During the holiday seasons countless people spend more and more money online. Online shopping is becoming more popular, for many reasons. It’s easier than fighting crowds at large stores. Many online stores run special sales during holidays. Overall it’s just a more convenient way to shop, but the convenience could also have a price. Scams and phishing attempts rise during holidays. There are a few simple steps that can be taken to reduce the risks.

• Always be sure of the website your visiting. IE Bookmark your favorite store’s website.
• If that email offer seems to good to be true, it usually is.
• Always verify offers from the retailer’s website.
• When checking out verify the payment method
• Probably the most important is to use a good security software to protect your computer from malware that could compromise your personal information

(more…)

After reading this article dealing with “bulletproofing” a blog, I started looking at my own blog. Over the past few months as more and more great plugins come out that I depend on now, my page load times had started suffering. A load time of 14 seconds on a T1 was not unheard of, and it could get as bad as 20 seconds on some days. The article by Eric Amundson had a link to a couple of Firefox plugins that looked promising in helping diagnose ailing websites. One is Page Speed from Google. The other from Yahoo! called YSlow.

(more…)

Tags: apache, blog, caching, compression, web

Recently while doing some work on my theme for WordPress I came across a very helpful idea. Using PHP in a stylesheet to make it more dynamic. The basic idea is to use PHP variables and define certain elements that repeat in various places such as a color code to make it easily changeable by only having to change one line instead of searching for and replacing multiple times. Other examples are fonts, images, widths, even whole sections of code could be shown or hidden with the use of variables and an if statement.

(more…)

Tags: css, Internet, tips, web

Mozilla has starting thinking about Firefox 4 and with these mock ups have starting throwing ideas around. There are two different versions as of now, tabs below address bar and one with the tabs above the address bar. Another thing their showing off is a combo refresh/go/stop button, where depending on what’s being done in the browser the button changes.

Tags: browser, firefox, Mozilla

For those who don’t know Firefox is the leading alternative browser to Internet Explorer. In constant development Firefox is continually improving and version 3.5 should be released soon. For those that can’t wait or want to help find bugs the second release candidate has been publicly released. It’s available for download from Mozilla’s Blog. There are big improvements in memory management which has always haunted Firefox. According to this site it is now a non-issue, even out performing the other big free browsers. Another big feature is the inclusion of HTML 5 elements, and native support for open-source audio codec Ogg Vorbis.

Source: PCMag

Tags: browser, firefox, RC