Latest Snap! Website Journals

How do I know whether an Internet Product has any value?

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on 03/11/2011 - 13:04

Mons Meg, 51cm medieval canon of nearly 7 tons If you have been on the Internet for any amount of time, you certainly ran in ads telling you that you'd be able to quit your job in a month (or less?!) but you'd have to act right now to benefit from that special offer, or the costs increase from the low $47 now to a wooping $197 next month...

An important note I'd like to make:

Chances are: you can quit your job any time you want! In the US, most of the people who work are working at will and do not even need to give a notice before leaving a company. Of course, your income will also go away and if your job is the only source of money you currently have, it may be a good idea to keep. It at least until you find another good source of money.

At what point can you say that you're famous?

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on 02/22/2011 - 12:52

Categories: Snap! Internet SEO Marketing

Visit the real Shoemoney,com

There is a quick one. I thought that was interesting as I received an email, supposedly from Jeremy at Shoemoney.

Jeremy has been playing on the Internet for a while and made several millions at it already. So he's pretty famous and has many incentives for you to give him money so you can follow in his path and make money yourself (you can also get T-shirts as shown on the side here.)

So... receiving an email from him would be sensible, especially if you registered with him before (since in that case you'd be on his mailing list, wouldn't you?)

And today I received this one:

Stagnant Snap! Blog... Why you need to post about once a week!

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on 02/09/2011 - 13:04

Categories: Blog Internet Nature Technology Knowledge

Phoenix Vernal Pool, Feb 2011, Algae in vernal pool

Vernal Pool at the Phoenix Park, Orangevale, CA
This pool may look stagnant when in fact the water is
moving, albeit slowly, it remains clear. Just like your blog!

I think I mentioned that before in my Snap! Journal but wanted to strengthen the argument...

There are several reasons why you want to keep posting on your blog. First of all, your readers will continue to read your posting only if you actually post. Otherwise, well... there is nothing to read, right?

Because most people cannot handle reading pages and pages every day. Posting once a week or so should be enough for most audiences. Although at the start, to make the blog useful, posting once a day for a month or so is not a bad idea.

The other reason is that new posts tend to attract new readers. That means more of a chance for you to get that click you really want to get. Of course, this assumes you created the necessary Snap! Blocks on your website asking users to take action. There are many ways to do that, the two most important ones are:

Websites and security, big guys always being attacked!

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on 01/30/2011 - 13:48

Categories: Internet Security Website Technology

Hackers are most often refered as Black Hats programmers.

A Black Hat—coming from black magic—is often used as a
reference to programmers hacking systems for no good.1.

Last Thursday, SourceForge.net was attacked again2.

You would think that they would be safe from such attacks since SourceForge.net offers a free service for users to offer their free (open source) software online. Yes! That's where you download many of the free tools you are using everyday. For instance, if you have an archaic type of a website, you probably need to FTP3 your data to your account. On Microsoft Windows,Mac OS/X, and Linux, this can be done with FileZilla. Although they have their own website, the download comes from SourceForge.net4.

Security is one of the area where our base CMS system is very strong at and we also ensure that our own Snap! code is secure. This starts with your password, but it includes very much more than just that. This being said, we are not looking for hackers to visit us. Well... it's not like that doesn't happen, but so far so good.

1. This hat comes from a picture of Coolidge who helped the Smoki in 1924.
2. Yeah... Unfortunately, that's not the first time, and it will go on and on and on, and not just for SourceForge.net. See how you can start by protecting your account using a strong password.
3. The FTP protocol is notoriously insecure, but a very large number of people are still using it (if you can, at least try to use the SFTP so the data is encrypted, including your log in and password.)
4. Note that if you were plaining to create a free software, that's a good place for the download because they have access to very large pipes (many T3) and thus thousands of your users could be downloading your data simultaneously.

Presentation of Snap! at the Sacramento Drupal Users Group

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on 01/19/2011 - 22:49

Categories: Hosting Internet Marketing Technology

Tonight I had the chance to present Snap! features 1, concept, business model to a Drupal Users Group (DUG).

The presentation went well. We talked quite a bit about how to make use of Drupal to create such a system. Three other groups of people are doing a similar work, so it was an interesting event as we talked about the different solutions we each have.

Snap! Websites are powered by Drup CMS. A system used by more and more people as it has matured to a quite advanced system with a large number of third party modules that complement it very well.

1. I'm attaching the presentation below, click on the link to view it in your PDF reader.

Tiny URLs dangers and your solution!

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on 01/14/2011 - 19:29

Categories: Internet Security Technology

If you've been around the Internet for some time, I'm sure you've seen a tiny URL. The name comes from the very first website that offered tiny URLs to the world. The service has always been free and has evolved quite a bit with time. Today, we have a name for such website service:

URL Shorteners

Although many people still refer the first company name for this service.

Why tiny URLs?

The idea is rather simple, it's easier to send a URL that's less than 32 characters rather than those at length URLs, especially those with random numbers (although the numbers are randomly generated, obviously, they have a meaning in regard to your usage of the site that gave you that URL and are generally called Session Identifiers.)

For example, there is a tiny URL for this very page:

http://tinyurl.com/4994dst

Why are pictures from my movies looking so bad?

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on 01/13/2011 - 12:03

Categories: Devices Nature Physics Technology Knowledge

Video versus Photo

Have you ever tried to film a movie to later find out that you just couldn't use a single one of the many images as a nice photo on your Snap! Website?

Newton's Cradle

If you still wonder why the quality of a video image is so poor in comparison to just taking a still picture, then this article will most certainly help you understand the several reason behind the problem.

First of all, know that there are now many different types of video cameras available and each runs with a different software. Each brand created the best version ever, yet it really results in each brand having a set of features better adapted to a specific situation. This being said, it actually would not be possible to just merge all the software and get the best of all worlds! The same properties as found in physics apply here: when you gain on one side, another has to give way.

Getting out of of some pages you liked and are not using anymore...

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on 01/05/2011 - 13:36

Categories: Internet Technology Knowledge

Facebook is a wild beast. I'm not too sure why they feel like they have to change their interface so very often, but the fact is that they do.

The current version is not so bad once you understand where the navigation is. Do you know where it is?

I'm sure most people don't find the Facebook menu practical. It's not a usual, easy to use, and intuitive website menu, to say the least. And yes, I'm not talking about the one at the top right corner which is a regular drop-down menu and works well. That one is also useful to manage your account (what email you receive, change your email address, password, or even close your Facebook account!)

What do you need for creating a new Snap! websites?

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on 01/04/2011 - 20:49

Categories: Internet Website Knowledge

Pense-bête

There is the pense-bête (French meaning reminder)1 I use whenever I create a new website. These are a few basic things you mustn't forget to include on all the websites you create or you will lose traffic, and everyone knows that traffic is the bloodstream of a website, after all.

So, what's important to include on your Snap website on day 1?

Name
Domain Name to correspond to the chosen name
Twitter/Facebook Accounts
read more...

1. In case you try Google Translator, let me tell you that it won't work on that one. "pense" is "think" at the 3rd person. "bête" is "idiot", many translation will tell you "beast", which is correct too. However, in this case, it is an idiot reminder. This is quite similar to those Books For Dummies. So a good translation here would be: Creating a new Website for Dummies.

AddThis not working...

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on 12/19/2010 - 19:52

Categories: Hosting Internet Technology

Somehow, today all our websites looked like there were running very slowly...

The problem was that it was trying to read the AddThis button and attached JavaScript code and could not do so because for some reason AddThis is currently down. It has been for hours so I'm writing this blog post in that regard!

It is the first time that I see AddThis down. It may have happened before, but the fact is I have never seen it before. The site still shows up, after all the necessary connections time out and it shows up without any styling (ugly Web 0.9 or something like that.)

No shame in having your system down, especially for small companies. That's a much bigger one though therefore that's strange that they would be down for so long. Anyway, CSS problems similar to this one did happen to us as two of our caches were not properly synchronized!

Snap! Websites

Latest Snap! Website Journals

Why tiny URLs?

Video versus Photo

Pense-bête

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