By Anastasia Holdren
May 5th, 2008
Matt Mikulla has joined Sitening’s SEO team. An accomplished artist and self-described creative geek, Matt changed career directions to pursue his long-time interest in computers and technology.
Prior to Sitening, Mikulla worked for commercial art galleries and launched his own studio and gallery, Art Rogue. During this time he freelanced as a Web developer, graphic designer, and illustrator.
“We’re pleased to have Matt work with our SEO team,” says Jon Henshaw, Sitening’s Internet strategist. “Matt’s deep understanding of social media — combined with design skills — helps Sitening provide comprehensive website optimization programs for our clients.”
Mikulla has a B.A. in Studio Fine Arts and a minor in Media Arts from The University of Montana in Missoula, Mont. While there, he focused on photography, ceramics, and media arts.
Mikulla lives in the Nashville area with his dog Dutch…
Posted in Company News, Press Releases, SEO, Website Marketing | No Comments »
By Jason Tan
April 8th, 2008
A few weeks ago, we noticed that someone had managed to insert a bunch of spam links into our WordPress header and footer. We quickly updated to the latest version (2.3.3 at the time), thinking it would fix the security hole. However, this happened again, and seems to be happening on WordPress blogs all across the Internet.
The hack in itself is very interesting. First, it attempts to be undiscovered by any human observer, but fully indexable and followable by search engines. The spam links are inserted into a block with the style: “position: absolute;overflow: hidden;height: 0;width: 0“. Second, the links point to legitimate blogs that have been compromised. These blogs not only have link spam inserted into their pages, but entire pages that are created within their WordPress themes directory as landing pages to host the spam-targeted content.
We have now upgraded to the newest WordPress 2.5 (which was released the very next day after we upgraded to 2.3.3). I haven’t seen any in-depth documentation of this security vulnerability. We hope this has been fixed in 2.5. To take extra precaution, we recommend that anyone running WordPress disable the online theme and plugin editor by removing the web server’s write permissions to the appropriate directories:
chmod -R -w wp-content/themes
chmod -R -w wp-content/plugins
This is just an example, and may vary depending on your specific installation and server setup. Also, be sure to check your directories for rogue files, and of course, fix your header and footer templates.
Posted in How To, WordPress | 6 Comments »
By Anastasia Holdren
April 3rd, 2008
My iPhone now sports Griffin Technology’s ClearBoost, a protective polycarbonate case with a built-in antenna booster. I was the lucky recipient of a pre-launch product, and I’ve had a couple of days to test it out. If my iPhone could talk, I am sure it would be thanking Griffin for finally providing protection, from me. I drop it at least once a week, usually on a painfully hard surface. ClearBoost would have helped yesterday when I dropped in in Nashville’s Commerce Street garage.
But, hands down, the biggest plus is the improved signal. The case has a small stub on the top that connects to a built-in copper antenna. According to Griffin’s site, ClearBoost results in “an increased ability to maintain connection with the cellular network, with more stations available to your phone, and less interference from signal reflections. This means fewer dropped calls, greater coverage areas, and faster Web browsing and file transfers.”
My husband and I have iPhones. We commute together, work together, eat lunch together… and side-by-side, my iPhone bars are kicking his iPhone bars’ butt. At lunch today, his naked phone had ‘No Service’ and my ClearBoost phone had 5 bars.
I was particularly excited about the product because we don’t have a home phone line. Our house is essentially carved into a cliff, and I’d estimate 30 percent of our calls are dropped or choppy. Quite often our incoming calls go straight to voicemail. With ClearBoost, that problem seems to be resolved.
I have a few more tests to run; there is a spot in Bellevue on Highway 70 that has consistently dropped every call, for eight years. I am driving that way tonight and I will run a test.
Posted in Apple, Review, iPhone | 1 Comment »
By Jon Henshaw
March 31st, 2008
By now, most people are familiar with Google Maps Street View feature. Street View shows you a 360 degree view of any address you enter. Google accomplishes this amazing task by using an army of specially outfitted vehicles that drive around and take pictures of every street in the city. The Street View feature has received tons of praise from Internet users, but cities like Nashville, TN are up in arms.
“These Google cars ride up and down our streets, sometimes 12 or 5 times back and forth. They’re making pot holes, causing wrecks and costing our city millions of dollars,” said Nashville’s Mayor, Karl Dean. “If they’re going to ruin our streets, then they’re going to fix them at the same time.” And that’s exactly what he made them do. He had all of the Google Street View cars retrofitted with road line painters and forced them to paint all of the streets of Nashville.
Although Nashville was the first city to make Google provide a municipal service with their vehicles, several other cities have followed suit. Atlanta, GA recently required all Google cars to be outfitted with mosquito sprayers and Houston, TX is requiring all of the cars to pick up road debris.
Matt Cutts, a long-time Google employee, was asked what he thought about this alarming trend. He said, “I’m not really sure how our cars are causing any harm to the city roads and I don’t really see any merit in the claims these cities are making.” He then pulled out a box full of soap, stood up on it, and ranted for about twenty minutes about the real evil that people should be worried about, paid links.
Posted in Google, Humor, Just for Fun | 7 Comments »
By Joel Taylor
March 28th, 2008
So today I went to provide someone with a Google Map link to our house. When I pulled the address up on my browser I noticed a small picture of my house! Wow. So I clicked it and there it was … a view of my street.
As I zoomed-out I noticed that I was on the very outskirts of what the Google Maps team had been doing in Nashville. Driving around in their cars taking millions of photo’s of almost every street in Nashville.
So, go check out Google Maps and see if you have Street View.
Posted in Google | 2 Comments »
By Jon Henshaw
March 15th, 2008
Web designers and marketers often need full-size screenshots for before-and-after shots and also for portfolio pieces. Fortunately, there’s many ways to create website screenshots. However, among all of the options, my favorite way to make full-length screenshots is by using Screengrab! — a Firefox Add-on.
Using Screengrab! is about as easy as it gets. Simply bring up the page you want to grab and then click on the Screengrab! icon on the status bar.
The result is a full-sized screenshot of the Web page. I used it to take a screenshot of Snipplr, our public code snippet repository for designers and programmers.
Posted in Firefox, How To, Open Source, Web Design | 4 Comments »
By Jon Henshaw
March 10th, 2008
Richard Kershaw of Quality Nonsense just launched a Firefox extension that makes it super easy to lookup domain names. The extension lets you perform one click domain searches at your registrar of choice using the selected text in your browser window.
It’s super-simple: select the text for your domain search and hit the keyboard shortcut (CTRL + SHIFT + D by default). Alternatively, you can right click for the contextual menu and hit “Domain Lookup for…”.
You can learn more and download it here: Domain Lookup Firefox Extension
Posted in Firefox, Search Engines | Comments Off
By Jon Henshaw
February 22nd, 2008
Snipplr, a social networking code repository created by Sitening, reached over 7,000 registered users today. Thanks to a highly acclaimed redesign, the past year has shown incredible growth for the website. 4,559 users have registered within the last year. Those users have also contributed over 4,000 code snippets.
Snipplr is a Web application that makes it easy to find, save, create and share code snippets. The service currently supports over 50 programming languages.
- ActionScript
- ActionScript 3
- Apache
- AppleScript
- ASP
- Assembler
- Bash
- C#
- C++
- ColdFusion
- CSS
- Diff
- Emacs Lisp
- eZ Publish
- Forth
- Fortran
- Groovy
- HTML
- Java
- JavaScript
- LaTeX
- Lisp
- Lua
- MatLab
- NewtonScript
- Objective C
- Open Firmware
- Other
- Pascal
- Perl
- PHP
- PicBasic
- Prolog
- Python
- R
- Rails
- Regular Expression
- Ruby
- Scheme
- SmallTalk
- Smarty
- SML
- SQL
- SVN
- TCL
- TYPO3
- VB.NET
- VHDL
- Visual Basic
- W-Language
- Windows Registry
- XHTML
- XML
Snipplr also provides software plugins, like the TextMate plugin that allows you to search, retrieve and save snippets directly from TextMate.
Posted in Company News, Open Source, Productivity, Programming, Tech Industry | No Comments »
By Jon Henshaw
February 21st, 2008
Originally presented at PodCamp Nashville
Many people have figured out how to record, edit and create their podcasts, but they don’t know how to easily setup a podcast website — let alone, set it up for the possibility of hundreds or thousands of people downloading it at one time. This tutorial shows you how to setup a fast, high-capacity podcast website without spending a lot of money.
A key component to this solution is Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). S3 provides very cheap file storage and high-capacity delivery. That enables you to distribute your audio files to thousands of people at one time, but at very little cost and without slowing down the delivery of your files.
Preflight Checklist
These are the items you’ll need in order to setup your podcast website. You will need to download the following software and plugins and create an S3 and Web Hosting account (if you don’t already have them) before you start the tutorial.
Software
- WordPress (Free)
- PodPress (Free)
- Firefox (Free)
- S3Fox Firefox Add-On (Free)
- FireFTP Firefox Add-On (Free)
Accounts
- S3 Account (Cheap)
- Hosting Account with MySQL db (Cheap)
Step 1: Get S3 Access Key ID and Secret Access Key
Login to your Amazon.com S3 Account and retrieve your S3 Access Key ID and Secret Access Key. Amazon keeps the keys somewhat hidden, so you’ll want to look for the button that says “Your Web Services Account.” Hover your cursor over the button and then select “AWS Access Identifiers.”
You will need to copy and paste this information for later use, so go ahead and open a text editor program (TextEdit, Notepad, Word, etc…). Select the Access Key ID, copy and then paste it onto your text editor document. Repeat that step for the Secret Access Key. Save the file and keep the document open for use throughout this tutorial.
Step 2: Setup MySQL Database
If you’re using a good Web hosting provider, you will have access to an online administration for your account. Login to your account. Navigate to the MySQL database admin page and create a new database. Copy and paste the database name, server, username and password onto the text editor document. The username and password should have full access (read, write and the ability to create new tables) to the database.
Step 3: Install Firefox and its Add-Ons
Install Firefox and then the S3Fox and FireFTP add-ons.
Step 4: Setup WordPress
Open Firefox and access FireFTP. Open a new connection on FireFTP using the FTP/SFTP details from your Web hosting provider. Copy the WordPress files into the root directory of your public HTML hosting account. Rename the “wp-config-sample.php” file to “wp-config.php”. Then edit the file and enter your database details. Finally, access your website in a browser window and follow the instructions.
The best instructions for setting up WordPress (WP) can be found on WP’s website: Famous 5-Minute Install.
Step 5: Setup PodPress
In FireFTP, copy the PodPress files into the plugins directory of WordPress — located at “wp-content/plugins”. Then login to your WordPress online administration, click on Plugins and then activate the PodPress plugin.
Step 6: Copy Podcast File to S3
In Firefox, access the S3Fox add-on and login to your S3 account using the S3 Access Key ID and Secret Access Key saved on your text editor document. When you login, the first thing you have to do before you can copy files is to create what’s called a “Bucket.” The Bucket must have a unique name and will be the repository of your files. After you create your Bucket, double-click on it to open it. Copy your audio file into your bucket.
After your file is completely copied to S3, you will need to modify the access settings and then get the public URL (link). Right-click on the file and click on “Edit ACL”. Click on the “X” underneath “Read” and across from “Everyone” until there’s a green check. Then click on the Save button.
Right-click on the file again and click on “Copy URL to Clipboard”. Then paste the URL onto your text editor document. That URL is the link that will be used to publicly access the audio file.
Step 7: Write Podcast Blog Entry
Login to the WordPress online administration and click on the “Write” navigation menu item. Enter your podcast title and blog entry related to it. Then scroll down and setup the podcast details. Paste the S3 audio file URL where is says “Location”. Then click on each “Auto Detect” button to auto-retrieve and auto-fill file details. Complete any other details and then publish the entry.
That’s it! You’ve now created and published a podcast website that can handle and deliver your audio files to tens of thousands of subscribers, affordably!
Posted in Amazon, Content Management Systems (CMS), Firefox, How To, Open Source | 2 Comments »
By Anastasia Holdren
February 19th, 2008
Nashville’s Hammock Publishing has a 16-year-old annual tradition: giving T-shirts to the people they work with throughout the year. This year they added a new twist to that tradition: T-shirt+Photo=Laptop.
If you received a T-shirt, Hammock asked you to add a photo to a world map on their website. For every five photos added to the map, they donate a laptop to the educational efforts of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation in developing countries.
Kudos for a very cool way to help kids! The Sitening crew added a photo to the map today.
Posted in Commentary | 1 Comment »
