July 05, 2005

Extra templates for First Business Website owners

For those of you who recently bought my "First Business Website" Toolkit" and haven't signed up for a hosting account, here is something of interest. I mentioned about hosting accounts using Cpanel that have Fantastico installed. This gives you additional programs that can be installed automatically from your control panel.

One of these programs is called Templates Express which allows you to install static templates to your website. You will need to use FTP and edit the html files, replacing the default text with your own text. Standard information like title, name, address and similar will be collected during installation and placed into the installed template in the appropriate locations.

There won't be anything special about using FTP to upload and download these templates. You will have covered this from the information provided in the toolkit. Here are some screen shots of the templates that will be available to you to have installed automatically for your use.

You can use the information provided in the toolkit to customize these to suit your needs. A search on Google will find many sites offering free templates, but I think these are pretty nice too.

Posted by Steve MacLellan at 05:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 05, 2005

My apologies

It has been a very busy week. I haven't had much time for anything but programming.

It seems most of you got a money back from your income taxes...

Guess I need a new accountant. I just seem to owe the government more each year...

Posted by Steve MacLellan at 03:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 05, 2005

HomeBusiness Websites Journal 04/05/05

To those of you who may be wondering why you didn't receive this week's issue of the HomeBusiness Websites Journal, I offer this explanation:

I need work done to both of my vehicles and since my regular guy isn't available, I'm scrambling trying to find someone else. I will only be at the computer long enough to get some work done for a couple of clients today.

Posted by Steve MacLellan at 07:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 31, 2005

AOL'ers: Stop reporting forwarded spam from your domain as spam

A problem that has come up twice in the last month involves clients who have their domain name email forwarded to their AOL accounts. When it is spam... they are pushing the button to "report spam" but in the case of forwarded email, they are really reporting their own domain.

Unless you're on a dedicated server, the server your site sits on is also shared by another 300-400 domain name websites. Reporting spam that was forwarded to you from your domain will cause the server to be blacklisted and can prevent thousands of people and you from getting legitimate email.

AMS Computer Services, where most of my clients are hosted, have a detailed explanation of this problem. If you use AOL you are encouraged to read it.

Posted by Steve MacLellan at 06:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 10, 2005

Acckk!! No power

A heavy rain storm and high winds up to 145 kilometers per hour hit Tuesday night and knocked out the power. It was restored early this morning, and I see after downloading about 500 emails (90% spam) I've got some catching up to do ;-)

If you sent me an email, I may have gotten it, but I can't be sure. So if you don't hear from me by the end of the day, you can assume I didn't. Please re-send.

Posted by Steve MacLellan at 08:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 04, 2005

My Kind of Hosting Company

I was surfing past Willie Crawford's Discussion Forum when his post, Free Ebook — You Make A Difference caught my eye. The first short story in the eBook told a story about telling people just how much you appreciate them. It made me think, AMS Computer Services, which is the company that owns the servers where I place clients who need hosting, deserves special recognition after this week.

I'd like to present AMS Computer Services with this virtual ribbon for all the great help they have provided me on behalf of my clients since 1997. I understand it hasn't always been easy for them, because I demand the best possible service from them. No... I mean it! I have been very demanding at times. I have expected them to treat my clients with the top most priority and professionalism and they have continually delivered. This past week... they went well out of their way to over deliver.

The problem started when the client went out of town for business and asked me to keep an eye on his web based mailing list software that was sending out to a few thousand people. Piece of cake! Right? It was just about finished when I had to retire for the evening. Woke up the next day to check the status and found the account had been suspended.

What the heck?!!!

Because of the amount of spam coming into the account, and the amount of messages going out, the technicians at the NOC (datacenter) have instructions to disable an account in emergency situations. This looked like a lot of spam so they shut it down. I contacted the technical support team and made them understand that there had been a mistake. This was a respected business person, not a spammer, and they were welcome to test the signup process to check (if they didn't want to take my word) that it was a double opt-in list, which had been continually growing over the years. They re-installed the site immediatly.

They looked into it a little more and sent me this message:

It seems so much mail is going through this account that it is causing problems on the server. It is actually filling up mail ques and hard drive partitions causing some mail not to be delivered to the server. I assume they have a large mailing list if they have been accumulating addresses since '97 or '98. It is probably time for this account to start consider upgrading to a dedicated server.

They said they would see what kind of deal they could get the client for a dedicated server, which wasn't a bad deal, but there would be other problems moving it. You see the software that most servers use to move sites isn't perfect, and things get broke. On a site this size, having the client pay 3-4 times more for a website, and then having to pay me for maybe days of work to fix the programming, would be unacceptable. I told support, we could consider this offer if they would guarantee that nothing got broken. Well... software to move sites is only so good... so what to do...?

Two days later they sent me another message:

We wanted to let you know that this server is doing much better so the upgrade for this account can most likely be delayed. It may be something that will need to be considered in the future, but for now the mail issues on this server have been resolved.

Administrators have moved a couple of other busy accounts to other servers and put some safeguards in place to limit the amount of spam going through the server. These steps have stabilized the server for now, since the amount of mail going through the server has been reduced significantly, the large amount generated by the clients account is no longer an issue on the server.

This is only one example. There have been other situations where these people, I feel, have risen above the call of duty to help make sure my clients get the best possible service. Their dedication, commitment and hard work has really been a GREAT help to my business, and they always provide the exact same kind of service that I would want to be able to provide if I was running their company.

Kudos goes to AMS Computer Services for continually providing my clients with the type of top quality service that I want them to have.

Posted by Steve MacLellan at 07:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 29, 2005

Paul Short's New Blog Consulting Company

I've known Paul for years. He's a very honest and ethical business person. He has several fields of expertise and he is drawing on this expertise and experience to bring you a new Blog Consulting Service. He is offering blog Consulting, Blog Promotion, Blog Set Up, Business Blogging for both personal and business bloggers who are serious.

If you read his about Paul page you will see mention of his wide range of experience. In '97 or '98 I was a subscriber of the Motiv8 Online newsletter he published back then. Few newsletters from that many years ago can be remembered as having any value. Paul Short's, Bob Serling and Marty Foley are three newsletters I recall receiving in the late '90's as having outstanding value.

I also took advantage of recommending his SEO business to a few clients of mine, who marveled at the way he over-delivered and when he says, he became:

"widely known as one of the best in the business."

... he is being modest. He was the best!

If you feel your company has some questions on blogs or need a blog consultant, this is the man to hire.

Posted by Steve MacLellan at 09:46 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

December 22, 2004

NOTICE: hosted clients

Late yesterday you may have noticed erratic behavior on your site... things that didn't appear to working right. Here is an announcement from AMS Computer Services:

On the evening of December 21, 2004 some security changes were made to all of our servers. These security settings were put in place to better provide our client's with a security environment and help to insure that their websites remain functioning. However, it seems that these settings had some adverse affects on numerous scripts, resulting in Apache 500 Internal Server Errors. Because of this, the security settings on all servers were relaxed. Your scripts and software should be working now.

However you should still contact the creator of any scripts you have installed on your account and insure that your scripts are up to date. There are numerous exploits on the Internet that a malicious user can use to wreck havoc on your website. Just because you are running the latest version, and follow every security guideline that is recommended, does not mean that your site won't get hacked or defaced. However, not having the latest version and following some security guidelines makes it that much easier for a malicious user to gain access to your account.

There has been a rash of account defacements and numerous script exploits reported in the recent months. Because of this we have had to step up the security on the servers. Unfortunately some of the security enhancements we have made, may break some of the old methods used to accomplish certain tasks. Please understand that we make these enhancements for the betterment of all of our clients, and it is because of these malicious acts that we are having to make these changes.

We at AMS Computer Services take the security on our servers very seriously. It is because of this that we implemented the above security rulesets, to offer a more secure environment for our clients. We apologize for not testing the security settings more before implementing them. We did not anticipate the amount of problems that this has caused. We want to offer all of our clients the best in usability, but also provide a secure environment for these websites. We will do some more testing on these security settings and will probably implement a better version in the future.

Again we apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you. If you have any other questions, comments, or concerns, please feel free to use our contact form to express any feedback.

Thank You
AMS Technical Support Team

NOTE: If any clients are still experiencing problems please email me to have a look at the problem.

Posted by Steve MacLellan at 03:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack