http://freze.it/

A classic reply from 'i8thecat' to a request for cloud computing skeptics....

"Cloud computing is having strangers provide your apps and data remotely... Hosting them in remote server rooms/farms. Trusting them to hire trustworthy people who will not steal your data. Trusting them to hire competent people who will not lose your data or have massive amounts of down time. People competent enough to protect your data from hackers who think that one stop shopping is a great idea. Hopefully you will have someone competent enough to negotiate the costs of record retention (data backups), storage, and hopefully hold them for the correct timeframe and hopefully destroy them after the legally required data retention period. Hopefully they have a disaster recovery plan, and they have tested that disaster recovery, and hopefully they don't have to spend years constructing a brand new (massive) data center (in order to facilitate the disaster recovery in the event of a real disaster). Hopefully your cloud companies ISP is relaible enough to ensure stable service so that your business doesn't come to a grinding halt when your network connection goes down (right before the world makes the leap to IPv6)... Oh yes, cloud computing is a great idea (If you are brain dead)."

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/saas/calling-all-cloud-skeptics/1116?tag=nl.e550

 Ever wondered why the pageviews count on Google Analytics Entrance Sources report is higher than the number of pageviews reported to that page elsewhere in your Analytics reports? Explanation at the link below...

entrance-sources-in-google-analytics-dont-go-there

The error "Inappropriate audio coding in file" can appear when trying to burn CDs in Infrarecorder if one or more MP3 files in the project is not in correct CD-DA format ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio ).

The MP3 may have a sample rate other than 44.1KHz, or it may be in mono.
Fixing these 2 issues is easy using the free, and excellent, audio editor Audacity (you will need to grab the "Lame" plug-in from there also).
Once you import your MP3 file, you can see immediately what sample rate it is and whether it is in mono.

 To fix an incorrect sample rate, just change the project sample rate in the bottom left corner to 44100. An export to MP3 should then resample to this rate.

To change a track from mono to stereo:
1. click + drag across the visual waveform display to select the whole track.
2. Copy this (edit > copy, or Ctrl + C).
3. Go Project > New Audio Track.
4. Click anywhere in the blank waveform area of the new track and paste (Edit > Paste, or Ctrl + V)
5. In the small drop-down menu on the first track (tiny arrow near the top left), choose "Make Stereo Track".
6. File > Export as MP3

Computer Hardware Chart
via Lifehacker

Piriform are a London-based software company who produce top-notch donationware like...

• CCleaner
• Defraggler
• Recuva
• Speccy

http://www.magicaljellybean.com/
http://www.freewarefiles.com/downloads_counter.php?programid=44343

http://xkcd.com/627/

http://www.speed.io
http://speedtest.net/
http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest?more=1

Handy intro to malware hunting here...
http://synjunkie.blogspot.com/2007/11/hunting-malware-in-windows.html

Most lists of the positive benefits of W3C validating your website HTML claim that it helps your site to rank better. They also usually claim validation makes a site more likely to work cross-browser/cross-platform.

Now, Google's Matt Cutts has restated that W3C validation is not taken into account in Google ranking, and that one reason why Google.com doesn't itself validate is that it would make it less compatible with some obscure browsers/platforms...
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020778.html
(earlier article where he mentioned the ranking question here)

Here's an article containing a list of major websites which fail validation...
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001234.html

Making google maps from google spreadsheets

Creating dynamic client-side maps mashups with google spreadsheets

PDF

http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2008/10/link_building_f.html

Includes links to various tools...

"Link Building Tools:

Link Harvester pulls back all the information in an Excel spreadsheet. It gives you the number of unique linking domains, the number of unique Class C Block, the number of .edu/.gov/.mil links and how many are linking to the home page versus deep in the site. She recommends using the tool on competitors.

Hub Finder compares the backlinks of two or more sites and points out their co-occurring back links.

The Langreiter Tool compares Yahoo and Google rankings and where they agree or disagree.

Search Status Tool turns all links using nofollow pink. It cuts your time down so you don't have to go to the code source to find out if the page nofollows links.

The Bad Neighborhood Tool will give you an idea of links coming from risky neighborhoods.

Google Alerts is a discovery tool that will let you know anytime one of your articles has been used and you can go there to see if they've linked to your site.

The Utility Linking Tool will pull up directories and forums that you can submit your URL to based on your keyword."

Filtering SQL Injection in Classic ASP

SQL Injection Tester

What to do if your site is vulnerable

SQL Injection cheat sheet

More - with and example

http://blog.vkistudios.com/index.cfm/2009/6/5/The-Google-Analytics-Power-User-Guide

Regex is a way of searching for patterns in text using different conditions & wildcards.

A nice intro to the concept here
http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/090199-1.shtml

More here...
http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/RegularExpressions.shtml

and this is an example of how to do it in Vbscript (ASP)

hr1 = "text to be searched here"
Set regEx = New RegExp
regEx.Pattern = "put the pattern here"
hr1replace = regEx.Replace(hr1,"")

Obviously, lines 1 & 3 to be customised to whatever you are doing.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-link-farming

http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/2008/02/make-all-links-open-in-new-window.html

http://www.asptutorial.info/script/searchfiles/

This can be refined by adding marker 'start-search' and 'end-search' HTML comments in the code of each page you want to be searchable, then editing the string so only the text between these markers is searched. This removes false positive results given when text in meta tags and navigation is included.

via Docstoc

Make sure the anchor text of the first copy of the same link in a page is the one you optimise...
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation...

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/7005.imc

For some time now Getty (and Corbis) stock photo publishers have been using a standard, and presumably very profitable, approach towards websites which use images from their libraries without paying. They claim it matters not whether the infringer was aware they were using images which should have been licensed. They use a company based in Israel to find the infringing images, using image searching software, then they claim outlandish sums from the infringer, with the threat of a larger claim via legal action made. What happens next can take various paths, detailed here...

http://www.fsb.org.uk/discuss/forum_posts.asp?TID=1106

As stated on the forum, Getty may have tried to take only one company to court over this. The case was settled before reaching court...

http://www.out-law.com/page-10367

...so we still don't know how the courts would assess such a claim.

http://icrontic.com/articles/diagnose_with_memtest86

In order to reduce the ability of spammers to use Google accounts for evil, Google have always tried to make it difficult for users to sign up for large numbers of accounts.

However, there can be legitimate, non-spammy reasons why one user/company/IP address may need to sign up for many accounts. If you are a computer teacher who wishes many students to sign up for accounts during lessons. Or, you may be a web design company who wishes to add Google analytics to each client site you produce, using Google accounts created for each client (so that they can log in and manage just their own data/settings and not the settings of all your clients.)

We are in the latter position, and Google no longer allows us to verify each account by email. They now ask for verification by mobile number. There is also a limit on the number of accounts you can verify per mobile number, so we are now in the position of having to go through our sim card collection to get these accounts going!

It seems to be, in our case, picking up on our static IP address. Tests using variations on the same domain name (user1@thedomainweuse.co.uk, user2@thedomainweuse.co.uk) still send verification the email way if I sign up from home. As many people aren't on a static IP address, they are unaffected?

There are different opinions on the max number of accounts - 15, 20 etc
There are also differing opinions on the number of accounts that can be verified by a mobile number. I've seen 3 stated, but have managed maybe 10 (wasn't keeping score!)

Next try may be sending invites to ourselves from Gmail accounts! I'll post any results here.

Google Analytics vs Raw log files (via something like AwStats)

"Ignoring the actual reporting, Google uses javascript tracking with cookies and sessions versus log file parsing from webalizer and awstats -- log files are much less sophisticated at understanding distinct visitors, paths and sessions.

Ignoring all other reporting, with GA and other robust analytics tools you can track funnels and conversion activities on websites. This means you gain a single place to see how your paid search, organic, display, email and any other campaign is doing at driving sales. With standard log tools you just see traffic.

Ignoring advanced reporting with GA you have the ability to add one segment variable which you can track. This could be returning vs new customer, membership type, gender, whatever you want. Reports can be keyed off of this to give you basic segmentation information on everything from user paths & flow to conversions. Of course with more advanced tools (Webtrends, Omniture, Coremetrics) you can do dozens of these variables and get into really powerful data insights.

So if you ignore 90% of the tool and look at just 3 features you can see how much more there is already."

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=556517

Google Web Elements make it very easy to add several Google services to a site by adding some embed code.

Note: Check out the terms of use for each.
eg. terms of use for Google site search seem to prohibit its use on a business directory.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/blue_screen_survival_guide
via Lifehacker

How many emails do spammers have to send to get a sale?
Here's a resourceful attempt to find out...
http://www.icir.org/christian/spamalytics/

Spam conversion rates
Various figures are quoted for this ( 0.00001% , 0.00036% etc), but it will vary depending on the thing being sold. Safe to say it's "a lot"! The kind of numbers you would need to send to make it worthwhile are likely to get you outed as a spammer, so if you fancy going for it anyway you may need "Online Reputation Management" services.

Conficker Eye Chart

via Lifehacker

Adobe Reader is forever being targetted by the bad guys, and Adobe aren't always too quick to respond to new threats. This is why many savvy users are switching to alternative PDF readers.

See http://www.pdfreaders.org/ for suggestions.
Not included here is Foxit, which fails the site's rules on transparancy and privacy.

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2009/02/facebooks-25-things-about-me-all-my-internet-and-bank-passwords-and-pin-numbers.html

Make certain programs wait before running when you start your PC with this

via LifeHacker

Tiny Geocoder is very easy to use and has an API.
Multiplottr allows you to make custom Google maps with multiple flags. You can then embed these maps in your website.
Batchgeocode does what it says.

This one works for up to 24 hours.
Meltmail

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/

Big collection of supposedly free fonts for commercial use. Check the licenses!