Alistair Lattimore » Websites

Housekeeping, Part 2

Al — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 13:17:29 +0000

Every once in a while, I go through this site and perform some general housekeeping and website maintenance work. The last time I performed a big chunk of maintenance was back in 2008 when I went through and consolidated about 25 categories and subsequently re-categorised a huge number of posts.

The time has come again, this time it is to do with the how I format images within posts. Back in the earlier days of this site, I used a custom image formatting setup which looked quite cool but is less practical. With the more recent versions of WordPress, I just want to be able to use the WYSIWYG editor and focus more on writing and less on the formatting issues.

I’ve got about 80 or so old posts to go through and do a little tidy up on, so I’m thinking I might have it done in dribs & drabs by the end of the week.

2010 Traffic Statistics

Al — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 13:14:37 +0000

Following on from my 2009 web statistics, below is a summary of what traffic the site took in 2009.

In 2009 the site took 106,930 visitors over the entire year which resulted in 136,525 pageviews. During 2010, the site generated 97,509 visits and 132,068 pageviews. That figure is down from my two biggest years of approximately 145,000 and 135,000 during 2007 and 2008 when I was posting less frequently but the posts were of a more technical nature and also pop culture related such as Australian Idol. It’ll come as no surprise that from a traffic driving potential, a lot fewer people are interested in reading about my personal ramblings compared to technical style posts that I used to post.

During 2008 and 2009, I wrote a couple of posts each year that grabbed a moderate amount of traffic and were clear standouts with respect to the number of pageviews. During 2010, none of my posts really caught the attention of the internet; which per above can be attributed to the topics that I’m writing about.

The traffic breakdown by source shows a considerable decrease in the reliance of search engines, with their traffic percentage falling from around 85% in 2008-2009 down to only 74% in 2010. Within the search engine space, Google are completely dominating with 94% of the search engine traffic. During 2009, Yahoo! were the first non-Google search engine with about 2.5% & Microsoft Bing was the new kid on the block. Fast forward a year and the tides have turned with Bing now accounting for 2.6% and Yahoo! 2.4% of the search engine traffic.

The most popular posts for the year were nearly identical to 2009, with four of five remaining and one newcomer:

Removing those posts from the top of the list since they clearly dominate:

It is probably worth noting that nine out of ten of the highest traffic web pages on my site are not about anything to do with myself or our family but are in fact to do with helping others. This makes a lot of sense, especially when you see the meteoric traffic growth question and answer sites Stack Overflow and Quora have seen in the last two years.

That being said, still nothing from 2010 were showing up in the list. Isolating the posts written in 2010 and the landscape is vastly different:

Onward and upward for 2011!

Comparison Shopping Websites, A Consumers Best Friend

Al — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:52:52 +0000

Claire & I have recently been on the look out for a new compact digital camera, to replace our aging Canon Ixus 65. During our research process, we’ve looked a countless cameras on the internet, via the manufacturers’ websites, consumer electronic web sites such as cnet and read countless reviews.

When it came time to actually buy a digital camera though, we were going to buy it in person at a local Gold Coast retailer such as Harvey Norman, The Good Guys or similar. What we found was, while they had prices that were better than the recommended retail price by the manufacturer and some were going to be flexible on price, they were still quite expensive.

Inevitably when people start researching online for a product, they’ll start with a search engine with looking for the best compact digital cameras. The results will yield sites such as a digital camera product round up on cnet and a number of companies will be paying for advertising on Google & co. as well. While possible, it was going to take a lot of time to sift through all those sites to find the best deal and this is where the comparison shopping websites become the consumers best friend!

Comparison shopping web sites crawl over literally tens or hundreds of different ecommerce web sites, cataloging what they find and how much each product costs. Of course, the comparison shopping websites aren’t just for digital cameras – you can buy all manner of things via them from fridges to perfume, pet supplies to furniture, there aren’t a lot of things you can’t find. As a consumer, you enter the product name or product category into these sites and see dozens of different companies selling the same product, with wild variances in price.

In Australia, the three most prominent shopping comparison websites are probably:

They all have a similar feel about them, however the interface and how the products are cataloged and organised differs by site – which makes some easier to use then others. In the case of the Canon Ixus 200 IS digital camera we purchased, it retails for approximately $600 for the bare camera chassis. Claire bought it via Shopping Square, a massive online store that we’d never heard of before but discovered by the comparison shopping sites. For less than half the retail price of the camera on its own, we managed to get the camera, a 16Gb memory card & prompt postage.

Next time you’re looking for a product that you can buy online, I highly recommend that you do yourself and your wallet a favour and visit one of the above sites before you spend a whole lot more money than you need to.

Windows Live Profiles & Twitter Integration

Al — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 13:01:53 +0000

Last year I wrote about Microsoft Windows Live getting smarter, specifically that Microsoft were gearing the new Windows Live profiles as a one stop shop for social web site aggregation. In a few quick clicks of your mouse, you could consolidate down dozens of your social networks and personal services into a single place, removing your need to visit each of them independently – fantastic!

One of the social networks that the Windows Live profiles had a web activity for was Twitter. Without any hesitation, I configured the Twitter web activity and all of my tweets were seamlessly imported into my activity stream within Windows Live. My only criticism at the time was that Twitter is a real time service, however my tweets were slow/sluggish to appear in my activity stream – sometimes taking a few hours to show up.

I was disappointed to receive an email on 30 June from the Windows Live team stating that they were no longer able to support the Twitter web activity and that they’d be disabling that functionality, until such a time as they could work with Twitter on their policy change which meant that Microsoft could no longer use the service.

Fortunately, Microsoft provide a generic web activity named “Blog RSS Feed” which will import any valid RSS or Atom XML feed into the Live profile activity steam. Of course, Twitter being the good netizen that they are, also provide an individual RSS stream for each user. Joining the dots and it means that Windows Live profiles and Twitter integration is still possible.

The downside is that because it is using a ‘generic’ web activity, how it is displayed within my activity steam isn’t as elegant and neat as it was prior – bug beggers cant be choosers.

Suncorp Bank, Looking Out For Clients

Al — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 12:06:36 +0000

Last week I unexpectedly received an email purporting to be from Suncorp Bank. In the last year or so of banking with Suncorp and using their online banking system countless times, I don’t ever recall receiving an email from them about anything.

It doesn’t surprise me that I haven’t received an email from Suncorp before, given the prevalence of phishing attacks these days. For those unaware, phishing is an attempt to fraudulently acquire personal information from someone by getting them to enter it into a web site that looks familiar, that is in fact just a shallow replica of a real site. Phishing attacks are one of the reasons you’ll read and hear major institutions state that they will never ask you for your username and password, ever.

Just to checkout what the latest phishing attempt looked like, I thought I’d investigate the email to see if the spammers had gotten any smarter over the years. First thing I noticed was it was from an email address that was clearly related to their online banking system and at the correct domain. Secondly, the subject had to do with BPay – so I though how fantastic that the spammers now use brands or products related to the local country to garner trust with the user.

After opening the email, I suddenly realised that the email was legitimate and I couldn’t believe it! It turns out that Claire had just paid our rates online, through the Suncorp internet banking web site using BPay. The email was a notification, to let me know that a large payment had just been processed and if I hadn’t arranged it to call them immediately.

What I love about the email though:

The subject was clear, it was a BPay notification
They sent it to both of the email addresses I’d provided Suncorp, not just my primary one in case I didn’t check it immediately.
It was a plain text email, so no fancy images or design – just the message. That meant that you needed to read the content of the email to see what it was about and not blindly clicking on something because it used the familiar Suncorp branding.
The first line stated what it was about (high value BPay transaction), the second contained what action to take (phone Suncorp) and for full details you could check the transaction on their site.
Suncorp include their business name, address, ABN, contact information in the footer
Most importantly, there isn’t a single hyperlink anywhere to be seen in the email. As such, you can’t just ‘click the obvious link’ to go to their site.

A lot of the things above seem pretty small things to a lot of people, however I’m really impressed that they’ve chosen a lot of those options – especially the plain text email. Nefarious individuals and companies that use phishing attacks prey on people reacting to a familiar company and brand, such as from their bank to take an action. By providing it in plain text, it removes the familiarity aspect away to make you read the email. By not providing any hyperlinks, you need to open your browser yourself and go to their web site.

All round, a great email from Suncorp and they should be congratulated for doing their part in helping keep their clients information private and their money safe. If I were to make a single change to it, it’d be to remove the phone number and direct the user to their web site (no hyperlink) to get the phone number if they don’t already have it on hand. That way, all of the contact information needs to be entered by the user on their own behalf, which would all but remove the risk of a phishing attack.

Suncorp Bank Anti-Fraud Department Saved Me $686.73

Google Maps Earth Art

Al — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 13:35:48 +0000

Andy Graulund, a 19 year old from Copenhagen in Denmark recently went on a wild hunt through Google Maps looking for obscure and scarcely seen aerial photos of the world. The hunt resulted in Earth Art, a collection of 19 (at this stage) spectacular photos taken from Google Maps.

My favourites in the list so far are:

Gobi Desert, Mongolia
Yukon River, Alaska
North Slope, Alaska

There are none of Australia or New Zealand featured in his list at this stage, however I thought the following places produced some great shots:

Great Barrier Reef, Queensland Australia
If you can block out the coastline of Australia from your mind, this shot reminded me of specs of opal within a blue stone
Uluru, Northern Territory Australia
While not as visually spectacular, I enjoyed looking at Ayers Rock because of the anomaly that it represents. There is a vastness surrounding a focal point in the middle and unless you know what it is – I think you would be drawn to find out what you’re looking at.

What would you add to the list ?

Doodle 4 Google Winner On Display

Improve Your Online Personal Security

Al — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:31:29 +0000

With the explosion of the internet in the last ten years and the ever increasing use and reliance on it to perform our every day life and work, it has become more important than ever to consider your personal security online.

The overwhelming majority of internet users have no idea at all about the steps required to help protect their personal information online. This can be seen by the massive surge in identity theft in the last five years, which is happening online and offline.

To help combat that epidemic, below are my top recommendations to lower your risk of identity theft and improve your online personal security:

Don’t Share Your Account Information
Just like your PIN number on a debit card or your credit card number, don’t share your account information for with anyone. If you have in the past, regardless of how much you might trust that person – make a point of changing your password as you don’t know how lax they have been with your personal information.
Don’t Reuse Your Account Information
People hate having to remember different usernames and passwords for different web sites. However, reusing your account information from one site on another puts all of your online accounts in serious jeopardy if someone tries to attack your identity online.
Create Different Accounts For Different Purposes
For most people it is hard enough to not reuse your account information across literally dozens of different online accounts. However, if you can’t manage a unique set of credentials for each web site – at a minimum group the web sites by type (email, social network, banking, online shopping, ..) and use a different set of credentials for each site. At least if someone gains access to your Facebook account, they don’t automatically get access to your bank accounts.
Choose Strong Passwords
Just like people hate having to remember different usernames, people hate having to remember different passwords. This leads people to using a simpler password, in the hope that they’ll be able to remember it. That mental stumbling block is the perfect attack point for an average user, as their password will probably be a dictionary word or another simple combination of characters such as ’12345′. When creating a password, regardless of whether it is for an email account, social networking or an internet banking account – it should contain lower case, upper case, numbers, special characters and be at least 8 characters long. I know that sounds like a lot of hoop jumping but there are simple ways to remember a complex password, such as using a memorable phrase and replacing a few characters within it.
Reduce The Number Of Online Accounts
With the creation of the authentication protocol OpenID, web site developers now have the ability to allow clients to create a new account without having to worry about managing yet another password. Instead users can signin using an existing account such as a Google, Microsoft Live, Yahoo!, AOL and many more. By signing up using an OpenID enabled account, you have one less password to remember and when you change your password – it is changed on all sites that are linked to it. It might seem as though using OpenID contravenes points 2, 3 and 4 above however it doesn’t because you can create one more OpenID accounts and use a strong password on each instead of something simple like your pets name.
Ensure You’re Using HTTPS
If you’re logging into a site or disclosing your personal information online, make sure you’re currently viewing that web site in HTTPS. The ‘s’ in HTTPS stands for secure and it uses high strength encryption to keep your personal information private when transferred from your web browser to the web site in question. If you aren’t viewing it site in HTTPS, your personal information is transferred across the internet in clear text that anyone could potentially read.
Practice Minimal Disclosure
The internet is a public medium, once you put your personal information out into the public realm – it could very well remain their for the foreseeable future. That means that anyone that might be inclined to go looking for information about you can find it with ease. With that in mind, you should make a point of only ever publishing as much information about yourself on a web site as you’d be happy to have displayed on a billboard beside a busy motorway.
Consider Using A Password Manager
If you do have dozens of different accounts and you cannot keep up with it all, consider using a password manager. You can generate a strong, high complexity random password for every site you create an account on and store it within your secure password manager. If and when you need to signin to that site again, simply look it up within the password manager. If you don’t want to use a standard desktop password manager like KeePass, there are also some fantastic secure password managers which provide web browser integration such as LastPass.
Your Email Address Isn’t Your Username
If a web site doesn’t support OpenID but it does allow you to create a username that isn’t your email address – you should take them up on that offer. While convenient, your email address isn’t your username and can lead to issues in the future if you lose that email account. A friend of mine signed up to Amazon using their Hotmail account and it was previously used by another person but expired. Once signed in, my friend could see all of the previous owners personal information they’d provided Amazon, including name, address, purchase history and more.
Shared Computer Access
If you’re in a position where you use a computer and it is shared between a number of different people, either at home, work or elsewhere – always remember to clean up after yourself. Most web browsers have the ability to remember usernames and passwords for convenience. However if you’re using a shared computer, you could be leaving your account information laying around for someone else to pray on. An easy solution for this is to simply clear all the temporary internet files when you’re done or before logging out of the machine. If that seems like it is too much hassle, the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera all provide a privacy mode or private mode which won’t keep any history of your activity while it is enabled.

While there might seem like a lot of things above to consider, those ten items certainly aren’t the only things you can do to improve your identity management process. In a future post, I’ll talk about how you might go about implementing some of my recommendations above so you can take the first step, which is often the hardest.

DoFollow No Longer

Al — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:03:47 +0000

In 2005 Google decided they were going to attempt to unsettle the online spam ecosystem by recommending that web sites add an additional attribute to a link from site A to site B if they were not verified to be trustworthy. For instance, if someone left a comment on my site who I didn’t know or couldn’t vouch for – I would add a rel=”nofollow” to the link to their site.

While it sounds like a small change, the longer term plans were for search engines to not include those links when ranking a given web sites content. It was common place for spammers to comment spam thousand or millions of blogs, leaving a link to their preferred sites. Before the rel=”nofollow” attribute was introduced, the search engines had no way of knowing if a web site owner trusted that site and as such had to use other methods of measuring trustworthiness.

The intention is clear, by removing the incentive for a spammer by using rel=”nofollow” in the links – it was hoped it would have an impact on the insidious and incredibly aggressive spam ecosystem online. Unfortunately, spammers aren’t the kind of people that just roll over at the first sign of a battle and the war on spam raged on. As the rel=”nofollow’ attribute gained momentum over the years, spammers have subsequently sought out web sites which were considered dofollow – in that they have clean links that the search engines will count when ranking a web site.

As I’ve upgraded WordPress over the years, I’ve been carrying the same set of themes or templates forward through the upgrades and hadn’t bothered to upgrade to a newer base theme. Of course this meant that links from my site were dofollow links and were valuable to the spammers. So valuable in fact that my site has been listed countless times on different forums as being a dofollow blog – essentially proclaiming to the spammers of the world that they should target my site for high quality backlinks.

I’m happy to say that after a recent upgrade to WordPress 2.9.x, I ported my current theme over to a new base theme provided in the 2.9.x code base which uses rel=”nofollow” links by default. In fact, if I want to allow people to have clean links – I’ll need to specifically allow them by use of a plugin – which is fine by me.

This will no doubt upset the spammers out there that thought they’d be getting easy, free dofollow links from my site. While I understand why they want my clean links, I also hate having to deal with comment spam – so I’m going to leave my comments rel=”nofollow” from now on.

Twitter Is Over Capacity

Al — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 12:08:26 +0000

Twitter is over capacity at the moment and the famous fail whale is on display.

I wonder if it has anything to do with Bill Gates joining Twitter today and amassing over 175,000 followers in less than 12 hours.

Windows Live Profiles & Twitter Integration

2009 Traffic Statistics

Al — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:42:07 +0000

Following on from my 2008 web statistics, below is a summary of what traffic the site took in 2009.

In 2006 the site took about 95,000 visitors, increasing to 145,000 and declining to 135,000 respectively in 2007 and 2008. In 2009 the site took 106,930 visitors over the entire year which resulted in 136,525 pageviews. It’ll come as no surprise that from a traffic driving potential, a lot fewer people are interested in reading about my personal ramblings compared to technical style posts that I used to post.

While last year saw a couple posts catch a moderate amount of attention and punch through the metronomic rise and fall in traffic each day, in 2009 none of my posts really got any traction within the greater internet. Not surprisingly traffic did start to decline towards the end of the year, however I’m happy that it wasn’t obliterated like it was last year when I moved web servers within the same host.

The traffic breakdown, just like in 2008 shows the complete dominance that Google has within the web search market. Yahoo! are still the first non-Google search engine and is still delivering approximately 2.5% of the traffic the they were in 2008. The latest addition to the web search ecosystem is Microsoft’s Bing, which sits at position five. Of course, that isn’t a fair comparison since they haven’t been around for the entire year. If you count Bing, Live and MSN together they drove about 1750 visits for the year putting them in at fourth however by the end of May 2010 I expect Bing to have delivered 2000 visits – narrowing the gap against Yahoo!.

The most popular posts for the year were similar to 2006, 2007 and 2008 but with a few newcomers:

Removing those posts from the top of the list since they clearly dominate, changes things a little:

However still none from 2009 were showing up in the list. Isolating the posts written in 2009 and the landscape is vastly different:

I find it telling that my two gripes about the quality of the Applie iTunes account sign up process are within the list. You’d assume a company with a market capitalisation of nearly USD$200 billion would have such a visible component of their business highly polished but it just goes to show everyone has their problems. Having a home phone plan comparison post residing at position three is just more evidence that the consumer is becoming more savvy by researching online, even when purchasing offline.

Onward and upward for 2010!