We all find ways to deal with the ongoing onslaught of incoming spam. Even with filters, blockers, mass deletion, it's nearly impossible to avoid seeing some spam. The purveyors of spam are clever and persistent. Fortunately, our spam protection systems do a pretty good job of protecting our hosting clients.
We've been building sites using Drupal since version 4.7 (version 9 is now under active development). Over that time we've tried to find ways to contribute to the community that has created, developed, supported and promoted the platform we've used to make our living. We've provided support where we could, we've donated to the Drupal Association, but we haven't contributed code back to the community until recently.
The domain name system can be baffling. If you run a website, chances are you also have your own domain name. But do you know where it's registered? Do you know when it expires? Learn to take control of your domain.
A couple weeks ago, I got a call on my cell phone from a number in the United Kingdom that I didn’t recognize. Usually, these unrecognized numbers are spam calls, so I ignored it. But this time, the person calling left what looked like an urgent message as I glanced at the garbled transcript. It was around 6 AM. I wasn’t fully awake. I listened to the voicemail. The voice had a British accent. I didn’t fully understand what he was saying. He claimed to be calling on behalf of the server provider called Cogeco/Peer1 which is the company we use to supply our hosting servers.
A few years ago we had a client who was running Drupal 6 (Drupal is now on version 8). We regularly ran security updates on both the Drupal core installation and installed modules. We charge a small fee for this service because we do more than just run updates. We check to make sure if doing so will cause any issues with the site or introduce more problems than the updates would fix. We also have a subscription service to provide such support automatically and at a discounted price.
Be sure you are practicing safe web browsing. Always look for the little padlock in the web address field. If you’re a website owner and you host with us, your site now has that option. For free!
The name may be less common these days, but we're all familiar with the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. Word processors like Microsoft Word are the dominant example. If you work on a web site, you've undoubtedly used one to create and edit pages. If you have, you've probably noticed that it doesn't work quite as well as the ordinary word processor. What You See is never quite What You Get. Why is this? Maybe the WYSIWYG editors for web sites are just bad. There's some truth to that, certainly, but the problem is actually deeper.
Cyber security is a vast and complicated subject. Security breaches, hacks, and identity theft stories abound. In spite of the best efforts of some of the brightest minds in technology, cyber insecurity is only going to get worse before it gets better. There are many reasons for this, but basically it comes down to these main points:
In recent months we’ve been called upon to analyze and implement changes on websites in order to help them become compliant with web accessibility standards. What does web accessibility mean exactly? At its core the goal is to make web content available to the widest possible audience with special attention paid to those who have a variety of disabilities. Just like accessibility issues being addressed in the physical world, increasingly website owners are becoming aware of the need to make their sites available to all.
We've slowly been making a number of changes, and enhancements to our hosting services over the last several months. While we are going to continue to find ways to improve things, it's about time to tally up the most important changes.
