Sarasota Web Design, 3d Animation, Video, Audio

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!

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.