HTML5 loophole

Lots of web developers are saying how wonderful html5 is, but perhaps everyone with a website should read this story about a major loophole in html5 which allows a malformed or malicious website to fill up your hard drive space! Yes really! Newest isn't always best! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21628622

A timely warning!

I was shocked to read this http://www.twitlonger.com/show/bt5akp long message from a Google user who has had his account terminated for an alleged but unexplained breach of terms and conditions.

It is claimed that Google hasn't explained or responded in a professional manner to the user concerned, and this should be a heads up to anyone about the danger of relying solely on online services to store their information, whether it be emails, images, documents, videos, or whatever. One word is needed here: BACKUP!

If you have everything stored in Gmail, Yahoo!, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube or anywhere other service you risk losing it if you do not have a copy of it yourself, offline, in a safe and secure location such as a standalone backup drive like the example here http://www.ebuyer.com/product/200792. Such devices are not expensive*, they are simple to set up (plug into your USB port and use), and you can even get free software which will back everything up for you on a schedule of your choice - an example we have used is here: http://www.karenware.com/powertools/ptreplicator.asp [Note: * Compared to the cost of losing all your data, the hassle of delays, lost work, lost emails, and all the other inconvenience.]

Although these huge online services have apparently good Terms & Conditions, it seems that their implementation is not always carried out in the way which smaller businesses do. These huge businesses have long been abused by spammers and those with less than respectable intentions, and objections to those persons' activities, via an email to the relevant abuse@ address for the service, has normally resulted in reasonably swift termination of problem users' accounts. But times have changed, and rather than simply being a spammers' tool these services have marketed themselves to those users who want to undertake legitimate online activities. By doing so these big services need to change their approach to reports of abuse and not simply press the terminate button, but they need to set up a system of notifications to the account holder advising them of a complaint and allowing the user a reasonable time to investigate and respond to and disprove the allegation. In law, an accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty, online it seems that an accused is guilty, full stop. The only way to improve things is for users to raise this issue with the big services and request an alteration in the way they do business. Otherwise nothing will change.

We have a huge sympathy for the person who has lost everything, and we understand how frustrating it must be to not be able to get answers to the questions raised about the account. By sharing this here we hope to help prevent others from suffering the same fate.

To interact or not to interact, that is the question...?

The ability to interconnect different bits of social networking with a website is quite exciting. By integrating Facebook or Twitter buttons into your webpages you can enable easy sharing of your content by your visitors.

The huge growth in popularity of social media sites means that any site can benefit from linking to them: not only in terms of spreading the word, but also as a means of raising the bar with search engines, as all the social media sites seem to score highly in results terms.

The code to add links or widgets into a webpage code is usually fairly simple to incorporate, especially in plain HTML pages. Many php scripts can include them too, but a good number of those such as Wordpress, PHP-Fusion, Joomla, etc. have mods (add-ons) that do this to save you having to hack (and possibly break in the process!) the code.

Go on, give it a try, you might be surprised as to who drops by!