Image by ozgurmulazimoglu via Flickr
Please check out All About Dragonflies. It’s been fun to develop, I hope you all enjoy learning more about dragonflies. I thought it was especially interesting that the babies bite, but adults don’t. hmmmmmmmm
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02Jul
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18Jun
Be sure to check out our latest efforts at RamonaGolf.com! We will do our best to provide the visitor with all things golf in Ramona, CA including the latest tournaments, course information, local golf links, as well as selected training guides for the golfer out to improve their game.If you know of an upcoming tournament, help us spread the word to improve the attendance of the event. Charity tournaments are our favorites!
Tags: charity, courses, golf, ramona, tournaments
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08May
We’re excited to introduce our latest development project - Ohio Sports Teams - a social networking site dedicated to sports in the state of Ohio. If the site goes over well, we will be expanding to add other large states such as Illinois, Texas, California, and New York.
Feel free to drop by, sign up, comment, and become part of the community!
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Tags: development, Ohio, Social network service, sports, website
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11Mar
We’d like to share with you our latest client: eDataLockDown.com. We are working with them to optimize their site for search engines as well as for useability.
This company provides managed data backup and storage services. We will soon be partnering with them to offer our clients the same service. Just think, never worry about if your data was backed up, never worry about how to store your backups - your data will always be available to you, wherever you are.
We will let you know more as we implement this service for our valued clients.
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23Nov
Many apologies for our extended down time. We expect to have all services up and running within the next 4 hours.
An explanation of what has happened will be forthcoming at some point today or tomorrow. I’d call it a comedy of errors, except that it’s not very funny, for us, or for our clients.
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21Nov
As most of you know, we migrated to a new server earlier this year. One of the reasons we did that was to bring our operating software (system, web, and email) up to current technology standards. Our plan at that time was to migrate to a new server every two years.
So why so soon?
From the start, we have had problems with the server. Despite literally spending hundreds of hours researching, pouring over logs, and discussing the subject with our upstream provider, we have never been able to resolve the issues.
Additionally, late last week our server was hacked into and used to distribute thousands of illegal spam emails. This, of course, caused many ISPs to block emails coming from our server. Again, despite many hours of effort and discussions with our upstream provider, we have been unable to remedy the problem.
The long and short of it
It is our responsibility to provide our clients with a fast and reliable web and email server. We felt we were not performing this task to our high standards, so we elected to make further technology investments in order to return our service to one of the best.
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21Nov
We thought it might be helpful to briefly discuss what happens when we migrate to a new server. There are many different things that need to happen behind the scenes in order to make the migration a success. So here, in chronological order, are the steps that happen.
- Purchase a new web server. In essence, a web server isn’t much different from a desktop PC. They pretty much have the same components. One of the primary differences is that there is no keyboard, mouse, or monitor hooked up to the server. It’s simply a box, located in a huge facility alongside hundreds or thousands of similar boxes. In our case, we’ve selected a server that is pretty much comparable to the newer desktop computers on the market - the primary difference being that the web server runs a version of Linux, while most desktop computers run Windows.
- Verify that all hardware and software on the new server are configured correctly. This is more of a challenge than you might think, as a web server runs many different programs, including the web page serving software, the email software, anti-virus software, anti-spam software, database software, and a myriad of other components. Sometimes we miss one, but we do our best to make sure everything is functioning correctly before the migration.
- Turn off email services. The email server runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Although you may only check your email once every 5 or 10 or 30 minutes, the server is always available to receive email. Because of this, we have to make it stop receiving email prior to the migration, because once the migration process begins, the old server will continue to receive email, but since the email accounts have already been migrated, incoming emails would never be received.
- Begin the migration process. Essentially, the migration process takes all of the web sites, the databases, the user accounts, the FTP accounts, passwords, emails, and everything else on the old server and moves it to the new server. This process can take anywhere from 4-12 hours, depending on variables such as network speed, amount of data to be transferred, etc.
- Tell the internet where to find the new server. This is the most arduous task in the process. We must go in to each domain record, and adjust them to show the address of the new server. At the current time, that’s approximately 200 domains, with 3 records that need changing for each domain. This is about an 8 hour task (for two people). After these changes are made, it takes anywhere from 24-48 hours for the changes to show up on the Internet.
- Verify that data has been transferred completely. This again requires us to validate each website to make sure everything converted correctly.
- Back up user accounts and databases on old server. This is our safety net in case anything goes wrong.
There are a few other tasks that need to be performed, but these are the highlights of the process. If you have any questions, please feel free to make a post in the comments section, and we will try to answer them.
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23Sep
Last week we discussed setting a SMART goal for your website. This was a sample goal we created:
I would like to increase traffic to my website by 10% and begin gaining 1 new client each month by the end of December, 2008.
Once we know our goal, we can start to set out some strategies. Marketing strategies are simply high-level thoughts on how to achieve the goal. Here is a possible strategy we might devise in order to reach our goal:
- Revise content on current site in order to educate site visitors, increase the trust factor, and help potential clients feel more comfortable about using our services.
So this week, take 5 minutes to devise a new strategy to help you achieve your goal. Don’t forget to write it down!
We wish you great success.
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16Sep
We will, at some point in the not-so-distant future, get around to discussing the recent restructuring within SmileyRose Web Solutions. One of the things we will be sharing with you is how we found an overwhelming need within our client base to help with your marketing efforts, especially online.
One of the greatest points of discussion from our clients stems from the topic of “too much to do, I have no time to read all the information that’s available”. So we are going to start this series of “Website Marketing 101” articles, with the goal of publishing them weekly, and having them take no more than 5 minutes of your time (to read, anyway).
If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?
Do you have a goal for your website? Does it go beyond “sell more products” or “get more customers”? Goals need to be SMART:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-boundAn example of a SMART goal for a website might be:
I would like to increase traffic to my website by 10% and begin gaining 1 new client each month by the end of December, 2008.
So take another 5 minutes, right now, and think about what a SMART goal for your website (or your business) would be. Write it down or type it in Word or Notepad or scribble it on the back of your hand. Next week we will start working on achieving your goal.
Until then, we wish you all the best.
Related articles:
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12Sep
Image via Wikipedia Full story hereCongress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It’s difficult to understand this judge’s thinking:
The Virginia law “is unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails, including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Justice G. Steven Agee wrote.
How can SPAM be protected under the first amendment?? Did this judge miss his history class? Does he not understand the reasoning behind the first amendment? It is to allow people to speak their minds and not be persecuted by the government for doing so. How can millions of emails, sent anonymously to people (or “email addresses”, technically) be considered speaking one’s mind? So now it’s ok to harass and annoy millions of people and hide behind freedom of speech?
As many of you know, our outgoing mail service became unusable a few weeks ago. Emails were taking over 24 hours to arrive at their destination. This was not a service outage. This was a brand new server, with plenty of processing power and more memory than it can every use, being brought to its knees by SPAM.
As individual users of the Internet, we can shrug off the problem, increase our SPAM filtering on both the server side and on our computers locally, and pretend the problem doesn’t affect us. The problem is, it has a profound impact on us as small business owners. The costs of fighting SPAM are astronomical. From SmileyRose’s point of view, we spend probably 20 hours a month on SPAM related issues. Of course, the SPAM problem of a few weeks ago escalated that to about 40 hours for the month. But if you look at how much time and money you spend on fighting SPAM, you’ll see that the costs aren’t just relegated to service providers.
We, the people, are going to have to start speaking up loud and clear. We, as business owners, are going to have to start speaking even louder. SPAM directly impacts our bottom line, and these days as we watch our profit margins shrink because of the escalating cost of goods, we can’t allow that to continue.
UPDATE: Here is CNET’S analysis of what happened. Simply put, the law was too loose. That’s a shame.
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Tags: CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, First Amendment, First Amendment to the United States Constitution, Freedom of Speech and Expression, G. Steven Agee, United States, Virginia
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