I’m not a very prolific blogger. The DrakNet blog is here primarily for us to tell you of things you need to know, and things that we find that we think you may not know about, and months could go in between blog posts because… well, I host bloggers. I’m not what one would classify as a blogger.

Like all things on the Internet, what’s expected of Net businesses has changed – you’re expected to engage your audience, share your expertise, become public with who you are (always with an eye towards your marketing). And so we did the blog, the Twitter, and the Facebook thing.

The Facebook thing? Well, we’re there. The Twitter thing? We’re supposed to use it to chase down people that are complaining about us and fortunately, no one has yet, so we can’t really use it the way we’re “advised” to use it because you all don’t complain enough. The blog thing? We got that, too, and try and come up with things that we know as second nature but that perhaps you don’t know. That’s not always easy.

You may have noticed an uptick in posts of late – you have Microsoft to thank (or blame) for that.

Bye, Firefox. I’ll miss you.

At the beginning of February, I kicked Mozilla Firefox to the curb for good. The upgrade to 3.6 was, to me, bloated, slow, and I got so tired of the browser crashing repeatedly that my long love affair with Firefox came to a “crashing” halt (pun intended). Internet Explorer is even worse than Mozilla in the bloated arena, and though I had given Google Chrome an install and a test drive, its lack of extensions kept me away.

Google Chrome added extensions, and so I gave it another go after being so disappointed in Mozilla Firefox. I was incredibly impressed with the speed and stability and decided within a day that this was my new primary browser. I then needed to set about replacing the extensions I depended on day to day in Mozilla Firefox – which was not as easy as it sounded, as Mozilla Firefox still kicks the butt of Google Chrome in the extension department.

Replacing Scribefire

I used Scribefire exclusively for blogging, and Scribefire is a program that is exclusively a Mozilla Firefox extension. It doesn’t run on its own, and its not available for any other browser, so my choice was to keep Mozilla Firefox around and fire it up just to blog, or go in search of another tool.

A friend said “Try Windows Live Writer”.

Yeah, right. It’s from Microsoft.

Frankly, despite the fact that even a broken clock can be right twice a day, I don’t expect anything stellar and stable to come out of Microsoft, especially with regards to anything hosted on a Unix server. I had to deal with Microsoft Frontpage extensions as a host. That made me kinda jaded, sorry to say.

You can serve up that crow now, please. A little salt would help.

Windows Live Writer is a seriously impressive piece of free software. Did I mention it was free? Yes, it’s free. Free software from Microsoft – that alone should be an eye opener.

Installation and set up was quick and painless, and connecting it to the various blogs (this one and the Network Status blog) went very, very quick. It imports enough of your template that you can get some idea of how your blog will be formatted while you are actually crafting it off line, and keeps enough junk out that it doesn’t completely mess up your post while you are crafting it. Switching between blogs is a breeze.

The importing of images, formatting choices for those images, gives a much cleaner appearance than Scribefire, and it has all the extensive options you would expect, like categories and tags and future publishing.

Honestly, the photo treatments are pretty damn wicked.

Since this software is free, we highly suggest that you give Windows Live Writer a try if you’re on Windows. (If you’re on a Mac, give Blogo a try as its been said to somewhat rival, and for Linux folks, your best bet is probably still Scribefire).

Windows Live Writer is one of the best pieces of software we’ve ever seen come out of Microsoft, and its made blogging a much easier endeavor for us.

Good luck with this one. Really. I mean it.

The advent of digital information has created a plethora of opportunities to rip off other people’s content because, after all, content is king. You can right click and save a graphic. You can cut and paste a bunch of text, and republish it somewhere else. Stealing information has never, ever been quite so effortless as it is now – if you have an RSS Feed on your blog, you can even automate the stealing of your content for the plagiarist.

There is no real awesome automated way to protect your content. Forget the “no right click” JavaScript as that is, and has been, a bit of a joke since JavaScript can be turned off by plagiarists, and it just frustrates the visitors that want to share a snippet of your content and point to your page in any one of the 100 social media sites – visitors that likely won’t bother turning off their JavaScript just to do it.

Protecting your images? Well, if the browser can see ‘em, they’re already on the users hard drive. That’s how browsers work. You can watermark them but then it ruins the presentation of the image.

Your music? Countless audio programs can record whatever sound players on people’s computer, save it, and turn it into an MP3. Many of them are free. So even if they can’t get to the file, they can make their own.

There are some services you can use to try and keep the thefts to a minimum, and we’ll go over a few of them here.

Protecting Your Words

For writers, bloggers, and businesses, their words are their creditability currency on the internet and in many cases, writers are required to submit only original content to places that pay them for that writing. When it’s your own blog, it is just as important – especially if you are serving ads to pay the hosting bills or using the blog to drive traffic to your own store.

So, your first mission is to find your words on the Internet, and see if they are in any other places that you didn’t put them. The easiest (and free) way is to pick a particular phrase you wrote that’s fairly unique in the article, and just Google it.

If you don’t have the time to set aside once a week and check, you can use Copyscape (http://www.copyscape.com/). Copyscape has several levels of services, the lowest being absolutely free, and the highest being a recurring monthly fee.

If you input your URL in the field (the specific page you want to check – putting your main URL in won’t check your whole site), Copyscape will present you with a list of sites that may have take your content. Once you click and take a look, they will even let you know in the top frame if the info has recently been removed, and will provide you a link to

 http://www.copyscape.com/respond.php

which gives you excellent steps to take regarding responding to a site that may have plagiarized your work.

Copyscape also has a premium service for $.05 a search that allows you to check content before publishing (which is useful of you have others writing for your blog and you want to make sure they didn’t plagiarize), and Copysentry, a service starting at $4.95 a month that automatically monitors the web for copies of your pages, emailing you as soon as they appear.

You should also include a warning in your RSS Feed and in each post that if people are viewing the content on a site not your own, the information has been plagiarized.

Protecting Your Images

This is also tough, though there are some tricks that you can use that won’t totally thwart a thief, but will make it harder for them to grab your image.

One of the main places people snag images nowadays is at http://images.google.com, which is Google’s image search engine. An easy way to keep Google out of your site and your images off their image search engine is with a robots.txt file. Create an ascii file, and if all your images are in the /images, directory, simply add

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /images/

to the file, and then upload it to the same directory as your index file. This will at least make your images more difficult to find.

You can also “shrink-wrap” or “cloak” the image – place a transparent image over your image to that when someone clicks to save it, all they get is a blank image. There’s a write up of it here along with an image and table generator.

And, of course, there’s watermarking. You don’t need any special software to do this if you can manipulate an image. Simply place a semi-transparent line of text in the middle of the image, making it useless for anyone else.

Protecting Your Audio and Video

Almost anything we tell you here can be navigated around and folks grabbing this stuff likely know all the tricks. Google “how to copyright protect music files” and “how to crack copyright protected music files” and you will see what we mean.

Using flash/FLV players instead of directly handing off the downloading of the music or video file is a good bump to make people have to try and get over to steal your stuff.  There are so many, though, and so many various plugins for various sites that it would be folly for us to try and name just one.

Another infringement search service for videos and music is http://www.mimtid.net/. The search is free, and for $49.95, you will be given access to their DMCA Takedown system that allows you to submit Takedown notices with ease.

Alternative Copyright Protection?

There are a number of places, including http://myfreecopyright.com/, that allow you to “register” your copyright, even though its not registered with anyone but them. An attorney that specializes in the needs of photographers said not so fast with the legal claims in a blog post on the service.

While these are little tips and tricks you can use, obviously, if your content is extremely valuable, you’ll want to see an intellectual properties attorney regarding what steps you need to take to protect yourself, or properly register the copyright yourself according to your country’s legal requirements.

Adobe Photoshop is the hands down gold standard for image editing. Adobe Photoshop is also $699 if you are buying it for the first time, putting the graphics editor out of the price range of an awful lot of people.

There are a number of free image editors and services that allow you to manipulated your graphics in different ways, and which won’t cost you a thing.

GIMP

Don’t let the name put you off.

GIMP is the favorite of an awful lot of graphics folks. GIMP (which stands for the GNU Image Manipulation Program) was originally created for UNIX systems, but has since expanded to include Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems as well, which means just about anyone can install and use it.

GIMP has often been cited as a replacement for Adobe Photoshop, however, it does have some limitations that make it less than ideal for print work. It is used for web image manipulation extensively, is very popular, and has a large community of folks that use it who produce excellent tutorials on how to get the most out of it.

And again, its totally free, so that’s always a plus.

You can check out GIMP and download a copy at http://www.gimp.org.

Paint.NET

Paint.NET is another freeware editing program that’s highly reviewed, but this one’s just for the Windows folks and has not been ported to any other operating systems. While you would think you would get Paint.NET at http://www.paint.net you would be wrong.

You actually get Paint.Net at http://www.getpaint.net – though the owners of http://www.paint.net have very kindly provided redirection to the program.

This program was named PC World’s Top 100 Products of 2007, and in comparisons between GIMP and Paint.NET, Paint.NET’s been called a “better” program that’s easier to use, though that’s a pretty subjective assessment so if you’re on Windows and looking for a free option that you want on your computer, downloading both of these and test running them is a great idea.

Again, this one is only available for Windows, but also has a rich community of users that publish tutorials, and it has plugins and effects galore.

Splashup

Splashup is a service that runs in any browser, so it isn’t a program that lives on your computer. The fact that it isn’t tied to a program definitely presents many benefits to bloggers, travelers, and folks that are often on the go when they attempt to add something to their site. With the advent of netbooks, lots of folks don’t want or can’t handle a large graphics program.

Splashup aims to closely emulate Photoshop, though it does run in the browser and so its unlikely that (no matter how much they want to) they will be able to fully emulate the power and options of Photoshop.

Splashup is flash-based, so it should work in any browser, and it integrates with popular photo sharing sites like Flickr and Facebook as well.

We had a client write in after ordering a new web site, setting it up, and getting ready to launch – and who was baffled that his site got a big, hairy yellow alert from Zone Alarm.

See actual big, hairy yellow alert to the left.

While it says that the site isn’t known Malware or spam or virus, and while it says its in the US, its also a big, hairy, nasty yellow alert as if the site you are about to visit is a big, nasty site that you don’t want to visit.

We’re not sure how recently Zone Alarm chose to do this, and a search in their support area showed no information about why they would do this on a new site (or even that they do), but a dig through their forum does show an official answer that Zone Alarm will alert on all sites, without exception, if they have been registered less than three months from the date of the visit, and there is absolutely no way for web site owners to get the alert off their site until that 3 month time period passes by.

This is the official answer from the Zone Alarm Forum moderator:

Hello,

In this case and ANY website that’s reported like this our software is working as designed and there is NOTHING that can be done to change it.

Its the fact the website if 3 month or newer.

Its the unfortunate fact that hackers put up thousands of sites a day for malicious reasons so we rate any new website like this.

We don’t have the staff to evaluate every new website in the world daily.

So we go with just telling you the website is 3 months old or newer and let the person surfing make a decision to go to that website or not.

We never say there is a definite threat on the website.

Forum Moderator

and you can find this answer posted as the last entry in this thread on the Zone Alarm forum.

Normally, we don’t blog in the middle of the night, but since the forum thread is fairly recent, we surmise that this aspect of the software is fairly recent as well or the question would have come up sooner. This also seems like a fairly serious new step for a security company to take that can seriously confuse people and have an adverse affect on newly launched web sites and e-commerce endeavors. This is something people should be aware of when planning any new web site or registering or changing a new domain name.

Obviously, by not completely outlining the issue in the warning, by throwing a red herring in there by implying its a security certificate even on sites that don’t even use SSL Certs, and by casting a blanket suspicion and warning on all new sites, this has a huge potential to make people seriously suspicious and (especially if its their own brand new site) incredibly confused.

It also will likely backlash onto hosting companies because people will go to their web hosting company if they use Zone Alarm and Zone Alarm says there is a problem with the site itself, and since its already happened to us we felt we needed to address it immediately.

If Zone Alarm was going to choose to do this, it would have been nice if they provided documentation regarding the warning and an explanation of what it means that didn’t panic or confuse people. The decision to cast suspicion on any new site less than 3 months old has more implications than I believe they truly thought through.

But of course, since the hosting companies would get the support tickets, I imagine they didn’t much take that one into consideration.

When we opened, we expected that people would know how to code a site. Of course, that was 12 years ago and the times have changed.

While we offer a number of site generation tools and CMS’s, a lot of people prefer to create their site on their computer and upload it the old fashioned way. Many other folks get nervous about using software like Soholaunch and Wordpress when they don’t really understand it well enough to secure it, and there are alternatives out there.

One of those is SiteGenWiz for Microsoft Windows.

SiteGenWiz

According to their site “Enersoft SiteGenWiz is a web site generator for html novices and people who just want a web site without the hassle of coding html. With SiteGenWiz you can design your own web site without any html knowledge. Select from various frameworks, define a menu structure for your pages, choose colors, fonts, bullets and background images. Create and edit your pages with the built-in editor. Without knowing html you have formatting options like headline, sub headline, text, bold, italic, underline and you can define links to other web pages and add images. Automatically generate sitemaps and image galleries. Also available is seamless integration of other html documents. With the upload utility you can even upload the finished result to your host site.”

Key Features:

• Change the layout of your site at any time by selecting a framework
• Include your own logo and images
• Import images of formats Bitmap (BMP), JPG, PNG and GIF
• Generate complete image galleries with index pages and adujstable image descriptions.
• Pick foreground and background colors for headers, menus, headlines, text and links
• Set font faces and font sizes
• Load and save templates for colors, fonts and bullets.
• Select menu bullets and define hover and selection effects
• Define your site’s structure with up to 4 hierarchical layers
• Format and edit pages without any html knowledge
• Use automatically generated sitemaps that are always up to date.
• Specify tags for search engines like keywords and site content description.
• Automatically upload your finished site with the upload utility
• Save and load projects

You can see some of the capabilities of SiteGenWiz in a list of links contained on their site of various live web sites that have been built with the software (just click here).

This is very, very, very, very simple and likely won’t appeal to anyone who knows a bit of HTML. It is free for a few pages, but to do a site larger than that, you’d want to upgrade (29.95).

We have a few clients that found it too simple and basic, and a few that rave about it specifically because it is simple and basic and does not go much beyond a static HTML site (which some people still want).

It is free to try out, though, so if you’re a rudimentary beginner and don’t need or want extremely fancy options, you may want to take a look and take it for a bit of a test drive.

I know… I’m about to break the hosting vow of silence – you know, the one that says you never make it easy for someone to cancel because then they’ll… um, well, they’ll cancel.

If they can’t find out HOW to cancel that means they WON’T cancel even if they WANT to cancel and then they’ll just sit there on your servers unhappy and pay you perpetually! Muahahahaha!

Actually, that’s not really how it works.

Run! Run and don’t let them see you leave!

There’s a prevalent suspicion that the best way to leave your hosting company is to sneak out the back door behind everyone’s back, hoping they don’t notice. Then, when you have moved everything you come back to inform your old hosting company afterwards, victorious and triumphant that you left them without their having ever getting wise to your move thereby thwarting any attempt they would have had to be vindictive in destroying your site or services early in retaliation for your rejection of them! Ha!

So, first off, I have to point out this isn’t a middle school love relationship.

The idea that a professional company will retaliate against you just because you rejected them is pretty lame – now, there’s a caveat in that just as there are bad web designers, there are bad hosting companies and some are not professional. Most are, though, and hopefully you have an idea which one you’re with (and if you’re with us, hopefully you know we’re not certifiable or anything). This industry isn’t all that huge and a lot of us know each other. We pass clients back and forth all the time, and its not unheard of for two hosting companies collaborate on a move so that it goes well for everyone involved. So, relax. No need for cloak and dagger stuff.

While you’re moving from here to “there”, you’re still our client and its our responsibility to give you good, sound advice on the best way to gather your toys so that you can easily plunk them down in someone else’s sandbox. That’s just part of the service you pay for, and since you pay until the last day you are here, it is help and advice you should feel entitled to expect.

We can’t give you advice on your new host – that you’ll have to get from them. But in our case, we would definitely prefer that we know so that we can make sure everything goes smoothly and we don’t do anything that could screw things up for you (like move your site to a different server and overwrite DNS settings you changed and the like). Saving and moving a lot of files also may mean that your resource usage explodes, and if we know what’s taking place we’re less likely to put a stop to your processes thinking there’s a problem because of out of the ordinary usage.

So, tell us. It goes better for you and we’re happy to help whether you are coming in the door or going out the door.

We want you to cancel

Ok, let me clarify that heading – no hosting company generally wants to lose your business (unless you are one of those clients and that is a subject for another article). Obviously, if there’s something we can do or change or offer you to make things better for you here, we want that chance to make it right if we can do so.

If you are absolutely, 100% moving hosts, then we absolutely, 100% want you to cancel your account formally so that we know you’re gone. Why?

1. While we do audit the servers to see what sites are not resolving here, it involves auditing 6 servers and several thousand sites. Manually. It’s a big undertaking, and we don’t generally do it more than quarterly – if you don’t formally cancel, you’re going to pay for services you don’t use.
2. If you just take your credit card off recurring billing thinking that’s a cancelation, its not – it’s taking your card off so we can’t charge you. Your billing account will remain open, and your account on the server will remain installed, which means…
3. You owe us for the time your account is installed regardless of whether it resolves here, regardless of whether you login. We still have to secure it, back it up, monitor it, and those services are still provided to you. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t using it – we treat all accounts as if they are and perform services on them that we expect will be paid for. (I know, you figure you’re never coming back so it doesn’t really matter, but you’d be surprised at how many return clients we get. It’s never a good idea to burn bridges, just in case.)
4. If you just walk without canceling, you leave an unmonitored login sitting on the server and that additional login point of entry that is unmonitored puts the servers at a slightly elevated risk. If its not needed, we would far prefer to shut that door down.

While we hate to bring it up, we do need to point out that if you just walk without canceling your account AND you leave your card on file, we will continue to charge you for the service, and you will legitimately owe that money by the contract. If you think to yourself “I’ll just dispute the charges and get the money back”, think again.

We can, and will, provide the card companies with your contract (the TOS), and documentation showing you were installed, and a search of all tickets with your domain name in it showing you never canceled, and in every case where we have done this the former client lost the dispute. You may be the first to win one for the team, but I wouldn’t bank on it (no pun intended). We take our reputation with our merchant bank very, very seriously and defend accusations of fraudulent charges vigilantly if they are used as a way to get something for nothing.

Of course, the easiest way to keep this from happening is to simply use the cancelation form. There’s a link to it in the Terms of Service itself, and if you search the FAQ for “cancel” you’ll find it there as well. We also send the link out in past due notices so people can grab it easily.

It’s Just Business

Most hosts have a target market and while I’m sure every CEO sometimes dreams of hosting the entire world, the simple fact is there are a wide variety of companies with a wide variety of specialties, and no one host fits all (no matter what the marketing crap suggests).

Generally, we all recognize we cannot perfectly serve every client and every need they may have, and we don’t take it personally when people find something that fits them better somewhere else. While we’re sorry to see you go to another host, we’re certainly not surprised or stunned or hostile about it – hosting customers have gotten savvier over the years about what they need, what they want, and most seem to recognize different companies have different strengths and weaknesses.

So, don’t assume a cancelation is going to immediately get you the cold shoulder from your old host. Since they know your site, they are the best resource you have to help make sure the transition to a new hosting home goes smoothly.

If you take the proper steps and keep everyone informed, you’ll be happier with all the companies you’ve dealt with than if you try and perform a slipshod move without utilizing all the resources available or following all the rules (formal cancelation) you should be following.

A few years ago, DrakNet started a few initiatives aimed at doing a little bit for the world, and getting our clients involved in doing a bit for the world with us. While lots of companies write checks, we wanted to choose projects that people could make some level of an investment in rather than us simply writing blog posts tooting our own horn for taking the money you gave us and donating it.

We do, though, want to toot a horn or two here and give you an update on how those initiatives are working out.

Kiva

We began lending through Kiva.org, who’s mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty through microlending. The principle behind Kiva’s person-to-person micro-lending website is to empower individuals to lend to unique entrepreneurs around the globe.

We chose Kiva for a few reasons. One, alleviating poverty is always a good thing. Two, entrepreneurship is something that’s near and dear to our hearts since DrakNet is an entrepreneurship itself and we love the idea of supporting small business owners all over the world. Three, Kiva is an ongoing endeavor that we can share with our clients – like us, you can see who the loans go to and watch the course of the loan and see the updates the same as we can.  We feel that helps people feel involved in the initiative itself. (We also often solicit people’s participation by asking people to choose the next country we lend to via Twitter.)

As of the time of this writing, DrakNet has made 31 loans in 22 months (as well as giving away two gift certificates for the “winners” to loan our money themselves), far surpassing our original stated goal of one loan a month. We’ve also had five clients join us in Kiva lending, and those folks have made an additional 36 loans, bringing the total number of loans originating in one way or another with DrakNet’s initiative to 67.

Statistic Name	DrakNet	Avg. Kiva User*
Number of Loans Made	31	5.1
Number of Successful Invitations	5	0.24
Number of Loans Made by My Invitees	36	0.81
Number of Gift Certificates Given	2	0.39

We’ve really enjoyed participating in the Kiva program, and look forward to making more loans in the future.

World Community Grid

The World Community Grid brings together people from across the globe who donate their idle computer time to create the largest volunteer computing grid benefiting humanity. DrakNet was officially welcomed as a World Community Grid Partner on June 2, 2009.

Thanks to clients joining us on the DrakNet team, we’ve managed to rack up quite a bit of run time:

Team Name		Status Joined-Retired		Total Run Time (y:d:h:m:s)		Points Generated		Results Returned
DrakNet		5/18/08 – Current		1:019:05:22:53		372,810		675

The above are our overall totals, and below, you can see our statistics by project.

Statistics By Projects

Statistics Last Updated: 2/5/10 00:06:02 (UTC) [3 hour(s) ago]

Project	Points Generated	Results Returned	Total Run Time (y:d:h:m:s)
Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy – Phase 2	30,289	109	0:024:05:36:08
Help Fight Childhood Cancer	42,151	63	0:038:12:26:48
Nutritious Rice for the World	22,765	69	0:022:01:40:08
Help Conquer Cancer	78,164	134	0:077:02:14:35
Human Proteome Folding – Phase 2	83,851	132	0:097:23:22:43
FightAIDS@Home	76,271	106	0:081:04:35:07
Influenza Antiviral Drug Search	11,937	18	0:011:06:10:08
The Clean Energy Project	2,473	3	0:001:22:33:16
Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together	24,909	41	0:029:22:44:00

Our current team rank is 4,016 – keep in mind, that’s with a team of 5. Yes, just five. There are thousands of you (ok, not that many thousands, we’re a small company and all) and only FIVE people are on our team – and 2 work here!

We’d love to expand our team and rise in the rankings, so if you have a computer that wants to moonlight as a world saver and all around humanitarian, think about downloading a client and joining the Grid on Team DrakNet.

It’s far cooler than Team Edward or Team Jacob. Really!

Those of you that follow us on Twitter and Facebook got to sneak peak at the new forum, and now that the forum URL has propagated, we wanted to let everyone else know about it, too.

We’ve nuked the VBulletin forum that we had after discovering that we had a bit more activity in the comments section once we switched to social media login, and Get Satisfaction is a customer service forum that allows you to login with your various Facebook and Twitter and other “whatever the kids are doing these days” accounts to participate in the forum.

It’s also much less likely to be spammed (at least at this juncture – I imagine if you give it time, the spammers will find their way around just about anything in order to sell you Viagra), and I personally like the format quite a bit more than a “plain old” vanilla Bulletin Board system.

If you have a ticket that you think someone else would benefit from seeing answered that doesn’t require us to actually dig in your account or that would need to be private for security, we urge you to submit it there so other folks can see and find the answer or participate in the discussion. We have three official representatives monitoring and responding to discussions, and they’ll be marked as such so you’ll know who’s who.

To encourage folks to utilize the new forum, we’re going to give away a $25 credit at the end of each week in February to a random name that was active on the forum in submitting a question – sorry, folks, submitting praise won’t count because we’re adamantly against paying anyone to sing our praises.

Though you can submit a question or and idea AND a praise, and that’ll be ok.

We hope you like the forum and if you don’t have one of those new fangled social media logins, there will still be an area to sign up.

Finding a decent web designer or developer is a monumental task, and finding a designer or developer that you can trust more so. Hiring someone to work with you is often an excellent idea if you simply don’t have the knowledge to create the site you envision in your mind – it is also fraught with pitfalls.

Do I need a Web Designer or a Web Developer?

You might be surprised to find out that there really is no clear distinction between titles – people can hang a shingle on the door and call themselves whatever they want. While its generally believed that a “Developer” is more technology minded and understands more about the backend, and a “Designer” is more artistically minded, understanding more about the facade, that simply isn’t always the case.

What you need is someone that comes highly recommended, who has a portfolio of sites that you can look at, with companies and businesses similar to yours that you can speak to with regards to their ability, and their reliability, and what the experience is like working with them. You don’t want your friend’s nephew’s girlfriend who knows a little about code to take over your business site, but on the other hand, you don’t want a template generation business that costs an arm and a leg tossing you a cookie cutter site for an enormous amount, either.

Take some time, and interview more than one person or business. Prices, artistic visions, talent, and knowledge will be all over the map. Just because they can make a good presentation on their vision for their company doesn’t necessarily mean they can do the same for your company. You want someone that can marry your vision of what you want with their talent and what they know about the web that you don’t, and the only way to find out how good they are with that (and how easy it is to get them to do it) is by talking to other clients that have worked with them in the past.

By the same token, you want someone knowledgeable enough to be able to tell you when you are off base on some part of your vision – The comic “How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell” is a perfect example of what you want your designer to stop you from doing. Once you do your due diligence and are assured they are capable of of creating a fantastic site, you need to trust them and listen to them when they explain the pros and cons of your ideas.

Once you hire someone, don’t hand over Keys to the Kingdom

A lot of people, once they hire someone to “take care of it” just pass off the keys to the web site like they’re handing over a car and then book out of the process. A good portion of the time, this is fine.

But sometimes, that’s just a bad idea.

Once you hand over the administrative login to your site, your web designer has access to absolutely everything. Your mail accounts – and your mail. Your logs. The ability to lock you out of your own site if they get upset. If you have handed over the keys without becoming familiar with the structure of the site, what’s there and what shouldn’t be there, you are at a serious disadvantage if something in the relationship turns sour and your designer turns out to be the monkey above – cute and funny until he gets mad. And then when he gets mad, the poo throwing begins.

“Poo throwing” could take the form of your designer/dev getting angry and wiping out the files on your site. They could upload nasty messages embarrassing you in front of your clients. They could wipe out your emails. Would a professional designer or developer really do this?

No, of course not – but most people, especially people that host on shared hosting, do not do the due diligence we outlined above, and most do go with the “friend’s nephew’s girlfriend” web design model because its cheap and the person sounds like they know what they’re doing (even though you generally don’t know enough to judge whether they know what they’re doing), and boy, do people get in trouble when that girlfriend catches him cheating on her, or he dumps her.

You surely would have a contract for the design (Right?), and you could, of course, sue for damages if someone would be vindictive and unprofessional – but ask yourself if you would bother. Likely not. Most people don’t for small sites, and small amounts of money and damage.

None of the things we are outlining are made up – in nearly 12 years, we’ve seen these things happen, and more than once.

We recommend that you never, ever give your cPanel password to your web designer or developer. There are some things they may need you to do for them, like create a database. If you aren’t comfortable doing that, change the password for them in your cPanel and then change it back when they are done. But someone working on your site should, for the most part, only need access to your web site’s files, so create them an FTP account with access to the site only.

If your designer demands unrestricted access to your cPanel perpetually, consider finding another designer. If they don’t understand your concern and approach to security, their approach to security may be lacking.

When the Unthinkable Happens

The web designer or developer is:

gone, mad, locked you out, stole your files, deleted your email, not returning calls, [insert catastrophe here]

The first thing you need to do is install the backup you have been taking to get your site back the way it was. You do have a backup, right? These are files you paid to have created, and a site design you likely cannot recreate without the site designer. If you don’t have a backup, you’re flushing money down a toilet. While we have a backup for catastrophe purposes, things can always happen if the stars align right and that backup could be corrupted. You paid for the design and the site – keep a copy.

The second thing you need to do is change all of the passwords – and for that, you need to know what your site’s admin area is supposed to look like, and what should and should not be there. Now is not the time to begin getting familiar with how cPanel works, and what accesses it offers.

But I hired someone because I don’t wanna know all this stuff!

You don’t have to become a tech guru, but you do need to know how to secure your site if you are ever left high and dry by someone you have handed carte blanche access to. You can email us but if you have 17 FTP accounts (14 for clients and 2 for your designer), we won’t have any idea which ones belong and which ones don’t.

Your knowledge of your site should be such that if you are abandoned, end the working relationship, or if something crazy happens with your designer that you can and are able to step in and secure it and will be familiar enough with it that you can protect it until you find someone new.

So, we promised, when we rolled out the DNS editing, that we’d tell you how to install Google Apps yourself if you didn’t want us to do it for you. Unfortunately, life intruded and we forgot. Luckily, we were reminded, and here’s the promised post 2 weeks late.

What do I need to know before installing Google Apps?

Most people go to Google Apps for the email as its a fantastic webmail app with all the Google-Search goodness, its free, and it gets you a lot more space. The difference between Google Apps and a regular Gmail account is that Google Apps works directly with your domain – there’s no forwarding this, pop that, program this to answer as that kind of stuff. It is where your domain mail goes.

Now, it *is* where your domain’s mail goes – your email will never, ever come here for your domain again. Once the MX Records are changed, they handle your mail. If you have problems with mail delivery, you go to them, not us.

That means you are giving up nearly every feature under “Mail” in cPanel – mailing lists, forwarding, pop accounts, the whole nine yards. With Mailing Lists, discussion lists, this is a big deal because you don’t have any functionality in Apps to replace it. With forwarding, not so much – Google Apps is giving 50 accounts on Standard at no charge, and using their settings you can filter and forward. (For those trying to get around our off site forwarding ban, here’s your answer – we don’t care if you forward from your Apps account. It’s not our IPs that would get Blacklisted and, frankly, Google is way too big for anyone to even think about blacklisting them.)

If you are having problems now that we use tokens in getting your mail from work in webmail from work, this is also your answer – Google Apps operates on a regular web server port, so unless your company blocks Apps specifically, you won’t have a problem getting mail and you can pull your stored mail into Google Apps (though set aside some time to re-tag it into different folders).

There is no cost for Google Apps to Google if you used standard, and there is no discount off your hosting because you’re not using our mail accounts.

I still want to do it – how do I set it up?

First thing you’ll need to do is go open a Google Apps account. You do that at

http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html

and click the “Get Started” button. On the first page, you’ll click “Administrator: I own or control this domain“, and give them your domain name, no www. or anything attached – just domain.com, and click “Get Started“.

The next page is where they gather the account information and its all pretty straightforward. If you aren’t a company you don’t need to provide company names, though we have had clients make up some, like “Local Deity” as a Job Title. Once you get through all that, making sure to check that you know you have to change your DNS, click to go to the next page, which will be “Set up – Create your first administrator account (step 3 of 3)“

This administrator account is going to be two things – your main login to administrate all of your Google Apps account, and a Gmail Apps account, so if you have an email address you’re using its a good idea to put it here.  Pick a good password, make it through Captcha, and agree to Google’s TOS. Once you do that, the fun of changing DNS begins.

OK, I have the Apps Account – how do I hook it up?

Once you agree to Google’s Legalese, your next page will welcome you to Google Apps. Now, you have an Apps account at the moment, but its not activated – Google wants you to prove that this is your domain. You can do that by either uploading a file, or creating a CName record. Since we are going to have to play with the DNS eventually we may as well start now, so click “Change domain.com CNAME record” and then click continue.

Google wants you to create a cName pointing to its site so that it can verify you have control of this domain. Leaving this tab or window open, open up a new tab or window, and go to cPanel, and then click on “Advanced DNS Zone Editor”.

Ok, back on Google’s page, #2 says “Use the following unique string to create a new CNAME record for the domain.com domain:” and that string will look something like google72c80c5640c1fd7f - we want to put that where it says “Name”. Just cut and paste it.

For TTL, look down below to see what your TTL is on all your other records – cut and paste or type whatever that number is in the TTL field.

Under “Type” we want a CName, and the CNAME is always going to be google.com. Hit add record.

Now, go back to your Apps window and tell Google you did this by clicking “I’ve completely the steps above.” It will bring you to a set up guide to introduce you to the service – busy work for you while they verify the CNAME. You can come back to this later – since almost everyone gets Apps to get mail, let’s go ahead and set that up now. Click “Dashboard“.

Your dashboard is going to show you all your Apps. If you notice, your Email app says its not active. We want to change that, so click “Activate Email”.

Activating Your Email

When we set Google Apps up for you, we do not set up more than one user. Changing MX Records will, as we said, change all mail handling from us, to Google. Obviously, if you have only one email account set up on Apps and you have 30 email accounts on your domain that you are switching to Apps, this would be a bit of a problem, hence why some folks want to do this themselves.

If you have more than one email account on your domain, you do not want to change your MX Records now. The message:

“If your domain already has email addresses, please be careful
changing MX records. To avoid disruption in email service, be sure to
create the same set of user accounts with the control panel before
changing your MX records”

applies directly to you. You will want to click on “Users and Groups“, and on that page “Create a new user” for every email account that you are moving first, ensuring that email will go one place or the other, and not get lost in the transition. Once you have done that, you can join the rest of us back at the “Activating Email” page.

“Set up email delivery”

So we should be on the activating email page which says “Set up email delivery“. (Again, we get to it by clicking “Dashboard” and then clicking “Activate Email” under the Email area). This is where you are actually, formally going to change email delivery from our servers to Google. The instructions for “any hosting company” are fine as long as your DNS is here and for the purposes of this post, we’re going to assume that they are. If they are at your registrar, use the drop down list to find how to edit DNS records for your registrar and follow those instructions instead of these.

In your second window, Navigate to the “Home” panel, and find the “MX Entry” button under “Mail”. At the bottom, you’ll see “MX Records, and it should say “0″ under priority, and the destination is your domain name. If you have any need to change this back at any time to our servers, you’ll need to delete the Google servers and return the record to just what you see now.

But for now, we’re going to nuke that puppy, so click “Delete” under actions. Really. Go ahead. It won’t blow up, I swear.

Under #4 on the Google page, you will see a set of records you have to input. At the moment, they are the following:

However, these can and do change periodically as Google balances mail load so you will want to put in the server addresses that google gives you. You want to cut and paste the MX Server Address into the destination under “Add New Record”, and then its proper priority in, obviously, the priority field. When giving you the MX addresses, Google gives you the trailing period, which is necessary in an MX Record – however, cPanel adds that in for you and it will give you an error if you actually cut and paste that, so instead of

ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.

you will want to cut and paste simply

ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM

and leave off that period at the end.

You should wind up with a Cpanel listing that looks similar to this at the end:

Go back and report to Google that you’ve completed the steps. Once your email is verified, it should begin being delivered to your Apps.

There is one more thing you need to do, and that’s enter in an SPF record now that this has changed. If you have one, you will see it under the Advanced DNS Zone Editor, so lets go back there.

Adding the SPF Record

If you have an SPF Record, you will see a record that is designated “TXT”, and will have a line with quotes around it that starts with v=spf1. You will want to click the edit button to edit this record, and replace whatever is in quotes with

v=spf1 include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all

where it asks for TXT data – the quotes are important, so don’t leave those out. Here’s ours, to give you an idea of what it should look like:

If you don’t have one already, you’ll want to add it just like you added the CNAME, only this time choose TXT, and cut and paste the SPF Record, quotes and all, into the TXT Data Field.

After doing all this, your Google Apps should be good to go!

BUT WHAT ABOUT ALL MY MAIL ON THE SERVER!!!

Oh, right.

Log into your actual Gmail Apps account for the email account you want to pull over. You can get straight into your Mail account, bypassing the dashboard, by going to https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com (replace your domain.com with your domain name, obviously).

Login, and click “Settings” at the top, then the second tab is “Accounts” – click that. The second box says “Get mail from other accounts:” – click to add a mail account you own. When it asks you what your email address is, tell them you@servername. For example, if I wanted to get the mail from jen@draknet.com on the server to jen@draknet.com in my Gmail, if I say jen@draknet.com is my email, Google gets a little suspicious and tells me I can’t do it. So, use the server name, which in this case would be jen@weedle.drak.net. Click next step.

Now, your login name is still going to be your email address, so you’ll use that for your login. For the pop server, use the server name (just the server name, nothing else). Then use your regular password. Once you add the account, Google should begin pulling your mail down – if you don’t archive or label it, it will just appear in your inbox, so you may want to create a label to be able to sort through it later, and archive it there so you can start off with a clean inbox.