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Forget Memorable Passwords

by Bud Parr on September 19, 2008

altimage As we live more of our lives online it’s easy to get lost in all the passwords we’re forced to carry in our heads and it’s tempting to settle on something memorable that we can use for a lot of sites/accounts. But the following should come as a real warning:

“Yesterday, it was reported that wannabe VP Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account was hacked by a perpetrator wishing to find incriminating information in her emails. It was not done using some strange computer security vulnerability. It was not done by guessing her password. It was done just inthe same way as Paris Hilton’s T-Mobile account was hacked some time ago: by guessing the answer to the respective owner’s security questions. For Paris Hilton, it was the name of her dog. For Sarah Palin, it was her zip code, date of birth, ad where she met her husband.

How hard is it to learn somebody’s zip code? Not that hard.Try the whitepages. Date of birth? Easy for a public figure – try Google. This will take you less than a minute each. Now, we know that Sarah Palin and her husband were high school sweethearts. The answer to this question turned out to be “Wasilla High School”. All in all, it took the reported hacker less than 45 minutes to break into the account. In fact, using your pet’s name appears more security conscious than using zip code, date of birth and where you met your spouse.”

- IT World

This goes for personal as well as professional accounts. We suggest using long, non-word passwords, which may even include characters like ^#& and odd, perhaps even incorrect answers to security questions. These of course are not memorable, but there are many programs out there that will store them for you and your Web browser does too; Firefox is particularly good with handling passwords, although I’d suggest keeping them in another secure program as well (if you want suggestions for password storage programs, just drop me a line and be sure to mention if you’re on a mac or pc). Also think about changing your most important passwords from time to time. Organizations should have a formal protocol for this.

There is hope for our increasingly overloaded info-age life. Standards are being created to both increase security and make access easier. Some of those are very high-tech, but one standard, OpenID seems to be catching on widely. OpenID, according to Wikipedia is a a service that “allows Internet users to log on to many different web sites using a single digital identity, single sign-on, eliminating the need for a different user name and password for each site.” I’ve been using it for a year or so at least and like the layer of security and relative simplicity, but it takes adoption by myriad Web applications and Web sites to be useful and we’re not there yet. Some of the services that use OpenID are Blogger, a free blogging service (owned by Google) and Basecamp, a project management system.

Some Useful Stats for Thinking About Your Website

by Bud Parr on May 06, 2008

I keep up religiously with the guru of Web usability, Jakob Nielsen and while his work is mostly of interest to professionals, he often publishes tidbits good for anyone in the process of getting their site up and running.

As a Web designer/developer the biggest issues I face are the constraints of speed and space, which essentially come down to thinking about the variety of audience that my site might encounter. Here are some notes from Nielsen’s latest newsletter that speak to those constraints:

Two interesting observations from WebSiteOptimization:

(1) Over the last 5 years, the average Web page grew from 94 KB to 312 KB: a growth rate of 82%/year.

(2) Despite this obesity epidemic, observed response times for U.S. users with broadband decreased from 2.8 to 2.3 seconds per page (average across 40 big business sites) from 2006 to 2008.

My comments:

(a) First, let’s remember that almost half of the Internet users still don’t have broadband, particularly in rural areas. In fact, FarmersOnly.com explicitly decided to design for dial-up access.

(b) While 2.3 seconds is better than 2.8, it’s still 130% slower than the 1.0 seconds required for optimal user experience and a true sense of flow while navigating.

(c) In the past, big images were the largest offender, but now response times are delayed by the inclusion of ever-more external objects, code snippets, and “widgets.” Keep a lid on it. The biggest contributor to interactivity is still the ability to navigate fast and furiously.

The bold formatting is mine because I think those two points are worth keeping in mind. I often separate navigation as an entirely separate design process. Findability is everything on the Web and that’s not just search engine optimization, but how people find what you want them to on your site.

Min Jin Lee is So in Vogue

by Bud Parr on April 01, 2008

Our client Min Jin Lee reports this on her blog: The U.S. paperback of Free Food for Millionaires will be released on April 9th. It has a new cover designed by the talented art director Anne Twomey of Grand Central, and copies should be at bookstores near you presently. There’s a new essay in VOGUE this month (April 2008) titled “Weighing In” in its Up Front column.

Best of Both Worlds: Offline Access for Online Applications

by Bud Parr on March 31, 2008

Google Google reports today that they are rolling out offline access for their Google Docs application and that will be just the first as they utilize their Open Source browser extension Google Gears to download and upload data from your hard drive to the Web in the background. This will allow you to use Google docs (and in the future other apps, I’ve already seen it in use on a nifty to-do app called Remember the Milk) whether or not you’re near an internet connection.

According to Macworld “Google has lofty aspirations that Apps – with Docs in tow – will extend its reach into medium-size and large companies, and to that end has been boosting its security and administration features, particularly in its fee-based Premier version.”

This is good news because I believe one of the major hurtles Web-based applications have to overcome is availability (at least until every corner of the earth has Wi-fi or its next iteration). Although the aggressively functional Zoho suite of online apps offers offline access, it’s Google’s success that will drive the industry toward Web apps. As offline access becomes a typical feature, adoption of online apps will widen and developers will be able to create better and more varied applications.

The key to Web-based applications is not just the convenience of never having to synch devices or being able to collaborate with teams (or coordinate with family), but the ease with which data can be used from one app to enhance another – say for instance, you could pull financial data in from an accounting app and manipulate it in a spreadsheet app, without downloading or synchronizing. It remains to be seen exactly how the new functionality will handle this “mashed up” data, but as with all of this technology, it’s a work in progress.

The New Fast Way To Find Out What’s Going On

by Bud Parr on March 25, 2008

If you’re new to the concept of RSS, then this might be the fastest way to figure it out…

Tales from the Town of Widows Awards Finalist

by Bud Parr on March 19, 2008

Our client James Cañón’s Tales from the Town of Widows & Chronicles from the Land of Men, has been selected as a finalist for both the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award and a Lambda Literary Award. The winners will be announced on April 28th and May 29th respectively.

Google offers Free Checkout (for a while) and Grants for Ads for Non-Profits

by Bud Parr on March 18, 2008

title As part of a push to bring Google Apps to the non-profit world, Google Checkout is waiving certain fees until at least 2009: “no monthly, setup, or gateway fees. Regular transaction fees are 2% + $0.20 per transaction.” I think though, this is the same deal they’re offering everyone to jumpstart their product line. I’ve tried it and found the service as whole lacking compared to Paypal.

More interesting though is Google Grants for ads on their network. For both offers you must be a verifiable 501©(3) organization.

In the Land of the Free, Logos May be Worth Nothing

by Bud Parr on March 17, 2008

Please note that while I continue to work on some elements of the site, posting here will be light. Thanks

The Free I’m talking about is of course the new business environment driven primarily by Web-based companies. Company logos, once an important signal for consumers have less impact now that new business flood our semi-consciousness and trust, on the Web at least, is driven by other factors. Here are some points from a recent panel discussion on the matter from the Functioning Form blog:

“Web-based products have enormous flexibility and often grow/change as they mature. Take for example, the e-commerce site Zappos. They originally began by selling shoes online but have since begun to sell clothing and fragrances as well. When the CEO of Zappos talks about his company he is justifiably adamant that the Zappos brand represents “great customer service.” Yet, the Zappos logo prominently features a shoe. Sounds like it’s time for a new logo?”

The writer of this post also suggests that names have become more important than logos. Google is on the tip of my tongue, but their colorful logo, just type, doesn’t come to mind. This is probably good news, except for logo-designers, because as new businesses keep popping up it’s increasingly difficult to be original, and if original at all, it’s got to be increasingly difficult for a company to police a trademarked logo. If you’re a content provider, or rely on distributing information via email or RSS feeds for your marketing, logos have less value because they are diminished or get in the way.

Better Quality Videos at YouTube, Finally

by Bud Parr on March 14, 2008

Wired reports that Google is finally upgrading the resolution in which they encode videos. The Wired piece is geared toward viewers, but if you use Youtube to get your trailers etc out to the world it’s good news to know that you won’t have to compromise quality. Still the best bets for quality videos are Blip.tv and Vimeo or Viddler.

Speak, Gmail

by Bud Parr on March 04, 2008

Fluid Hardly exciting to write about Gmail after it’s been around for years now and has millions of users, but despite having a Gmail address dating from when you had to get invited and wait for one, I’ve only really just embraced it. Here’s why: Spam filtering, tagging, easy filters, and very fast search – to start.

The life of someone who gets hundreds of emails every day just got easier and I just uploaded over 6,000 messages from Apple Mail into my Gmail account (if you want to know how I did it, just drop me a line at budparr AT gmail DOT com). Bye Bye Apple Mail, I’ve moved to “the cloud.”

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I have quite a few email accounts, one for personal, one for business and others for various projects. It wasn’t until I thought of using them all through the Gmail client that I started my love for Gmail. Now they all get the benefit of filtering, tagging, spam filtering and search and I get them through my iPhone via my one Gmail IMAP set up so I no longer have to check each account individually and changes there (read mail, etc) are automatically reflected on my computer.

So, access is big – Whether I’m on my iPhone, my computer, or any computer I’m looking at the same thing without any synching (I’m an anti-synchite).

The filters, which I always struggled with in Apple Mail are simple and fast, but the search function works so quickly that you only need them for all but your most common emails. The tags are so easy I’m tagging everything now (I’ve gone a little tag crazy like an administrative assistant on his first day with post-it notes).

Apple Mail’s spam filtering was okay, but never really kept up with things. Gmail’s is actually pretty amazing.

Searching, at least for the six thousand message I have (only 4% of my allotment), is very fast. I do try to delete unnecessary messages as they come in, both to keep my space clean and my search results better.

Keyboard shortcuts – learn ‘em. Navigating email is faster.

Gmail is a Web app, meaning that I get improvements as they hit without having to think about updates (why should I ever have to think about updating my software?).

Gmail is smart: Integration with the Gmail Calendar program is nearly seamless to the point it’s almost scary. It detects events in your emails (the same way it tries to present contextual ads) and asks you if you want to add to your calendar.

altimage Integration with contacts (which in and of itself is not fully fleshed out yet) is also pretty clean. When you look up someone in your contact list or even just hover over their name in the inbox you can click to see your “recent conversations” with this person, either “to” or “from” them, something I’d have to set up in Apple Mail, which does either, but not both without setting up a smart folder. I don’t know how “recent” is defined, but for example, if I filtered to see conversations with my friend Mitch, it would list “1-20 of hundreds” etc.

It also integrates with Google Reader, another app I’ve come to rely on (more anon).

What I don’t like about Gmail

1) Ads. But as everyone knows, when you look at them every day you tune them out.

2) It’s a little scary having your life sitting on someone else’s servers (I have another post in store on that).

3) And, related to that, the potential for security leaks, the potential for government access (which, at least in principle is disturbing, although I don’t know how much of a threat that is). If I had concerns for critical data loss, I’d probably run a backup copy on my computer, but that’s not an issue for me.

4) Apple’s Mail handles attachments much more seamlessly. Nice when you’re sending photos, but I do that less because I use Flickr and other services now.

5) On the Mac, clicking a “mail-to” link doesn’t work. This is something that’s broken, so I suspect it will be fixed in time.

Enough Already

I haven’t even really gotten into the chat function, but I probably should and I’m sure there are other things to talk about. The only reason I post about Gmail at all is that I suspect a lot of other independents like me spend a lot of time grappling with an overload of email and I’m also going to be writing about Google Apps soon, so this, you might say, is an entry into that subject.

p.s.

The title of this post is an elliptic reference to Nabokov’s memoir, “Speak, Memory”. Email becomes for many of us a form of technological memory, recording events and conversations accessible in far more linear and accurate ways than the human memory.

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