Trying to Get Back to the Forest - Image from Imgur.com/2IaHG

I’ve been waiting for Thesis 2.0 to be released, just like many of you, for quite some time.  Chris Pearson finally had a great update post and announced Thesis 1.8.3 was being released!

Yeah!  I always like seeing what new toys I have to play with.

Naturally I couldn’t wait

I’ve already installed thesis 1.8.3 on a few site I manage.  Overall the experience has been excellent.  Thesis is pretty easy to upgrade as long as you DO NOT MODIFY THE CORE FILES!

OK.. now I’m upset…

GoWebBaby did the design and thesis implementation for ExperSignal.com.  I really like their design but their Thesis implementation was … how shall I say it???  Non-standard?

I didn’t realize it at first, but they Modified the Thesis core files!

Why would they do that?  (I actually have stronger words but I’m restraining myself now… calm down..)

I asked them for a list of core file changes they made so they sent me a list of two or three things.  Not TOO bad, but still just isn’t the right way to create a Thesis site.

After a little digging, I found about 5 other core files they modified.   GRRRRRRRRRR.

After a few hours of repair coding, I’m down to one or two core file changes I have to think about how to implement.  I’ll get there but I’m still P.O.’d I have to do this at all.

For the time being, I’m holding off on upgrading expersignal.com to Thesis 1.8.3 until I solve the final pieces and correctly customize thesis totally in the /custom folder.

Let’s talk about UberMenu now.

I found UberMenu on CodeCanyon and it’s pretty awesome.  My son is a composer and building a website for sound effects (sfxfoundry.com).  Spencer wanted some pretty cool menus and I bought UberMenu for him.  What’s a dad for?

UberMenu looks pretty sweet.  However, when I upgraded to Thesis 1.8.3 it totally died.  I wrote to the developer of UberMenu in hopes he has an Uber-Simple way to fix the upgrade problem.

Bottom line: If you use UberMenu and Thesis 1.8.2 or earlier, hold off on upgrading to 1.8.3 until this issue is resolved!

I’m sure it’s probably something easy like deactivating the plugin and reactivating it, but I don’t want to mess up Spencer’s menus to test it…but I do have a good backup.. hmm…. something to try!

OK.. back to fixing GoWebBaby’s induced Thesis problems…..

I really like my Mac.  One thing I miss when I use my Windows computer is the Mac’s ability to zoom the screen with CTRL plus moving my finger forward or back on my magic mouse.  As you get older, your eyes start appreciating this feature a LOT! When I upgraded to Mac OS X Lion, I had to go to Universal Access and set this up by turning Zoom on.  Every once in a while, zoom turns itself off.  I suspect it’s another program doing this, but it’s easy enough to get it working again.  Here’s what you do: Step 1 Click on the upper left Apple symbol and choose “System Preferences” Step 2 Click on the Universal Access icon on the right as shown here: Step 3 Click on the “Zoom in Window” check box, then click it again to de-select it.  This resets it every time I’ve done it so it goes back to the normal zoom I use every day. If you haven’t tried the screen zooming in Mac OS, try it.  You’ll like it!  If it stops working, try this trick to get it working again.  I don’t need to do this often, but it’s handy to know how to when you need it! Enjoy the Mac OS X Lion Screen Zoom!!

I had a great tour of Reedge today. Reedge is a two year old company offering website testing on steroids. Wow is it easy and fun to setup a test!

Dennis (the CEO) gave me the tour and did a fantastic job of analyzing the website at sheridanmentoring.com. One thing he pointed out was the optin form used a Captcha and that reduces the conversion rate. Captchas are popular but display hard to read text that frustrate users trying to submit a form. While Captchas do reduce spam, they also reduce submissions from customers and prospects.

Dennis suggested using dynamically generated checkboxes. He recommended this great page showing the pros and cons of Captchas versus checkbox

Because we don’t use wordpress, I had to write my own javascxript.

This isn’t a terribly difficult task; however, good developers “borrow” code whenever you can. I found this post from Jeremy Bililck from 2008 which basically had everything written for me

I just had to add some divs and formatting and server side processing to make it all work.

I have these CSS styles defined:

.displayinline {display: inline;}
.fontsize10pt {font-size: 10pt; }
#addcb {width: 20px;} 

This is the HTML to contain the checkbox and text shown to the visitor:

<div class=”fontsize10pt” align=”center”> <div id=”addcb” class=”displayinline”></div> I am not a spam bot. </div> 

Here’s the javascript to create the checkbox:

<script language=”JavaScript” type=”text/javascript”> var checkbox = document.createElement(“input”); checkbox.type = “checkbox”; checkbox.name = “verifycheckbox”; checkbox.value= “1″;

var div = document.getElementById(“addcb”); div.appendChild(checkbox);

checkbox.checked = false; </script>

All you have to do once the form is submitted is to check for the existence of form.verifycheckbox. If this variable doesn’t exist, the user didn’t click the checkbox so redirect them back to the form.

Pretty simple solution. This is much easier for a human visitor and spambots won’t see the checkbox.

I’ll monitor the performance of this technique and let you know how it goes on our live web site.

I was looking for a way to secure my WordPress sites easily. Since my server only has a few IP addresses and I don’t want to buy and install SSL certificates for each web site, I was looking for an easy way to secure my WordPress Admin area.

Using htaccess files to secure your web site

I’m a big believer in using sever-side security tools. You can easily add an .htaccess file to any Apache web server web site for quick server-side protection. This is a simple text file used to tell Apache how you want to secure your files or folders, among other things you can use .htaccess for.

The two main ways I use server security is to restrict by user authentication or IP address restrictions. Because user authentication involves a username and password, unless I control the password, I don’t know if the user actually is using a secure password. I suspect people are creating better passwords these days, but if you don’t have a tool to help you remember passwords, people generally create passwords that are easy to remember…and easy for hackers to figure out!

If you like to use passwords, I highly suggest using this online site to generate REALLY good passwords: GRC’s Perfect Passwords I will take a random selection of the middle row to generate REALLY secure passwords.

I prefer using IP address restrictions for security

Even as good as GRC’s passwords are, I still prefer using IP addresses to restrict users from my admin pages. This approach is great if you have a static IP address but you do need to keep updating the .htaccess file with updated IP addresses if your IP address changes. I needed an easy way to re-generate that .htaccess files.  There are a few htaccess generators online but I wanted something customized for me so I wrote one this afternoon.  You can access it here:

http://www.toshop.com/htaccess-generator.cfm

Here’s what it looks like:

This htaccess generator is very simple to use.  You enter in a list of IP addresses (one per line) and what action you want to take and generate the code, either to ban the list or only accept that list of IP addresses.

After you run the code generator, just copy and paste the generated code into a text editor and save it in the folder you want to protect.

I store the list of IP addresses in a cookie in your web browser (NOT on my server) for six months.  The next time you come back to re-generate your htacces file, your list of IP addresses will still be there.

Summary

You can use the htaccess generator for your web server to protect or exclude a list of IP addresses quite easily.  If you have a dynamic IP address, you may need to keep updating your .htaccess file, but this generator makes easy work of that.  It’s a lot more secure than just letting anyone have a crack at your wordpress admin area!

• Telestream Episode 5 and Episode 6 (they are releasing an update in August so I can run Episode again)
• Briksoftware’s Camouflage which hides your desktop icons
• Intego’s VirusBarrier X6  (http://www.intego.com/virusbarrier/ )  They say Lion compatible on their website so I might be able to get this to work.  Not sure yet.
• Disk Inventory X ( http://www.derlien.com/ )
• VMWare Fusion 3.1.2 (for running a virtual Windows OS.  At http://www.vmware.com/fusion) caused a Kernal Panic during the update to 3.1.3 and I had to reboot.  3.1.3 did NOT install.