28th Jan 2013 | General Information, Salesforce, Web Hosting, Websites
The good news is that we have survived the move!
The even better news is that, with the business based in the cloud, there were no servers to move. Even our removal company, who seemed intent on damaging as much as possible, could not compromise our data – it is all safe on servers in data centres.
As far as the business is concerned, it is business as usual. Until the landline internet is connected, we are working off the local 3G signal. The 3G in this area gives us a similar speed to that expected off the wired internet. Thanks to Virgin Mobile, we have unlimited internet at a very reasonable price.
If only all the office furniture were based in the cloud! Much of that is in need of unpacking. For you, our loyal customers, it is business as usual. Even our 0800 number is automatically forwarded to our new line. (Thanks to Telecoms World for that.)
I suppose that you do not really need to know where we are located, as we can work from anywhere. For the curious, we are in a village near Ammanford in the county of Dyfed, just off the end of the M4. The full address is on the Contact Us page.
8th Dec 2012 | General Information
I received some bad news today! Google Apps is no longer to offer its free product to new customers. Until now, it was possible, after the initial trial of Google Apps for Business to downgrade to Google Apps Standard, which was free.
At Cloud Genius we see great benefit in the Google Apps product – we use it ourselves.
This policy change at Google will affect our offerings – we can still set up Google Apps for you as part of one of our great website offerings. We will even set it up for you as a standalone product. Unfortunately, after the first month you would have to pay Google a fee. Currently that starts at £3.30 per user per month (less if you pay annually). It is still a great product.
Exact pricing details are at: Google Apps Pricing
23rd Oct 2012 | Defeating spam, General Information, Websites
In this article I will look at how you can prevent your email addresses being harvested from your website. It continues on from Defeating the Spammers pt1
The ‘traditional’ method was to put up a graphic instead of an email address. This may have prevented spammers from harvesting emails, but it also reduced the ease of use of the site. With a link the legitimate surfer could just click to open an email. With an image of the email address the surfer would have to type the email address into his/her email app. (If you linked the image to a mail address you would be back in situation where the harvester could gain your email address.)
Fortunately there is a WordPress plugin that addresses this exact problem.
CryptX
This will find anything on your WordPress post or page that looks like an email address and create an encrypted link. It can convert it to one of several different formats: john@cloud-genius.com can become:
- John[at]cloud-genius[dot]com – which is human readable, but cannot be clicked on.
- Can be replaced with a link that goes elsewhere.
- Can be replaced with an image of the email address
Or, my favourite
- Be replaced with a link that a robot cannot follow, but a human can. The text on the page is obfuscated so that a bot cannot read it.
If you need a page to not receive the Cryptx treatment, there is a tick box on the page editing screen that allows you to turn it off.
In total, it is easy to use Cryptx does it all for you. (Warning techie bit: you do not even have to put ‘mailto:’ links on your page.)
13th Oct 2012 | General Information
We have teamed up with our partners at webhost.cloud-genius.com to get you the best offers until the end of 31 October 2012.
For any purchase over £20, simply put in the code 5NC25 to get 5% off. (They actually price their services in dollars, so you might scrape through with a smaller purchase, depending on the exchange rate.)
Can’t get much fairer than that!
We use them for our hosting, so they must be good.
26th Sep 2012 | Defeating spam, General Information, Websites
One of the most disheartening things about having a new website is spam. It can attack in several ways:
1) The email addresses on the site are ‘harvested’ by spammers. All those email recipients then receive ever-increasing levels of unwanted emails.
2) The lovely form designed to receive information from interested customers starts to receive lots of spurious messages that appear to be meaningless drivel.
3) Comments are received on the blog that are completely meaningless, irrelevant and full of strange links.
Fortunately there are ways to defeat all of these problems, or at least get them down to manageable proportions.
This week I am going to look at getting rid of email link spam:
One of the reasons it happens is that email addresses are worth money. If a spammer can send out emails to lots of people and 1% of people buy something as a result then the more emails the spammer sends the more money he or she makes. A spammer sending 10 million emails will make 10 times as much as a spammer sending 1 million emails (all other things being equal). But, you say, these emails are not selling anything, how does the spammer make money? The links and pictures in the emails are there to test whether the email address is ‘live’ before selling it on!
The best way to stop this process from happening is to have the email addresses on your website unreadable by the harvesting program. Many people do this by putting up a picture of the email address rather than a real link. This causes inconvenience to your real visitors as they can no longer click on the link to send you an email, they have to type it themselves (and will inevitably make mistakes). This results in you receiving fewer legitimate emails and, if you are selling something, making fewer sales.
How about setting up links that are unreadable to the harvesting programs but are fully readable by humans and work properly as links?
Try this one: john@cloud-genius.com
If you hover your mouse over it you will notice (normally in the bottom left of your browser) that it produces gibberish. This is what a harvesting program (‘bot’) would see. It will look something like: javascript:DeCryptX(‘kpioAdmpve.hfojvt/dpn’). Click on it [the one that looks like an email address, not the javascript!] and it will open up an email to send to me.
Clever? In the next article I will explain how you can set this up.
Defeating the Spammers pt2
9th Sep 2012 | General Information
On the Contact Us page you may notice a web form.
When you put your information in it does three things:
1) Puts the information in my Salesforce database.
2) Sends me an email telling me that there is a new person interested in my services.
3) Thanks you for kindly giving me your information.
If you are interested in Salesforce and how it can help you be more responsive to customers, fill in the form!
Here is the form.
