How to protect your computer
If you own a computer there is a very good chance that your computer is infected with Virus or Spyware programs. They come in many shapes and forms and come at you from many different directions. There are also many tools to help you remove Virus infections once they happen, but the best bet is to avoid these problems all together. How you can prevent infections is what this article is all about.
Windows automatic updates
I've had this warning pop up on my laptop for about 4 days now. I hate it. I'm telling the world now I hate Window's automatic updates. The whole thing sounds so nice, your computer will be kept up to date automatically. Unfortunately its a major pain in the ass. Microsoft will update your computer automatically but then this stupid message will pop up over and over again. Worst than that the Window takes focus over everything you are doing. So you could be typing then lookup and see everything you just typed didn't make it to the screen. You could have even accidentally clicked yes on this message and begun a reboot you didn't want.
I just hate stuff like this, its annoying. I'm still running Vista so you may wonder if the problem still exist on Vista. Yep. It does and its even more annoying. Note to Microsoft - please make it so if you have automatic updates on it doesn't beg you to restart your pc. Just have it install the next time the PC is restarted.
'Updating your computer is almost complete. You must restart your computer for the updates to take effect. Do you want to restart your computer now?'
Internet Explorer 8 Released
Finally Internet Explorer 8 has been released to the public. You can give a download here. I have a few mixed feelings about the browser, (I'm a long time FireFox user). However I am happy that IE8 has been released. Whenever a new version is released it raises awareness and hopefully people will upgrade. As a computer techician / web site developer it helps when people have the latest version for several reasons.
- Security
This can go both ways because newer software doesn't does not guarantee its more secure. However in comparing Internet Explorer 6 to 7, I'd say IE7 is more secure. Its also easier to remove virus infections via the 'Enable/Disable Add-Ons' feature - which I love - CSS capability
This can also go two ways. IE6 and IE7 handle CSS differently. Now how different is IE7 from IE8? Well I don't have too much experience with IE8 to properly answer that.
The two above features is what concerns me. If IE8 proves to have better security and normalizes the CSS differences between IE and FireFox I'll be more than happy. That being said lets look at some of the other features of Internet Explorer 8.
- InPrivate Browsing
Basically you can browse web sites and not have certain ones go in your history file. My favorite part of this feature is how Microsoft spins it, they say 'Ever want to shop for a gift and don't want others to know'. Like yea I'm sure that'll be the biggest use of this feature certainly it won't be used to hide peoples porn habits from their loved ones. - SmartScreen Filter
Google kinda already has this, basically if the site has been reported as a 'bad' site, it'll warn you blah blah blah. - Compatibility View
This is an awesome feature ... for developers. Weird Microsoft would push this as their third biggest feature. Essentially this will emulate an older web browser if you are having display issues. For example if the page was written for IE6 and it looks weird in IE8 you can emulate IE6's environment and have it display properly. This is a great feature but for the average computer user I think its asking a little too much. People just want it to work right. We don't have that problem now, its not like too many people are trying to view a web site made for Lynx and it looks weird in IE. I don't know I guess its an OK feature. - Accelerators
Seems like a neat idea, fast easy buttons to do what you want to do when you want to do it!! Looking at the IE8 site it says 'Search Windows Live', 'View Windows Mail','Define with Encarta'. Seems like a way for Microsoft to try and push their services. I'm sure we can change to whatever providers we want but still we know when something is the default, it'll stay that way for 95% of the users.
Anyway so if you are up for it, check it out. Its not horrible but I'll be staying with FireFox.
Secure your wireless network
In my last post I went over how to add a Linksys router to an existing Internet connection. Now we'll go over how to secure the wireless networks so other people can't use it.
Log into the router
- Open Internet Explorer and type in the following address http://192.168.1.1
- You will then be prompted for a user name and password, the user name field you can just leave blank and the password is 'admin'.
You are now logged into the router. You can take a look around see the different options in there. We are mainly concerned with the wireless network so click 'Wireless' at the top and then below that click 'Wireless Security'. We are now editing the wireless security settings for your Linksys router. There are a few choices you can use here, for the sake of keeping this simple I'm just going to use WEP 128bit encryption.
- Select WEP encryption
- Then select 128 bit encryption
- Now you can either type something in key 1 or use a pass phrase to generate it. Easiest way is just to type in numbers in key 1 until you have 26 characters. So for example you could type in 12121212121212121212121212 or whatever
- Then hit 'Save Settings'
Now your wireless will need the code 12121212121212121212121212 in order to connect. So lets go to your laptop and do the following:
- Hit 'View Available Wireless Networks' by right clicking on the Wireless connection icon in the lower right hand corner of your screen, or its in the Control Panel in Network Connections.
- If you were connected before you may have to hit disconnect from the network. If you were not just click on the network name and then hit connect.
- You'll have to enter the WEP key twice
- Hit OK and you are good to go!
I tried to keep that pretty simple. If you have any questions just leave a comment and I'll help.
Connecting a wireless router to an existing Internet connection
This question was recently asked in our Ask A Question section, the exact question is here. The situation is that this person already has an existing Internet connection. For the purpose of this guide I'm going to assume they have a cable Internet provided. Lets take a look at what we'll need to get. We'll start with the basis, a Linksys Wireless Router. There are a lot of wireless routers out there and everyone certainly has their own opinions. For me personally I like Linksys (Cisco) and its really easy to setup so this tutorial will go over how to set one up with a cable Internet provider.
Materials Needed
- Linksys Wireless Router (Model Number: WRT54G)
Steps to take
- Currently right now your cable Internet comes out of the wall and into the cable modem. From there a network cable comes out of the cable modem and into the back of your computer.
- What we are going to do is take the network cable out of the back of the computer and plug it into the WAN (or Internet) port on the Linksys Router. This outputs the Internet into the Linksys Router.
- Now take the included network cable out of the Linksys box and placed it in any of the 4 other ports on the back of the router.
- Put the other end into the computer.
- Unplug the power to your cable modem. Wait a few seconds and plug it back in.
So what this did was take the Internet and place the router in between the modem and the computer. By default the Linksys router will be broardcasting the wireless (insecurely!). Next time I'll go over how to secure your wireless connection so your nosey neighbors don't use it.
Coldfusion - Remove tags from a string
Recently I had a variable that had some HTML that I needed to get out. I was going to write an article on the best way to do this, however I did some research and found a really great article already existed. I just wanted to share with everyone else.
CSS Developers need this (Firebug)
I've talked a good amount about CSS and how much of a pain it can be. With different web browsers displaying content differently it can be a major pain trying to get something to work with all of them. Thankfully there are some great tools out there to help make your life easier. The most important tool you probably already have, Adobe Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver makes it very easy to manage all the different CSS options you have. However when developing you have to make a chance, save the file(s) then upload and then see the finished product. If there is a problem (and it seems there always is) now you have to go back and repeat the process. Dreamweaver does a pretty good job at the what-you-see-is-what-you-get but it isn't perfect. Thankfully there is a great Firefox Plugin, Firebug.
Firebug
Firebug will show you a lot information, real time right in your web browser. Once installed you have a little icon in the lower right hand of your browser. Click on 'Inspect' then move your mouse around the web page. You can see different sections are high lighted. Here you can see all the different tags in your site. This can be useful when trying to track down a weird display bug. That's all fine and good but the amazing feature comes when you click on Edit. You can actually change CSS, HTML pretty much anything on the fly. Its truely amazing. Now you can quickly edit CSS and immediately see the results. I hope everyone gives this amazing utility a try, so far its been a huge time saver and has helped me track down countless errors.
SEO - Introduction and best uses of Sitemaps
I wanted to talk about an important issue with web sits and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Web site development along with technology itself is extremely fast changing. As a web developer it is extremely important to stay on top of upcoming changes as fast as possible. What was the 'cool thing' last year is now outdated and useless, that's just the way it is. My point? Stay up to date. This blog, and myself will try and help with that.
The first item on the list is ...
Sitemaps
Sitemaps is basically giving your search engine (Google) a clearer layout of your web site in XML format. Google offers some amazing tricks in part of their Webmaster Tools site. I'll go into depth on some of the many different features offered in the future, for now lets go to to create our first sitemap.
Ok so you already made your web site and I'm sure you used on CSS and no tables right? We'll save that for another day. I'm assuming you linked all CSS in an external file, same with Javascript? Ok good now lets begin.
Creating your Sitemap
I prefer just to go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com they offer a great (and free) service to create your sitemap, just put in your web URL and let them do the rest. Once its finished click on the link to download your un-compressed XML sitemap.
After you do that go to Google's Webmaster Tools and login.
On the first screen just type in your site URL (example: www.ccexperts.com) then click 'Add Site'. You'll have to verify your site by following the simple instructions, just create the file it says to then upload it. This is to show Google you actually own the site.
Upload the Sitemap
After you have verified your site click on Sitemaps, then Add Sitemap and selected 'General Web Sitemap'. Now remember where you saved the XML file we downloaded? Upload that to your web root directory, doesn't matter where but we have to access it from the Internet. So it would be easy to just leave it named sitemap.xml and upload it so you can access it by going to your root directory, for example http://www.ccexperts.com/sitemap .
If you followed that example exactly you would just type in sitemap.xml and then hit 'Add General Sitemap'.
That's it! Google will need some time to check out your site, in the next day or so I'll let you know what kind of cool information Google will share with you and how it can help your site function better.
