Technically Easy

5 Reasons to Backup Data Online

Paul — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 12:00:18 +0000

I have written many posts in the past regarding data backup. I regularly backup my data, especially the data I can’t replace, such as digital photos or videos. I have seen hard drives and entire computers
fail, and all data stored on them lost completely.

There are many methods to backing up your data, including DVDs, external hard drives, and USB flash drives. In this post I’ll talk about why online backup may be good choice to include in your backup strategy. I currently use online backup for all my data, but let’s look at 5 good reasons you can also backup online.

Reasons for Backing Up Online

While you can use other physical media to backup your data, here are 5 reasons you may want to look at online backup.

Your data is stored offsite.
When backing up your data, it is important to store it away from the building that currently houses the data. Having a copy in another location ensures that your data isn’t lost if something were to happen to your current location. For example, if you were to have a fire in your home and your computer was destroyed, you can recover you backed up data since it was stored outside your home.
Your data is always accessible - with an Internet connection.
If you need to restore your data, you can easily do so with an Internet connection. You don’t need to find a specific DVD, or go out and retrieve the USB flash drive you stored offsite. Your data is available as long as you can connect to the Internet.
Your backed up data is secured.
Online backup providers usually encrypt your data on your local machine before it sends it to their servers. When it does transfer your data, it is done over a secure SSL connection. The data remains encrypted on their servers so your data cannot be read.
You data is automatically backed up.
Many online backup providers supply a small executable that runs in the background on your computer. When you computer is not in use, these applications will automatically read the directories/files you specified to be backed up, and then back up any new/changed files. This means you won’t have to remember to backup your data.
Online backup is affordable.
You can easily find online backup providers that over a few gigabytes (GB) of storage space for free. Others charge a small fee for many gigabytes to unlimited storage space for personal use.

As you can see there are many benefits for using an online backup service to protect your data. As I mentioned earlier, I currently use online backup to protect my data. I am currently using Mozy and have backed up over 140 GB of data.

With Mozy I unlimited Online Backup for only $4.95 a month
. You can also sign up with Mozy and receive 2 GB of storage space for free.

Regardless of which online backup provider you choose, I suggest you do your research and then choose one that fits your budget and needs. While there are many methods of backing up your data, online backups are one of the easiest methods to keep your data safe.

How to Prevent Spam in Your Wordpress Blog

Paul — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:41:42 +0000

When someone first starts out using Wordpress, and then their blog starts getting some traffic, one thing they may notice is the amount of comment spam that they receive. This is a problem that can cause panic among first-time bloggers. In a matter of days a blog can be spammed hundreds or even thousands of times.

The good news is that there are many plugins available for Wordpress that can help decrease, or better yet, eliminate spam. While you don’t need to use all of them, there are two that I like to use to help control spam on Technically Easy.

Controlling Spam With Plugins

I haven’t explored many of the comment spam preventing plugins that are available, but I have been using two of them for almost a year. I rarely, if at all, get any comment spam within my blog. This is a testament to the job these two plugins do.

One plugin works by analyzing how the spammer is accessing my blog, and if it doesn’t pass all the checks, then they are displayed with a message and can’t access Technically Easy. This plugin works with both human and bot spammers.

The second plugin analyzes the content of each comment to ensure it meets specific standards. Comments that include too many links are flagged as spam. The combination of these two plugins has reduced my spam to almost nil.

Let’s take a look at each of the two plugins that I have been using to prevent spam.

Preventing Access with Bad Behavior

I can’t remember how I came across Bad Behavior, but I’m glad I did. This is the first line of defense to blocking comment spam for Technically Easy.

Why do I say this is the first line of defense? Simple, it can prevent spammers from ever reading your blog. It goes beyond a traditional anti-spam plugin in that it analyzes the delivery method and the software used by the spammer. If something doesn’t look right, Bad Behavior will prevent the spammer from even reading your blog. This will save your blog from spam as well as your bandwidth since very little from your site would have been downloaded.

The spammer, in turn, will receive a forbidden message instead of your site. I have seen this recently when I had an issue with Bad Behavior, but overall, I haven’t had many problems using this plugin. I highly recommend you give Bad Behavior a try.

Removing Spam With Akismet

Bad Behavior won’t catch all the spam, especially if it doesn’t detect anything wrong with the spam’s delivery method. This is where Akismet comes into play.

Akismet is probably the most popular anti-spam plugin for Wordpress. It is installed, but not active, when you install Wordpress. To activate it, simply create a Wordpress.com account and retrieve your API key. You then use this key to activate and use Akismet.

Akismet analyzes the content of a comment to determine if it is spam or legit. If it determines the comment is spam, it will flag the comment as spam. You can review all the spam comments to properly determine if the comment was legit within the Comments options within Wordpress.

I haven’t had any real issues with Akismet, and it has only flagged a few legit comments as spam. Akismet has found over 3,000 spam comments on Technically Easy over the past year. This is after Bad Behavior has stopped thousands more from even posting a comment. Bad Behavior keeps a log of all the entries that are rejected in case you would like to find out where most of the spam-attempts are coming from.

With both Bad Behavior and Akismet enabled on my blog, I get very little comment spam appearing within the actual comments on Technically Easy. If you would like to prevent spam on your Wordpress blog, I suggest you look at installing and activating both the Bad Behavior and Akismet plugins.

4 Wordpress Plugins to Help Protect Your Blog
OIO Publisher - Private Advertising Made Easy

Internet Explorer Issue Using Bad Behavior

Paul — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:00:39 +0000

One of the plugins that I use, and have used for sometime, is Bad Behavior. I like this plugin as it provides a first-line of defense against link spam. This plugin works by analyzing the delivery method of the spam, instead of just the content.

I have been very happy with how it has stopped hundreds of attempts to spam Technically Easy. Unfortunately, I had an issue with Bad Behavior preventing me from accessing Technically Easy from an Internet Explorer browser. I could easily access my blog from Firefox on the same machine, but I couldn’t using Internet Explorer. I decided to look into the problem, and here is how I solved it.

The Problem

As mentioned above, I couldn’t access Technically Easy using Internet Explorer 7, however, on the same machine I had no trouble accessing my blog with Firefox. The problem was the request was stopped by Bad Behavior, which I knew because of the message that was displayed, shown below.

The one thing I like about Bad Behavior is that it logs all the blocked attempts, so that is where I looked first.

Like many other blocked attempts, the request I submitted from Internet Explorer was logged as well. The error that was displayed in the log file is shown below.

The interesting part of the error was the “User Agent was found on blacklist”. It is interesting because I am using a standard Windows XP Pro machine with Internet Explorer 7, and nothing else. The one thing, however, that did stand out was the “http://bsalsa.com” portion of the user agent. I decided to do a little research online.

The Solution

It didn’t take me long to find a solution to my problem that worked. I simply performed search for “bsalsa.com” in Google and checked out one of the results. It appears that the user agent information for Internet Explorer as modified in the Windows registry. To correct the problem, I used the following steps:

I closed any open Internet Explorer browsers I had open.
Next, I opened the Windows registry by typing “regedit” at a command prompt.
I then navigated and expanded the following key: “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\User Agent\PostPlatform”.
On the right, I saw a value starting with “User agent:”, which matched the one displayed in the log of Bad Behavior.
I removed the value from the registry by left-clicking the value and pressing “Delete”.
I closed the registry, restarted Internet Explorer, and then loaded up Technically Easy. It displayed without a problem.

This solved my problem when accessing Technically Easy through Internet Explorer, because of a black-listed user agent. I’m not sure how that key was added to the registry, but I’ll have to find out.

Two Years Later…

Paul — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 12:00:44 +0000

I was debating about writing another yearly update post, mostly because I didn’t think it would add any value for someone to read it. As I thought about it some more, I decided to write it because I figured it may add some value.

One of the hardest parts about starting a web site or blog, at least for me, was generating traffic. It is always hard to put your hard work into something and not receive much traffic. I decided to publish my yearly traffic statistics and other information to show what is possible after two years.

Two Year Traffic Comparison

Last year I wrote a post that outlined my traffic statistics for the first year of Technically Easy’s existence. This year, however, I decided to compare the traffic numbers. I remained active in writing posts each week throughout the year, and partially because of that, my traffic numbers have slowly increased.

A graph of my traffic numbers can be seen below.

As you can see the traffic on Technically Easy has been growing slowly. As I write and post more content, I get more visitors. Most of my visitors come from search engines, which I’ll show later in this post.

The numbers related to the above graph are as follows:

	First Year (2007-2008)	Second Year (2008-2009)	Change
Visits	74,809	317,060	323.83%

It is also important to keep in mind that for the first six months I had barely any traffic at all. It wasn’t until December 2007 when I started to notice an large increase in traffic. It has been growing since then. Technically Easy now receives about 1,000 visitors a day from various sources. Most visitors, however, come from search engines. The next section will show a breakdown of the traffic.

Traffic Sources

I used to display my traffic sources on the advertising page, but I have since removed the numbers. It was not easy for me to remember to update the numbers each week, so I have since included the statistics from StatCounter. The problem is that the stats I link to provide an overall number, and does not indicate the traffic source.

Over the past year I have enjoyed an increase in direct traffic, referring sites traffic and search engine traffic. Traffic from search engines remains the largest contributor of visitors to Technically Easy. A comparison between the traffic sources can be seen in the following table:

Source	First Year (2007-2008)	Second Year (2008-2009)	Change
Direct	8,833	31,208	253.31%
Referring Sites	28,720	48,553	69.06%
Search Engines	37,256	237,299	536.94%

As you can see, the biggest traffic source increase came from search engines. This is probably a result of the regular post publishing that I do on Technically Easy. The more content I have, the more traffic I seem to get from the search engines.

From Blogger to Wordpress

While I enjoyed using Blogger, and found it very easy to get listed in Google’s search results while on Blogger, I decided I wanted more freedom with my blog. In July 2008 I decided to make the move to Wordpress.

I wasn’t sure what was involved in the conversion, but after making the change I realized it was rather easy. I wrote four posts detailing how I managed to convert from Blogger to Wordpress:

Since then I haven’t missed a beat in terms of traffic, but I did my planning ahead of time to make sure the conversion went smoothly. I also had the advantage of using domain name with my Blogger blog so all the external links to Technically Easy still worked.

Overall I am happy with how my blog has grown over the past two years. I’m hoping the traffic continues to increase over the next year and beyond as I continue to publish more content.

One Year Later: Traffic Stats

4 Wordpress Plugins to Help Protect Your Blog

Paul — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:00:36 +0000

If you have a Wordpress blog, then you have probably thought about securing and protecting your blog. I have read about many instances where someone has lost their blog because it was hacked. In some of the cases, the owner of the blog had to start over because they didn’t have a backup. Protecting your blog is just as important as protecting your computer.

For the past few months I have been learning about securing a Wordpress blog, and have implemented many changes into Technically Easy to help keep it secure. At the same time I have also began using plugins that will help protect it from potential deadly visitors, as well as ensure that if something does happen, I won’t lose everything. In this post I will look at a few plugins that I use to protect my Wordpress blog.

Protective Wordpress Plugins

While there are many changes that can be made outside your Wordpress blog, there are also a few plugins that you can use to help make things easier for you. When it comes to securing your blog, it can become very technical at times, however, with the plugins listed below, you don’t need to be too technical to protect your blog.

Akismet: This plugin is probably the most popular plugin used to prevent comment spam. It is included with the Wordpress package, so it is available without downloading. It does require a Wordpress.com API key, which you can get for free by signing up with Wordpress.com. It isn’t perfect, but I have found it to be very good. I do, however, check my comment spam to ensure there are no false positives, but overall I get very little comment spam.
Bad Behavior: This plugin is not as well known as Akismet, but it is very powerful for stopping link spam by acting as a gatekeeper for your blog. It does this by doing more than just analyzing the content of the spam. Bad Behavior analyzes the delivery method and software being used by the spammer. All potential spammers are then logged, including their IP address, so you can see more information about who is potentially trying to spam your site. I have had one issue with this plugin, however, where it blocked my work from accessing my blog, or have had a few people being blocked. Overall, I have found this plugin to be very useful.
WP-DBManager: I have written about the WP-DBManager plugin in the past, and am still using it with great success. Backing up your Wordpress database is a must if you want to protect your blog. This plugin will allow you to automatically schedule the backup and then e-mail you the backup file. This plugin backs up and optimizes my Wordpress database each morning, and then sends it to my e-mail account. The e-mail account is not associated with Technically Easy, just in case something were to happen to my domain.
WP Security Scan: I haven’t used this plugin for very long, but decided to give it a try since I have heard good things about it. It basically analyzes your Wordpress blog and informs you of any possible security issues. It also includes the ability of changing the prefix of your Wordpress tables for even more security.

The above plugins help me manage, secure, and protect my Wordpress blog. There are probably many other plugins that can be used to secure your blog, and I’ll be interested in hearing what you use to secure your blog.

Preventing Directory Browsing With .htaccess
Managing Your Wordpress Database

Security Tips for Online Shopping

Paul — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 11:59:40 +0000

I do a lot of shopping online. I enjoy the convenience, and the lack of crowds, but mostly I can find almost anything I want online. Many are wary of shopping online because of the security risk. Security is a huge issue when purchasing online, but there are many things you can do to ensure your security.

I have been order online for about 10 years now, and have had no identity theft or financial issues. Others have not been so lucky, which is why it is important to know what you can do to keep yourself protected. In this post I outline many steps you can take to ensure your personal information stays safe when you shop online.

Staying Safe When Shopping Online

The following tips should help you to keep your private information secure when shopping online. While this list isn’t exhaustive, it does provide some of the most common tips.

Shop only at trusted and secured Web sites. There are a few things you can check in your browser to ensure the Web site is secure.
- Ensure the Web site address begins with “https://”. Many times this will not be displayed until you begin the ordering process.
- Web browser will display a closed padlock icon when you are on a secure site. Make sure this padlock is displayed. For Firefox this icon is located at the bottom in the status bar, while in IE it is located next to the address bar.
Ensure you read both the privacy and security policies of the Web site. These policies will outline how your order will be processed and how your information will be managed. If you aren’t comfortable with the policies, then order your item from another site. Also keep in mind that policies can change, so make sure you read the most current version.
If you are asked to create a user name and password before ordering, ensure you create a very strong password. A strong password should be long, at least 8 characters, and should contain letters, numbers and punctuation. Some sites may not allow punctuation, but all should at least allow letters and numbers.
In addition to the previous point, always keep your password private and secure. Don’t save your password where it can easily be read. Online stores and financial institutions will never ask you for your password, so if receive an e-mail asking for your password, don’t share it.
If you have a PayPal account, and are able to use it to pay for your item, do it. This will help keep your credit card information more secure as you won’t use it online as frequently. With PayPal, you simply use your e-mail address and password to log in to their site to pay for your item.
Don’t visit questionable sites. Many sites can install viruses, spyware, and other malware that can run in the background of your computer. These programs can monitor your keystrokes, control your browser, and send information to other Web sites. Ensure you run an antivirus and anti-malware program on a regular basis to ensure you computer is clean.
Above all else, if you don’t feel comfortable with ordering online from a particular Web site, don’t do it.

If you have any tips, just let me know in the comments.

Outlook: How to Recover Hard Deleted Items

Paul — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 11:54:48 +0000

For many that use Outlook at work, you are probably connected to an Exchange server that manages your e-mails. In many instances, the administrator of the Exchange servers has probably configured the server to retain deleted items for a specified period of time. By default, Outlook sends any deleted e-mails to the “Deleted Items” folder, where you can restore the item or permanently delete the item. But what if you hard delete an item that doesn’t goto the “Deleted Items”?

There is a simple change that you can make in the Windows registry to make use of the Exchange Server’s retention period. This will allow you to recover any items that you have hard deleted. Let’s see how to do this.

What is a Hard Delete?

There are two types of deletes in Outlook: a regular delete and a hard delete. A regular delete is simply deleting an e-mail by pressing the “Delete” key. The e-mail will then be sent to your “Deleted Items” where you can recoverthe e-mail if you have accidently deleted it.

A hard delete, on the other hand, doesn’t send the e-mail to the “Deleted Items”, but instead removes the e-mail completely. There are three ways that a hard delete can happen:

You press “Shift+Delete” to delete a message.
You are using an Internet Message Access Protocol 4 (IMAP4), Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3), or another type of messaging client that doesn’t move the item to the Deleted Items folder.
You work offline with an offline folder file (.ost) and remove the message for you Inbox or another folder. You then clean out your Deleted Items folder before synchronizing your offline folder with the server.

Even though the item may not appear in your Deleted Items folder, you can still use the Exchange Server’s retention period to recover the e-mail.

Recover Hard Deleted Items

To recover the hard deleted items, first you will need to add a registry key. To do this, use the following steps:

Press “Windows Key+R” to open the “Run” dialog. Type “regedit” and then click “OK”.
Navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options”.
Right-click the Options subkey and select “New”. Next select “DWORD Value”.
For the DWORD name, type “DumpsterAlwaysOn” (without the quotes), and then press “Enter”.
On the right side, double-click “DumpsterAlwaysOn”.
In the Value data box, type “1″ (without the quotes), and then click “OK”.
Close the registry editor, and close and restart Outlook.

The next time you restart Outlook, a new item called “Recover Deleted Items” that will display a windows showing all the message you have hard deleted. You simply select a message and click the “Recover Selected Items” in the toolbar to restore the item.

Word: You Are Working Without a Word Work File and Memory is Nearly Full

Paul — Fri, 29 May 2009 11:59:49 +0000

I have been struggling with a Microsoft Word problem for a few weeks now. Whenever I opened a document and then began changing it, I occasionally received an error message. Once the error message appeared,all the buttons and options within Word became grayed out. This prevented me from saving my work that I had done up to that point. It became frustrating to say the least.

To find a solution to the problem I turned to the Internet. It appears that this error is quite popular as a search in Google produced many results. I tried many of the solutions, but none seemed to have worked for me. It wasn’t until I decided to look further into the error that I found the solution that appears to have fixed the problem.

Word 2003 Error

While working on a Word document I encountered the following error:

You are working without a Word work file and memory is nearly full. Save your work

The error prevents me from saving my work, contradicting the error message, which means that I lost anything that I changed in the document since the last save. The error is also confusing as I have 2GB of memory in the computer that was running word, and there was plenty of memory available.

When I did a search online, there were many results for that particular error message. Some indicate that the problem was from Word 2000, while others from newer versions. I tried various solutions, but none seemed to work. I decided to look further.

The Solution

While reading some of the solutions I noticed that some had made reference to the Word cache size, which is defaulted to 64. While I couldn’t find where to set this in Word, I decided to see if it can be changed in the Windows registry. Usually settings such as this are located in the registry. I managed to find a site that listed the key to change.

The following steps outline the process to modify the Word cache size:

Close any open Word windows.
Open the Windows registry by running “regedit.exe” from a command prompt.
Once the registry editor is opened, navigate to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\Options”.
This key is for Word 2003, indicated by the 11.0 version. You will need to navigate to the key indicating your Word version.
Click the “Options” key on the left to display all the values within that key. In an empty location on the right, right-click and select “New->DWORD value”.
Type “CACHESIZE” as the value name and press “Enter”.
Double-click the value “CACHESIZE” to open the “Edit DWORD Value” dialog box.
Under “Base”, select “Decimal”. Under “Value Data”, type “512″ (without the quotes).
Click the “OK” button to accept your changes and close the dialog.
Close the registry editor.

When I relaunched Word, I never received the error message displayed above. This registry change seemed to have fixed the error. From what I read, you can set the CACHESIZE value to any value that is a multiple of 64 up to a maximum of 1024. While I can’t guarantee that it will solve the problem if you experienced the error, it may just be the fix you need.

How to Find Disk Space Hogs

Paul — Wed, 27 May 2009 12:13:27 +0000

During my regular computer maintenance I tend to delete unnecessary files to conserve and recover hard disk space. Files such as temporary Internet files, regular temporary files, and old shortcuts are usually files that I like to remove. There have been times in the past when I have removed the unnecessary files but still have little disk space. Unless you go through each directory, it could be difficult to find which files are hogging all the disk space.

A few months ago I stumbled on a small application (less than 2MB) that has helped find files and directories that use up the most disk space. I use this application on all computers that I have used since then and have been easily able to recover disk space by finding other unnecessary files that have been using up a lot of disk space.

Map Hard Disk Space with SequoiaView

The application that I discovered recently is called SequoiaView. While the name may not indicate what it does, once you run it you may be able to figure it out. The tool simply reads a hard drive or directory that you specify and creates a map of all the directories and files. Each square in the map represents a single file on your computer. The larger the square, the larger the file.

When you first start the tool it analyzes the last hard drive or directory you specified. It may take some time for larger hard drives, but it will usually complete within a few minutes at most. Once the hard drive has been analyzed, all files are displayed on the screen as squares.

To determine the file a square represents, simply move your mouse cursor over the square. By default, a large yellow square will surround all the squares in the directory, and a red square will outline the individual file. The path and file name will be displayed as a tooltip. By hovering over the larger squares you can easily see which files are using the most hard disk space.

If you want more information about the file, right-click a square and select “Properties”. You can then see more information about the file, as well as the directory where the file is located.

While not enabled by default, choosing “View->Colors” will display a colour dialog box. This dialog allows you to assign specific colours to different file types. After selecting the colours, click “OK” to close the dialog and you will notice the some squares within the display will now be coloured. This is handy since you can locate specific file types easily by using an individual colour.

In my case, I was able to find and delete a log file that was taking up over a gigabyte of hard disk space using SequoiaView. Keep in mind, however, that before deleting any file, it is important to understand what the file is before deleting it.

How to Display Web Code Examples in Your Web Site

Paul — Thu, 21 May 2009 15:59:00 +0000

I had been struggling with an issues in some of my blog posts. In posts that explain how to change HTML or PHP code for a web page, I like to display the actual code in my blog post. The problem is that when a visitor copies the code, it isn’t formatted properly. While the actual alphanumeric characters are copied properly, the single and double-quotes aren’t valid.

When I simply typed the single or double-quote character from my keyboard, the characters would be rendered in the browser differently than if I had typed them in the code. The characters would be formatted and looked different on the web page and when they were copied, it would cause coding problems, such as when the code was pasted in the Blogger editor. I think that I have fixed the problem, and I’ll explain how in this post.

Different Quotes

To better illustrate the problem, let’s look at some simple HTML. The HTML code below shows code created by simply typing the double-quote character from the keyboard:

As you can see from the above code the double-quotes have a nice formatting to them. The problem is if you were to copy this code, the double-quotes formatting could cause problems, depending on the editor, such as the editor in Blogger.

To fix this problem, you would have to use the character code for the double-quotes. For example:

The above HTML code will produce the following:

As you can see, the double-quotes are standard with no formatting applied to them. I simply replaced the double-quote character with the character code ". For single-quotes I would use '. This should prevent problems when displaying HTML code in your web pages when it is copied and pasted in certain editors.

Technically Easy

5 Reasons to Backup Data Online

Reasons for Backing Up Online

How to Prevent Spam in Your Wordpress Blog

Controlling Spam With Plugins

Preventing Access with Bad Behavior

Removing Spam With Akismet

Related Posts

Internet Explorer Issue Using Bad Behavior

The Problem

The Solution

Two Years Later…

Two Year Traffic Comparison

Traffic Sources

From Blogger to Wordpress

Related Posts

4 Wordpress Plugins to Help Protect Your Blog

Protective Wordpress Plugins

Related Posts

Security Tips for Online Shopping

Staying Safe When Shopping Online

Outlook: How to Recover Hard Deleted Items

What is a Hard Delete?

Recover Hard Deleted Items

Word: You Are Working Without a Word Work File and Memory is Nearly Full

Word 2003 Error

The Solution

How to Find Disk Space Hogs

Map Hard Disk Space with SequoiaView

How to Display Web Code Examples in Your Web Site

Different Quotes