Name: Orlando Vazquez
Reason for being: just another Perl hacker
Quote to live by: Safety third!

We’ve had plenty of new faces join the Gossamer ranks in the past year, so we thought it was high time to do another one of our employee profiles!

Early speculation that Orlando was taller than yours truly turned out to be nothing but slander on the part of the office’s usual gossipers (*coughTarrincough*), but either way, there are now at least two gangly dudes in the office who love heavy metal.

Orlando at work

Orlando caught wind of us through a friend he home-brews beer with…who just happened to formerly code for us. Small world indeed!

Having previously worked on enterprise-level social-networking applications, Orlando was keen to broaden his experience in the Perl coding field and signed aboard the USS Gossamer Threads with great enthusiasm. Orlando was summarily tossed into the whirling maelstrom of GT custom work upon his arrival, and proved to be remarkably adept at navigating the churning waters of client requests, bug fixes and custom coding.

…Laying the tortured nautical metaphor to rest, Orlando has primarily lent his expertise to site re-skinning and template migration.

Orlando at play

Like any self-respecting Perl hacker, Orlando doesn’t take his coding hat off when he checks out of the office, and works on open source development in his spare time. Recently, he’s been working on a distributed rendering framework as well as a blogging application.

Turning to more malty matters, Orlando’s part of a group of dedicated home-brewers: people who aren’t just crafting beer to suit their connoisseurs’ palettes, but are saving valuable pub dollars in this wintry economic climate. Currently, Orlando and his friends have a batch of peach wheat beer in the primary stages, and have been enjoying an imperial pale ale that was recently finished and determined to be the hoppiest brew they’ve produced yet.

Bracing and spicy Christmas Ale!

Orlando loves him some metal, and cites the Egypt-obsessed death metal band Nile as his favourite. While he won’t be going to the Slayer/Megadeth show coming to town in a week’s time (although I will!), he did recently check out and enjoy a show by the legendary Cannibal Corpse. That being said, his pick for record of the year (thus far) is the decidedly un-metal “Lambs Anger” by avant-garde French house producer Mr. Oizo. Go figger.

Nile: Keeping death metal technical and brutal.

Casual water cooler jibber-jabber revealed that Orlando has been juggling for about four years. While he isn’t turning down offers from Cirque du Soleil just yet, he’s become quite adept at juggling balls but has also been known to try his hand at clubs and club passing.

We eagerly await a performance of his rumoured “juggling five ergonomic keyboards lit on fire while compiling code” act at the next GT Christmas party.

Not pictured: Orlando.

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It’s no secret that people are concerned about information security while doing business online. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard is list of protective, preemptive measures enforced within organisations which process credit card payments.

So, what does PCI/DSS have to do with you?

Well, if your site is handling credit card payments, your bank and payment provider will soon require PCI/DSS certification to continue accepting payments.

Additionally, PCI/DSS compliance gives you the peace of mind that comes with storing your customers’ credit card data on servers that have been configured to the highest industry security standards.

Why Be PCI/DSS Compliant?

• It’s gaining traction within the security and hosting industries.
  • The PCI Security Standards Council is working to make PCI/DSS an industry standard.
  • PCI/DSS is set to be the hallmark of secure online vendors and credit card companies.
  • Working towards PCI/DSS compliance on your site now will put you ahead of the curve and at the forefront of server security.
• It ensures that server activity is constantly monitored.
  • Compliance is not a one time goal, and doesn’t just come straight out of the box.
  • As an ongoing process, PCI/DSS requires the full attention of knowledgeable and dedicated sysadmins.
• It increases payment freedom.
  • Store credit card data on your own server.
  • Switch payment processors and payment systems without requiring your customers to resubmit credit card information.
  • Enjoy payment flexibility unavailable with certain payment providers: configure recurring subscription payments with a set expiry date, for example.

What Does PCI/DSS Consist Of?

The current PCI/DSS consists of 12 overarching compliance requirements, each of which have multiple sub-sections and technically specific details, totaling up to a 228-point checklist.

These requirements provide standards for firewalls, passwords, physical and remote server access, and other security concerns.

Visit Gossamer Host’s PCI/DSS page for a list of all 12 compliance requirements, or for further details on the current PCI/DSS (v1.2), visit the PCI/DSS website and read their Self Assessment Questionnaire.

PCI/DSS and Gossamer Host

As the above list indicates, PCI/DSS compliance is no small task, and requires significant and long-term collaboration between site admins and their hosting providers.

PCI/DSS compliance has become a key issue for Gossamer Host over the past year, starting with establishing it on the servers which run our own Gossamer sites.

We’re now happy to extend PCI/DSS service to Gossamer Host clients.

9 of the 12 PCI/DSS requirements come standard with any Gossamer Host hosting plan. For those who want the added security and customer confidence that comes with total PCIDSS compliance, Gossamer Host’s systems administrators are specially trained in enforcing the remaining requirements and will be happy to work with you.

Feel free to contact us to discuss how we can help you ensure that your website is ready for the next generation of web security.

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Gossamer Threads recently completed development on the relaunch of Malaysia.com. Designed to be the ultimate resource for Malaysian culture, cuisine and travel, Malaysia.com extensively uses Gossamer Links to deliver its content whether that’s in the form of hotel listings, recommended Malaysian dishes, or video galleries.

Modular Design!

Gossamer Threads also developed a modular and intuitive architecture and site design for Malaysia.com’s content from the ground up, building a site which offers an easy-to-navigate and aesthetically unified design, and can seamlessly integrate new content.

Using GLinks as a CMS

Gossamer Links generates the Experiences, Tour Packages, Accommodations and Videos pages for Malaysia.com. While each of these site areas serve extremely different purposes and deliver radically diverse content, they are all powered by a single GLinks installation!

Malaysia.com uses its Experiences pages to offer detailed looks at individual dishes, beaches, jungles, cities, and cultural events across Malaysia. Each of these are set up as categories in the Gossamer Links installation, with individual experiences (the infamous durian fruit, for example, or the capital city of Kuala Lumpur) organised within those categories as individual link records.

Detail Pages

Link records are also used to generated the tour package pages which display images, detailed info, and price ranges for the site’s Malaysia tour packages.

An extensive series of columns were added to the link table to facilitate detailed hotel records, containing address, rating and amenities information. Would-be travelers can also book hotels and flights through our integrated Travelocity forms!

Hotel amenities pulled from the database, and a nice booking engine

Malaysia.com’s video gallery is also stored in a separate category of the Links installation.

The links table has been customised to promote cross-referencing between all of these different types of links - related link IDs have been entered in the record for the entry on Penang Asam Laksa, a noodle soup dish native to the island state of Penang. These IDs prompt GLinks to display accommodations from the Penang category under the Hotels listing on the Penang Asam Laksa page, as well as a video on the topic of the dish on the side of the page.

A video detail page

This cross-referencing was a key element in the design of Malaysia.com, and a great example of Gossamer Links’ adaptability as a content management system - allowing for all of Malaysia.com’s content to be stored in a single database, and promoting lateral browsing by the site’s visitors.

Designing Malaysia.com

Malaysia.com operates on the philosophy of allowing its visitors to “Experience Malaysia”. With this in mind, Gossamer Threads’ designers set out to craft a look for Malaysia.com that wasn’t just unified and easy to navigate, but was as inviting and immersive as the country of Malaysia itself. They decided upon taking an approach which was highly visual, utilizing photos and textures to showcase the beauty and contrasts of Malaysia.

The main navigation

The image-backed navigation lozenges which act as a header throughout Malaysia.com were created with those principles in mind. The lozenges are intended not only to provide stability and easy movement throughout Malaysia.com’s pages as the user explores the site, but also to ensure that a variety of colours and images from across the spectrum of Malaysia were always present during site visits.

Different colours tied thematically to each section

Colours were selected to thematically represent each of the site areas, with the subnav, text and borders of pages within those areas adjusting to give each area a look to match its content, as well as subtly remind the visitor of their orientation on the site.

Main Marquee

Widescreen marquee images became a major element in the design of Malaysia.com, with pictures from across the site’s image galleries rotating through high-profile marquee frames throughout the site and linking to specific category and detailed pages. As users drill-down into more specific pages and content, the images change to become more specific - the home page marquee features images from a selection of Experience pages, and the marquee on the Food page shows off images from the site’s pages on Malaysian cuisine.

Sub Category Marquee

Above the marquees, category, sub-category and detailed page names are displayed, again to help the user stay oriented.

Playing Host

A top-level domain needs top-level hosting to accommodate its traffic. Gossamer Host’s servers were an ideal home for the heavily indexed and search engine optimized pages of Malaysia.com.

Running on a dedicated server which gives it room to grow and adapt to higher traffic levels if needed (like our friends at Magnify.net), Malaysia.com enjoys fully managed hosting, with round-the-clock surveillance of the server’s CPU usage, system load and bandwidth.

The Total Package

The development of the new Malaysia.com required something from every one of Gossamer Threads’ departments: products, web design, customization and hosting. It was a large and multi-faceted undertaking, but one which we’re extremely proud of.

Take a look around the site and see what the GT treatment can do for your domain!

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