CNN has an article on how the US enabled the recent Chinese hacking of Gmail via a backdoor created for US government searches.  So how can you protect your email from hackers, corporations, and governments?  Easy.  Encrypt it.  Here’s how to do it for free:

- Download Mozilla’s Thunderbird and use it as your email client.  It works on Windows and Mac machines.

- Click Here to install GNU Privacy Guard on your computer, open source PGP software. The will allow you to encrypt and decrypt messages.  (You can find the Mac version here.)

- Download the Enigmail extension for Thunderbird. In Thunderbird click Tools, Addons, Install, and then browse to wherever you downloaded the Enigmail file to, to install it.  (Mac version here.)

- Once it’s installed, you’ll see an OpenPGP button in Thunderbird. Choose Key Management, and Generate a New Key Pair. Choose the email address you want to use the key for, and make up a good password with difficult letters, numbers, and characters.

- When you’re done, right click your key and email it (only the “public” half will be emailed) to your contacts. Have them do the same. Then you can send and receive encrypted messages that hackers and spies won’t be able to read even if they get your messages.

What about the important files on your computer? Go get TrueCrypt.  It’s free, and you can encrypt anything from your entire computer to important files only.  That way if your computer is ever stolen or hacked, no one will be able to access anything you don’t want them to.

Links on Page & Google Results Bookmarklet

And a video on the later:

Enjoy!

Many content management systems, like WordPress for blogs, e-commerce carts like Interspire and OSCommerce, Drupal, Joomla, etc. create multiple versions of the same page, with different URL’s.  That’s duplicate content…when you have the same content available on two different “pages”.  Search engines don’t know which page to rank, and the “link juice” you get from people who link to your site will be watered down…split between the duplicate pages.  If you’re using a content management system, it’s likely that you need to do something about this for sites you want to rank well.

To give you an example, some e-commerce sites have sort options for products.  You can click on a link to sort by price, in alphabetical order, etc.  Each one of these sort options has a different URL.  So when Googlebot comes along and visits the links, it sees multiple versions of a nearly identical page.  This is bad.  WordPress has similar issues, splitting link juice between categories, archives, tags, etc.  (Yoast has created a WordPress plugin to deal with this.  You can also use his Robots Meta plugin to stop Google from indexing certain pages.)

Getting back to the canonical tag…  Google came out with a canonical link tag, which allows you to specify which version of your URL you want them to index, as a solution to some of these duplicate content issues.  Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Web Spam Team, also posted about this canonical link element.  The problem is, IT DOESN’T SEEM TO WORK!  Read Here.

So what can you do?

1. Disallow pages/areas via robots.txt (this leaks a bit of “page rank”, but is probably better than duplicate content)
2. Add a noindex, follow tag to the header of pages you don’t want indexed, but still want “page rank” to flow through.
3. Block Googlebot from seeing the link at all by using an iframe or a javascript hide (javascript needs to be in an external file for this to work…maybe)

It’s not a simple topic, but it’s a problem that many webmasters have, and one that needs to be dealt with if you want your site to rank.  If you have any questions, post them in the comments below.

Or is it?

There’s a lot of talk these days about “free” being the new business model, especially in the online world.  But there’s actually nothing free about free.  Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine says $0.00 is the future of business.  As an example he writes, “Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.”  Don’t you believe it.  Nothing is free, including Anderson’s book Free: The Future of a Radical Price.

Aaron Wall gets it.  Gmail may appear to be free, if by free you mean giving all your private correspondence to Google so they can create profiles on you for uses you probably can’t even imagine.  Google Analytics may appear to be free, if by free you mean giving Google access to all your web statistics, sales numbers, etc., or until a Google remote quality rater has a problem with one of your sites and then decides to de-rank all of the sites in your profile.  Google Analytics is not free, even if Google does say it’s “smarter, friendlier, and free”.

Facebook isn’t free either.  Not only does Facebook want to share your private conversations, pictures, and videos, but there is also the issue of opportunity cost.  Unless your time is worthless, everything you do has a cost.  Facebook isn’t free to you, you are free to Facebook!  You are Facebook’s “user generated content”…their free ride…if you let yourself be.

Free isn’t free for businesses, and it isn’t free for consumers.  Businesses must pay for “free”, and for consumers of “free” goods, there’s always a combination of small print and opportunity cost.  Nothing is free.

If you’re still on the toilet, the debate continues.

You can find the background story here.

1.  Get yourself a domain name (register one at Godaddy).

2.  Get a hosting account (Dreamhost is cheap and easy to use).

3.  Add your domain to your account at Dreamhost in the “Manage Domain” section.

4.  Change your “nameservers” on your domain at Godaddy to the ones Dreamhost gives you.

5.  Click “Goodies” in your Dreamhost control panel, select “one click install”, use the “advanced” installation, choose WordPress, and follow the instructions.  Bam!  You’ve got yourself a blog.  Moving it to a new domain is another story though!  Here’s how to do so and avoid all the mistakes I made on my first blog move:

Moving your WordPress Blog

You must follow the steps below in the EXACT order they are presented, or risk having your blog flushed down the toilet.  Yes, you may be able to rescue it, but you’ll likely have poo poo all over your body from climbing around in the sewer.

1.  Save a backup copy of ALL your files and your database. Filezilla is a great FTP program you can get for free, and use to copy your “blog” folder to your hard drive.  Then, export your database to a file on your computer.  To export your database from Dreamhost, just go to “databases”, log into phpMyAdmin, select your database, select export, and use the following settings:

Click to Enlarge

The above will make a copy of your old blog files and database.  It’s a good idea to have this in case your move fails and you need to start over.

2.  Go into the admin section of your blog, and change the domain in the “settings” to the new location where you want your blog to reside.

3.  Go back to Dreamhost and export the database AGAIN, to a new file.  This time, the database is going to use the new domain that you switched to in step 2 above.

4.  Create a new database on your new domain/server. This should be a very easy step.  Just go to the database portion of your control panel and select to create a new database.  Take note of the database name, userid, password, and host/location.

5.  Import the database you exported in step 3 (your old database files) to the new database you just created in step 4.

6.  Go into your blog files you have on your computer (which you moved in step 1), and find the wp-config.php file.  It will be at the root level.  Open the file with Notepad, and change the database name, userid, password, and host/location to the new info you made note of in step 4.

7.  Move the entire “blog” folder onto your new domain wherever you want it to reside.  If you want it to be at www.site.com, move all the contents of your blog folder directly onto the root.  If you want it to reside at www.site.com/blog, just move the entire folder names “blog” onto the root.

The shorter and harder to follow WordPress instructions will tell you you’re done now…but you may not be!

I’ve run into two additional problems:

1.  If you’ve moved from the root directory on one domain to a “blog” directory on another domain or vice versa, you may have to modify your .htaccess file, ESPECIALLY if you’re using custom permalinks…which you should be!  WordPress will need to redirect their crappy URL’s to your custom permalinks, and it needs to modify the .htaccess file to do this.  But, it may not be able to modify the .htaccess file if it’s in a different directory.  So you’ll need to go to the permalinks section of WordPress under settings, select the “custom” box, put in your custom link structure (which should ideally be: /%postname%/), and copy the .htaccess code that will apear at the bottom of the screen to paste into your .htaccess file if it WordPress wasn’t able to do it.

2.  Your “file permissions” may have changed when you uploaded them to your new server, and WordPress may be unable to access folders it need to be able to access.  Using Filezilla (FTP), set your folder permissions to 755 and your file permissions to 644.  This SHOULD allow WordPress to function.  If you have problems with image uploads you may have to temporarily go into WordPress and increase the accessibility of your uploads folder to the likes of 777.  BUT, only do this temporarily, as it will allow hackers to upload malicious scripts in your comments!

Finally, go back to your old domain, and upload a new .htaccess file that redirects users and search engines to your new blog.  You can use this code if your blog was in the root directory:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.site.com/blog/$1 [R=301,L]

Change blog/ to wherever your blog is now, or leave it off if your blog is going to be in your root directory again.  If you’ve got any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments.  Happy blogging!

I’ve been very busy recently migrating an e-commerce site to a new shopping cart and host, so I thought I’d post a few recommendations related to hosting, shopping carts, and domains.  If you want to have a website, you’ll need a domain (www.site.com), a “host” to place your site’s content on, and if you want to sell products you’ll need a shopping cart.

Getting a domain is very easy, and very cheap, although different domain “registrars” charge different amounts.  Your best bet is probably to register new domains through GoDaddy.  You can use GoDaddy to find out if the domain you want is available for sale.  If you’re unable to find an unregistered/available domain at GoDaddy, you can try to buy a domain you like from the current owner, or browse lists of domains for auction at a place like NameJet.  Once you’ve got your domain, you need a host for your content.

All hosts are NOT equal, by any stretch of the imagination.  Many of them belong in the crapper, and plenty should be flushed down the toilet for good.  I’ve used 7 different hosting companies over the last few years, and can only recommend two:  Dreamhost is great for hobby sites you’re not that concerned with…not trying to make money with.  They’re very cheap, set up is extremely easy, and there are plenty of “one click installs” for everything from WordPress to photo galleries.  This site is hosted on Dreamhost, for example.  BUT, Dreamhost isn’t known for reliability.  Your site will go down from time to time with Dreamhost, and there is no customer service number…only email support.

If you’re looking for a solid host with99.9% uptime, able to handle bursts of traffic, sustained high levels of traffic, 24/7 customer service, etc., go with Pair.  They’re WAY more expensive than Dreamhost, and don’t have all the one click installs and such, but they’re solid.

I’ve used a few different shopping carts.  If you’re looking for something free, there are plenty of options, from OSCommerce to ZenCart.  DO NOT go with companies like Network Solutions, where one company is your host and shopping cart, and offers you little to no control over either your hosting or cart.  This may seem like the easiest option from the start, but stay away!  Network Solutions is a horrible company for all that they “provide”.  My recommendation for a really nice and completely customizable cart is Interspire.  No cart is perfect, including Interspire, but it’s the best I’ve seen…and I’ve seen a lot of them.

So if you want to throw up a quick site or blog, GoDaddy and Dreamhost are a good combination.  If you want a more reliable host for a high traffic site, you can still register a domain with GoDaddy, but choose Pair as your host.  You won’t be disappointed!

I work on the web for a living, and am not the first to notice a sad trend.  Less people are developing their own websites or writing on their own blogs.  They’re using social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter.  You might not lose any sleep over that bitchy chick hanging out on Facebook and Twitter at the expense of her blog, but it makes me sad. It also makes Jonathan Zittrain sad, as he explains in convincingly great detail in The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It.  These social networking sites are not only helping people trim their attention spans down to the level of a 2 year old, but they’re also killing creativity on the web.  So to do my part, I’m starting ReadingOnTheToilet.com.

Because I make a living on the internet, some of these posts will be about the internet in general, creating websites, and making money on the web.  Others will include interesting news stories and websites I come across…but all in easily digestible chunks you could read on the toilet…if you don’t mind your legs falling asleep.  If you’ve got anything of interest you’d like to share, please leave a comment or send me an email.