This fashion website called ‘Nasty Girl‘ has gone from $28 million in revenue from last year, 2011 to a cool $128 million on track for this year 2012. This kind of growth is quickly attracting investments from venture capitalists. They just secured $40 million in Series B funding and they plan to grow steadily as Forbes has called them out at a staggering 10,000%.  Nasty girl isn’t the only one cleaning up in VC fund raising, other niche’ fashion websites are doing well. Just Fab raised $76 million in funding.

I’ve noticed an uptick in niche’ fashion websites and their marketing strategies towards their target demographics. They are using edgier tactics along with exclusive offerings through their email marketing blasts which aren’t present visually from their public facing website. I have been using Jackthreads for quite sometime and I am always impressed with their ability to entice my to click through ads in their email blast to their website.

It seems there is a trend with these websites in sales growth. Go Global. Nasty Girl is now selling 35% of it’s product outside the United States and Zolando, the samwer Zappos clone has also opened it’s doors to a global audience with some investment help from JP Morgan and Quadrant Capital. There is also a website that mimics Jack Threads almost to a tee but is aimed towards the outdoorsman, sport shooter, archer, camper etc. It’s called Dvor.

If you do a Google Search for Dvor it yields this:

The idea that there is an exclusive membership makes a shopper feel they are missing out on some incredible deal and they must be a part of this secret society of shoppers for the hipster elites. It worked on me, I had to relinquish my email address, as this is how these types of websites attract daily traffic from their members. The private shopping experience is open to all. Invitation only? Well, sure, give them your e-mail address and you will be invited. This is nothing new, there are dozens of websites world wide that have been doing this for a long time, but it’s still working in more ways than one. The growth of these niche’ websites is rapant in an economy which for the most part has been fairly flat. Looking to start an online business? You may want to consider a niche fashion site with an exclusive membership that’s “invite only”.

The post Fashion Sites The New Craze For Online Purchases? appeared first on Blog Of Joshua Chase.

It happens to the best of us. Sometimes it has nothing to do with the level of security you have tried to impose for your website. Coming up with crazy long passwords that no one or machine would guess. Sometimes it is beyond your control. I host several sites on Dreamhost, and their servers were hacked. The hackers were able to gain access to the database server. On January 20th Dreamhost admitted there had been a breach, but they weren’t divulging specifics. Link to TechCrunch Story.

So what happens if you have been a victime of such a hack? Well, if you ‘re like me, you had sites that were redirecting to other websites when visitors would request your page or URL. Not cool. Totally sucks right…amIright? Ok, so you’ve been hacked…now what? Well, depending on what kind of hack you have it could be a simple resolution or a complete pain in the ass to resolve. This post is focused on what I have done to fix hacks related to websites redirecting due to injected “base64 encrypted” code. To resolve it we need to take a look at the files in your website.

This how to is going to make a couple assumptions:

1) You have a shell connection to your server

2) Your website is running on a Linux web server

3) You have some familiarity with using an SSH or shell connection from a terminal, putty etc.

Ok, so what are we looking for? Well, once logged into your site, look at your index.php or any “.php” file and see if you see anything that looks like this:

Looks pretty nasty right? Well that’s because it is. So let’s get to it. The first thing I recommend is BACK YOUR SH*T UP. Ok, now that we have that clear, let’s move forward. Linux has some pretty amazing tools within it’s tool set to do some pretty powerful stuff. We are going to use “find” and “sed” commands. Find is a powerful search tool that we can leverage to search throgh files and directories and combining that with the power of sed allows us to filter and transform the string we are wanting to manipulate. Think of it as a powerful “find & replace” type of function. Once you have successfully backed your data up, you want to drop to a shell on your server where your website lives and run this command:

find . -name "*.php" -type f -exec sed -i '/eval(base64_decode(/d' {} \;

That should do it.. enjoy, drink beer…profit. Put questions down in the comments..

The post How to remove base64 encrypted code from your website appeared first on Blog Of Joshua Chase.

So Santa brought me a new HD TV this year that was destined to be used in the bedroom. Very exciting time indeed as up until this point watching t.v. has been a bit of an issue with the existing projection HD television that is on the floor. Kinked necks and not being able to see the bottom of the screen fueled the request to the jolly man in the red suit for a new t.v. that could be mounted on the wall. Well, that’s exactly what I did. I hung a 40 inch LCD on a full motion tilt mount that makes watching shows and movies a more enjoyable experience.

Up until I just purchased the Western Digital WD TV Live Streaming Media Player – WDBHG70000NBK-HESN I have been using an actual laptop to play movies, Netflix, Pandora and other types of media on the television. I didn’t really want to continue using the laptop, so I was looking into DLNA solutions for streaming movies and other types of network content.

I considered the ROKU system, and liked it but I liked that the WD TV Live had USB built in which allows me to slap a thumb drive in the system with movies on it and play them directly. It also has DLNA support so it will stream from my Boxee Media server along with any other DLNA compliant system.

Check out my unboxing, setup walk-through and demonstration of the WD TV Live box, and let me know what you use and why!

The post Western Digital WD TV Live Unboxing & Review – Demo appeared first on Blog Of Joshua Chase.

So Lion has now been out since late July of this year and I have been slow to jump on board. My reluctancy has mostly come from being busy Mon – Fri at work and not wanting to lose productivity, and then not wanting to even open my laptop on the weekend. It’s always a process to reinstall / upgrade an operating system in any environment.

I’ve been trying to ease this burden more and more over the years by using applications such as dropbox, google apps, evernote and other syncing and cloud services. It does get easier but there is also the plethora of software suites and licensing fun and all that junk.

Well, I downloaded Lion from the App store and I wanted to burn it to a DVD and perform a fresh install. I have upgraded a few times and it was time to do it clean. I know it’s “easier” to simply do an upgrade, but I would rather the back everything up and then wipe the disk. In order to do that though I need a boot-able DVD that I can use. Below is a video tutorial on how I did that. I also wrote out the quick steps for creating the DVD in case you don’t have the time to watch the video.. I can be long winded at times.

Step 1: Download Lion from the App Store

Step 2: Right click on the lion download and select “reveal in finder”

Step 3: Right click the Install Max OSX Lion icon in the Application directory and click “show package contents”

Step 4: Open the “Shared Support” folder and right click on the InstallESD.dmg file and open with “Disk Utility”

Step 5: Insert a blank DVD and then click the “burn” button

Step 6: Reboot your machine with the DVD in the drive and hold the letter “C” down on your keyboard until it boots.

You should now be installing OSX Lion!

The post How To Burn Lion To DVD From App Store appeared first on Blog Of Joshua Chase.

One thing that many people don’t know about WordPress is that it comes with the built-in ability to put itself into “Maintenance Mode”. This can come in super handy while you’re developing, switching, upgrading, or troubleshooting your WordPress site. It will give you (or any user with the ability to sign into the admin area of WordPress) the ability to sign into WordPress and see your site as you normally would while your visitors / users see a completely separate splash page or even a completely different site. For the sake of this tutorial, we’ll just stick to a splash page.

Below are the steps to put WordPress into, and easily get it out of, “Maintenance Mode”. For this tutorial, you’ll need to make sure that you can see / edit hidden files (files that begin with a “.”) in your file system or FTP client.

1.  Create a .maintenance file and put it in the root directory of your WordPress install.

2.  Add the following code to the .maintenance file. This will allow any user logged into the admin panel of WordPress to actively access the front-end of the website while non-admin visitors will see your page / site in the next step.

<?php 
    function is_user_logged_in() 
    { 
        $loggedin = false; 
        foreach ( ( array ) $_COOKIE as $cookie => $value ) 
        { 
            if ( stristr( $cookie, 'wordpress_logged_in_' ) ) 
            { 
                $loggedin = true; 
            } 
        } 
     
        return $loggedin; 
    } 

    if ( ! stristr( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/wp-admin' ) && ! stristr( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/wp-login.php' ) && ! is_user_logged_in() ) 
    { 
        $upgrading = time(); 
    } 
    else 
    { 
        $upgrading = 0; 
    } 
?>

3.  Create a maintenance.php file and put it in the wp-content folder. The maintenance.php file can be styled and laid-out however you want like any traditional HTMNL / PHP “splash” page.  **Note: If you’re using images and relative file paths in your maintenance.php file, you should know that the maintenance.php will start looking from the root of your website and not wp-content or your current theme’s root.

4.  To take WordPress out of “Maintenance Mode”, simply rename .maintenance to !maintenance to turn maintenance mode off (and vice-versa to turn it back on) while leaving all other files in place. This “toggling” of the filename gives you the ability to save doing this all over again next time.

You can also make changes to the look of the maintenance screen. For instance, if you want to change the background you can can simply use:

body { background: url('LINK_TO_IMAGE'); }

The post Maintenance Mode For WordPress appeared first on Blog Of Joshua Chase.

So after a lot of thought, I decided to ditch the “Scattered Blogger” website I created about a year ago. The idea was to create a more focused blog about blogging techniques, tutorials on WordPress, plugin reviews and just about anything on the topic of blogging. Well, I started off strong about 20 posts, and things were moving along fine, and then life happened. I am sort of making an excuse but the bottom line is, I just became overwhelmed with updating multiple properties.

So I decided to move over the posts I created on Scattered Blogger to my personal blog here. I wanted to make sure I didn’t lose any of my links and SERP rankings to the key to success is the proper use of a “301 Redirect” from the old blog to this one. This is a quick blog post with a video demonstration on how I managed to do this.

What I did to redirect the posts on my old blog to my personal one was pretty simple because I exported all the posts from the Scattered Blogger site to my personal one. This means all the page / post names were the same so the slugs didn’t change. I then updated the .htaccess file on the old blog with the following:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^.*scatteredblogger\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://joshcaza.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Now I wont lose any of my google juice I had on my own posts. For instance, if you google’d for “Custom Login URL For WordPress Admin” it would pull up the following URL to a tutorial I had written:

http://scatteredblogger.com/modify-contact-info-wordpress/

It still reveals that result and will for quite sometime, but when people click on that URL it will take them to the correct page I want them to now which is:

http://joshcaza.com/modify-contact-info-wordpress/

Below is a quick video on a demonstration of the 301 redirect from one WordPress site to the other. Please let me know if you have any questions and I will help you out.

The post 301 Redirect WordPress site to New WordPress Site [video demo] appeared first on Blog Of Joshua Chase.

So when Netflix decided to a streaming only service and the “DVD” portion would switch over to “Qwikster” I thought to myself, “ok, who cares”? Apparently there was a lot of “caring” going on to the point where Netflix has decided to can the whole idea. They also changed their pricing sheme and according to the email I received from Netflix just moments ago, they do not plan to change the pricing plans again. We will see about that. Below is a screenshot of the email they sent to me.

Their blog basically reflects the same noted here.

I suppose it’s only a matter of time to see how they plan to recoup the money they probably spent on the acquisition or strategic partnership to maintain the DVD home delivery service, and will those costs eventually be absorbed back into the service fees to their subscribers. I honestly don’t mind paying 8 bucks a month to strema TV shows and movies anytime I want to my iPad, iPhone and xbox. I think it’s well worth the service.

So many people were bitching and complaining when they changed their rates, but I still felt there was a lot of value in the price I paid, and I don’t use the DVD mailing service at all. So do I think this will really affect me in any way? Probably not but I think it’s funny when things like this happen to read the comments on the social media outlets. People take this way to seriously, it’s just business at the end of the day and Netflix did change their model based off feedback, what more do you want really?

I am stoked that even before season 2 of “the walking dead” airs you will already be able to stream season 1. That’s just bad ass you have to admit. If you are a zombie fan I highly recommend checking it out. It’s one of my favorite shows that has come out in the last year.

In any case, I would love to hear other opinions and in the meantime I will not be quitting Netflix, I will be enjoying a first rate service for less than the price of two venti vanilla latte’s.

Check It Out.

The post Netflix dumps Qwikster appeared first on Blog Of Joshua Chase.

Simply put, a vpn (virtual private network) can be incredibly beneficial for multiple reasons. Most corporations require access to their networks via a vpn for security and allowing flexible access to much needed resources within their networks. VPN services are becoming much more popular however for the general web surfer not connecting to corporate networks. I have been on a quest to find a solid service provider, and here is my 30 day review of ivpn.net.

Doing it right.

One of the first things I loved about ivpn.net was that they “claim” not to keep logs. That is really important to me because that is kind of the whole point of using a vpn as a regular web user. To remain as “anonymous” as possible. Why? So I can do illegal activities? No, just because it’s not anyone’s business. I pay a fee to my ISP every month for access, but I know that they log and sell that information and provide it to marketers, federal agencies, and other agencies such as the RIAA and MPAA.

The other feature I really appreciate is that the account and VPN user ID are separated. You can also pay anonymously without using a credit card. I know if you’re reading this you might be thinking “man, is this guy a crackpot thinking the government is watching his every move?” the answer to that is, yes. To a degree I know that I’m being tracked not just for suspicion of anything, it’s primarily for marketers to use that data for re-targeting ad campaigns.

I wont condone the illegal download of copyrighted content, but it is also tracked to the IP of the user. Evrytiime you do anything online, there are packets of data being streamed across the internet with your IP address and other useful information to ahckers or anyone monitoring traffic. Did you know that most of what users do online that requires a login often isn’t encrypted? Yup, that’s right. For the longest time even Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and several other websites didn’t default to a SSL (secure socket layer) web page when logging into their web application. So anyone that was monitoring traffic on that network could see usrnames and password in plain text and hijack those accounts. They can also highjack session cookies like in the case of fire-sheep. 

Do You Surf From Coffee Shops?

As I write this blog post I’m sitting in a popular cafe. Granted, I usually use my own internet provided by a 4g clear hotspot, but sometimes I do use the public wifi. Most users will also be on that wifi. If I’m connected via a vpn ALL of my trasmissions are being encrypted. A vpn creates a security blanket essentially around your internet traffic. Anyone on that network running wireshark, nessus, nmap or any other packet sniffer will see traffic from you but all your data is encrypted so it just looks like garbage to them. They will then just move on to the next victim.

Obviously security is very important to me, and ivpn.net provides a lot of it. I’ve been thrilled so far with the ping time responses, the uptime, and options available. You can use openVPN or Tunnelblick to use their service. They allow you to create 2 hope connections as well which is super bad ass. I use Tunnelblick which is a Mac OSX version of openvpn. Both applications are registered under the GNU GPLv2 license and the source code is freely available which means anyone can look at the code of the vpn application, no surprises. No proprietary softwre required to use the vpn service.

All in all I feel safer and more secure when using a vpn connection through ivpn.net and I encourage you all to look at them and the benefits of using a virtual private network.

cheers.

The post Choosing a VPN service Provider – iVPN.net Review appeared first on Blog Of Joshua Chase.

Ok, it sounds a bit precocious to say “finally” simply because the social network that was launched by Google is still in beta, and it’s only been a few weeks. In web launch terms though that’s more like 6 months. I was a bit peeved when I knew there was an Android app out for Google Plus but not an iPhone app? Well, how could I be all that shocked, really? After-all, it was “Google’s” social network and they take care of their own first before tending to the herds on the other side of the digital fence. Ok, I can accept that. So finally though they released the iPhone application and this is my first impression after using it for two days.

First off, when it was released it was hard to locate. I actually ended up tracking it down on the web and then emailed it to myself where I launched it from my email on my phone. That seemed to work just fine. If you are looking for it yourself you can click download google plus for iphone or click on the logo above. So at first glance, the application is pretty simple, and clean. I like that and appreciate the simplicity. Let’s take a look at the home screen:

simple & clean

I notice at first that all the components are clearly marked and consistent with the online experience. With one exception. WTF is huddle? Good question, essentially it’s the online equivalent to using the “hangout” feature which is the chat feature where multiple people can be in the session at once. I’m not sure why they call it “hangout” on the web and “huddle” on the mobile version. The notifications pull up menu is at the bottom of the screen similar to the Facebook application. Pretty cool so far.

So the “stream” screen is similar to the Facebook newsfeed. Just like in the Facebook application you can filter based on different selections. Pretty nice you can swipe to change status by which circle you want to see it.

Posting new messages is easy. You can also take a photo or upload one from the library. That’s a nice but expected feature to have because that’s the reason most people even use social networks is to share the moments with their friends and family.

After you have crafted your message, uploaded or taken a photo, you then choose which circles you want to share with. This is pretty neat actually because you can get granular on the fly with what kinds of photos you want to share with every posting. Is this overkill? Perhaps, although it’s nice to have access control at that granularity as you post pictures.

Once you have selected your circles it’s time to attach a photo if you want to.

Next it moves to your posting. Here is a quick screenshot after I posted a funny YouTube video to my “wall”?

From the “circles” menu you can add new people, create circles and designate who you want in each circle. You can also use the “suggest people” tool to find more people via Google Contacts that you might have missed. I haven’t used that yet but I’m sure I’ll use it at some point. So far all of contacts have been added from the web application and not the mobile app.

Huddle is a feature I haven’t used on mobile yet. I have tested the online version called “hangout” with 5 people including myself and I was quite impressed with it. From this screen you can see which huddles are available for you to join, or you can create your own and get your chat on. You can start a huddle by inviting people by name, email, or an entire circle. That is actually pretty awesome.

Lastly is the notifications stream. Pretty simple nothing to crazy. You can click “+1″ on peoples posts but not comments on that post. Facebook as the same limitation but it would be a nice feature from both applications.

So far I have really enjoyed the application, it makes it portable and usable now as before I was relying on the web version on mobile via Safari which worked ok but I’m not a fan of using social networks via the browser on my phone. It’s just cumbersome and frustrating. In any case, if you have an iPhone and are on Google Plus give it a whirl. If you don’t have a Google Plus account shoot me an email with your gmail address and I will send you an invite.

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