JBCR Virtual Solutions Blog

Archive for April, 2007

We were hacked. Bet the thought of it gives you shiv­ers. It sure did me, and more!

Mid week I signed up for Google Web­mas­ter Tools and was hor­ri­fied to see a list of key­words that were porno­graphic AND not on my site. The first ques­tion, of course, was where on earth were these com­ing from.

I went on the server and started check­ing every file to see if I could find some­thing that did not look right. As I was doing this my Live Help (Crafty Syn­tax Live Help http://www.craftysyntax.com//) popped up with a vis­i­tor on my site. As usual I checked to see the key­words they used to find me and what page they were search­ing for and was hor­ri­fied to see porno­graphic key­words and a url on my site that I did not know existed.

OMG!

I imme­di­ately searched the par­tic­u­lar folder and there were pages and pages of porno­graphic text files that had been uploaded to my site. I reported it to my host­ing com­pany who did give me infor­ma­tion that helped. I down­loaded one of the pages to view the code and saw that there was a script under­neath. On fur­ther research (google search) I dis­cov­ered that these pages were sim­ply jump­ing off points, due to the script, to actual porno­graphic sites. But there was my url listed with these awful porno­graphic words — in Google

Read the entire arti­cle here:

http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html#Attack

Jan

When you decide to start a busi­ness online, or bring your off line busi­ness online, you will no doubt have a lot of ques­tions, I know. So I have started a FAQ page that I hope will help you as you walk along this path. Visit my new page here:

http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/faq.html

If you don’t find the answers you are look­ing for please drop me a note.

Have a great weekend!

Jan

I was work­ing on a few things on my site tonight and typed in a file name that didn’t work. The page redi­rected to a 404 page at my host­ing com­pany. I’m sure you have seen that hap­pen on sites you have been on — doesn’t look very pro­fes­sional does it.

I changed the appear­ance of my site a few months ago and elim­i­nated some pages and — oops — for­got to upload my cus­tom 404 page. This made me real­ize it would be a good ‘tid-bit’ to pass on to you. Here is what you do.

Check the con­trol panel of your host­ing com­pany to see what they say the cus­tom 404 page is named. With mine it gave me the abil­ity to do a very gen­eral text mes­sage, but I knew if I named the page what it was going to name it I could make my own page. In this case it is:

404.shtml

So this is how my 404 page looks (this page does not exist):

http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/error.html

Try your url with error.html and see what comes up. Do you need a cus­tom 404?

Stay tuned for more ‘good­ies’ and be sure to check out our arti­cles page here:

http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html

Jan

Bring­ing your com­pany into Sec­ond Life is a new way to give and share infor­ma­tion. Yes there are a num­ber of major com­pa­nies in Sec­ond Life, such as, Dell, Nis­san, Adi­das, IBM, Reuters, Sony BMG, but there are also more not so well known names that offer art, graph­ics, design, products.

I real­ized, once I got past the part of cre­at­ing my ‘image’ and pick­ing up some fee­bies here and there, that I had to find some land to build on.

Find­ing land cer­tainly has not been easy. How does one fig­ure out where you should buy or not? Should you be in “PG” land, should you be in “Mature land”, and even then, try­ing to find at least a rea­son­able cost.

Read more here:
http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html#Find

Want to join Sec­ond Life? Click here and do look me up when you get there!

Jan

What is Web­site Storyboarding?

Basi­cally it is break­ing the whole into small man­age­able pieces. It is not just cre­at­ing pages, the link­ing struc­ture, though that is part of it, but also the flow of where you what your vis­i­tor to enter, the paths you want them to fol­low (guide your vis­i­tor) to reach an end result.

This sto­ry­board will end up telling your story to your vis­i­tor both visu­ally and structurally.

In one of my employ­ment incar­na­tions I worked for the film indus­try. Part of my edu­ca­tional train­ing, which is crit­i­cal for film pro­duc­tion (in fact pro­duc­tion of any kind), was sto­ry­board­ing. The story board cov­ers every last detail of the pro­duc­tion to ensure noth­ing is missed, tim­ing is cor­rect, there is con­ti­nu­ity, etc.

My train­ing in I.T. Publishing/Web Design/Programming also had one very crit­i­cal part of the course which was Project Man­age­ment. Under that umbrella was also storyboarding.

Read more of the arti­cle here:
http://www.jbcr-virtualsolutions.com/tips-and-articles.html#Two

Jan