pctoolbox.co.uk

We have recently come across and brilliant secure website called How Secure Is My Password.net.

The website provides users with rough estimates of how long it could take a hacker to identify their passwords and hack into their account. It will also tell you if your password is one of the 500 most commonly used (e.g. 12345, house, smith and chicken).

Simply visit ‘How Secure Is My Password?‘ and then start typing your passwords for instant feedback. Ideally, for accounts which don’t have your important information (e.g. bank details or address), you want your passwords to be secure for at least a few hundred days. Otherwise, for very secure passwords, you ideally want at least a few hundred years.

The longer it takes to crack the safer you’re likely to be!

You may have noticed that a lot of our links recently have been going a website called Followthis.  The whole idea behind the website is to get rid of ridiculously long link addresses and make them much smaller.  Followthis generates a unique link address when you insert the original link into its generator.  Its quick and easy and worth doing.  Here’s a little example:

1. Say I wanted to search MP3 Players on Amazon.co.uk.  The link I’d have would be this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_ss_w_h_?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=mp3+players&x=0&y=0. Which is a very long link.
2. I may then want to send this link to a friend or colleague.  Sending the original link would look very scruffy in an email…which is where Followthis comes in.
3. Copy the link into Followthis and click the button ‘Generate Link’.
4. Followthis will then create you with a unique URL address for the link.  For example, here is the followthis link for the MP3 Player Search: http://followthis.info/f417i95

So as you can see, its simple and makes linking look nicer!  As well as  making linking nicer it helps links from breaking.  Some email clients will wrap the link around onto the next link, but sometimes if it wraps round too many times some email clients will not keep the link whole, and therefore miss a bit off the end meaning the link won’t work!  FollowThis solves that problem!

Try it out!

In the past we have written about recognising spoof emails trying to acquire some form of personal information on you, whether it be from a hoax bank email or website, the problem is becoming much more common and serious.  In September 2008 there were over 8,621 Phishing Sites/Emails found and verified.  Our previous posts on this topic are:

Phishing – general advice to help you stay safe online

Advice on Hoax Virus Warning Emails

Quick Tip: Stopping Spam

Today we came across PayPals 3 Part Phishing Guide.  We think that articles are well worth a look.  They are primarily based on helping identify PayPal spoof emails, however much of the information applies to general spoof emails.  The links below link to each Part of the Guide:

Part 1- Understanding Phishing

Part 2 – Recognizing Phishing

Part 3 – Fighting Phishing

With more and more phishing sites/emails being found each month we all need to be on our toes with what’s going on!

Safe Surfing!

So far we have looked at Domain Names, Hosting and Tools for a basic website setup. The hardest thing is to get your website known. If this site is just for friends and family to see your holiday snaps then you can leave this bit out as you just need to give them the link. But for a site you want people to be able to find in Google, Yahoo etc then you need to think about a few things!

There is far too much to cover in a quick tip, so this is just a finish to the series with a reminder to consider it, search for website optimisation tips and you will be well on your way

Part three in our Basic Website Setup Series! So far we have looked at

• Part 1 – Domain Names
• Part 2 – Hosting

This week we are looking at Site Building Tools.  Now professionals tend to use a program called Dreamweaver by Adobe, or something similar. However for beginners this is a steep learning curve and one that can often be avoided.

We recommend that you use a pre-written tool to create your site and manage it as well. For most people a simple blogging tool will be more than enough, however for those that want something more they will need a Content Management System (or CMS for short!).

The tool you use will need to work with your hosting provider, for this tip we are going to work with tools that come with Fantastico as that is often installed on the control panel of a Linux hosting package.

For full details on how to install these tools you will need to see your hosting providers support pages, but just to give you an idea. You can log into your control panel (cPanel) and select fantastico and without any programming or web building knowledge install tools such as:

• WordPress (our favourite)
• Nucleus
• Joomla
• Mambo
• PHP-Nuke

The first two are Blogging tools and the last 3 are CMS tools. Our favourite is WordPress, it is easy to use, easy to install, there are many themes and plugins available to make a site that does just what you need it to.  Check out our User’s Review of WordPress here.

With a tool like this you just have to learn to use their Admin area, which in my opinion is much easier than learning Dreamweaver and getting messy with an FTP application. It often involves just filling in form types pages to get your content online!

Once your domain and hosting is setup (see your hosting provider on how to do this, you will need to point the nameserves of your domain to your hosting space) you can literally have a site up and running in minutes with a tool like the ones we have listed, all that takes the time is you coming up with valuable content to put on it!

I hope this helped, let me know if you have any thoughts or comments or if you get a site up and running like this link us to it!

Following a successful series on Planning a Wireless Network, we have decided to continue the trend with a short series on Planning a Basic Website!

This series is part of the weekly Quick Tips, which are supposed to be short, this set will be a bit longer in order to help beginners understand how to setup a site and provide resources or suggestions of what to use for this.

The things we will look at are:

• Domain Names
• Web Hosting
• Tools to create the site
• Site Optimisation

Today, we will look at Domain Names. A domain name is the web address that people will use to access your website, e.g. www.pctoolbox.co.uk, www.brandstar.co.uk or www.google.co.uk. These are also often referred to as a URL. If you are really interested in know more about domain names then Wikipedia can help!

When choosing your domain name consider the following:

1. Needs to be easy for people to remember, so generally shorter the better
2. If you can get the .com version of the domain then go for it, this is the domain level that most people remember. Bet you wouldn’t remember a site that ended with .uk.net!
3. It needs to be available!
4. Should ideally be the name of your site / company, OR tell the visitor what your site is about
5. Don’t pay too much for it! We tend to find 123-Reg.co.uk* to be the cheapest and provide a generous amount of tools on the control panel to manage your domain.

Struggling to think of a domain name? or finding that all the ones you choose are taken, try nameboy.com for some help!

Next Week, Web Hosting!

*this link is an affiliate link, we have to run the site somehow if you want a link without the affiliate link then try this one: www.123-reg.co.uk. Please note, our affiliate status has no effect on us recommending 123-Reg.

The last day of each month this year we will be writing a short post with our “Site of the Month” suggestion, with a brief explanation of why we like the site so much This can vary from it being a fantastic design to useful content to something just very different!

This month the site is Xpanity, with social networking becoming bigger and bigger on the web these days this is yet another way to communicate with new people while browsing the web. This tool allows you to chat in real time with people viewing the same web page as you.

I have to say we haven’t tried the tool out yet, but plan to soon. It is a interesting idea with lots of potential, if you decide to have a play with it then let us know what you think!

The reason for it being our Site of the Month? The design is great, clean, crisp, colourful and I love the logo! The content (or in this case, the tool) has huge potential and I would certainly say it is different!

If you have any suggestions for our site of the month then let us have them

I am often asked what are the advantages of having a server for a small business. Which is a good question as it can be a heavy investment and often a wasted investment if it is not used to its full potential. So how could a small business use a server to its full potential without using features for the sake of it..?

It’s my opinion that using Small Business Server from Microsoft is the ideal operating system as it is packed with features the standard versions don’t come with, most importantly for small businesses it includes Exchange Server. More specifically the features that I think would be most useful to a small business are as follows…

• File Storage – store files centrally to ensure easy access for all users rather than emailing documents back and forth or using USB Pen Drives.
• Exchange Server – Have your server manage your company emails so sending internally is immediate, you can share each others calendars and access all this remotely from any machine with an internet connection so your team can always stay in touch.
• Remote Access – Allows employees to work from anywhere with an internet connection for ultimate productivity.
• With all data stored on the server you have only one backup to worry about – even with the best server in the world you still MUST backup!
• Share printers
• Enabling Faxing from and to the server with faxes being delivered to the email inbox of users

Servers can do much more, but in my opinion those are the things that are the biggest advantages to Small Businesses looking to improve their Computing capabilities.
Something to try on your own? Most definitely not. Get hold of your I.T. Company and ask them to do it for you.