Author: Bill

Web Page Analyzer – free website optimization tool

Try our free web site speed test to improve website performance. Enter a URL below to calculate page size, composition, and download time. The script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component. Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time. The script incorporates best practices from HCI research and web site optimization techniques into its recommendations.

Source: Web Page Analyzer – free website optimization tool website

I was looking through my firewall log and noticed a large amount traffic coming from Ben Witherington’s Blog. This was surprising since I do not go to his website. All of this traffic must be coming in when my RSS reader reads his feed. Hmm… How can that be?

My first test was to validate the feed and it failed with a feed “Unable to validate, due to hardcoded resource limits ” error message. So I decided to see how big his feed is. I went to his home page and clicked on the feed link. When I brought up the properties for the resulting web page it was a whopping 706,911 bytes.

My next test was to run his feed through the Web Page Analyzer mentioned above. The Web Page Analyzer is very good at pointing out images that should either optimized to a smaller size or replaced with a thumbnail version. To my surprise most of his feed is text. It said the feed was a more respectable 180,280 bytes but this seemed to be really high. I guess that http compression must be dramatically lowering the impact when you view it in a browser. My feed comes in at a mere 9,232 bytes.

After going back to his home page the reason why the feed is so large became apparent. He is writing a novel and he is posting installments on his blog. His home page is large because it contains a lot of text.

My solution to the web traffic issue is to lower the update frequency for his blog to once a day. The default update frequency for my RSS reader is once every four hours. I had changed the update frequency downward from a higher frequency awhile back because RSS readers can be addictive and distract you from productive work. Now I know that RSS readers can consume a significant amount of bandwidth, too.
[tags]webdesign[/tags]

Publishing ISA Reports on your Sharepoint site

Here’s the problem. You want to look at your firewall reports regularly. You have gone so far as to set up ISA to publish the daily and monthly reports to a directory on the server but getting to yesterday’s report is a real pain in the butt. It would be nice to send the report via email as a pdf like Trend does or to have it appear on the home page of your sharepoint site. Although I may do the email option in the nearby future I have already completed the second option. Here is how I did it.

  1. Publish the ISA reports you are interested in to a directory if you have not already done it.
  2. Add a virtual directory to your default web site and point it at your report directory. For this example I will use srv1 as the server name and isa as the virtual directory name. This virtual directory points to my ISA reports directory located at h:\reports. To get to the Daily report for 4/25/2007 I would use the following URL, http://srv1/isa/Daily_(4.25.2007-4.25.2007)/report.htm. As you can see entering this URL can get pretty tedious.
  3. To solve this problem I created a small web page with some javascript that calculates the URL to yesterday’s ISA report and then redirects you there. I called that page, daily.htm, and put it in the Reports directory. So if I wanted to see yesterday’s ISA report, I would enter the following URL into my browser, http://srv1/isa/daily.htm, and the latest ISA daily report would pop up.
  4. Now since we have a URL that will always point to the latest ISA daily report, the Page Viewer Web Part becomes a simple solution to the problem. The Page Viewer Web Part gives me a peak at the Daily report and it makes it easy for me to browse the rest of the report. I created a similar web page that produces Monthly report. I put links to both pages and the directory in my Sharepoint Links list and My Favorites.

Although I used this technique for looking at firewall reports it could be easily modified to show a web page with key business indicators that you create daily, weekly, or monthly.

Here is the code for the daily.htm web page.

< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en_US" lang="en_US">
<head>
<meta name="generator" content="HTML Tidy" />
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<script type="text/javascript">
//< !&#91;CDATA&#91;
function getRptDate()
{
var now = new Date();
var ydate = new Date(now.getTime() - 86400000);
var yday = ydate.getDate();
var ymon = ydate.getMonth() + 1;
var yyear = ydate.getFullYear();
var datetext = ymon + '.' + yday + '.' + yyear + '-' + ymon + '.' + yday + '.' + yyear;
return datetext;
}
//&#93;&#93;>
</script>
</head>
<body>
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
var d = getRptDate();
var path = 'http://srv1/isa/';
window.location = path +'Daily_(' + d + ')/report.htm';
//-->
</script>
</body>
</html>

Safeguards For RIAA Hard Drive Inspection

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes

“In SONY v. Arellanes, an RIAA case in Sherman, Texas, the Court entered a protective order (PDF) that spells out the following procedure for the RIAA’s examination of the defendant’s hard drive:

(1) RIAA imaging specialist makes mirror image of hard drive;

(2) mutually acceptable computer forensics expert makes make two verified bit images, and creates an MD5 or equivalent hash code;

(3) one mirror image is held in escrow by the expert, the other given to defendant’s lawyer for a ‘privilege review’;

(4) defendant’s lawyer provides plaintiffs’ lawyer with a ‘privilege log’ (list of privileged files);

(5) after privilege questions are resolved, the escrowed image — with privileged files deleted — will be turned over to RIAA lawyers, to be held for ‘lawyers’ eyes only.’ The order differs from the earlier order (PDF) entered in the case, in that it (a) permits the RIAA’s own imaging person to make the initial mirror image and (b) spells out the details of the method for safeguarding privilege and privacy.”

Link to Safeguards For RIAA Hard Drive Inspection

This fascinating description highlights a procedure being used on discovery requests to reduce privacy concerns of the defendant.
[tags]security[/tags]

Ricardo Galli, de software libre » WP-Cache 2.1

I finally bit the bullet and added the WP-Cache plugin to the site. I do not have a response time problem but this should help if I every get Dugg. I was a little concerned it might break things. Some folks are big fans and others says it causes more problems than it is worth. So far everything has worked as expected. Hopefully this is the end of my blog plugin changes.

Link to Ricardo Galli, de software libre » WP-Cache 2.1
[tags]wordpress[/tags]

Fixing My Technorati Tag Cloud widget

I have been using the “My Technorati Tag Cloud” widget for several weeks now and I finally decided to fix the HTML validation errors.

  1. The first problem is the embedded CSS in the body of the page. It should be in the header or in the stylesheet. I prefer the stylesheet fix so I commented out lines 169 through 174 and inserted the stylesheet info into my stylesheet.
  2. The W3C validator expects the widget to be a list item. So I added a <li> before the <h2> on line 179 and a </li> behind the </ul> on line 206.

For those who are not familiar with this plugin here is a short description and a link to its author.

This plugin will download your most used Technorati tags and display them in a tag cloud on your blog just like they show up on your Technorati profile. As always this plugin has caching so that it will only talk to technorait’s web site one an hour.

Source: Warping On » Blog Archive » My Technorati Tag Cloud
[tags]css, webdesign, wordpress[/tags]

Embracing the Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress Plugin

I finally decided to bite the bullet and switch over to the Ultimate Tag Warrior. The Related Posts plugin “worked” but the posts it said were related were not very related. I was reasonably happy with the Technorati tag cloud. It is closely linked to categories so it showed me were most of my posts were focused but I was concerned about the dependence on Technorati. So I decided to change my tagging.

Adding the UTW plugin is relatively complex task by plugin standards since you need to manually edit two theme templates, main site index and single. The automatic version would have been acceptable except the results were not right so I decided to edit the files manually. Getting the UTW tag cloud in the sidebar required me to download another widget. I may end up hacking that widget since I would prefer an alphabetic list.

So everything is working.

Link to Ultimate Tag Warrior WordPress Plugin for Dummies « Lorelle on WordPress
[tags]wordpress[/tags]

Eric’s Archived Thoughts: Reworked Reset

I added this css to two WordPress themes, MistyLook3 and Andreas09. It did not alter the layout for MistyLook3 besides the line-height in the sidebar. I liked the change so I left it unchanged. However I had to make several changes to the Andreas09 theme to overcome some annoying problems.

  1. I had to add the font-weight:bold; property to the h2 element on the leftside in the regular css to get the bolding back.
  2. I had to fix one margin in the regular css(.date) since the reset.css caused it to overlap a heading.
  3. I was not able to see the default list styles for ul and ol in my content even when I specified them in my regular css. I could get the li elements to indent but I was never able to get a disc or a number to appear. So I commented out the statement in the reset.css. A picture version for the ul element worked in my MistyLook3 theme so I probably am not doing something right.

Link to Eric’s Archived Thoughts: Reworked Reset

Colligo Reader and Contributor – Your Offline SharePoint Solution

Colligo Reader is free for individual use and a great way to try the rich offline experience that Colligo for SharePoint delivers. Reader provides read-only access to SharePoint content offline, including documents, lists, and metadata. It is so simple to use that training is not required. Download Colligo Reader for free today!

Source: Colligo Reader and Contributor – Your Offline SharePoint Solution

The good news is that our board is asking me questions. The bad news is that I do not always have the answer on the tip of my tongue and I need to look it up. For the last year I had been bringing my laptop to the meetings so that I could answer those unexpected questions. About two months ago our nonprofit moved their board meeting to an offsite location. It is a nice conference room in a good location but it does not have public Wi-Fi access. This is where Colligo Reader has been a great help. I store all of my nonprofit reports, letters, and worksheets in a Sharepoint site I run. Before I go to the meeting I let Colligo synchronize the files. This is a great solution for the mobile workforce and especially for those people trying to keep their nonprofit work from consuming the rest of the day.

Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants #38-Nonprofit Management and Leadership | Aspiration

3. Marion Conway—Consultant to Nonprofit’s writes about, “Accountability and Transparency for nonprofits” and references Guidestar’s Accountability and Transparency article.

Source: Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants #38-Nonprofit Management and Leadership | Aspiration

I followed this jewel this morning and ended up at Guidestar.org site reading their article, Paper-Thin Transparency. In that article Guidestar defines transparency as:

At GuideStar, we think transparency means answering these questions for donors and funders:

  1. Is this a legitimate 501(c)(3) nonprofit?
  2. What social impact will my donation have?
  3. How fiscally responsible is this organization?
  4. What are this organization’s goals and intentions?

Effective means that address these questions are to state publicly, clearly, and concisely your mission, annual accomplishments, ways you measure success, and goals.

Recently the nonprofit I volunteer at has been trying to articulate these goals in writing. Some large donors are particularly interested in this information. Unfortunately this effort drops down on the priority list for the working board members as the problems of running the nonprofit bubble up to the top of the list.  The hard part is documenting the social impact. The words are easy to write.

Once you have words to say, a small part of the problem is making the data available to the public. The folks at Guidestar have a simple, low cost solution, eDocs Service. For a $35 annual fee you can keep upload:

  • Letter of Determination or Advance Ruling
  • Audited or Reviewed Financial Statement
  • Annual Report
  • Form 990(current)

This service looks pretty handy for large and small donors and the fee is nominal. I noticed that the latest 990 for my nonprofit at Guidestar is for 2003. That won’t do!

Using CSS Page Breaks in phpWebSite

I spent some time this week fixing up the print versions of some html pages. You could call the pages, product pages, and they are the most likely candidates to be printed by a customer. They looked okay in the browser but they suffered when printed. IE had the most problems. I thought a print.css would help but it didn’t. FireFox and IE disagreed how the printed page should look. I ended up tinkering with them to get them both to print acceptably. Forcing page breaks helped out considerably. Initially I created a new section in phpWebSite in put a paragraph with a css class that would force a page break. This worked but it was kind of clunky. So my final solution was to modify an existing phpWebSite section template to give me a page break after the section. This way I can select the modified template for those sections I want a page break after. I looking forward to the day when I migrate this phpWebSite system over the new version and use a regular html page. I learned to use sections in phpWebSite to get the site up but I am not a fan. I have enough experience with them now to say I would be more productive without them.

I really want a nicely formatted Acrobat version of the web page but that is a project for a different week.

Technorati tags:

If You Don’t Use Del.icio.us, You Will Now

I downloaded the Firefox Add-on for Del.icio.us to give it another try. I have been gradually changing my mindset to tagging but so far it has not done anything for me. I did find a problem when I imported my bookmarks and found that I had a bunch of old Sage feeds as bookmarks. When I clicked on one of these bookmarks, it tried to add them to my RSS reader. This was very annoying so I set about deleting the bookmarks. It was not easy. The only way I found to get rid of these bookmarks and keep the rest of my bookmarks was to delete them individually. 🙁

One of the more frustrating issues is that when I use the plugin to update a link it does not appear on Del.icio.us. In fact if I want to share a link or update a keyword I have to go to the web site. If I update it locally, it forgets!

Source: If You Don’t Use Del.icio.us, You Will Now

Technorati tags:

To budget or to not budget, that is the question?

I just got through making a comprehensive budget/cash forecast for our local Habitat affiliate. I made a budget for affiliate two years ago but I was dissatisfied with the results. I plugged the historical values from our income statement into a spreadsheet and after a few calculations I plugged the resulting values back into QuickBooks. QuickBooks integrates the budget into a couple of reports but the focus is on the income sheet. I published the standard QuickBooks Budget report for a year but we spent few words discussing it except for the fact that we were not raising enough funds to support our proposed construction plan. The budget accomplished little besides creating work for me because it focused on income and expense acoounts and the key Habitat board decisions concern asset accounts. Since then I have thought a lot about budgeting. What I consider to be key indicators for the affiliate led me to a refined conclusion. We need a budget to support board decisions on whether we should build houses, purchase land, and expand our building capacity by hiring personnel. Our capital expenditure plans are directly related to our ability to raise funds and our cash flow.

For a Habitat affiliate the most important cash flows, mortgages receivable, home owner principal payments and construction costs, are asset accounts and do not appear on the income statement. As a result a “useful” budget for a Habitat affiliate must establish goals not only for the income and expense accounts but for the mortgage receivable, construction in process, and land inventory accounts. The first time I made a budget I “winged” it in this area because the construction plan was not available. I knew this was important information but you cannot budget items you do not have a plan for. Since then I have convinced most of the board on the importance of this part of the planning process. Our cash situation is much tighter than two years ago so there considerably less wiggle room. The board placed a much higher priority on planning and executing the plan when I told them we did not have the money.

The budget is almost complete for this year. I modeled the format of the budget on the existing QuickBooks Income and Cash Flow statements. I did re-arrange the Cash Flow statement to highlight the essentials, fund raising/operating costs, home owner principal payments, and construction expenditures. I am going to use spreadsheets to create future financial statements for future time periods that look a lot like the existing statements. Although there are existing budget reports in QuickBooks, they do not model the cash flow adequately. Although I loathe to use reports outside of QuickBooks because it will take additional time on my part, the budget reports in QuickBooks do not do the job for us because of our cash flow forecasting needs.

I used this tutorial, Tutorial: Modeling and What if? analysis with pivot tables – 20 Jul 2006 , on pivot tables to provide me with an easier to use mechanism to summarize data. Basically I have a row with monthly values for all of the pertinent accounts I need to reconstruct the income and cash flow statements. I started off by modeling the first nine months of this fiscal year and making sure it matched existing accounting reports. Then I added three more rows for the last quarter and estimated the values. We should have a good cash forecast for the fiscal year end. My final trick is to model a minimal balance statement.

Putting together a construction plan for the next fiscal year is going to be difficult since the construction/fund raising plan is still in a state of flux. We have land we do not want to build on and land we cannot build on without significant capital improvements. This probably means we need to buy additional lots. The best I can do is guess on the plan. This should be beneficial to the board since they tend to focus best when I give them construction start and finish dates. By tying together the fund raising plan to our construction plan via the cash flow statement, the board should keep focused on the key issues.

Adding Related Posts to your WordPress blog

Today I was looking at a list of the top 30 WordPress plugins in blogosphere and decided to give the related entries plugin a try. Adding a related posts section to each post should make the post more informative and handy. It was a little more complicated to add the plugin to the blog than most plugins since I had to edit your my main Index template, my single post, and my archives in my theme. The first time I edited the main template it was fatal and I had to use the back button to fix the problem. After a little tinkering I got related entries working on all three templates and looking okay.

TrueCrypt 4.3

TrueCrypt is a software system for establishing and maintaining an on-the-fly-encrypted drive. On-the-fly encryption means that data are automatically encrypted or decrypted right before they are loaded or saved, without any user intervention. No data stored on an encrypted volume can be read (decrypted) without using the correct password or correct…

Link to TrueCrypt 4.3

I have been using TrueCrypt for over a year on my laptop. I keep my QuickBooks and other sensitive files in it. My assumption has always been that if my laptop is stolen that my XP login password would be cracked pretty easily. Ophcrack showed me how easy it can be done. My other assumption is that breaking into TrueCrypt would be way too hard for most thieves. I highly recommend TrueCrypt.

WordPress Themes by Sadish » MistyLook Version 3

Recently I found out that my Version 2 theme had a problem with the MistyLook options screen under the latest version of WordPress and I could no longer exclude pages from the navigation bar. Before I went about hacking his code to make it work I decided to see if Sadish had upgraded his theme. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Sadish had upgraded MistyLook to Version 3. Not only had he fixed this problem but he added several other nice features such as, drop shadows, custom block quotes. The drop shadows looked nice on the posts so I am going to leave them in. I did not like that the drop shadows were being applied everywhere so I turned them off for the sidebar. Although he added a custom image header feature, I overrode it in the header.php so I could use my existing image. At another site I overrode the code so that I could use my rotating random images code. Great job Sadish!

Link to WordPress Themes by Sadish » MistyLook Version 3

Clean CSS – A Resource for Web Designers – Optmize and Format your CSS

I have been playing around a CSS Optimizer, Clean CSS. The most interesting feature is its ability to merge the same selectors and properties automatically.  This gives you a slightly different picture of what the CSS is doing and where you have duplicated properties. Today I finally gave it whirl on a live site and did not notice a change.

2003 SP2 is okay!

I installed SP2 late on Friday without any obvious issues besides that it took a long time to install. Late in the evening IIS shut down for an unknown reason. I did not catch it until the following day. It caused several problems in programs dependent on IIS. After I restarted IIS everything has been stable for the last two days. Everything I tried still works.

Win 2003 sp2 on Microsoft update now

Windows Update Screenshot

On Microsoft update and apparently soon on WSUS is Windows 2003 sp2. I want you to go over to your servers right now and turn off auto updates if you have then enabled on the servers. For R2 WSUS boxes you won’t get SP2 automatically as SP’s are offered up but not auto installed. But I don’t want you to accidentally install this service pack as for us SBSers we need to read KB932600 …but as of right now the link isn’t yet live..

Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2 (SBS 2003 customers – Please read Knowledge Base Article 932600 before installing SP2) …

I did not see this one coming. I am busy with other things and do not want to deal with SP2 until someone else figures out the problems. I do not have any problems that SP2 will fix. In fact I am pretty happy with my servers. With the tax season peak just around the corner this is the wrong time to drop in unannounced with SP2. Fortunately my servers will only update when I bless it. So I should be in good shape.

Where Our Standards Went Wrong

To validate or not to validate; that is the question. A List Apart’s own Ethan Marcotte helps us to re-examine our approach to standards advocacy and how we can better educate our clients on the benefits of web standards.

 

Link to Where Our Standards Went Wrong

I still prefer that my sites validate but I do allow warnings and occasionally minor errors to get through. It is a tradeoff. I want the sites to validate but I need to limit the amount of time I spend debugging validation problems since I am the only person who cares that the problems get fixed. The biggest advantage to having a site that validates is to minimize the maintenance headaches supporting multiple browsers.