everyday

Keeping your email secure is probably the single most important aspect of your online life. Every web-based service that you use, more than likely, will send allow you to reset your password using your email. Imagine if someone was able to access your email, they would be able to reset the passwords for your bank, cell phone, water bill, etc…

To help thwart would be attackers take a few moments to ensure that your Google Mail is secure (the same goes if you aren’t using Google Mail).

• Google now has a feature that forces the use of HTTPS when accessing Google Mail
  1. Login to Google Mail
  2. Click on “Settings”
  3. Select “Always use https” in the “Browser Connection” section
  4. Save changes, log out and back in
  5. Verify that you are using a secure site (there should be a lock icon next to the URL)
• Use a strong password that is unique from your other services
• Do not provide access to your email to any 3rd party (no Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn). While it may be convenient to have these sites look through your contacts, it is like handing them the keys to your kingdom

If you follow these simple steps, you will make it much more difficult for people to hack into your email.

Unfortunately I missed the final Presidential Debate last night. I went to watch it online, and once again ended up at hulu. I have ended up at hulu with increasing frequency lately. I have watched the Daily Show and Saturday Night Live to name a couple. Hulu seems to have finally gotten online TV right. The video is freely available, embeddable and linkable. There are ads, but they are minimal and I honestly don’t mind them in exchange for an easy to watch and well presented experience.

I was first turned on to hulu by a weblog post “Hulu figures out how to bring TV online” at Signal vs. Noise.

I just noticed that Google Maps has a nice new Public Transit feature called Google Transit [more information]. This is a very welcome and at the same time depressing feature. Welcome because I am a staunch advocate of public transportation. Depressing because the trip I was just mapping is 28 minutes by car, and 2 hours by public transit. That is unfortunate.

In my work as a Network Administrator for a school district, I run into problems with email click-through marketing techniques rather frequently. The specific problem is with click-through tracking of email advertising campaigns. Since we are a school district that provides internet access to minors, we tend to filter our internet traffic rather heavily. This filtering wreaks havoc with most click-through advertising emails.

For instance, an email is received inside of our network with a link to:

<a href="http://www.rs6.net/?kna76dv978y34qtib33t897jk1bt4hq3fr897&site=www.theactuallink.com">www.theactuallink.com</a>

The user thinks that when they click on theactuallink.com that they will be taken to theactuallink.com, they are instead taken to rs6.net and then bounced through to theactuallink.com. This causes a great deal of frustration with our users. We constantly receive phone calls that our internet filter is blocking theactuallink.com, when it is in fact blocking rs6.net, and rightfully so.

I imagine that this problem will only increase as more and more companies increase the amount of internet filtering they do to comply with various laws and regulations. So, what is the solution?

I would highly recommend never, ever rely on a 3rd party to bounce your links through. If you need to track the effectiveness of an email advertising campaign, then invest the time and resources to roll your own tracking. That or use a tool like Google Analytics that will not break the link even if the tracking itself gets blocked. I know that a large number of the emails are generated by non-profit organizations or businesses with limited budgets that are running their email advertising campaigns through a 3rd party, but I think the time has come to abandon the 3rd party and either hire the talent or develop it from within to avoid losing your audience entirely. There are a large number of free, open source applications that will allow you to run email advertising campaigns so the cost for software would be negligible. Hardware costs and requirements are ever decreasing as well, so the excuses not to are few.

via: Simple Bits

Some exciting news from the developers of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8! Basically they have reversed course on their previous decision to hamstring standards based web design by forcing IE8 to render all web pages in an identical fashion as IE7, unless explicitly told to do otherwise. Microsoft was planning on forcing web developers tell IE8 to render a web page according to web standards or else IE8 would render the page identically to IE7 (which has some shortcomings when it comes to standards).

This is definitely good news and I for one am glad to see Microsoft making a decision that makes sense for the web community at large.

Google Maps has added a new feature called “Terrain”. It overlays a street map on top of a terrain map. While this feature isn’t particularly useful for your everyday mapping needs, it could prove useful in a number of scenarios. What’s more, it is just another example of Google continually improving it’s products.

Unsubscribing from an email mailing list should be simple, one click simple. Microsoft makes the process relatively painful, except for one glaring design fohpah. The instructions to unsubscribe seem simple enough:

To unsubscribe, select the checkbox next to the desired communication(s) and click the Unsubscribe button below.

What the directions fail to explain is that the “checkbox” is entitled “Subscribe”! So I need to click on the “Subscribe” checkbox, then click the “Unsubscribe” button? That isn’t confusing at all.

You probably haven’t heard about OpenID yet, well if you are one of the few readers of this blog I can almost gaurantee that you haven’t. OpenID is, quite simply put, the end to usernames and passwords. Think about it, how many different sites do you frequent where you have to login with a username and password? How great would it be to be free from all that mess?

This has been done in the past, Microsoft tried with their “Passport” system (now called LiveID), but it was dependent upon Microsoft. There has been a move to get SAML into the mainstream, but that has all but failed as well due to vendor issues (although Google is using it for Google Apps).

All of these various systems basically work the same. Let’s say you want to sign in to some website to access some online service , maybe Last.fm (which I love!). Well, Last.fm needs to know that you are who you are so that it can provide you with its services. Currently they maintain their own username and password database for authentication. If they were to implement LiveID or SAML or OpenID then you would simply provide your username and password for one of those services and after some behind the scenes magic, Last.fm would authenticate you and allow you to log in.

The primary difference between OpenID and the other attempts at SSO for the web is that with OpenID you get to pick who does the authentication. With Microsoft’s Live ID, Microsoft provides the authentication. With SAML, it is some 3rd party identity provider. With OpenID it can be you (well, your website at least) or any number of OpenID providers. The point being that it is free, open, distributed authentication; which is cool!

I have used Flickr for years now. While I have been generally pleased with their service, pleased enough to upgrade to their “Pro” service, I have recently ran into a problem with their support (or lack thereof) that I find wholly unacceptable. I was in the process of migrating my Flickr account to a new Yahoo! ID when my Flickr account became inaccessible. When I attempt to login to my Flickr account using my Yahoo! ID, I receive the following error:

Your registration was successful.

However, we couldn’t log you in automatically because it looks like you don’t have cookies enabled.

There are a few options:

• Clear your existing Flickr cookies
• Check that your cookies are actually enabled (Click here for instructions on how to enable your cookies.)
• If you’ve done both of these things, and restarted your browser, and tried to log in and it’s still not working, please contact us.

Here’s a link to the login page.

Alright, some funky error is happening. No big deal, sometimes this stuff happens and I am willing to allow them to correct the problem. I set out to contact Flickr according to their directions. The form was simple and I had it filled out in just a few moments. After clicking on “Submit”, I received the following email:

Just a quick email from Team Flickr to let you know that we’ve successfully received your recent Help by Email query and we hope to respond within 3 days.

We’d also like to take an opportunity to remind you that one query is sufficient and multiple queries regarding the same issue make the Magic Donkey cry.

Lastly, you may not be aware that our FAQs and forums are full of help goodness:

http://www.flickr.com/help/faq/
http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/

The Flickreenos

Some of you may have missed the infuriating part… 3 days!!! Are they kidding? I pay good money for this service and their goal for simply responding to my support inquiry is 3 days! WTF? This is simply unacceptable, and I am looking into alternatives to Flickr as soon as I finish this post. With my annual membership as a Flickr Pro user I expect “Pro” support, not to have to wait 3 days for a response to my inquiry. Note that they have not said that the problem will be fixed within 3 days (which would also be unacceptable), they will only be responding to my inquiry within 3 days.

I was a little apprehensive when it was announced that Yahoo! would be acquiring Flickr. Up until today, when I required support, I have had no problems. After perusing the user forums I have found that there are many unhappy users that have received poor support from Flickr, post Yahoo!.

I will post Flickr’s actual response time and what the resolution of the problem when that eventually happens.

[UPDATE] I did receive a response from Flickr, within their specified time, but the the problem had already magically fixed itself. I still thinks that 3 days is way too long to expect a support response from a service that I am paying for!

Filed in the “holy-crap” category! Google Maps with Street View.