Web Hosting Blog

There is a lot of confusion surrounding the terms “search engine” and “browser”. Many people do not know what either term means and mistakenly use the terms interchangeably. Google did a sidewalk interview of people revealing this confusion. This article will explain the difference between the two and explain when you should use a search engine and when you should not.
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Years ago a student burst into my office brandishing a floppy disk and blurting out, “I lost my whole thesis off this disk and it is due this Monday!!!” I asked, “did you make a backup?” and he answered, “uh…no…I’ve never needed one until now!” I could only imagine someone with a flat tire on the interstate saying, “well, I’ve never needed a spare tire until now!”

Regardless of the cause, data loss is inevitable. The best protection is to make backups of any data you would prefer not to lose. This article explains how to back up your web site content, your email, and contacts.

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Now that your website appears on search engine result pages, wouldn’t it be nice to see your site appear at the top or close to the top of the list? There are commercial services out there that sell “web site promotion” and “search engine optimization” services. These can be costly and there is a lot you can do to improve your site’s ranking without shelling out the bucks.
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You’ve worked hard to build and publish a website. Now it’s up and you wait for the online visitors to come. You search for your website on popular web search engines and find…nothing? Where is your website?!?

How do search engines work?

Since the web is constantly changing and growing it takes time for search engines to discover and index new web sites. The process search sites go through to find and index new sites is automatic, but takes time. A new site such as yours may not show up on a major search engine site until several weeks after it has been published. If you are interested in learning about how search engines work, here are a couple articles that get into the nuts and bolts:

• How stuff works: Search Engines
• Wikipedia: How web search engines work
• Search Engine Watch: How search engines work

Submitting your own website to search engines

The good news is that you can expedite this process by manually submitting your website to search engines. You only need to do this if your site is relatively new (e.g. less than a month old) and not yet appearing on any search engines.  Here is a help file with links to popular search engines to which you may wish to submit your site.

Related articles:

Promoting your website

Putting your website on top of the heap!

SPAM, the common term for unsolicited email is an annoying reality faced by any user of email. Given the ease and low cost to those who would send thousands or millions of SPAM messages, there is little hope that the problem of SPAM will go away anytime soon. So how can you reduce your exposure to SPAM?

1. Use more than one email address
Consider creating more than one email address. Use one for your legitimate email correspondence with family, friends, and colleagues. Use another for any online activity such as online shopping, posting to forums, leaving comments on blogs, and anything else which would possibly reveal your email address to people other than family, friends, and colleagues you email directly.

2. Use contact forms where possible
Rather than posting your email address on your website, consider using a contact form. This allows visitors to your site to send you email without having to open an email program, manually entering your address, etc. This has two advantages: First, visitors using public  internet terminals (e.g. public library, internet cafe, etc.) won’t have to log into their email program. Secondly, posting your email address on your website makes it easy for nefarious people and their special email-harvesting programs to capture your address and add it to their list of SPAM victims. One drawback is that you may want to make your email address easily available to the people you want to contact you. Some people compromise by posting their email address on their website slightly modified, but still understandable to human eyes (e.g. “Email me at hostbaby (at) hostbaby (dot) com”).

Hostbaby wizard account holders have access to a great online contact form to allow web visitors to send in email. It includes a security code to ensure humans are using the form, not SPAM program. Learn more about it here.

3. Use less common email addresses
The most common email addresses are those that begin with “info”, “admin”, “webmin”, “contact”, and “me”. Because they are common, generators of SPAM will send email to those addresses since the probability is high they will work. You should consider avoiding creating email accounts with these names (ie. don’t use “info@yourdomain.com”, etc.).

4. Use SPAM filters
Preventing SPAM from even getting sent to you using the methods above is ideal, but eventually, SPAM will find its way to your email inbox. At that point, SPAM filters can offer relief.

Most email services include some sort of SPAM filters. These are services which inspect incoming email and make a judgment as to whether it is legitimate email or not. A good idea is to create a SPAM or Junk Mail folder and have suspected SPAM routed to that folder. You will want to inspect that folder occasionally as legitimate email may sometimes get improperly flagged as SPAM. Depending on your email system, you can tag such email as “Not Spam”, or add that email address to your white list. Conversely, if you seem to get a lot of SPAM from a particular site, you can restrict them by adding them to your black list. Many email clients (Outlook, Mac Mail, Thunderbird, etc.) also include their own SPAM filters and allow you to create “Rules” specific to the kind of spam you are receiving.

Hostbaby customers have access to Spam Assassin, which will allow you to configure how strict the filter will be, add address to your white list or black list, and to move suspicious email into a dedicated SPAM folder.

Have you ever made a change to your website, surfed back to see it, and the change disappeared? If you own a website it’s a good idea to install and use more than one browser on your computer. There are a couple reasons for this: First, by design, browsers will store content of websites visited. This locally-stored information is called the browser cache or temporary  internet files. When you return to a website you’ve recently visited, instead of pulling all the website information down from the Internet, the browser will read the cached information rather than pulling all the content from the Internet. In most cases this is a good thing as it can mean faster loading of web pages – especially if you have a limited speed internet connection. However, if you are making updates to your site your regular browser may not show you the correct, current content.  It may instead be showing you the cached info which may not be latest updates. That is one reason to double-check your website using a different browser. A different browser will help display what is really live for the internet world to see. One way to force your browser to download the most current web content is to purge any locally stored web content. Here is a web page which explains how to do this for various browsers. A second reason to have more than one browser installed is to see how your website may appear to different visitors. Skilled web developers will ensure websites they create will be both accessible and look consistent across multiple browsers. Some websites, however, require a specific browser to be viewed. You will want to verify that your site is both accessible and looks consistent across multiple browsers. Using more than one browser to inspect your site will help ensure this is true. Here is a list of browsers available for Windows:

• Internet Explorer (those on version 6.x should seriously consider upgrading)
• Mozilla Firefox
• Safari
• Google Chrome
• Opera

Here is a list of browsers available for Mac:

• Safari
• Mozilla Firefox
• Opera

Here are some additional articles you may find helpful:

• Clearing Browser Cache
• Clearing Browser Cookies
• US Government issues IE security warning

Here is a list in no particular order of the help files I most often send to Hostbaby customers. Some of these are fairly new documents, so this may be a sneak preview for you!

Resize Images for Image Bank

Most digital cameras take pictures at very high resolutions. Images for web pages should be much lower resolution to ensure fast loading and display for online visitors. This article explains how to resize pictures and includes links to several free online picture resize/ crop tools.

Log Into New Wizard

All Hostbaby wizard account users should be using the new Hostbaby2 wizard to take advantage of the latest features and fixes. This article explains how, as well as what to do if you encounter login problems.

Adding Dates to New Calendar
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To have a website you must own a registered domain and have a web host. Many people confuse and use these terms interchangeably.
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