WebDunnRight Design & Troubleshooting

At the end of last month I started to get some interesting e-mails.  You see, when you have customers and submit their information to so many search engines and sites, you’ve got to understand that interesting e-mails are pretty normal.  But these mails were ones that caught my attention - because they were claiming that a domain name was about to expire.  Below is an example of one of the ones I received, but all you need to see is one because everything else pretty much was the same.

When these were being received hot and heavy in my inbox (and I’m certain there were thousands of other folks getting these as well) Network Solutions had a great alert and warning on this growing issue.  By the time I’m typing these words, that warning is no longer a ‘top news’ item.  But it gives me the chance to share some information with you on the practice of phishing.

Wikipedia starts their definition of phishing with these words: In the field of computer security, phishing is the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. (Full Wikipedia information here)

How did I know?

Well, it was pretty easy for me.  I don’t use Network Solutions as my domain name provider.  So my curiosity was in how did I become the recipient.  And that wasn’t too hard to figure out (and it wasn’t what you may think).  At first, I thought someone just did a ‘whois‘ lookup and sent mail to the contact information that the query returned.  But looking at some of the mails I received, that was not the case at all.  It looked like a normal spambot attack where e-mail addresses are spammed and the return address is spoofed.  So this is nothing new or special - it happens all too often to all of us!

What can help me?

If you noticed in the image I included above, I happen to have all these mails go to a Gmail account.  They do a great job of putting up that red banner that gives a warning that something has been tampered with - in other words, spoofing has taken place.  So if you want (or need) to check out a super and free (did I mention FREE?) mail account with over 7Gb of space, maybe you will give Gmail a try.

But not everything requires a tool for help.  The first line of defense is you, and your thinking.  Take your hand off the mouse (so you don’t click on any links).  Take a hard look at what your mail says - it may seem legitimate.  But then, look to see who it is from - and by that I mean examine the header information.  I’ll assume you know how to do that, but if you don’t - be sure to check the help files in your e-mail client you use.  It will tell you how to do this.  You see, that name that shows up may give a legitimate name you trust, but the actual respond to address may be different.

The money (or the catch) is that these folks are trusting you to click on a link in the body of the e-mail.  It matters not who is in the respond to line, it’s all about clicking on links in the body of the e-mail.  So restrain yourself.  Don’t do it, just keep your finger off the mouse!  Once you’ve clicked, you may be launching some bad installer to put malware on your computer.

I hope this helps someone - if you have information or insight that will assist others, why not leave a comment?  Thanks for reading!

This is a follow up to my posting on Communications.  I’ve been intrigued at the concept of church marketing.  And - I’ve been thinking about how we do it at the church I belong to.  Our mindset in many church environments is one of letting the paid staff do the work of ministry.  That work, while including spreading the gospel (’Isn’t that what we pay the pastor for?’), ministering to those in need, etc. seems to always be something staff should do.  It is why they make the big bucks!

I’m thinking….NOT!  I don’t want our church staff to be the creative or end product of our efforts to market!  It would be like asking them to be graphics artists - and the last experience they had with art was either doodling on a church bulletin (or in a hymnal if you’re old enough to remember them…) during a boring service or creating their paint-by-numbers masterpiece as a youth.  What madness!

In that spirit, I ask for 5 minutes.  You may laugh really hard at this.  You may not…hard to tell on the web.  I see this is a great portrayal of church marketing, as revealed in something most of us can relate to.

So…marketing…what do we do in this area?  What can we do better?  When can we get started?   These were questions I asked in a similar post on our church blog. But it got me to thinking - what about marketing in our web efforts?

Hire a Professional

This may be the best option, or … worst.  I think it could be the best option because a professional is well versed in many marketing methodologies that could help your customer as well as you.  There are many things to learn from professionals in other areas that are not our (web designers) area of expertise.  Our tendency is to shy away from this option though because it costs money and somehow shows we have an area of weakness (as if we were suppose to know it all).

It is not a bad thing to bring a professional on the team in this area.  The benefits for your customer could be enormous (increased sales, product recognition, branding, etc.).  The benefits for you would be a fantastic opportunity to learn more in this area so you could apply the principles to other customers.  Yes, it comes with a cost, but the payback could keep giving for years to come.

Learn from Others

You may have an opportunity to barter with others that have knowledge and skills in this area.  By all means - take advantage of adding this into your box of tools and skills.  Or, you may take some classes in this area.  Another opportunity would be to learn more about it by books, or even information on the internet.  I am quite certain good can come out of that - but there are also opportunities to get hooked into some wild schemes as well.  So a bit of caution when dealing with these areas (much the same as many of the get rich quick schemes you may get in your inbox).

Listen to your Customer

Finally - your customer may have already hired a professional.  They may be your best teacher in this area, so don’t be afraid to ask them questions!  I freely admit that I learn so much from each and every one of my customers in the area of marketing (among other disciplines).  And I do my level best to teach them as well.  Don’t discount this area of your design and business skills - it could be one of the most important lessons to learn.

So for marketing it is more than a flowery thought - it is a must for your customer’s business.  And it is something you need to learn as well for your own.  Perhaps you have information or ideas that you would like to share?  If so, feel free to comment on this article, and thanks for reading!

WebDunnRight recently relocated (read that, our family moved).  Having to move brings on a whole new set of needs and opportunities.  I am very familiar with the ins and outs of our former home, could tell you where I had the best connectivity (wireless, that is - wired was pretty much decent everywhere), and could show you nuances that most would not notice.  All that has changed since the move.

Get the professionals out!

The first thing I did right was to contact my ISP and review my options for the upcoming move.  One of the services they offered was to send out a technician to check the lines at our new place of residence and ensure everything received the best possible signal.  We quickly learned it was money well spent.  We were in splitter city, which brings on signal loss, and our technician was on top of it.  After tracing down where lines entered the residence, he installed a signal amplifier and we’re golden throughout the home.  I’d highly recommend this to anyone moving, but your ISP can also provide this service to you if you don’t plan on a move anytime soon.

Checking my speed

After setting up just a portion of my gear (I’ve got to be connected), I went over to Speedtest.net to see what kind of speeds I’m getting.  Mind you, I’m typing this on my laptop working wireless over a Belkin IEEE 802.11g compliant router.  Going from here to a server in Washington, D.C. I turned a speed of 14252 kb/s for downloads and 2808 kb/s for uploads - not shabby in the least!

Why is this important?

All this talk about speed has real implications for your online experience.  Your connectivity is a deciding factor when we look at issues such as choppy audio and/or video, the way various web sites load in your browser, and a host of other issues (banking, interactivity with shopping or support sites, etc.) that have a real impact to the experience we have and the impressions we take away.

Imagine attempts to create and manipulate various web sites.  While I do this on my computer and experience little or no lag time (after all, I’m working off my computer’s hard drive only) while making and testing my creations, it is a totally different experience once the site is on the web.  That is when you get to experience it!  But what if I have a hard time writing files up to the server (my connection is slow)?  Will I be a happy camper?  Probably not, and you wouldn’t notice one bit (since this is all about me and my ISP, I can either get what I pay for in speed or I settle for what I hooked up to if I chose not to get the professionals out to the home).

Perhaps more practical is the connectivity to sites like YouTube or news sites where watching video or listening to audio (streaming, of course!) means lag times or choppy ‘reception’ of the media.  One of my customers has asked me to fix a video that was perceived as choppy, but the video was fine - it was all about the bandwidth and connectivity of my customer.  And that can be disappointing!  Remember, computing has moved forward quite a bit.  I’m old enough to recall my first 300 baud modem (yes, I was alive way back then) and logging on to my first Wildcat BBS.  When I bumped up my old Amiga modem to 2400 baud, I thought my computer was the cat’s meow.

Times have changed…

With this change comes newer hardware, newer software, and new capabilities.  We now have so many choices!  You can still connect via a dial-up connection, just realize your speeds will be limited by the capabilities offered in that arena (56 kb/s will be tops, and that is utopia - expect speeds of 52 kb/s or less).  Or getting a broadband connection which is what many folks are doing or have done as this rides on their existing cable connection.  Others are opting for FiOS connections, and it’s hard to tell where the future may take us as compitition for speed heats up.

What’s it mean for a web designer?

As I have written before (in my Images and the web article) we should still design for the ‘lowest common denominator’ standards.  Don’t forget that not all your customers will be visiting you on some high speed access, there are still plenty of people coming to our sites using dial-up.  So do the right thing with your images (properly size them and use thumbnails as needed) and media files (make them streaming).  Remember, it’s not about you and your capabilities - it is always about the person on the other side of the computer screen - the customer.

Interested in your speed?

Below are links to some speed tools.  Have fun!

• www.speedtest.net
• Speakeasy Speed Test
• CNET Bandwidth Meter speed test
• Verizon Speed Test
• Cox Speed Test
• Comcast Speed Test

If you have other tidbits you’d like to share with me, feel free to comment.  Thanks for reading!

You know the drill…you try to change the channel using the remote.  Nothing happens.  What do you do next?  Push the button harder!  Again, and again, and again!  That is most of our responses, and it doesn’t matter if it is the TV remote, our mouse (when clicking on some link or application button), or even other items use use day in and day out.  So it is my hope to address common troubleshooting techniques in this post.  I know it will not be all-inclusive, but it should be useful as a starting point for more than just computers or web sites - it is intended to be more of a troubleshooting 101.

What is troubleshooting?

I think of troubleshooting as the art of whittling down what a problem could be (remove it from the picture) until we are in the right area to address the problem.  In a nutshell, it’s all about the process of elimination. This can be real easy to say, and most of the time it is equally easy to do, but there are times where it isn’t quite that simple.  For example, your Internet connection may not be working.  Wouldn’t it be lovely if you had a spare router laying around the house so you could just swap it out with your existing one?  Or a spare NIC card?  Or spare CAT 5 cable?  Perhaps a spare computer?  Maybe even a spare cable modem?

Of course, most of us reading don’t have all those spares laying around our homes just waiting to be put into service.  Well, at least ones that work!  Perhaps it would be helpful if we could narrow down the issue before we start swapping parts in and out.  After all, it could be that our Internet provider’s service is down, and nothing at all is wrong with our system.

To taclke a problem such as this only requires thinking in a logically progressive manner.  And this can be applied to many other areas, not just your home computer functions.  (NOTE - I didn’t say you had to be a logical person, just approach the problem logically and continue to progress from there in a logical fashion.)

Logical Progression

I listed many of the items above we may need to address to troubleshoot a problem with our internet connectivity.  So, where do I start?  It depends!  For me, I start in front of the keyboard, since I’m there and I’m lazy.  This, of course, precludes some other event that would redirect my starting point (like a strange sound and smoke rising from my cable modem…I’d probably start with the cable modem if that occured).  For me, I’d want to see if I had a good IP address.  (At this point, many non-techies would be screaming ‘and how would I know to do that?’)  Instead of showing you how to precisely do just that or sending you to a site which explains it, I’m simply going to say I’d be using my command prompt, running ipconfig /all and looking to see what IP addresses I have.  I might then release my IP address, flushdns, and renew my IP address.  If that gave me good information back (a good IP address) with no issues, I would then know if my problem was further in my computer settings (remember, I’m still at the keyboard) or external of my computer.

In my above illustration, I tried to cut the pie down the middle.  I could have started at any other point (cable, modem, browser, etc.) but from my testing and trials I should be able to narrow down which way the issue lies.  Then I would work towards resolving the problem.  If I didn’t get a good IP address, I might have plugged the cable from my cable modem right into the NIC card on the back of my computer and tried to obtain an IP address (that would have eliminated wireless issues or router issues if I am using them in my system).  Or I may have chosen to just reset the cable modem at that point to ensure that it was not in a stateless way (where it may or may not be working, you know the drill - and if you don’t, you haven’t called your cable provider in some time to hear their message of powering the cable modem down for a minute then back up which clears up xx% of all connectivity issues…here’s a look at their troubleshooting for just one cable modem model).

How to finish strong

Once you have started to troubleshoot, you need to finish (or you would have never started).  Above I chose to start in the middle.  The odds are I will go one way or the other and not have cleared up my problem just by choosing a starting point and * bingo * that be the culprit.  I chose the middle to eliminate with some degree of certainty half of the things it could be.  Then I work to find out what the problem is.  This technique works well for me for hardware, software and connectivity issues.  If I can narrow down where the issue lies, I can normally get it repaired or working again.

So I continue down the path of a process of elimination.  And it works.  Granted, I may have more ‘experience’ than some in troubleshooting web sites, computers and such, but many others use these same methods to fix your car, solve engineering riddles, and repair a bevy of other things during the course of their work.

I recommend getting someone with experience and certifications when things are beyond your (and my) level of expertise.  I take my car to a mechanic that has the right tools and knowledge to get it repaired right and in a timely manner.  I could try to do it myself, but may be without a car for some time!  This also applies to other areas, like electrical work or other hazardous jobs (think Mike Rowe…some things are better left to professionals).  And don’t forget to use the internet to your advantage when troubleshooting issues.  There are many helpful folks who have solved problems that may be identical to the one you are facing.

I hope this article give you some food for thought.  If you have comments or insights in this area, I certainly welcome them - just leave a comment.  Thanks for reading!

Section 508 - it’s from the government and it’s the law, so it is large!  If it’s large, there is always a business opportunity, and many gotchas along the way.  First, the intent of this is to give you information on Section 508, but the real message will be more geared towards coding to web standards and learning about WAI.

So - what is Section 508?

Section 508 requires that Federal agencies’ electronic and information technology is accessible to people with disabilities. IT Accessibility & Workforce Division, in the U.S. General Services Administration’s Office of Governmentwide Policy, has been charged with the task of educating Federal employees and building the infrastructure necessary to support Section 508 implementation. Using this web site, Federal employees and the public can access resources for understanding and implementing the requirements of Section 508. (from the Section 508: The Road to Accessibility web site)

Basically, if you are going to do any work for the government (like community, local county, state or federal web work) you are bound to comply with this law.  You don’t have a choice.  But how do we get there from where we currently are?  And how does this fit in with those of us that are not doing federal, state or local web sites for the government?

Well, if you choose not to make your site(s) accessible to individuals with disabilities, you are really choosing to reduce your web traffic and business.  Don’t fool yourself into thinking these folks don’t need the information provided by your site or the products you offer!  You may earn their trust and loyalty just by putting in the effort to meet their needs.  So…let’s explore how to do just that.

What should all of my web pages be coded to?

In a nutshell, let me be very plain.  All your web pages should be coded to the current web standards.  Today, I would suggest it be xhtml 1.0.  Because of this, the top line of code in all of our web pages should read:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

Standards are important!  It gives you a baseline that everything else springs from in code development.  It also helps you to keep up with the advances in the code as well as ensuring browser compatibility for your code in the many different web browsers individuals use.

Why should that top line of code be there?

So any validator (or web browser) that renders this page knows how to interpret the information / code / mark up on the page.  One of the tools we can use to troubleshoot any browser issues is to make sure our code is fine.  I will highly recommend the W3C Validator for all you webbies out there.  The validator looks at the information you have declared in that top line to know how to parse the code you are writing.

What do we need to know for web accessibility?

This is where we switch gears to move towards Section 508 compliance by using something called WAI.  W3C has introduced their Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) which has 14 points to consider (guidelines), 3 levels of priority, and 3 levels of conformity. The latest ratified version (standard) is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (W3C Recommendation 5-May-1999).   Version 2.0 is currently under consideration and has not been ratified as a standard to date.  Where can you find version 1.0 and the 14 points, etc.?  Just visit this site.

How can we identify web accessibility issues?

Here’s the start of a lovely walk - http://www.w3.org/WAI/eval/Overview.html.  The reason I approached this in the fashion I did was because your content and my content will be different.  Reading over these guidelines will give you things to look for as well as approaches to bringing your site up to conformance standards.

Are there any tools to use?

Certainly!  If you are using an HTML editor or something other than Notepad to code in, go into the help files and see what your tool offers in this area.  Some of the free ones I employ are:

• HTML Validator
• CSS Validation Service
• HTML Tidy
• QA Validation (loads of various validators)
• All tools maintained by WAI
• Simple search for section 508 tools returns 49 results

And there are tools that are not part of W3C - there are a ton of them out there.  Some you must purchase and others are free.  The would include tests for color blind reviews, text readers, and more items than most have considered in their page design plans.

I hope this puts you in a better place - in increasing your knowledge - about Section 508 and web accessibility.  It was not intended to be all-inclusive of all things to do with accessibility, but was meant to be a starting point for the discussion.  If you have information you want to add to the discussion, just leave a comment.  Thanks for reading!

Of all the ways used to protect ourselves and our important information, why do we choose things that are easy for others to guess?  A recent example of this making headline news is the hacking into Gov. Sarah Palin’s e-mail account.  Certainly the information she had secured her access to this account was good, strong and not easily guessed, right?

Wrong.  Wrong-o.  Nope.  Nada.  Not even close.

According to this article by the Associated Press, it only took a few items of information to get to a governor’s account.  Being the governor, Mrs. Palin is like a lot of us.  Well, not really - she IS running as a Vice-President in the current campaign, but she is like us in that she has log in information, passwords, and secret questions to manage.  So let’s look at that and think of how we do this.

Log In Information (User Name)

This is information that you should know.  Granted, sometimes you don’t get to pick this information.  Your IT department assigns it to you.  But there are other times where you do get to choose.  This may be the easiest one to guess or get, because some folks (like the governor) put in titles and names.  Others may pick ‘cute’ user names that are hard for others to remember and may leave the impression of something less than honest or professional (cutiepiexx00, dolphins4ever, ilovesnookims2 or some such nonsense).  Just know that this may be the easiest of the three areas addressed to actually obtain or easily guess the information.

Passwords

Here it’s all about you.  And that’s the problem!  Most of us choose passwords that we use for most if not all of our accounts.  Security minded folks will tell you, that’s not good.  Here is where hackers use brute force attacks, dictionary attacks, social engineering schemes and sometimes they just guess based on what they know about you to come up with the password.  Don’t make it easy for them.  Use strong passwords each and every time, change them periodically, and don’t share your password with anyone!

Secret Questions

This one is a bit tricky.  Some sites give you a choice to make up your own question while others stick with the same ones everyone sees (What’s your city of birth or your mother’s maiden name).  If you don’t have a choice, you may want to make up a city of birth that you use on the vast majority of sites where this makes no difference!  Why must you say ‘Newport News’?  Why not pick Hackensack?  It would be used only when you have needed to get back the information you had forgotten (like your password), so it may not be the best thing to do to populate this with information that is real and either known by others or can be easily obtained.  NOTE - if you are doing banking or other information that hinges on having ‘real’ information in there, be aware of that and be very, very careful!

You know, one of the easiest articles on this that I have seen (and the one that blossomed into this post) was about these very issues.  It’s titled Video: Paris Hilton & Sarah Palin - what’s the connection? and it’s written by and posted on Graham Cluley’s blog.  I’ve been reading the security news from Graham and his friends for some time, they put out a fantastic newsletter that I recommend to those that want to learn more about security (just click here to visit their site and subscribe to their newsletter).

Put some thought into your passwords and secret questions - or you could be the next victim.  I hope you enjoyed this post, if you did - comment and let me know.  If you have other pointers, share them by commenting as well.  Take care!

It seems like we don’t often hear those words - coupled with eye contact anyway.  You’ve been there, in line at a store, or on the phone, anytime you come into contact with another person do you notice how the customer service aspect takes place?  Granted, the customer service area is one of fluctuation - by that I mean when times are good, seemingly this area can fall a bit short.  When times are not so good, many businesses seek to improve in this area because they know very well that customers can (and will) take their business elsewhere.

This article found on Business Know-How titled ‘Customer Service Sins’ (by Bob Massey) was the inspiration for this post.

Do to others what you would have them do to you

While I am applying Matthew 7:12 here, it is absolutely the best insight you can have in dealing with your customers.  How would you want this situation resolved?  I’ve watched, listened and been on all sides of the isle on this issue.  From my time working as a help desk analyst, to running my own business, I have learned that I need to always treat others as I would like to be treated.

What does that mean in a practical sense?  I have had the unfortunate pleasure of hanging up on irate customers who choose to vent their wrath on me.  Yes, I needed to explain my actions to my superiors, and yes, at times there are repercussions for my choices - but to take abuse for no rational reason is to assist in perpetuating the abuse.  So, when customers were behaving irrationally (taking out their verbal wrath on me) for an issue that I was paid to try to assist them on, after a warning or two for them to tone it down (as it were), they were given my supervisor’s contact information and disconnected!  How’s that?  Well, it works out well actually.  Everyone has someone to answer up the chain to, and in our company the abuser could face consequences from their lack of decor.

You see, situations are stressful.  Some more so than others!  But no matter the level of your stress (or the one you are dealing with in the situation) - do to them as you want them to do to you.  It’s the way you respond that makes the difference.  My above example is an illustration of extremes - if you really want help, you may, as someone once told me, ‘attract more bees with sugar water than with a pile of poo.’

This is something that works well on either side of the situation.  As a business owner, my customer is NOT always right.  I know, that is not so popular to say.  But let’s think of it in terms we can relate to.  I am no car mechanic.  When my mechanic tells me what needs to be done to my vehicle (either to fix something that is broken so the car will run or move again) or something to do to ensure my car keeps functioning as designed (and desired), I listen to him.  I may base my decision on factors outside of the mechanic’s influence (lack of funds, lack of time, etc.), but I certainly give credence to what they are telling me to do.  In the end, the decision is mine (I’m the customer in this situation, so I give the ultimate direction).  And so are the consequences.  The same happens in my business.  I provide customers options to meet their needs and goals.  In the end, I do what the customer wants, but I don’t want them to be forced to make an uninformed decision.  I wouldn’t want to be in that situation, so I don’t place my customer in that spot.

So this little area goes much further than an irate customer, or you and I as individuals needing assistance in stressful situations.  It goes to our general living of life - that’s why it is first on my list.

Communicate often and effectively

Here is where most folks miss the boat - the area of communication.  There is no stupid question!  Any question your customer asks you needs some level of response.  Your customer is coming to you for a service, product or information.  Who better to assist them than you?

This is also an area fraught with peril.  You may be tempted to answer them in a short or curt manner, assuming that they know as much as you do and just needed the finer detail to complete their quest for knowledge.  Or, you could assume they are totally void of knowledge on the subject and approach it from a beginner’s standpoint.  Usually the truth is somewhere in between.  Tailor your response to your customer (it shows that you have been paying attention and that you are attentive to their needs).

Follow through

If you tell your customer you will do something - do it!  Follow through on your promises, and don’t do it half way, do it with pride.  I’m hard pressed to think of a reason for a customer to look elsewhere for business apart from dealing with someone that doesn’t completely follow through.  For me, I’d rather know that the job will be done completely or not done at all.  At least I know how to proceed from there!  But if we choose to do parts and not the whole of the task, the customer is always uncertain of the level of performance they will be given.  Do that a time or two and your customer will look for someone more reliable.  You need to do what you say you will do!

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This post wasn’t designed to be all-conclusive in the area of customer service.  There are plenty of other articles, courses, books, and pieces of advise you could review for other aspects of this important area.

If you have tips, tricks, stories or comments on your experiences in Customer Service, feel free to comment about them here.  Thanks for reading!

I had written previously on why you should resize images and want to flesh that out a bit by showing you how to actually do just that.  I originally wrote this for my parents as a ‘tutorial’ on resizing the pictures they were taking with their digital camera.

First, you will need to take all your pictures and copy them from your camera to the computer hard drive.  I’m assuming this has already been done.  In this document the pictures have been written to this folder: c:\pictures.  So that is what you will see in the screen shots that follow.

Also, for this example, I’m going to use a program that is available off the internet for free called Irfanview (http://www.irfanview.com).  You may be using a different program, but the steps are either similar or exactly the same.

So let’s start at the folder where our images are.  As you can see below, I have one picture there.

First, I open this image in my image manipulation program.  Again, for this document it will be Irfanview, but if you double-click the image it may open in a different program for you.

Now, I want to know some information about this image.  I can see from the top of the screen that it is being displayed in a 640×480 mode.  At the bottom of the screen I can see the original image is much larger, it is 1600×1200.  So, I decide I want to resize this to 25% of the original image size.  To do this, I select Image | Resize/Resample… from the menu options as shown below.

From there, I need to make my selection to resize this to 25%.  You can see this screen below.

Once I click on OK, the image is resized and this is the screen you will see:

Now I need to save this image.  I don’t want to overwrite the image that is the original, so I need to go up to the menu and select File | Save As… as shown below:

From there, I will need to navigate to the folder I want to save the resized image to (here, I go right to the same folder that the image originally was in - c:\pictures) and add to the picture file name, in this case I just added a ‘- small’ to the end of the original file name so I would be able to know which one was the original and which one was the one I resized.  Then all I need to do is hit the save button.  Below is a picture:

That’s it!  Now, I should have a good picture but it should be smaller in size - both physically on the screen and also in file size so I can send it to friends via e-mail.  So, below is the folder that has both pictures in it:

Notice that the original picture has a file size of 426Kb, and the one I resized has a file size of 52Kb - that is almost 10% of the original file size.  It is not only easily viewable, I can also easily e-mail it to family and friends.

I hope that helps you better understand the mechanics behind resizing pictures and saving them with different file names.  This (resizing pictures) is a MUST in web design - it is best to get these images ‘web ready’ and smaller for illustrative purposes (and then linking to the larger image if you need to).  If you have comments or other insight you would like to share with others that read this, feel free to leave a comment - take care!

My friend Cindy inspired me to write today.  Why?  Well…something not so good happened to her today on Facebook.  Some messages went out from her to some of her friends…and I know Cindy - she wouldn’t send out message like some folks got.  I would venture a guess that some folks clicked on the messages because they supposedly came from Cindy (and we all love Cindy!).  They were probably in for a surprise.  Before I go totally on subject, let me make sure you know my ‘take’ on social networking.  Overall, it’s good.  But note I didn’t say ‘it’s all good’.  Just as with most things in life, we need to place boundaries around this area.  And that’s what I want to write on (and I hope you will bear with me on this journey and take in some of the sights…).

What struck me as odd was - I didn’t receive anything from Cindy.  Well, except an e-mail that was rife with warning.  She wrote:

Something is going on with Facebook. If any of you have received some shady or nasty messages from me on Facebook, it wasn’t really from me. I have been locked out of Facebook for now and have contacted them about it. I don’t know if this was from hacking or from a virus. But if you get something from me that doesn’t look right, don’t click on any links. Of course, I didn’t either and look where it got me.

I felt for my friend.  Then, I went to my account to see if I had something.  I did!  But it wasn’t from Cindy, it was from a mutual friend I’m calling ‘Your Friend’ (as seen in the image below).

Wow - my friend saw me, and on YouTube…odd, I don’t recall putting anything there.  And that’s where the teaching begins.  I hadn’t put anything there.  Normally folks don’t have a video camera anywhere near me (I’m positive not many even keep pictures of me!).  But this is the beginning of something known as social engineering.  Basically, the thought process is - this is from my friend, and the link looks weird but it seems like it is going to youtube, so it must be ok.  Umm…not really.

I took the URL and wanted to know where it was going to send me.  I had no intention of clicking on it because I could be sending an invitation for a virus, trojan, key logger, or any other number of malware by clicking on this link (if interested, I have written this post titled ‘Must Have Software to Keep Your PC Safe and Secure‘ on software you should have on your computer to combat many of these things, but nothing stops the action that takes place between your brain and your click finger).  So I copied the URL and placed it in a tool called Discombobulator (oh yeah, I love KarenWare.com).  What I found was the rest of the first part of the URL.  Sure we could see the youtube part, but what you couldn’t see ended in .pl - that’s the extension for Poland!

Most would have thought that ‘Your Friend’ just copied and pasted a URL, and, you know, those things can get all messed up!  I’m pretty certain that someone may have hacked an account or sent some kind of bot that exploited a weakness and was propagating through my friends accounts.  I’m sorry for those that did think that it was safe, on the web and in your inbox everything - and I do mean everything - should be suspect first and trusted after it has been checked.

That leads me to some tips on social networking.  This has caught on for many friends at our church, and this is a good means and method of communication.  But I believe we need to put parameters around our social interaction on these networks for ourselves and our kids.  Here are some things I suggest and why I suggest them.

Don’t post the wrong information

If I said don’t post your social security number, you would go - No Duh!  What I mean here is information that can be used by identity thieves.  Don’t put in your actual birthday.  Don’t put in your actual place of birth.  Don’t post risqué photos of yourself or your friends.  Many things that you joyfully put in when you initially signed up - you may want to revisit.  Often more information is not the best thing!  Do you really want all that information available to your friends, and their friends, and their friends?  More on that with…

Friends can see other friends

Oh yeah, that’s the point of social networking!  That’s the beauty and the beast of the issue though.  It’s all connected, and once you let a friend into your circle - they get access to others information.  You can check on your site of choice to see if you can set various items as private or what level other friends can see of your friends…so revisit that if needed.

All passwords are private

Never share passwords with others.  Never share a profile with a friend.  There come times that friends disagree and bicker, and then it is a free for all, or worse yet, one friend performs a ‘hostile takeover’ of the account and trashes their ‘former’ buddy.  Also, I’d recommend changing your passwords often (and that is subjective, of course) and not using something that is easily guessed or hacked.  You know, your address, your birthday, you kids or grand kids names, or other things we can learn about you pretty easily.

Be wary of strangers

Not everyone has your best interest at heart.  Be suspicious of folks you don’t really know.  Try to read between the lines when folks you don’t know well ask to be your friend.  As someone else put it;

‘If you’re going to decline someone’s offer of friendship, especially on Facebook, where it is rare for random people to get in touch, don’t write back saying, “Do I know you?????” … Just ignore them and hope they go away.’

Don’t post anything you don’t want on the front page of the local newspaper

Employers look at your profile to learn about you.  Others may as well.  Don’t write things about the tough night you had partying, or the scuttlebutt of who is doing what behind another’s back.  There are plenty of recent news articles and information on this information being used in courts of law and - in the court of public opinion (you can click here for a Google Search result of items).

Well, that’s my short missive on some information from my mind.  It’s not much, but I hope it’s a start.  You can perform a search on Google for things like ’social networking do’s and don’ts’ or any other number of searches to find more information.  It is my hope all my ‘friends’ don’t bail out on our social networking experience.  Instead, maybe they can learn from this and do social networking from a more informed position.

Do you have something to add?  Feel free to share your comments on this post, and thanks for visiting!

I really want to try to explain what some differences are in the use of images on the web.  Why is this important?  Because, as a web designer (and for some reading, as someone who posts images and information on the web) I need to design for the ‘lowest common denominator.’  By this, I mean this: I design for my Mom (no harm or slight intended here, I just know the equipment my parents have and use because I am their tech support person).

Let me put it in perspective.  While my Mom doesn’t use a dial up modem (they have cable, thank you), you may be surprised that there are quite a few households in the USA that still use dial up.  One statistic reads:

Connectivity: 1.2 percent of US households are FTTH subscribers, 25 percent have NO Internet, 53 percent have broadband, and 21percent still use dial-up. (year 2007 statistic cited from Birds-Eye.net)

So, what does that have to do with images and what I do with them on the web?  Well…an awful lot.  With many of us wanting to share various photos and images with family and friends, we could stand a reminder of the size of these files - yes, the actual file size.  Below is an image of a car (my 2006 Dodge Charger) I would like you to look at.  But before you see that jewel, look at the screen shot below of my explorer window.  It shows the exact same picture, the largest one is straight from my digital camera, the other two are then reduced to illustrate what I’m talking about.

The initial image I worked with is at the bottom, the name of the file is car-original.jpg, the file size (dimensions of the picture in pixels) is 2816 x 2112, and the size is shown as 2,745,391.  That’s 2.7Mb!  Try e-mailing that to your friends using dial up and see how long it takes for them to ask you to cease and desist.  It would take over 8 minutes to get that image alone on a 56kbps modem!  The only alteration I made to the photo was to smudge the license plate, for those wondering…tried to keep the picture as is with no compression on resave.

The next thing I did was to resize the picture.  I used a free program called IrfanView and took some screen captures doing this to add to another future post.  As you can see, the car-800×600.jpg (file size of 125,057 or 125Kb) and the car-200×150.jpg (file size of 8,544 or 8Kb) are the result of this activity.  [Warning - Tech Note: In each of those resizes, the compression was set to 80% and the dpi setting was to the web standard of 72dpi, these were the 'standard' settings for jpg files in IrfanView.]  That, coupled with actually resizing the picture, gives substantial file size differences.  Below is the 200 x 150 picture (you could refer to this as the thumbnail picture that is displayed).  If you click on that picture, you will have another window open and the 800 x 600 picture will appear in it.

Why would you want to resize the image?  To REDUCE FILE SIZE.  Below is a quick calculation of how long it would take a person to download and display these pictures.  (My thanks to the calculator on HP’s site for the tables below, you can find this here if you have other file sizes you want to run the calculation on, and note that this only works in Internet Explorer.)

An 8kb file, like the 200 x 150 image, would take:

Line Speed	Approximate download time (seconds)
ISDN or DSL
64Kbps
56Kbps
38.4Kbps
28.8Kbps

A 125Kb image, like the 800 x 600 image, would take:

Line Speed	Approximate download time (seconds)
ISDN or DSL
64Kbps
56Kbps
38.4Kbps
28.8Kbps

And, a 2,745Kb image, like the 2814 x 2112 original car image, would take:

Line Speed	Approximate download time (seconds)
ISDN or DSL
64Kbps
56Kbps
38.4Kbps
28.8Kbps

Wow - pretty big difference!  Now, think of your customer on the web, that person that is getting information or wanting to review or purchase your product.  It really doesn’t have to be a business, it could be the folks reading your blog, the family that is trying to view your families photos, or any other number of areas you are using images for.  How long do you want these folks to wait?  What if you have 2 of these pictures?  Or 4?  Or 12?  That time adds up real quick.

Think about those images you are sending to others or posting on your site.  Are you helping that person on dial up?  Or are you making certain they leave your site never to return?  Grab some image manipulation software and resize those images (for a quick tutorial on doing this, visit this post)!  If you have comments, tricks or tips you’d like to share on this topic, feel free to leave a comment - and thanks for visiting!