Change Your Password and Keep Your Site Updated

Over the past 3 weeks over a million sites have been attacked with site re-writes and cross scripting. You can stop this. Here's how...

If you are running a content management system such as Joomla or phpNuke update to the latest version. There are several upgrade patches out there and they are a pretty easy install. If you are unsure about what you are doing then contact your Technical Support person at Sequinet Internet Technologies via email at support@sequinet.com.

In the past months there was a hack found though Google that allowed hackers that have cracked your password to rewrite your index.html pages. These hacks will redirect your clients to other dubious web sites and will also download Spyware on their computers. This can result in having your site flagged on Google as a potential hazard.

Frequently changing your password can alleviate this. This can easily be done through the Sequinet Control Panel. You can access this by going to http://www.yoursite.com/cpanel. You will be prompted to enter your login and password. Then click on change password.

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Heavy images cost you money and traffic. They cost you money because they require both significant storage space and bandwidth.

Then, heavy images cost you traffic: put up a web page that takes more than 10 seconds to load, and your visitors will run away faster than you can say “back button”.

Fortunately, there is a solution: you can optimize your images for the web. Your images should be in either .gif. .png or .jpg formats (.gif and .png works best for logos and navigation buttons, while .jpg works best for photographs.) The idea is to reduce the size of your graphics so that they take as few bytes as possible while retaining acceptable quality.

Photoshop is the heavyweight champ in the image-editing category, but most people don't need such an advanced toolset for everyday image-editing tasks plus it runs around $650! For those who just need a tool with a modest features for everyday tasks, I've rounded up my three favorite free image editors.

IrfanView
IrfanView is longtime user favorite for its simplicity. It was the go-to for free image editors a few years ago and remains as one of the best for quick image editing. Basic features such as cropping, resizing, and file conversion are all part of the toolset, and if you want more options, there are IrfanView plug-in packs you can download from the IrfanView developer site. This one doesn't have the prettiest interface of the group, but for basic tasks it gets the job done.

FastStone Image Viewer
FastStone Image Viewer is the program I use to crop and resize screenshots here at work. I even have Photoshop on my hard drive, but it just can't beat the speed and convenience of FastStone Image Viewer. An intuitive interface lets you browse your image folders and select what you want quickly and easily. But my favorite thing about this free program is the ability to double-click an image to bring it up in full-screen mode for closer inspection. You can then mouse to each side of the screen for pop-up tools for editing and basic effects, file management, and image info.

Paint.NET
Paint.NET is a free alternative that is closer to Photoshop than the rest in this collection. Complete with Photoshop-like toolbars, a layer manager, a history window, and more image effects than the others, Paint.NET offers just about everything you might need. Though the feature list is not nearly as long as Photoshop, you can't beat what you can get for free with Paint.NET. The only caveat is you'll need to download Microsoft's .NET framework to run this program.