Wilsonsway Designs | Blog
Random Notes and Thoughts from the Keyboard

I know most of you like to fish. Some like to just fish for the sport of it. Some like to just eat fish. Some just like to get in the great outdoors. But the type of fishing I’m referring to isn’t a sport. It’s for personal gain. Thing is, it’s not your personal gain that benefits. Let me explain.

Phishing is the act of a criminal attempting to gain your personal information electronically by either poisoned links in emails or on compromised web pages. Or by cleverly getting you to click a link in an email that leads you to a supposedly valid web page on which they hope to glean your private information such as logon details, credit card account information and many more things that you normally take for granted.

To put it bluntly, you need to be very aware of what you do online. More so nowadays than ever before. I mean, you do lock your doors at night or when you leave for the day to go to work, don’t you? Well, you need to be aware of any emails you get that ask for personal information or trying to get you to click a link in the email that supposedly takes you to a valid web page for you to validate certain credentials. Yes, they look authentic and the crooks take every precaution in making them look that way. So should you in making certain to not divulge anything that could be used to compromise your security. (more…)

A lot of people are looking to the web for their shopping needs these days. It’s become a convenient, much more secure way to shop from the relative comfort of one’s home or office and to top it off, it keeps you out of the maddening crowds in the holiday season. That is of course unless, you like being in the maddening crowds during the holiday rush. If so, this post isn’t for you my friend.

For those that are in business, whether for themselves or a company looking for an alternative to the big dollar shopping cart systems available today, osCommerce has what you’re looking for. (more…)

We all take this for granted mostly. You know the drill, usually use the one reliable password that is easy to remember yet difficult to discover. Use some others just to mix things up a bit.

Well, these days of high security beg to have you use a password that is virtually undetectable. It just makes you shudder to know that someone out there could crack your password(s) and run rampant throughout your website, your bank account, email, etc. We’ve all read the stories of even large companies that had their databases cracked and valuable information stolen.

Take a gander at this site David Finch’s Hobby Programming Projects because he has a strong password solution that seems to do the trick. The page I’m referring to is called The Strong Password Generator.

You can specify password length, number of generated passwords, password format or strength, and any additional entropy that you might require. Then with the press of the mouse button…you have your strong passwords generated for your use.

I’ve been using them for a while now just for peace of mind and to get myself out of the habit of using something that I felt comfortable with and could remember easily. Thank God for Firefox’s password remembering abilities or I’d be screwed. Of course, writing them all down would work too but that presents yet another dilemma if they’re discovered.

The fact that we need to have strong passwords these days is continually brought up almost every day in stories we read or hear about on the news. So give David Finch’s page a try if you already don’t have a strong password generator for your security. You won’t regret it.

Found this great page for looking up colors and their respective codes for those web applications we all use from time to time. Real nifty for that budding webmaster in all of us!

It’s called the 4096 Color Wheel and it’s easy to use. Just hover your mouse’s cursor over the wheel somewhere and the color will be displayed below with these three perspectives:

1. Web-Safe
2. Web-Smart
3. Unsafe

Hover over the square to change saturation (left to right) and value (bottom to top) of the last hue.

Use the keyboard to rotate hue:
j rotates slowly counterclockwise,
k rotates quickly clockwise, and
l rotates slowly clockwise.

Jump to a primary or secondary color: red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, or yellow. The enter key will also add the current color to the pick list.

Just what we need for those quicky checks for color codes, shades and blends for our sites.

A lot of folks know about SMF (Simple Machine Forums) but did you know about the Tips & Tricks to make them even better? SMF just rocks right out of the box but with some tweaking here and there, it’ll just blow you away!

To start, SMF is one of the easiest, most secure forum software available on the planet. Of course the added feature of it being free is a nice perk too. There’s thousands of skins or themes if you will, plenty of Mods to personalize things and add features. The list just goes on.

Well, with Tips & Tricks you can make things even better. They’re listed alphabetically so it’s easy to find what you’re looking for. Give it a try to spice up that forum you have going!