I guess that’s stating the obvious, but I thought that it was worth looking at what some of your options are if you were planning on creating a personal website or blog.

Free Hosting

There are quite a few free webhosts around, but like most hosting services they need to make money somehow. The way they usually do this is with advertising. So whilst you can get the hosting for free, you also need to keep in mind that there may be a few ads floating around your website. If you Google ‘free webhosting’ you will find a bunch of those guys.

WordPress.Com/Blogger.Com

WordPress.com offers free blog hosting, using their WordPress blog software. It’s similar to the Google owned Blogger.com. These two providers have quite a different look and feel so if you were thinking of creating your own blog you would probably want to try both and then choose the one you are most comfortable using.

Squidoo Lens

Squidoo is a site that, like many, is dedicated to sharing knowledge. They call their web pages ‘Lenses’ and like the blog hosting sites their site is free of charge. A lens is like a single page website that relates to a specific topic. They have a bunch of ‘widgets’ that allow you to add content from other blogs, polls, images, videos and most things you might want to put in a website.

Hosting Your Own Website

Having your own fully hosted website probably isn’t as hard as you think – particularly with software like WordPress that allows you to edit your content in much the same way as you would write a document in a word processor. Domains cost from around $10/yr (.com, .net) to $30 for 2 years (.com.au) and hosting is under $10/mth.

Why Would You Want A Personal Website?

The usual reason is simply to share your knowledge, an interest or perhaps a hobby. As you probably know, there are websites out there on just about every topic you can think of. I started one of my own just a few weeks ago. I have always had a love for music and have played several instruments over the years including saxophone, violin and guitar.

My site brings together some performances and performers that I think are unique, unusual or special in some way. You can check it out if you like. It’s called Inspirational Performances. I plan to continue adding to it and already have a bunch of performances in mind.

You may have an interest, hobby or passion that you would really like to share with others and there’s no better way to share it with the world than having your own personal website!

SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation. Basically it is the science of optimising your website so that it appears higher in the major search engine results. A higher ranking means more visitors to your website. In this video I summarise what SEO is and why you need to optimise your website.

If you watch television, even just every now and then like me, you would have seen and heard the latest Target Christmas ads. When I heard the ad I was sure that I’d heard the song before.  I googled a line of the song and sure enough, it’s a song by Shakin’ Stevens called ‘Merry Christmas’ that he originally released in 1991 and then re-released in 2007.

I recently decided I wanted to create a snappy new HTML signature for my email messages. In the past I’ve generally used a text signature, but I kind of like the idea of having my business logo at the bottom of my emails and links to our website and social marketing profiles.

I had done HTML signatures for a few customers in the past so I figured it would be a fairly easy thing to do. I was right – it is fairly easy – if you are using a version of MS Outlook that isn’t MS Outlook 2010. Apparently Microsoft decided that the ability to paste HTML signatures into the signature settings box was some kind of security issue and they took that option away.

After a lot of searching around the web I found the answer in a forum. Given that it takes a few steps to do I thought it might be best explained with a video.

Seasons Greetings

We’d like to take this opportunity to wish all of our customers and friends all the very best for the festive season and the new year. It’s been quite a big year at CAS Netlink with lots of changes, new products and our new web site. Also, you’ll be hearing from us a little more regularly now that we have a much better newsletter system set up – and we’ll be sharing some info on how we set this new system up in the new year.

Anyway, do stay safe and enjoy the break!

Ballarat – Social Networking Wasteland?

Unless you’ve been hiding somewhere a very long way away from the Internet, you’ll probably already know that social networking is fast becoming a main stream form of promoting a business. It’s a very unique and useful tool as it allows you to become more engaged with your customers and potential customers.

When you look at the history of advertising, it’s always been a one way street – unless you actually stood out on the street and spruiked your wares! With social media you have two major options that simply weren’t available before – immediacy and feedback. You can tweet a special that is only available for the next few hours, post a special deal on Facebook or create a quick poll and get results almost instantly.

When I browse around Ballarat business websites though, I’m finding that only a very small percentage are using social media and most that are using it don’t really seem to know how to use it effectively. There are exceptions of course. New Generation Clothing for example, are using social media (Facebook and Twitter) to connect with their customers and attract new customers to their shops and their website. Sadly they are one of the few…

In 2012 we are going to be providing information to help other local businesses engage with their audience and use their websites and social media as a sales tool rather than just an online brochure – so keep an eye out for that in the new year!

The New Newsletter

As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, we now have a new system set up for our newsletters. It’s quite clever as it automatically takes new content from our blog and posts it out to our newsletter mailing list. Early next year I’ll be explaining exactly how we do that and what tools we use. Any website owner can set up a similar system and there’s no cost involved (unless you need someone to set it up for you which takes an hour or two).

Not A Business Owner?

Don’t think we are going to get all businessy and leave you out! One of our goals with all of our newsletters will be to provide information that business owners can use as well as some general info that is of interest to anyone. Tips, tricks, amazing facts… you’ll find it all in our 2012 newsletters!

That’s all for now, but keep an eye on your inbox (and tell your friends about us!) as we will be bringing you all the latest news, tips and miscellaneous stuff in 2012!

Gary Smith
CAS Netlink

In the tradition of many phishing attempts, this one is visually quite genuine looking. As you can see from the email message, it says that I made a purchase for $102.90. What you can’t see is that the purchase, apparently, was for a wig. Now I may be getting on a bit but I still have enough hair left that I’m not ready to shop for wigs – and I’m certainly not a cross dresser!

This message plays on the fact that many people would see the details and immediately go into ‘what the heck!!!??’ mode thinking they had been charged for something they didn’t order. It’s a clever play on emotions that will most likely get quite a few people in. It won’t get us though because we’re a little more diligent about links in emails and we never, ever click a link in an email based on the compulsion to wring someones neck for taking our money!

Here’s the message. Note that when I hovered over the ‘log in to your PayPal account’ link it looked nothing like a link to paypal.com as it should do (click on the image to see it in full size).

If you are really, really worried about anything like this and want to make sure you didn’t get charged then you can always go directly to the PayPal website and log in as you normally would, rather than clicking the link in an email. This is the advice I give all of our clients – regardless of how genuine it looks, if you need to log into one of your online accounts, Facebook, Twitter etc always do it the old fashioned way (i.e. from your bookmarks or Roboform) rather than clicking the link in the email.

There’s a new email scam doing the rounds and trying to get your Facebook login information. As with many of these it looks very legitimate, but if you look at the ‘From’ address the domain on the end of that address is not facebook.com – it is t724p6uv.facebook-email.com.

Also, when you hover over the Sign In button the address, which should be facebook.com is actually:

static77-68-16-117.live-dsl.net:8887/facebook-friend1/t724p6uv

Remember to always be on the lookout for dodgy addresses like that otherwise you may end up having your details and possibly your identity stolen!

One of the most common causes of websites and online accounts being hacked is weak passwords. Many people create simple passwords because anything more complex than a date or a simple word can be difficult to remember.

I recently created a video that shows how long it might take to crack a password, given a certain length and complexity, and how you can create passwords that are easy to remember AND virtually impossible to crack.

Sound impossible? Read on and I’ll explain and I’ll provide a link to the video at the end of this article.

If there’s one thing us humans are good at it is remembering patterns. We can recite the alphabet in our first year of school (or earlier) and most of us are fairly good at mental arithmetic. That’s because there are patterns and consistency in the alphabet and numbers.

Unfortunately, passwords that are made up from numbers and/or letters are the easiest to crack. Let me digress briefly and explain what this ‘cracking’ is about.

The act of trying to illegally obtain passwords is called ‘cracking’.  The most common type of attack on online and stolen passwords is known as a ‘brute force’ attack. Put simply,  the attacker has a program that runs through the most commonly used usernames and passwords (e.g. admin/admin, admin/password) in an attempt to stumble upon a combination that works. They will usually have a ‘dictionary’ containing hundreds or thousands of popular username/password combinations.

After exhausting the dictionary the next step is to sequentially step  through numbers, symbols and the alphabet until all possible combinations are exhausted. For example, if we were just using the lower case alphabet and we were stepping through all combinations up to six letters the sequence would start with the letter ‘a’ and the final sequence would be ‘zzzzzz’.

By adding a broader range of characters and more length to a password we make it stronger. This is why some sites enforce a password policy that says your password must include upper case, lower case and at least one punctuation character. This greatly increases the number of characters a brute force attack would need to use in order to crack that password.

Unfortunately, while most of us are good with street addresses, telephone numbers and birth dates – we have difficulty remembering sequences of characters that include upper case, lower case and punctuation. To get around this difficulty we can use what I call ‘password templates’.

The basic idea is to use a password that includes a word that starts with a capital letter, followed by a sequence of characters that is easy to remember, followed by something common to the site you are signing into.

For example… let’s say my sequence is going to be my dog’s name, followed by some smiley faces and then the first part of the domain I am logging into. Here’s how it would look for my GMail, Hotmail and bank account:

Amber:)(:gmail
Amber:)(:hotmail
Amber:)(:commonwealth

I can tell you that if you were using a super computer that could do 100 trillion guesses per second, the shortest of those passwords would take more than 38,000 years to crack. Not many cyber criminals have access to a super computer, so the average fast computer would take more than 3,890,000 years.

That’s an incredibly strong password and yet it is not at all difficult to remember. So don’t be fooled into believing that a strong password has to look something like 23eRRt5%#@! – it honestly doesn’t.

If you use a ‘password template’ you CAN have a virtually uncrackable password that is really easy to remember!

You can view the video showing where I test my passwords at our CAS Netlink YouTube Channel.

Just a reminder that ANY email can have a virus laden link in it. The Mozilla organisation recently released a new version for its Firefox browser (version 8.0) and I’ve had a bunch of bogus emails with a link to download the latest version of Firefox. Like many fraudulent emails, these ones have been skilfully crafted and do look very legitimate. The only way you would know if it was a fraud would be to check the link that the download button takes you to. As you can see in the image below, rather than taking you to the Firefox website or a well known download site such as C-Net, it links to a very dodgy looking web address. I haven’t clicked the actual link – I never do as sometimes all it takes is one click to get your computer infected with malware or a key logger.

So please do be careful with all emails – hackers are trying their hardest to get access to your stuff!

I had an email yesterday to notify me of a phishing site on one of my blog sites. The site had a theme installed that uses the ‘Tim Thumb’ library which was recently found to have a serious exploit. It’s serious because it allows a hacker to upload and execute files on your site. You can find out all about it as well as some instructions for updating/patching it  HERE.

The tim thumb library is used by a lot of WordPress theme developers and is common in many of the premium themes. I use WooThemes themes on many of my sites and there’s plenty of discussion in the WooThemes forums about sites being hacked. WooThemes have released updates for all of their themes which use TimThumb and have provided detailed ‘cleanup’ instructions in the forums as well.

You should check straight away whether your theme uses the library and whether an update is available. You also should be aware that once a hacker has gained access, they can read the wp-config.php file which contains your wordpress database details and can modify your .htaccess file – so you should check your .htaccess and also change the database password for your blog. If you are using CPanel you will need to delete the database user (just the user – not the database!) and then create the user again with a new password. After changing the password, you will need to edit your wp-config.php and insert the new password.

If you think your site may have been compromised then I recommend you have someone who knows what to look for check it out. It is very easy to detect in the themes directory as there are a number of oddly named files that will get uploaded in there and also the date/time stamps on the hack files will be very recent.