel – July 17, 2010

In Web design, the navigation selections are commonly all the same color. However, some web design clients may request that specific navigation selections be a different color from the rest. In a static HTML web page, this is easy. But in a CMS web page this can be difficult, as cms website navigation is typically generated from a database, then formatted by a global template and stylesheet.

WordPress will often generate unique class definitions and/or id’s from which you can style specific elements. View the page source and find the specific element you want to style uniquely. If WordPress has generated a unique ID or CLASS definition, just add this definition to your style sheet with your desired unique web design stylings. Your navigation selection will reflect the unique style.

Here is a very useful and easy to use image resizing tool for Windows Vista and Windows 7.

http://imageresizer.codeplex.com/releases/view/30247

It’s an updated version of the Windows XP Powertoy, which places a right click menu that allows you to resize single or multiple images with two clicks. For web design clients who are intimidated by the complexity of Photoshop and similar image editors, this tool is perfect.

I am a 15 year Photoshop veteran, but I found this tool to be refreshingly quick and simple.

Digital cameras take some pretty good, high resolution photos. Cameras with a higher Megapixel capability can produce photos of a higher pixel resolution, and can thereby be printed at a larger dimension. However, these megapixel images are typically too large for display on a website. Web design clients who manage their own website content via a content management system, such as WordPress, often need to reduce such megapixel images prior to posting them to their website.

For example a 3 Megapixel image has a pixel dimension of 2048 x 1536. This image will print out nice, however if you try to view it on a computer screen, it will most likely exceed the viewable area or be resized to fit in the viewable area. That’s because the average computer screen has a pixel resolution of 1024 x 768. So any image larger than that size is overkill.

But the main disadvantage to high resolution images is excessive file size. A 3 megapixel image will often have a very large file size, like 2 megabytes, give or take. That’s a huge file size  for one image and can significantly slow down your computer. Resizing the  same photo to 1024 x 768 also reduces the file size well below 1 megabyte, which can be downloaded and viewed much faster.

Internet Explorer 6 has fallen below 5% of Internet usage. Microsoft released the IE 6 web browser in 2000, and it became functionally obsolete in 2006. The Internet Explorer 7 release added very important support for Web 2.0 standards and security protections that IE6 lacks. Most Internet users upgraded, yet for half a decade, an alarming number of people and corporations have continued to use this broken web browser.

Yahoo has an article about the imminent retirement of IE 6 at:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/IE6-Falls-below-5-for-First-bw-2049028363.html?x=0

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!