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March 17th, 2010 by Jeff P.
Trying to go viral? Planning on a lot of site traffic? Our techs have helped sites stay online during Super Bowl ad campaigns and opening weekend movie premiers. And along the way, they’ve learned what it takes to stay online during a massive flood of traffic.
So before going live with the next greatest Internet meme, here’s a checklist of what to do to keep your site alive:
- Understand the scope of the project. How many people will be exposed to your campaign? What is the expected turnover rate? What time of day do you expect traffic to hit your site? How will your site’s application handle a dramatic increase in visitors?
- Allocate enough time for planning. The right amount of prep time depends on the scope of the project. Is one week really enough time to bring everything together? One month? The bigger the project, the more time you will want in advance to make sure everything goes smoothly.
- Be prepared for all the what-ifs. Expect the unexpected; people, especially visitors to your site, never behave exactly the way you expect them to. Map out all of the scenarios and have a plan ready for them.
- Have a back-up and back-out plan. As much as you prepare for success, never assume that failure is impossible. Failing gracefully can make a big impact on retaining the trust of your visitors. Also, you don’t want to lose valuable data. If your site crashes under the load, make sure you can retrieve the data gathered before the crash.
- Make sure your configuration is scalable. Being able to add an additional web server without downtime means that you won’t interrupt the traffic surge in order to accommodate an unexpected volume of visitors. If your site relies on a database or dedicated application server, make sure you can add more power to these areas, as well.
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Tags: marketing campaign, uptime, viral, web performance
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February 3rd, 2010 by Jeff P.
In a perfect world your website would be available all day, every day, completely without fail. In reality, downtime happens. Hosting providers like to guarantee uptime, but what does that really mean? Here are three things your hosting provider isn’t telling you about 100% uptime:
#1 – Uptime is your responsibility, too.
When you talk about uptime, you mean that your site is available to your audience. When a hosting provider talks about uptime, they mean network uptime, and possibly hardware availability if you are using shared resources instead of dedicated servers.
In a dedicated hosting environment, device availability and fault tolerance are your responsibility. If a hard drive fails, did you purchase a RAID configuration to protect yourself? Did you elect to build out a database cluster? Redundant firewalls?
Application availability is also affected by your developers. In many cases, changing a single file can drop your site off the radar, even though the pipes are live and the hardware is functional. Do you have a separate development area to prevent this kind of thing from happening? What controls do you have in place to make sure that only stable edits are pushed live?
#2 – Downtime happens. There is no preventing it.
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Tags: application availability, downtime, high availability, managed hosting, uptime
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January 13th, 2010 by Jeff P.
Here are some disturbing statistics:
- A recent Hotmail security breach revealed that an overwhelming number of users are using predictable, insecure passwords:
- 61% of passwords were either only lowercase letters or all digits (examples: iloveyou or 123456).
- 20% of passwords were six or fewer characters.
- An estimated 1 in 9 people use one of the Top 500 passwords posted on WhatsMyPass.com
- 1 in 50 people are estimated to use one of the Top 20 passwords, among which are password, 123456, and qwerty.
- Many of the Top 500 passwords are simple dictionary words, curse words, or common first names.
- 60% of web users only have one password that they use for all of their online accounts, including Facebook, PayPal, email, and banks, according to a recent study.
A typical strong password guide looks a little something like this:
- At least 8 characters long
- At least three of the following:
- lower case letter
- capital letter
- numeral
- special character
But this really seems to miss the point. For example, go to Microsoft’s password checker and type in this password: qwerty123456! The checker gives this password strength “Best.” But is it really?
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Tags: hacking, password policy, security
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August 19th, 2009 by Jeff P.
Read any web designer’s blog and one thing will become obvious—HTML5+CSS3 is allegedly the best thing to happen to the Internet since Firefox. It seems like their excitement has spilled over to the entire tech community, but does anyone know why they are so excited about the new languages?
The next time a tech tries to evangelize HTML5 at you, here are three tidbits you can throw back at them:
One, your browser doesn’t support it.
Even the newest browsers on the market have limited and spotty support for HTML5 and CSS3. New HTML5 tags like <header> and <footer> need to be styled for backwards compatibility. Developers need to jump through hoops to code CSS3 differently for each browser that supports it (Firefox requires you to prefix new property names with -moz-, for example, while Safari requires you to use -webkit-). In other words, until new web browsers fully support the new languages, and until those browsers become de facto standards (how many people still use IE6?), HTML5+CSS3 is just a hindrance.
Two, you won’t notice a difference, anyway.
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Tags: css3, html5, opinion, semantic markup, seo, web browsers
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July 15th, 2009 by Jeff P.
I could have entitled this blog “Information Architecture: How to Use Labels”; though that title would have been more direct, it wouldn’t have made you do my bidding, i.e.: click on the headline and read what I have to say.
In other words, you reading this proves that I picked an appropriate label for the link that led you here.
Information Architecture, what’s that?
Information Architecture is all about arranging and categorizing information in a way that makes it accessible to a seeker. Librarians have been doing it since the beginning of written catalogs. Web designers do it, too, but perhaps not quite so consciously.
The Internet is a task-oriented medium filled with structured information. Whatever your website’s purpose, you expect your visitors to do something. Ultimately, you want your visitors to easily find what they are looking for, or possibly be alerted of new information.
Take this blog for example. My goal (or bidding, as it were) was to inform you of the knowledge I am sharing. To reach my goal, I needed to promote a link. That link’s text is a label, and because hyperlinks are the glue that holds the Internet’s structure together, how I chose to identify the linked page on the linking page was important.
That’s great, but how does it help me?
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Tags: IA, information management, labels, marketing
