John Crumpton

A quick security checklist for your website, whether you’re running Joomla, Zencart or a bespoke content management system.

1. Choose a complicated password, at least 10 characters alpha-numeric including letters, numbers and upper-and-lower-case. Use Goodpassword.com to generate it
2. Create a new login for each person that needs to administer the site and don’t share login details. That way you have an audit trail to track down the source of the compromise
3. Use encrypted connections for accessing server files, such as FileZilla which supports SFTP or WinSCP
4. Create a administrator user account with unique name and delete your administrator user
5. Rename your administrator or admin folder to something unique and include numbers in the name
6. Once your content management system is configured, change the configure.php file to chmod 444 (read only)
7. On folders you’d like to protect from being accessed, for example the images folder, use a .htaccess to stop browsing with the following code:

   Options -Indexes

8. Keep all files CHMOD 644. If you need to edit the files, set to read-write before making changes.
9. Keep all folders CHMOD 755
10. Stay up-to-date with the latest software and patches for your CMS
11. Check log files for suspicious activity regularly
12. Remove unneeded templates
13. Backup regularly

A leading enewsletter provider has analysed the last six months of data covering more than 250 million emails opens and compiled the most popular email clients as of February 2009.

33.0% Outlook 2000, 2003, Express
16.5% Yahoo! Mail
16.0% Hotmail
6.1% Outlook 2007
5.5% Apple Mail 3
5.1% Gmail
3.6% iPhone 2.0
2.1% Apple Mail 2
1.7% Lotus Notes 6-7
1.7% AOL Mail

It’s intersting to note than Outlook 2000, Hotmail and Yahoo are the most popular, as coding enewsletters is slightly different for each system. Ensure you test your enewsletter in each one.

Some useful HTML codes for making a website look good, best used at larger sizes for example in headings.

Just insert the code instead of the usual character. The most useful being the apostrophe or right single quote ’ which looks alot better than the prime or rat’s tooth ' as it’s sometimes called.

’s compared with the usual 's

Market Share has released figures for browser usage for the first quarter of 2009. It shows that Firefox has a market share of 21% with Internet Explorer coming in at 67%.

This is an important news because if you have not checked your website in Firefox you may lose 21% of your customers.

Firefox more strict when it comes to web standards, so you may find menu’s do not work or content is displayed incorrectly (but looks fine in Internet Explorer).

Download Firefox and check your website today.

PowerPoint has an annoying feature of hiding menu items which you don’t often use. You have to click on the double arrows at the bottom of the menus to reveal the other items.

To turn this off, choose TOOLs -> CUSTOMIZE, then Options and tick “Always show full menus”. While you are there, ticking “Show Standard and Formatting toolsbars on two rows” will allow you to access more options for both toolbars.

This is a handy piece of javascript code that adds the last two digits of the current year to the footer of a website. This saves time as you don’t have to keep updating the footer on all your pages.

© Company name 2000–

&copy; Company name 2000&ndash;<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
var now = (new Date().getFullYear()).toString();
var theYear = now.substring(now.length, 2);
document.writeln(theYear,".");
// -->
</script>