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.

• 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

We’re all about empowering our users!  There’s nothing sweeter than making your own site, and being able to make updates on the fly.  Plus, a lot of our templates are pretty darn sweet.  Making sites with the Wizard can be pretty darn easy.  However, there are some tools that just about every Wizard user should have at their fingertips.

OH THOSE DARN IMAGES

Some of you may have noticed that resizing images, and getting them “just right” can be a pain in the butt!  For example, a lot of our templates accept “Style Graphics” to show some cool pictures on your site.  However, the fields that house your images can be very picky about the proportions of your image.  Until there’s a fancy re-sizer built into the wizard, you’ll want to have a powerful resizing tool handy!  Granted, there’s no tool quite like Photoshop, but that can be awfully expensive!

For PC’s; some of us like to use the windows XP resizing tool, that’s free for download here!  Just keep in mind you’ll need to be running Windows XP to make this work!  It’s called the “Image Resizer”, which does exactly that!  It’s a pretty quick install, and super easy to use.  Simply right click on the image you want to resize,  select “resize pictures”, and chose the proportions you want.  Presto!

Mac users may want to check out iZoom! This is also a free application for download (go go Open Source!)  There are Linux and PC versions out there as well.  After installation, you simply drag the photo you want to re-size, tinker with the proportion settings, and export a new image!  This program will even allow you to modify the quality of your image, to make them more Email, or website friendly.  Pretty savvy tool, and the price is definitely right!

BRING ON THE TUNES!

Obviously, a lot of us are artists.  The majority of our users have music that they want to share with the world, which is great!  But how do you get the music from your CD, onto your computer in MP3 form, and THEN uploaded onto your site?  Enter iTunes!

Yes, it’s an apple application, no hating on this program you PC people.  It’s free for download for PC and Mac HERE. Click on the download button, and you should get prompted to download the right application for your PC or Mac.  Install that bad boy, because it is one powerful piece of music encoding software, that also happens to be free!

Importing Music on iTunes is really straight forward.  Once you pop in a music CD, you’ll have an Import Settings and Import button handy (at the bottom of the window).  This is assuming you installed iTunes 9, the latest version as of today.  You just want to make sure you adjust your import settings to produce MP3.  If you want to get really fancy, be sure to keep the sound quality at a good level; around 192 kbps.  Most people these days have high speed internet access, so having higher quality music shouldn’t bog down most systems out there.   From there, upload your music to your page via the Wizard, and you’re rockin’ the web!

WHAT ELSE SHOULD I HAVE!?

You should definitely be running the latest web browsers on your computer. For those of us that aren’t the most tech savvy, here’s the definition of a web browser:

An application used to view websites on the internet.

Common web browsers would be:

1. Internet explorer 8
2. Firefox 3
3. Safari 4
4. Chrome

To give you an idea of what people are using, nearly 50% of users out there are using Firefox (and for good reason too!).  You can see general web browser trends HERE!

Of course, there are more applications out there that lots of people find handy when making their sites.  If you have one you’d like to share, make a comment on this blog post!  We’d love to hear what you guys out there are using.  So, good luck with your websites and keep the internet rockin’!

Check out our step-by-step tutorial here:
http://www.hostbaby.org/wiki/Embedding_Youtube_Video