Search is back in the news again. Long dominated by Google (and for now, still dominated by Google), some new tools are emerging. Microsoft is throwing a lot of ad dollars into Bing, which to me is Google with random header photos. Yawn. Meanwhile, Wolfram Alpha is fascinating, even to a mathematics noob like me.
Earlier [...]

A few weeks ago, a client Web site disappeared. It happens: in the past, other clients have occasionally lost their sites, for reasons ranging from hosting hard disk failures to various human errors. (In this client’s case, they hadn’t renewed the domain name, so the site was still there, but the URL pointing to it [...]

I’m in WYSIWYG hell… and I’m not alone. (For those who don’t know, What You See Is What You Get — the acronym is pronounced whizzy-wig — is a term for any visual HTML editor such as the ones in Web-based email editors, blogs or content management systems. It’s supposed to let you do basic [...]

Thirty-six seconds. That’s how long it took to crack my password a few years ago.
Years back, the IT guys at a company where I worked called me to ask if they could use my account passwords to run a test. They wanted to try to hack an account on the system, to test their security [...]

I’m the so-called “Webmaster” for a couple of large nonprofit organizations, which has me either managing the content of the site or coordinating with other content managers. It turns out that being a Web Content Manager requires a pretty diverse set of skills.
Tech Knowledge: Sure, a pretty good knowledge of HTML and CSS is needed [...]

First, this isn’t a process tutorial; more a warning: If you move your Web site to a new host or a different server within a hosting company’s server farm, you might break some things…
Here’s a hint: hosts will always tell you what technologies they run (or, as they say, “we support”). But they don’t automatically [...]

A few weeks ago, I was working with two separate clients to track down their various passwords and access notes. Took a long time… Meantime, a friend of mine started a new job where the outgoing guy didn’t leave any documentation, so he was trying to figure out procedures, and in a few cases finding [...]

If you haven’t looked at your Web stats lately, perhaps you should. There are useful things to learn there.
I’ve written about Web stats before (see Web Stats: Useful and Dangerous and Hit Counters and Other Bush League Giveaways), so this is just a quick reminder to check your stats periodically. Now let’s talk about errors.
Recently [...]

Earlier today, I deleted something I shouldn’t have. It was on a client site, and they had asked to have a promo removed. Easy, thinks I, and without much additional thought, I logged in removed the promo, and saved the page.
Oops! In my haste I removed the wrong promo. And since it seemed like such [...]

I’ve long been amused by the marketing of country top-level domains for other purposes — recently, I saw an ad for domains using the .me extension (Actual ad slogan: “It’s all about .me”). Pretty funny, if you know what’s really going on.
Turns out, it’s not about me. It’s about Montenegro.
Here’s the deal: In the history [...]