We crave feedback, right? That is the tickle bloggers get when there is email notification that someone has posted a comment. That is the reason why we build commenting features into system. It is what we look for in our online courses. It is what sends the blood boiling when spammers use this channel to […]

The party from the January RSS Winterfest seems to be lingering on- but I am not festive. I get daily emails notifying me of changes on their site, which I am not following nor interested in. Four freakin’ times I used the link on their messages to set up email notifications to “never” . But […]

About every three-four works, my non-friend John leaves a message offering his services from “Credit Foundation of America”. His recorded voice has a faux concern about why I have not called him back regarding their debt consolidation services (did I ever tell anyone I needed this? noooooo. Do I now John? Noooooo. Why does he […]

This blog, as well as our RSS2JS service and our eportfolio server all took an unintended four day holiday. Last week was Spring break for our system, and our admin offices close on Thursday and Friday of that week. Our building had a planned electrical outage planned for Thursday AM to test a new back […]

It’s been a while since I posted about those smelly blog spam cock roaches… mainly because the MTBlacklist Plugin has been quietly running in the background. However, in the last two days the number and frequency of blogspam has picked up. You can identify them quite easily when the comments are emailed to you– especially […]

My work commute is not much more than 10 miles, but invariably during that morning stretch I witness at least once, someone tossing their cigarette butts out the car window. Maybe it is a lot of pent up frustration since the number of public places available for their habits is shrinking, and maybe so far […]

Set up a feedback form on your web site, and you get cruft like: I am a marketer and am interested in buying the e-mail addresses of all your community colleges. Sure! Your odds are as good as a July blizzard in Phoenix. At least this spam merchant was direct.

No, Willie Nelson did not pen this song, but I think Alan Cooper may have been an influence 😉 And this old song has been eating a lot of my time and productivity this week.

But here is the moral first- Programmers are brilliant, intelligent people in their areas of expertise, but for the most part (ducking to avoid the lobbed rotten vegetables), they should never be allowed to lead or do web design for use by any normal humans (e.g. potential site visitors).

Wow, XPLANA’s Interface Impact When Developing and Teaching Online Courses : When using graphics in a course, it is imperative that the graphics match the subject matter they are being presented with. When graphics are either inappropriate (meaning that they either do not correspond with the subject matter or they are culturally biased) they are […]

Microsoft provides this “hard to believe someone wrote it seriously and they were not smoking crack” Knowledge Base article Steps that you can take to help identify and to help protect yourself from deceptive (spoofed) Web sites and malicious hyperlinks..

In a nutshell, the smart folks in Redmind suggest that you type all in the browser address field rather than actually touching your mouse on those dangerous hyperlinks:

…a malicious user could create a link to a deceptive (spoofed) Web site that displays the address, or URL, to a legitimate Web site in the Status bar, Address bar, and Title bar. This article describes steps that you can take to help mitigate this issue and to help you to identify a deceptive (spoofed) Web site or URL.

The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.

Can you imagine how popular the web would be if this was how Tim Berners-Lee designed it from the start? Heck, we’d still be using Gopher…