Sarasota Web Design, 3d Animation, Video, Audio

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!

In Magento custom options, required fields are indicated by a red asterisk *. But what if the client requests that required fields are indicated by *Required , and unrequired fields are indicated by a *Optional?

Screen print of product options with * only on required fields:

Screen print of product options with *Required on required fields and *Optional on unrequired fields:

Edit the file:  app\design\frontend\default\client\template\catalog\product\view\options\type\select.phtml

On line 29 find this code:

 <?php if ($_option->getIsRequire()): ?><span>&nbsp;*</span>

and change it to this:

 <?php if ($_option->getIsRequire()): ?><span>&nbsp;*Required</span>

Now required select menus will be indicated by an asterisk and the word Required.

To specify the *Optional indicator for unrequired fields, add the following code right after the previous code:

<?php elseif ($_option): ?><span>&nbsp;*Optional</span>

Now unrequired select menus will be indicated by an asterisk and the word Optional.

The following is a list of common keyboard punction symbols, with their proper name and common alias names.

WordPress has been voted “Best CMS of 2009″  in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. WordPress was awarded the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award.  This is a landmark, and it marks a shift in the public perception of WordPress, from blog software to full-featured CMS.

Every day thousands of new people are discovering why WordPress is the software of choice for websites, blogs and communities. Unlike other CMS software, WordPress empowers a website owner without compromising on usability or scalability. New users discover that WordPress has the easiest CMS administration interface, and authoring a page is similar to writing an email.

The Open Source CMS Awards received over 12,000 nominations and more than 23,000 votes across five categories.

A malicous software Worm (virus) has been discovered this week circulating the Internet. This software virus is hacking into outdated versions of Wordrpess, which is the Internet’s most popular website content management system.

As this worm expands it reach accross the Internet it hacks into older, outdated versions of WordPress and infects blog posts and web pages with spam and malware that can be downloaded by unsuspecting website visitors.

According to WordPress.org, the software developer’s website, this worm does not affect the current version of the WordPress website publishin software, which is 2.8.4. The company is strongly recommending that users running older versions upgrade immediately. WordPress.org points out that upgrading to the latest version of its software may entail some work, but not as much work as cleaning up a hacked blog post. WordPress.org analogizes upgrading the software to “a person taking their vitamins”, whereas repairing a website hacked by this worm is compared to “open heart surgery”.

The worm finds a way to break through the WordPress security and registers itself as an administrator user in older versions to execute malicious code through the permalink structure. The worm then uses JavaScript to hide itself when website readers visit a page. Meanwhile it has inserted spam and malware into older posts and pages that can be downloaded by unsuspecting visitors.

Once the worm has infected a page, according to WordPress.org, users may notice broken links and jibberish added to older pages and posts, which is sign that the worm has infected the website.

The Internet Explorer 6 web browser, or IE6 for short, has been obsolete since 2006, yet many users and companies are still using the broken web browser, either because they don’t know that it is obsolete or they merely choose not to perform the 5 minute upgrade to IE 7 or IE 8.

Here is a recent article from the popular Mashable.com website chronicling the most recent issues regarding the IE6 debacle.

http://mashable.com/2009/08/18/ie6-offenders/

There is a new website, http://ie6offenders.com/ , which publicly lists all persons and companies known to still be using the obsolete IE6 web browser. This website is intended to promote the rightful end of IE6. The IE6 problem is such a stumbling block for the advancement of the Internet that the web design community has been forced to resort to public humiliation in order to persuade people and companies to upgrade their web browsers.

Most modern websites will not display properly in IE6. The reason for this is because IE6 was released in 2000, making it almost 10 years old. Internet technologies have experienced a multitude of evolutions and re-evolutions during that timespan, rendering IE6 all but useless. Web designers have had to produce laborious hacks and backwards compatibility programming in order to insure that websites can still be viewed adequately in IE6.

The current web browsers that are included in standard web design testing are Firefox, Internet Explorer 7/8, and Safari 3+. Many web design companies have dropped support for IE6 and will no longer perform backwards compatiability hacks in their web design development.

FRIDAY, Feb. 27 (HealthDay News) — You might look like you’re not paying attention when you doodle, but science says otherwise.

Researchers in the United Kingdom found that test subjects who doodled while listening to a recorded message had a 29 percent better recall of the message’s details than those who didn’t doodle. The findings were published in Applied Cognitive Psychology.

“If someone is doing a boring task, like listening to a dull telephone conversation, they may start to daydream,” study researcher Professor Jackie Andrade, of the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth, said in a news release issued by the journal’s publisher. “Daydreaming distracts them from the task, resulting in poorer performance. A simple task, like doodling, may be sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance on the main task.”

For the experiment, a two-and-a-half minute listing of several people’s names and places was played for test subjects, who were charged with writing down only the names of the people said to be attending a party. During the recording, half the participants were asked to simultaneously shade in shapes on a piece of paper without attention to neatness. Participants were not told they were taking part in a memory test.

When the recording ended, all were asked for the eight names of those attending the party as well as eight place names mentioned in the audio. Those asked to doodle wrote down, on average, 7.5 names and places, while those who didn’t doodle listed only 5.8.

“In psychology, tests of memory or attention will often use a second task to selectively block a particular mental process,” Andrade said. “If that process is important for the main cognitive task, then performance will be impaired. My research shows that beneficial effects of secondary tasks, such as doodling, on concentration may offset the effects of selective blockade.”

In everyday life, Andrade said, doodling “may be something we do because it helps to keep us on track with a boring task, rather than being an unnecessary distraction that we should try to resist doing.”

WordPress Web Design in Sarasota by Razworks

The latest trend in corporate website content management is a software script called WordPress. WordPress is fully a customizable website publishing system that can be used for almost any website. To get a WordPress website, you need website hosting that meets the minimum requirments and a web designer who specializes in WordPress website development, like Razworks. There is also a social network website called WordPress.com, which lets you get started with a new and free WordPress blog website in seconds, but it varies in several ways and is less flexible than the WordPress website you will receive from a WordPress website design specialist, like Razworks.

WordPress began in 2003 with one piece of code to enhance typography of everyday writing. Growing from a handfull of users to the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, WordPress is used on hundreds of thousands of websites and is seen by tens of millions of people every day.

Everything the makes up WordPress, from the source code to the documentation, was created by and for the open source community. WordPress is an Open Source software project, which means there are hundreds, sometimes thousands of people all over the world developing and improving it’s functionality.  (More than most commercial software platforms.) Open Source means you are free to use WordPress for anything from a simple blog page to a Fortune 500 website, without paying anyone a license fee.

To learn more about WordPress, visit WordPress.org

A New Website Design for Trautweins ATA in Sarasota Florida

Razworks Web Design has produced and launched a new website for Sarasota, FL base Trautwein’s ATA Taekwondo and Karate for Kids. The official website, TrautweinsATA.com, is a showcase for the American Taekwondo Association sanctioned Karate school. Razworks produced an exotic web design interface for the Sarasota based small business. The website utilizes Web 2.0 web page layout and functionality, including tableless CCS design, a YouTube video playlist playing on the website’s homepage, and a Picasa photo gallery on the website’s photo page. The website also allows users to fill out new student registrations and pay the intial membership fee via Google Checkout. You can view the website at www.TrautweinsATA.com. To contact Razworks for website design, video, audio or animation production, visit http://razworks.com or call 941-685-8851