Well, I ought to give you a few better tips than that I suppose.

Why You Need To Back Up

Your hard drive is going to fail. It’s not a question of if it will fail, but when it will fail. Hard drives today are pretty reliable, but still they are intricate, delicate machines. They also spin and anywhere between 5400 and 10,000 RPM depending on the model you have, and with all that spinning, something is going to break eventually.

Redundancy is key. No storage media is infallible, and if you think of it that way, all your data should be stored in more than one spot. Always. Think about everything you have on your computer. Documents, email, pictures from your Aunt Virginia’s 90th birthday party, and that cool video of the water skiing squirrel. You don’t want to lose that stuff, do you?

Backing Up Is Easy. Here’s How.

This won’t cost you a lot of money, and it won’t take a lot of time. Here’s how to back up.

Step 1. Buy something to back up on.

You can back up on anything really, CD’s, zip drives (remember those?), or even floppy disks if you had a lot of time and still had a floppy drive (remember THOSE?). But the two best choices you have are an external hard drive or a USB flash drive. If you only have a small amount of information, you can get by with the usb drive, but for most people who use their computer for a bit, I’d recommend the hard drive. It holds a lot more than the flash drive. Not sure which to get? Look at how much space you are using on your computer and use that as a guide. To do that, in windows, open My Computer, right click your C: drive and hit properties. You should see how many Gigabytes (GB) are in use. You’ll want at least this much space (extra is good). On mac, open Finder, find your Macintosh HD and hit File, Get Info. Again, see how much is in use.

Special note: If you use Mac OSX, you’ll want to get a drive larger than the data in use on your computer. Time machine will allow you to roll back to a moment in time anywhere in your backup, so it saves versions of files. It’s a great feature but it needs a little more space to get the most out of it. Go for a little bigger hard drive here. It’s worth it.

Step 2. Set up Backups.

OK so you’re got your shiny new hard drive ready to go. Let’s copy some data!

Windows: 

If you got an external hard drive, it most likely came with a backup utility that you can install and use to automatically back up your information.

Mac: 

Apple’s OS X provides a very handy backup program called Time Machine. To set this up, just plug in your new hard drive and open Time Machine. It’s under Applications if you don’t see it in the dock. Turn it on and tell it to use the new drive for backups. It will take a while the first time, but it will back up everything. Then you can go back to time machine anytime you lose something, and if your computer crashes or hard drive fails, the drive has all your stuff stored there.

Manual Backups:

If you got a USB drive or if you just prefer to do it this way, you can back up your information manually. Just pop the flash drive in and you should see a new drive appear in My Computer (PC) or Finder (Mac). You can copy files and folders over to that drive. Once on the drive, they’re backed up. If you don’t do much on your computer, just do this once in a while and you’re all set! Just remember that anything stored in just one place is at risk for being lost.

Step 3. Go nuts.

If you’re like me, you’ve had a hard drive crash once a long time ago and you lost some data and you swore you’d never make that mistake again! My first line of defense is Time Machine. I use a mac and time machine handles my regular backups on a day to day basis. But I also write software, namely Waypoint which is the flagship software package for my company, Twin Harbor Web Solutions. I write code for Waypoint regularly, and it’s critical to the success of our business. Our customers use Waypoint every day and it’s important for them that Waypoint always be there. That being said, losing the source code to Waypoint would be an absolute disaster, so we go a few steps beyond just Time Machine. We make regular backups of all our software and store them off-site, on DVD in a fireproof safe. This way even if our offices burn down, we still have that software…at least the version since the last backup! That reminds me, it’s time to make another DVD backup and get it over there.

Hopefully this post helps save someone’s data!

Don’t use music

You may be tempted to add music to your website. Resist this urge! When you create a website, you want to encourage visitors to stay a while, and come back from time to time. Music will only deter this. Most people find music on websites annoying. Many of your visitors will be listening to other music when they hit your site, and then suddenly your music starts playing too. Now they have to scramble looking for an off button. Some percentage of these people will just hit the back button and get out of there. If you really want to add music, you can make it optional. Allow users to hit play if they are so inclined. I used to say that some specialty sites would be exempt from this rule, but I really think music should be left off regardless of the site now. Too many people can’t stand it and I do think it will hurt more than it helps.

Keep text styling consistent

When working with the text on your site, try to limit your text styling to headings and perhaps bold. Resist the urge to mess with font size and color options. Your site’s stylesheet will provide formatting for the different headings, and that should be used to organize content, much as you see here in this article. Each section has a heading tag and the stylesheet formats it as it should be. There are a few reasons to stick with this guideline:

1. Your content will look most professional when only a few different font styles are used throughout the site. It keeps things clean. When you start to add lots of text in larger font and different colors, it really takes away from the even flow of the site. The structure breaks down, visually.

2. If you just use headings and basic formatting, you make it much easier to rebrand your site down the road. When you build a new design, you can just change the stylesheet or your template, depending on the web system you’re using, and all your content can be reformatted without editing it all. When you use the formatting tools like font, size and color, it places those rules in-line and it overrides whatever is in the stylesheet.

Trust your designer

When you chose a web or graphic designer, you probably looked at their work and thought how great it looked and how you wished you could have a site like one of those. When that designer comes up with something for you, they will put all their passion into it and make something great. They want to make your site look great too. Once you have some mockups in hand, there is an opportunity for you to review them and make comments or request changes. Resist the urge to ask for changes just for the sake of asking. Not everyone does this, but it does happen. Too many changes can mangle up what once was a great design losing all the flow and purpose that it had before. That’s not to say you should never ask for any changes; if you have things you’d rather see or not see, bring them up to your designer, but be aware of how they may affect (and possible, take away from) the design as it is. When in doubt, ask your designer what they think of the changes you propose. The best thing here is an open and honest discussion.

Avoid Flash

Wait, avoid flash? But all those cool sites I’ve seen with sweet animations and effects were done in flash!

Believe me, I was reluctant to admit this one for a while myself, but flash is dead. You don’t want to use it. There’s a few reasons why.

1. Design aesthetics. People searching the web are less patient than ever. They want what they are looking for, and they want it now. When you make a site entirely of flash, you wind up abandoning the standard type of navigation that users are used to. Usually sites have a top or left hand navigation with a series of clearly visible buttons. Your website visitors are used to this. Don’t go throwing them a curve ball and make a series of cryptic icons because they look cool. At least some percentage of your visitors will grow quickly tired of this and hit the back button and move on to another site.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In short, SEO is the practice of making your website perform as good as it can in the search engine results pages for the terms that are important to you. When you build a site with Flash, all the content you place is invisible to those search engines, and good content is your most important asset in the SEO race. This reason is enough for me by itself to skip flash.

3. Flash is completely unsupported on Apple’s mobile devices (iPhone, iPad and iPod). I won’t get into the debate about why Apple made this decision, or if they should have, but on a web where more and more people are browsing with these devices, you don’t want to have content that a larger and larger percentage of your audience simply can’t see.

4. There is an alternative! New technologies are now available that will allow you to achieve many of the same types of effects you used to need Flash for. You can use Javascript libraries, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and simple html markup to make your site more interactive. The best part? It keeps your content visible for search engines and it works on apple’s devices (for the most part).

Don’t use icons instead of text buttons

One design element I’ve seen people been drawn to is icons. Icons are OK in my book. The problem comes when you use an icon without text along with it. How am I supposed to know that the little rolodex icon is your contact page? This will frustrate your users and just drive them away, and the whole point is to get people to stay on your site and read what you have to say. You might think, well, let’s just show the text when you mouse-over each icon. Although slightly better, you’re still forcing your users to hunt and peck through all the icons to find what they want. As fun as it may seem, your visitors have zero patience and just won’t do it.

Let us know your ideas in the comments! Agree with these? Disagree? Let us know!

1. It’s easy.

That’s right. I said it. HTML is easy. I’ve explained the basics of html to clients in just a few short minutes so that they could tweak and adjust content more easily. It doesn’t take much time to wrap your head around the basics. You don’t need a degree in computer science.

2. It’s not going away.

With all the new technologies out there, you might be tempted to think HTML is old and going to go away. Think again. Flash is on its way out, and the replacement? HTML5. Data storage as a whole is also making a huge move into the world of XML, which you may have heard of. Why does this matter? Because HTML, IS XML. (Not with quite as many limitations, necessarily, but essentially, it is).

3. It will save you time.

Have you ever sat there fiddling with a piece of online content, trying to coax it into looking the way you want it to? Sometimes online text editors do strange things, and you wind up getting frustrated and wasting a bunch of time trying to make the content look right. If you knew a little HTML, you would be able to hop over into the HTML viewer and diagnose and fix the issue in most cases. It’s not that you should sit there and draft all your content in HTML, but rather knowing it and being able to adjust it is helpful.

4. You’ll feel like you can hack like Hugh Jackman in Swordfish.

There’s something very satisfying about being able to accomplish things like this. Think of it as a trick you can use to show off to your friends. It’s kind of like being good with a yo-yo or knowing how to complete a rubix cube. Learn it. Show off. Why not?

This is how I code, every single day.

5. You might like it.

Who knows? You might actually enjoy the satisfaction of making some good looking content all by yourself. Not to mention, it’s a great skill to have in the professional world, regardless of what you do.

OK so you’re convinced! How do you get started? Well, you’ll have to stay tuned for our next post where we’ll go over the basics, but for now, this is a great resource:

http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_intro.asp

Thankfully, Facebook has provided its own solution, and since they control their own API’s, you can bet it will be more stable. It’s also very easy to install and configure. Here’s a quick walkthrough.

First, visit the setup page:

http://www.facebook.com/twitter

You’ll be asked to link your profile. Click the green button. You’ll then be asked to authorize an app.

This creates an application inside twitter which allows the posting. When you go to your settings page in twitter, then to the applications tab, you can adjust access if you like.

Then you will be prompted to configure the app. It’s very simple. Choose what kinds of items you want to be shared. If you are the admin for any pages, they will appear here too and you can set the posts from those pages to be shared too. Choose whatever makes sense in your situation.

To adjust these settings later, just go back to the same page and you can adjust everything. http://www.facebook.com/twitter

Track Active item in Solution Explorer

VS.net 2010 changed a default setting. Previously, when you used a tab to look at a different document, the solution explorer would automatically jump down to that file. I found this really helpful when you want to pop open a code behind, or just see what related files are in the same folder, especially in really large projects (like Waypoint!). VS.net 2010′s default setting doesn’t do this anymore. It’s a quick fix to bring it back.

Tools >> Options

Expand Projects and Solutions >> General

Check the box: “Track Active item in Solution Explorer”.

Disable Attach Security Warning

This may be due to my programming on Windows Server 2008, but by default if you try to attach to a process, a new warning message appears: “Attaching to this process can potentially harm your computer. If the information below looks suspicious or you are unsure, do not attach to this process.” Here’s how to kill that message:

Go to Control Panel >> Administrative Tools >> Local Security Policy >> Security Settings >> Local Policies >> User Rights Assignment >> Debug Programs

Ensure you are a member of this group (I was by default actually, but it’s worth checking.

Then we need a registry change:

Open regedit then navigate to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Debugger

Change the value of DisableAttachSecurityWarning from 0 to 1.

Restart all instances of VS.net.

Turn On Line Numbers

I like to have line numbers enabled. It helps finding lines and keeping track of where you are in longer documents and classes. Sometimes you even get a line number from an error report. To turn them on (they’re off by default):

Tools >> Options >> Text Editor >> … select the file type you want .. >> General

Check the box, “Line Numbers”. You’ll need to do this for all the applicable types of files where you want to show line numbers.

That’s all I have for now, but I’ll update this post if I come across more. Let me know in the comments if you have anything valuable!

Part 1:

Add the following line of code inside the system.web section of the web.config file. You can change the values of maxRequestLength and executionTimeout as you see fit. maxRequestLength is set in kilobytes, and the executionTimeout is set in seconds.

 <httpRuntime requestValidationMode="2.0" maxRequestLength="50000" executionTimeout=”1200″ />

Part 2:

IIS7 has a 30MB limit set overall, so if you are trying to allow files 30MB or larger, you’ll also need to set the following. Inside your web.config file, add the following inside the system.webServer section.

<security>
      <requestFiltering>
        <requestLimits maxAllowedContentLength="2000000000" />
      </requestFiltering>
    </security>

Thanks to this blog where I found this answer:

http://www.cyprich.com/2008/06/19/fixing-file-upload-size-limit-in-iis-7/

SSL is an acronym for Secure Sockets Layer. The SSL Certificate is a little piece of code that is used to make a website more secure. When you visit a website, the URL (web address) usually starts with http://. Once configured with an SSL Certificate, the website will support requests using https://. When this happens, the connection between the user and the server is encrypted. So when you enter information on that website, such as your credit card number, before it gets sent over the internet to the server, all the bits are jumbled up using an encryption algorithm. This prevents anyone who may be listening in along the way from discerning what is in that transmission. The SSL Certificate provides the means of securing that transmission.

It is important to have an SSL Certificate on your website if you are collecting any sensitive information. Credit card information certainly merits an SSL Cert, but other things do as well. Prices for these certificates range widely based on the strength of the protection (how strong of encryption is used) and they will often carry warranties with them as well. SSL Certificates are sold through a series of trusted authorities who validate the certificate’s authenticity. When you visit a site with a valid SSL Certificate, you will see a lock icon in your web browser. Click on this lock to see the details of the certificate.

If you visit a website that has an invalid certificate, you will usually see a warning message appear. Be wary of websites with invalid certificates. These messages can appear for a number of reasons. The certificate may be expired (they renew each year, just like a domain name) or they may not be properly configured. Speak with your web host for more information on SSL Certificates and how to purchase, install and configure them.

Spaces No More

If you are a first time Mac user, Mission Control is a nice feature. I think it’s more approachable for first timers than Spaces was. I’m sure that was Apple’s motivation in this new workflow. My issue with it is twofold:

1. Spaces are in one row. Personally, in spaces I used a 2 by 2 grid. I could go up down, left right. It was fast and efficient. Loved it. But it’s gone now, and I can’t have it that way anymore.

2. Applications don’t remember where they were after reboot. In Spaces, you could assign applications to particular Spaces. You can’t do this anymore. After you reboot, all your applications will open mashed into the first desktop space. Now when I decide to reboot, we have to waste time putting things back in their place. This is a real loss of functionality I am hoping Apple will remedy soon.

Launchpad is Useless

This one isn’t really a loss of functionality since it didn’t exist in Snow Leopard, but it’s something Apple is touting as useful and I don’t buy it. They are trying to make OSX more like iOS, but in this case I don’t see that a large grid of icons is so great. We have the dock for that. And if you want to have more, I like to use a folder of aliases in the dock that quickly fans out with one click and I can get to more apps that way.

Network Utility Lookup Dropdown Removed

A big part of my job is handling domain names, email and website hosting for my clients. The lookup feature in Network Utility was great. You could select what type of DNS records you wanted to see and it would fetch them. The option is now removed; you can still get the records but you can only do the full lookup and get all the records. This is a small thing, but still it’s something useful that has been taken away.

iCal’s Sidebar is Gone

iCal used to have a nice sidebar where you could check off which calendars were shown and which were hidden. Now in order to see this, you need to click a button which opens a panel with these details. This panel obscures the view of part of the calendar. This is a poor design choice. Additionally, Apple has re-skinned the calendar and although it’s just a design preference, I find it quite cheesy. The previous iCal had the look of a standard OSX window. It was clean and professional. I do think iCal definitely took a step back.

I’m sure there are other things I haven’t found yet. Feel free to post yours in the comments. I will update this post with whatever else comes up.

One big gripe: I can no longer assign applications to specific “spaces”. The settings panel that used to let me do this is gone! Now when I reboot, all my apps get mashed onto the first screen.

** EDIT: Previously I thought I found a workaround, but it seems after reboot, everything goes back to the first space. I hope apple comes out with a fix for this.

Here’s How to set spaces (although they will reset after a reboot):

• Right click (or ctrl click if you don’t use the secondary mouse click) on an app in the dock.
• Under the “Assign To” category, select the desktop you want to keep it on, or use “This Desktop” for the current one.
• OSX will remember this setting the next time you fire up that app.