Entries from June 2010 ↓

I have used Xara products for years. I upgraded from Xara Xtreme to the Pro version years ago, so I wasn’t aware how nice and inexpensive the regular version is. With the latest release, the product formerly called ‘Xtreme’ is now called ‘Photo and Graphics Editor’.

If you’re shopping for an image editor, this is very easy to use for cropping, brightening, etc. The program also has lots of advanced features if you’re into illustration.

The Pro model, now known as ‘Designer Pro’, also is a fully-functional web design program, with lots of drag-and-drop and instant update features.

The stand-alone design product Web Designer, is also available without the image editor.

The unfortunate fact is that recorded listings are still unavailable on Niteflirt, and there are customers who were able to listen who did not feel comfortable downloading them to their computer, where someone else in the household might find them.

There are options. Probably the easiest one is to download them directly onto a USB flash drive or a memory card, then pull them from the computer when not using them. Any memory card can fit in its case in a wallet, and some USB flash drives are small enough to do this with, too.

However, these can still be password-protected in case they are lost or just found by the wrong person.

Using file compression and its accompanying password capability to protect a folder or file:

This is an old post. The same may or not apply to later versions. Article
USB Drive Encryption
Cryptainer LE
Folder Password Expert
StorageCrypt

Googling on “password-protect USB flash drive” and other similar phrases will turn up lots of other options.

Let’s say you have your own domain. You have uploaded files, say, photos, and you intend to sell access to those photos. You don’t want to give access to anyone who doesn’t pay. All you want is to sell access to photo sets by email, not start a member’s area where someone could have full access to all the files you might have.

If you’ve read this far, you probably aren’t sure how to go about this. There are a lot of ways to do it, many of them requiring a fair amount of technical expertise.

I’m going to skip around those and give the one that is the easiest to use that I know of.

Let’s say I have a domain named mydomain.com. The URL of that domain is http://mydomain.com. If I have an ‘images’ folder, as many people do, the URL would be http://mydomain.com/images/. If you have an image in there named myimage.jpg, the URL of that image is http://mydomain.com/images/myimage.jpg.

The first thing you need to do is check to see what happens if you go to that /images/ directory by typing in the address http://mydomain.com/images/. It is often the case that typing in a folder name will by default send you to an index page you have in that folder. But if you don’t have an index page in that folder (because maybe you didn’t put one there), depending on how your server is set up by your host, you may see a default directory page that has clickable links to all your images.

This is a bad thing, as anyone who knows you have an /images/ folder (or anyone who guesses you have one) can see everything you have in there. You may want to contact your host to see if they will change that, or you can simply create and upload a blank index page.

Open Notepad (Start=>Accessories=>Notepad), select File=>Save As. In the window that pops up, choose where you want to save it on your computer first, so you won’t forget where you put it. Type index.html in the “File name” box. Change “Save as Type” from “Text Documents (*.txt)” to “All Files”. Then click Save.

Upload the file into any directory that doesn’t already have an index file of some sort.

Now, let’s say you want to sell someone a set of files named reddress1.jpg, reddress2.jpg, and reddress3.jpg. You may want to sell multiple sets. It’s really convenient to name them like that, because it makes it easy for you to see what you have and work with it. But it also makes it easy for someone else to guess what else might be there. So if someone who bought Set 1 guessed that Set 2 contained reddress4.jpg, reddress5.jpg, and reddress6.jpg, then typed those in, they could very well find them. They might also go looking to see what you named your other photo sets, based on your sales info.

Obviously that’s way too easy. Here’s what I do. I append a random string to the end of the file or folder I am giving access to, using PassUtils, a free password generator. Unzip it and install it. To use it just open and uncheck the “punctuation box”, because having punctuation in a filename can mess up opening that file. Create as many passwords as you like. Then right click each password and copy the password to your clipboard. Rename your files one at a time by right clicking in a Windows ‘Save As’ or ‘Open’ window, or in FTP, by right clicking and selecting ‘Rename’. The name will be selected. Hit the right arrow to put the cursor to the end of the file name, between the file name and the file extension. Type an underscore ‘_’ or hyphen ‘-’, then copy in the random string.

The goal is to change the file ‘reddress1.jpg‘ to ‘reddress1_6cYm2FTg.jpg‘. Now you can still read what the file contains based on what you named it, but nobody can possibly guess correctly what you named it to access it without permission.

You can also do the same thing with folders containing multiple images. If you sell a single set of images in a folder named /Set1_6cYm2FTg/, nobody can guess the folder name, and you can still give the photos easy names inside the folder.

It’s a lot easier for people who are reading your post when you quote the post. But it gets confusing if you just copy it and paste it in, as it seems like it’s part of what you wrote.

When you want to quote a post in a forum, look for a “quote” button or link at the top or bottom of the post you want to quote from. Click it. When the post appears, it will have the entire post you are quoting in it.

Like this one:

(Nothing will happen when you click the button.)

Then you can delete everything but what you are replying to.

People who spend a lot of money on website design sometimes put a fair amount of money into marketing research to determine what design features will end up getting them more conversions (sales). If you are observant, you will find that in certain industries, certain types of web design predominate. It would be reasonable to take that into consideration if you were designing a site in that industry.

A lot of the research which has been done is available for free or a small charge. For instance, we know things like the first place someone looks when they land on your page (upper left-hand corner). We know that the more clicks someone has to make to find what they are looking for, the more likely they are to just give up. We know that the more information you have on a page, the less likely they will immediately see what they are looking for, even if it is right there.

So the question is, how is your listing design working for you?

The issue is that while there are numerous different types of design in use (and apparently many of the different types successful), what matters is whether a design is working for you to make you money. How can you measure that?

Well, if you did it yourself—especially if you are not particularly skilled—are there errors on the page? Is it broken? Can you tell? Things like typos, grammatical errors, broken code, non-working buttons, and missing images need to be fixed, first of all. If you can’t tell by looking, have someone else look at it to see if they see anything that you missed.

Do you have a statcounter on the page? That will help you see how much traffic you are getting.

But if you’ve had a design up for a long time, it’s pretty much impossible to tell whether making changes would help you or not. It would be a mistake to simply assume that it will or won’t.

If you get a new design, put it up and WATCH CAREFULLY to see what happens. It’s not about your tastes and whether you like it. It’s about whether it inspires your customers to make purchases.

You may find your traffic and/or sales increase. You may find them drop off dramatically. I have heard several girls put up new designs, pleased as all heck, who took them down really fast when they found their business died off.