WordPress Is a Powerful Platform

WordPress is a state-of-the-art web publishing platform.  First released in 2003,  as a simple blog platform, it has grown to become one of the most popular website platforms, powering over 60 million sites. Some of the reasons why WordPress users love their sites include:wordpress-logo

  • Open Source.   Word Press is an Open Source system.  No license fees are charged for its use.
  • Standards Compliant.   WordPress conforms to standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community led by Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and CEO Jeffrey Jaffe.  W3 C’s mission is “to lead the Web to its full potential .”   W3C standards define an Open Web Platform for development and design, in HTML, CSS, SVG,  AJAX, and other technologies for web applications and  how to make pages accessible to people with disabilities (WCAG), how to internationalize them, and how to make them work on mobile devices. Other W3C standards include the Semantic Web, which refers to helping to support”a web of data,” to enable computers to do more useful work and to develop systems that can support trusted interactions over the network.  “Semantic data” refers to W3C’s vision of the web of linked data, enabling people to create data stores on the web, build vocabularies, and create rules for handling data.

 


By complying with W3C standards, WordPress protects not only the integrity and viability of the content on user websites, but also the long-term stability of the sites themselves. Word Press’adherence to W3C standards provides protection and peace-of mind for users

 

  • Easy to Use.   The WordPress platform  provides effective tools and support to create customized websites.  The administration section is easy to use and understand  .     The content management system  is user-friendly, and content can be added or changed with ease.(Some Blazing Systems clients, in fact, prefer to perform content changes and updates themselves—even though we’ll  provide that service for free!)
  • Powerfully flexible.   Word Press sites are available in hundreds of different themes, which define how the site looks and what features are available to visitors.   Similarly, the WordPress platform supports almost 25,000 plugins—features that can be deployed on individual websites to customize them to be most effective.  Plugins include functions like  site maps, SEO, social media, galleries, polls, and guestbooks.     Enhance the attraction of your site with a blog—Word Press’  original focus is still a strength.

  

 

Get A Word Press Website to Love:

Blazing Systems  builds, hosts, and maintains Word Press websites.  Hundreds of options, including a blog that works to increase your visibility on the web, are great options to have, but having an expert to help choose and deploy those options  makes it even better. To get the full advantage of all the powerful tools and customization available with the Word Press platform, you need a partner with the  experience and skills to maximize the value of your site, and to  securely host  and maintain it —-all for an affordable cost..   Get a great website with  no hassle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The PC’s Time is Gone

Several current news items clearly show that the personal computer–the primary driving force product in the IT industry since 1980—has become a just a minor piece of hardware .  The first set of data shows that the PC has been replaced by the mobile phone.  In Q04 2010, 92 million PCs were sold,while 101 million smartphones were sold.  By 2014 there will be over 1 billion smartphone users.  Nearly all Generation Y consumers own a mobile phone of some kind and 72 percent own smartphones  Over three-quarters of Americans age 43 and under now use a smartphone.   53 percent of American consumers use their smartphones to access search engines at least once a day.  Smartphones and tablet computers will increase mobile Web traffic by 26 times during the next four years.  The  other current news items that are pointing to the demise of the PC include:

 

  • Dell, the company that mastered the low-cost commodity distribution strategy for PCs, is struggling, and its board is asking its founder to buy it and take it private.
  • HP, the company that tried to save itself by buying Compaq, perhaps the premier desktop provider,is thrashing around , generating rumors of a break-up.
  • BillGates, the master of the PC product world, is now seeking to invest,not in PC-related businesses, but rather in the next-generation condom maker!

These major events have been driven by more than just the rise in mobile phones, but the smartphone is clearly taking over some of the key uses previously performed by the PC—like eCommerce ( now it’s mCommerce. )  Dell–although they undoubtedly beat the market by being the cost/price leader, never did get a toehold in account management via professional services.  Dell was just the cheapest commodity box maker.  HP,  for years looked successful because of their dominance in the desktop printer market.    The results produced by that dominance masked the deep problems and old-fashioned vision inside the company.   They never succeeded as a system solution provider, and their service business never evolved from the primitive break/fix cost center model.  They hoped that buying Compaq’s line of high-end servers would help them succeed as a mid-range system provider, but their stodgy approach to services locked them into the commodity product corner.

 

When you live by the product–instead of providing needed services to your customers— you die when the product gravy train is interrupted by the next best thing.

Yahoo’s WFH Problem Is Management, Not Policy

Marissa Mayer

Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer,recently made news when she banned all Work-from -Home (WFH) for all Yahoo employees. Part of the reason why this was news-worthy is that Yahoo had been aggressive in extending WFH and flexible hours to employees.  In the early years of the commercialization of the Internet—during the late 90s–Yahoo was one of the pillars of the Internet community.  Its success helped fuel the irrational exuberance that inflated the Internet Bubble.  In those days, Yahoo was an innovator, a leader, and a cool place to work; and it was growing rapidly.  It was a place you could go to find other places on the Internet—a kind of directory of websites. Yahoo ‘s revenue model was unique to the technology industry,but it was basically the same as network television’s—sponsors paying for advertisements.  Yahoo unfortunately got caught up in the marketing “wisdom” of the day, which said, “Just like with Nielsen ratings in TV, the more eyes you have on the screen, the more you can charge advertisers.  So, instead of concentrating on building a fast,efficient search of the Internet’s content, Yahoo tried to be a destination itself–a place where users would visit and spend lots of time looking at and clicking on ads.  The Internet marketing gurus called it making your site “sticky.”  Greatly underestimating the intelligence of the users, Yahoo thought people needed a “portal” to the Internet, a starting point, an on-ramp to the Information Highway. So they built a site that streamed information at the users,who were actually ready for a gateway that would take them quickly to where they wanted to go.  So, instead of being Google, Yahoo ended up being a sticky-portal-thing for people who needed their Internet spoonfed to them. Yahoo missed the search engine market, just as it would miss the social media market; but it was successful right up through 2000, when the Bubble burst.

 

Arrogance and Hubris

The history of the computer industry is filled with examples of companies that enjoyed rapid growth spurts, which were followed by periods of correction.  Even that old grey battleship, IBM, had to re-trench in the 80s after a phenomenal ramp up during the 50s and 60s (when Ross Perot was an IBM salesman, which he said was “Like selling umbrellas on a rainy day.”)   When technology companies are in the rocketing revenue-growth phase, they tend to develop arrogance and hubris.. “Hey …We must be smart—Look at how well we’re doing.’   Also, all of the management attention is on keeping up with the revenue growth—feeding fuel into the engine—not necessarily building infrastructure and processes to efficiently manage the company over the long run.  During the early years of Yahoo’s growth, various policies and programs were put in place to fuel the growth, to attract technical talent.    Arrogance and hubris made it feel invincible, and luxuries were built into the culture. During this time I worked for a company that provided break/fix maintence service to Yahoo for all their computer equipment.    When one of their machines failed, they would call us, and we would send in a highly-skilled field engineer.  A problem arose, however, because Yahoo  repeatedly hired the engineers we  assigned to the account.  I called the head of HR at Yahoo, and asked them to agree to stop stealing our employees.  The response was, “Oh, we can try, but working here is more of a Way of Life than a job, so we may not be able to control it.”  Arrogance and hubris.  I told them we would cancel their service contract if they continued to hire the people we sent in, and the practice ceased.   Several years later, the company for which I was working had developed an email application that we thought Yahoo might want to puchase and offer to its users.  A U. S. Senator who was associated with a major investor in our company offered to gain us acess to Yahoo’s cofounder, Jerry Yang.  This did result in a phone conversation with Yang,in which I said that Senator______ thought they would be interested in our email app.  Yang’s response was ” Senator _____can Go F*** himself.”  Arrogance and hubris.  That was when they were riding high, one of the most successful Internet companies.

Top-down Dictates Can’t Overcome Weak Management

During that same time, they implemented one of the most liberal  WFH programs possible, which gave them an advantage in recruiting.  In fact, many people were recuited to work there just because of the promise of being able to work from home.  So they had a very rich entitlement policy, but nobody managed it—they were all too busy enjoying the company’ success and growth rate.  Then, hard times hit and the correction cycle came around.  The management team didn’t know how to reign in the bloated structure, or transition the culture to one focused on cost-effectiveness and productivity.   People started abusing the liberal policies, and the managers couldn’t control the employees’ behavior.  According to reports, Mayer decided to change the WFH policy when she grew frustrated seeing empty employee parking lots.  Banning all WFH is an admission that the company can’t manage the policy.

When the company and its employees lose the advantages of innovative programs due to blanket top-down dictates because a small percentage of employees and managers can’t manage their behavior, the larger percentage of employees—and overall productivity–suffer.

Note:  Another company that once did very well, but now has fallen on tough times—Best Buy— recently announced a similar ban on all flexible hours, closing a program that had been viewed    as an industry leader. Chances are,  managers needed help, rather than  the  cessation and banning of  the policies.

 

Dvorak Desn’t Like the “Cloud”

John C. Dvorak, a graduate of UC Berkeley, has been all over the media in recent years, busy as a technology pundit and columnist.

 

In a column just published in that old standby, PC Magazine, he references Larry Ellison’s comments about the Cloud that we discussed in this space recently.  The surprise is that Dvorak seems to agree with Ellison.

In fact, the title of his column is, “Back When the Cloud was Dumb.”  Dvorak says that the Cloud is nothing but remote storage and client-server, saying “there is nothing new about remote storage and client-server, and that’s pretty much what we are talking about here. ”

Although Mr. Dvorak has  been official in-house geek and tech-pundit extraordinaire for all sorts of media outlets, including NPR,the NY Times, and Tech TV, he  is not very accurate in his belittling description of the cloud.

Like many seasoned industry vets, he rails against the new term, “cloud computing,”  with an emotional passion.  Like Mr. Ellison, he informs us that there is no water vapor doing the processing, that  it’s just old-fashioned mainframes:  “Why, though, does it have to be called the “cloud?” Where is this cloud anyway? It’s not in the sky and it doesn’t hold water. So why “cloud?”   Then, he goes on to his priority dislike:  the
Internet itself—-which is, of course, the “cloud” in question.   He says, “let us look at the Internet and what it has done. It has completely reversed the revolution that began with the desktop computer. It has returned us to a networked environment with centralized control. “  Now we see the clue to his real agenda—-Mr. Dvorak believes the Internet has  undone The Revolution!    ( Perhaps it’s that Berkeley influence.)   As he says,”Don’t kid yourself. The entire idea that people should have complete control of their computing needs with complete desktop subsystems, from hard disks to printers to telemetry gear, is frowned upon by a society that prefers centralized control. No matter that centralized control is too expensive!”

But he verges on paranoia when he says,  ” One thing is for certain: They are trying to convince us that the cloud will come and go and come and go when really it’s just old-fashioned mainframe-based distributed computing from 30 years ago all gussied up. They are trying to trick us.”

Really, John?  The whole Internet is a conspiracy, and THEY are trying TRICK us?    Whoa!   If anything, Mr. Dvorak is one of THEM, one of the tech-savvy elite power structure.  But claiming that Cloud Computing is just client/server is simply wrong.   Like Mr. Ellison, Mr. Dvorak ridicules what he clearly doesn’t understand.   Like Ellison, all he sees are products,   “remote servers, as I would prefer they be called,”  he says.   He misses the point entirely that Cloud Computing refers to a service—it’s about how the information processing is delivered, not what is delivering the processing.   And delivering processing power to endusers on an as-needed basis, with no capital investment required by them, liberates them.  It enables small businesses to get access to the same sophisticated databases and applications that the giant corporations use.  Before Cloud Computing became available, only very rich, large organizations could afford the infrastructure to manage Big Data. Using the Internet to leverage computing capacity creates a level playing field, with small and medium players being able to compete equally.   I would think that Mr. Dvorak’s Berkeley sensitivities would welcome such a  development.

ORACLE DOESN’T UNDERSTAND THE CLOUD

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is not universally respected and/or admired.  Viewing this video of him ranting about Cloud Computing may  or may not  change your opinion of him, but it will help you understand why Oracle’s “Cloud” offerings are not good deals.     For example, Oracle is now offering IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) that features Oracle selling you  some hardware and software to run your own “cloud” on your premises.

 

In other words—the cloud is the same old same old—we make a product, dump it on you, say goodbye, and then you do your computing.

Ellison, and therefore Oracle, just doesn’t “get” the Cloud, which he admits in the video.  In his words, “What the hell is Cloud Computing?”Even though Ellison says, with false modesty, at one point, “Maybe I’m an idiot.,”   It’s clear that he chooses to ridicule what he just doesn’t understand.   And there’s a reason—other than him being an idiot— that he and his company don’t understand.   They are locked into the product-driven model.   The Cloud is a metaphor–Yes, Larry, everybody—except you—understands that water vapor has not replaced hardware and software—-a metaphor for the networked environment created by the Internet.
In the Cloud, economies of scale can be gained by leveraging computing resources to serve multiple users.   This computing model is service-driven, not product-driven, so it is difficult for people who have done well in a product-driven world.   Being service-driven means staying with the enduser customer, working with them , to maximize the effectiveness of their computing capacity, whether it’s owned, leased, or in the Cloud. The Product model is”Dump and run.”   The Service model is, “We’ll help you get the job done.”   For decades some technology companies have treated service as a cost center, and the only attention executives like Ellison have paid is to squeeze the costs, and to deliver as little post-sale support as  possible.  Now, with the customer more in the driver’s seat, able to buy only what they need  in the service-driven computing model, it’s understandable that some of the old-line product mavens feel lost and confused, which is a better title for the Ellison video.

 

 

WEBSITES ARE PERSON-TO-PERSON

 

 

 

 

At Blazing Systems we practice “human-centric” technology.  We design and develop web-based technology that starts and ends with human interface as the priority. Our clients start with ideas about what they want to communicate and achieve with their website—They know the people-oriented requirements, and it’s our job to help translate those requirements into a functioning technical product . To do this successsfully, we need to listen and then translate into what is possible.  One of our first goals with each new client is to de-mystify technology, to simplify it, so that clients can decide which options are best for them.  Too many technology companies  take a product-centric approach, and seek to inflict pre-conceived technical solutions on people.   We make technology more human,and that starts a process that results in websites that people  like—they get a site that is more what they want, they are more a part of the design process.This is important, because they know what will connect and work best with their customers.

 Friendly and Honest

We recently completed a new website for a client that demonstrates how the human factor works. EP Energy Solutions president, W. David Wallace, worked with us to design a website that speaks to his customers and prospective customers in ways which he knows are most effective.   As you can see immediately when you visit the site, http://epenergysolutions.com/, you are greeted by a friendly photo of David that introduces him and personalizes the content.The photo is casual and candid–not formal and photo-shopped—-friendly and honest.   He knew that people are most interested in, and would look at, videos and high-impact graphics.  He wanted the site to convey the core values of friendly honesty.
IN web design personal values can be communicated as much by what you don’t do, as what you do.  So, the overall design is clean, uncluttered, and easy to read and navigate—friendly and honest.  There are no pop-ups or gadgets or noise-makers—no banner ads or whirling graphics or pretentious energy techno-babble articles
Instead, the whole right side of the index page is devoted to video streaming and some nifty heat map images of heat escaping  areas that most people have in their homes.   The website development process took David’s vision of what will work best for his folks,  and  built technology that delivers that vision to people who visit the site.  From one person’s vision to multiple persons viewing,  web-based technology works efficiently for people when you use  a human-centric  methodology.

 

WordPress Permissions and Security

Our clients have found the functionality for the wordpress framework to be quite good at putting power to control content and information on their site. We also find the wordpress framework to be flexible and powerful to use as developers.That said all this functionality does come with a price. Security and file access permissions are important to set-up properly. Instructions on what to do are also vague/hard to follow.

Recently one of our clients who maintains her own site was hacked. Now you hear a lot about hacking, but most folks don’t know what that actually means. Here is a picture of the hack that was added to plugins on her wordpress site.

 

That looks like a lot of gibberish but what it is is encrypted code using a base64 encoding which a lot of software uses for non-malicious means. If we translate it we get this:

Ok more code gibberish for the non-coders, but to give a quick translation this = referring sites like facebook, google, myspace etc are re-directed from your site to another site of their choosing. This makes it hard for you to know you have been infected unless you regularly check your site from outside locations (not typing in the URL directly and instead looking at search results).

So what do you do? First off don’t panic. And really don’t panic if you have good backups. (Ok official shout-out to our friends at rackspace managed backup. We backup entire file structure for all our servers daily. Combine that with the awesome customer service we get from our Managed Backup Team, and you know why our team sleeps well at night).

First Step-Clean up the Mess

Finding whats been infected is an important first step (You need to know what needs to be cleaned.) Start with a couple of key directories:

1) /wp-content/themes/your_active_theme

2) /wp-content/plugins/All Plugins

Take a look at these directories and in particular to the last time edited time stamp. Infections will likely have been done all at one, so you will be able to discover the date you were infected. Move these directories to a safe place for now.

3) copy your wp-content/uploads directory to a safe location. This usually has files/images that aren’t as open to infections, and  you’ll want to save them in the long run.

4) Your theme’s directory is important. If it has been infected cleaning it by hand can be a laborious process. This is where backups come in extremely handy. Once you know the date of infection, restore a version of your themes directory from your backups. If you do not have backups you are left with 2 options:

a) Manually disinfect removing all malicious code. This is hard…in one file on her site she literally had 1000 different encodings which make automation difficult. You also have to be aware of restoring the file to its previous state.

b) Download a fresh theme and re-deploy your customizations. This is also hard, but you should be able to at least see your customizations in your infected theme directory to give you guidance.

5) The final step is to download and install a fresh version of the wordpress framework. Move your uploads directory and themes directory to the new fresh version, and finally re-download and install your fresh plugins.

All together if you have good back-ups the process can be done in under 20 minutes. Without backups the time to back up goes upwards of 10-20 hours.

 

Second Step-Security and Permissions: Or how to make this never happen again.

This is where online guides tend to get pretty vague. We at Blazing Systems are not a fan of vagueness so with two clients permissions we set-up a bit of a permissions test to find out what worked best. What we did was change permissions on two sites at different times to see what exposed the site, and what didn’t expose the site to intrusion. Here is the permissions set-up that seemed to provide the most security while keeping most of the framework functionality intact.

1) General Permissions: We want to have the framework and the majority of files outside control of apache/users. So start with changing ownership of all files in the wordpress directory to ownership of the FTP user that accesses the site:

Example: chown -R site_owner:site_owner_group /wordpress_install_directory

Next we want to change access permissions: 655 or 755 seems to be good permissions to keep these files protected.

Example: chmod -R 755 /wordpress_install_directory.

2) Specific Permissions: You still want to be able to upload files and complete upgrades. Also a lot of the functionality in wordpress will give permission errors with the above settings. So we want to open permissions on 2 directories inside wp-content

chown -R apache:apache /wp-content/uploads and chown -R apache:apache /wp-content/upgrade

chmod -R 755 /wp-content/uploads and chown -R apache:apache /wp-content/upgrade

3) Open and Close Permissions: Some themes have very cool functionality making it easy to change the look and feel of the site on the fly. These files are in your theme directory, but opening them up = exposure, plus all the troubles above. We recommend only opening and closing permissions on this directory while actively working on it, then immediately re-securing when your completed.

 

 

 

JAKE’S PALS

We enjoy working with non-profit organizations.  The Internet offers great potential to help people who are trying to help people; and our latest project gave us a chance to help someone who is trying to help people who are helping animals.  Jake Raudabaugh is six years old.  He is my grandson.  Recently he was moved by a commercial for ASPCA on the TV.  He was surprised and saddened to find out that some dogs and cats did not have homes, and that some were mistreated.  Fortunately, Jake has great parents who are both intelligent and caring.  The conversation eventually developed to include the concept of charity.

Jake

 

Jake liked the idea of charity, and decided that he wanted to be charitable to animals in need.  That night, he founded Jake’s Pals, dedicated to helping animals.  With his parents’ help, he developed a plan to help shelters and

any organizations that are caring for animals.
He decided to collect donations of food, supplies, and eventually money, and distribute those donations to worthy organizations.

This week Jake visited Blazing Systems and sat down for hours with his Uncle Will.  Together they designed a website for Jake’s Pals,   Will guided the work, presented the design options, and implemented  the design, using  a LAMP-stack/WordPress architecture;  and Jake made all the design choices on the spot in our dev lab, just as most of our clients like to do.

 

This summer Jake started building his donations by selling lemonade at yard sales, and he visited the Montgomery County ASPCA to find out their priority needs.  We’re hoping his new website will give his charity some visibility and help generate donations .   We’re honored to be his pals.

 

Open Source as an Advantage: Cost isn’t the Only Advantage

We were talking with an Industry Marketing Committee today who are in the beginning stages of selecting a new platform for their online presence. The discussion included talking about some of the advantages of using an open source platform versus a closed CMS systems.

It may surprise you to know that if you have used the internet in the last 10 years you have actually used Open Source software without even knowing it.  Apache webserver, http://httpd.apache.org/, is a great example. Apache is the system that runs websites on servers. Simply put it’s what directs you to the proper place to see the website you were looking for and controls how and what you see on your system.

Source: http://www.greatstatistics.com/

Apache dominates market share by an almost 7:1 ratio to the next most used version.   So we know it’s the most popular, but why?

  • Cost: $0 Licensing costs means anyone can get it anytime for free.
  • Performance:  Apache is one of the fastest webservers available.
  • Cross Platform: Apache runs on every operating system generally used.
  • Uptime: Our primary apache  server has 587 Days of uptime since its last re-start. (That was the day the server was brought online out of the box).
  • Modularity: Gobs of Modules have been developed to enhance/improve/modify apache to meet specific needs:
    • We use Apache-Mod-Rewrite to join together XML templates on serving to add layers and layers of customization to our netMLS Software
    • We use Apache mod-cache to improve performance of WordPress Sites (It makes Databases and Applications a bit smarter in how they utilize resources).

Apache is certainly an example of a very popular and successful open source project. Another thats worth mentioning is the very software I am writing this article in. WordPress http://wordpress.org/, is a software set built in php and mysql (two other open source projects!). Its quite easy to deploy and use, but more importantly, anyone can go in and modify/add/change/use a whole host of plugins, themes, or systems to enhance or meet their needs.

An example is http:/boyertownpa.org. Powered by WordPress it’s easy to update/add/change content using a word like interface (just like below):

 

Ok that’s pretty cool, but even better is the site’s calendar function. Boyertown has a lot of events, and Building a Better Boyertown wanted to highlight all the great things going in.  Event calendars may seem like a small thing, but the one they use is feature rich, with color categories,  dynamic jquery effects,  the ability to slice and dice displays, and highlight specific categories.

From a cost standpoint it was a no-brainer for Boyertown. We were able to deploy the entire site, with calendar and donation functions for about the same a closed source shop would have charged for just the donation portion.

But the real advantage is found in features. Well done open source software is feature rich, supported, stable, and highly customizable. Ultimately it just works for our clients and that’s why we are proud to be an  open source development shop.

 

 

 

 

Yahoo Chief ‘s Resume Scandal

Here we go again.  It’s not just another guy with a bad goatee…Scott Thompson, CEO at Yahoo, former president of Pay Pal/eBay, has been exposed for falsely inflating his resume.
In a series of articles in Business Insider,this mistake is described in detail.  Also, reportedly, Yahoo employees are very upset and angry at Thompson.  This is, at a minimum, ironic. If Yahoo employees fit national averages, about 25% of them probably lied on their resumes too.   But, folks like to be righteous, and they absolutely love to be self-righteous.  It’s a contest to see who can throw the first stone, the hardest.  In this age of being able to find out everything about everybody, exposing people has become a blood sport.

 

Lying on your resume is a stupid thing to do.   So is lying on your profile in Facebook  (hmmm—check that one out).  If you do it, you’re a jerk, but you are still a member of the human race, and last I heard we honored the principle of forgiveness.

 

 

I’ve noticed this principle under durress regarding two other individuals lately—
Michael Vick and Joe Paterno.   When it comes to being kind to animals and not raping young boys, it’s too easy to jump down on the side of goodness and berate and dishonor those who made mistakes.     Too many people seem to be frustrated judges, and they can’t wait to get all ‘holier-than-thou’ on people whose stupidity gets exposed. I guess they are perfect and it frustrates them living with the rest of us slobs.

Look….The guy lied on his resume…That’s cheating and being dishonest.  He should be fired, but let’s tone down the moral outrage.  Until we’ve solved the really serious injustices and cruelties that occur daily in this country, let’s stop making such public victims out of people who do stupid, self-defeating things… Live and let live.