The White Plains Press: A New Press Release Publisher

As a website producer, I have produced some clever websites, some that are elegant, even some that are artistic. But my claim to fame is that I produce websites that work.

My promise to each new client is that the website I make for them will help their organization grow, adding business, members, and prestige. That's a pretty tall order for a few bits and bytes in cyberspace.

Usually, "making it work" requires some marketing of the organization, often including press releases.

Until recently, I'd work up the press releases, send copies to the local newspapers, and "publish" it online using a press release service. Some of these services are nominally free -- and have a spotty record of success. Others, that work consistently, have a fee schedule that depends on speed, tracking, and promised distribution, etc.

Eventually, I realized that what the press release publishing services actually do is to make sure the major search engines, particularly Google, picked up and indexed the press releases I trusted to them.

But wait a minute. I don't need to pay someone to do that. I can do it myself with a little care and effort. And so the White Plains Press was born.

At the Press, you'll find press releases for local non-profits, like Bryant Gardens and the White Plains Council of Neighborhood Associations (WPCNA), for small businesses like Delmonte-Smelson Jewelers, Hudson Valley Energy Consultants (HVEC), and Balch Buyer's Realty, for upstate companies, like Bob & Sallie Connelly who do appraisals, auctions, sell antiques, and run an art gallery, for out of state organizations, like the Biz@Net Business Networking Group, and for local chapters of the American Society of Appraisers. And that's just in its first three weeks of operation.

Today, the White Plains Press is a useful (and successful) handmaiden to the Webshop@servenet.com. Tomorrow, well tomorrow the child could be feeding its parent.

The Trouble With PC World

If PC World were free, I wouldn't mind the bad advice.

The problem is that the PC World staff, under the pressure of compiling and publishing a magazine every month, puts out a product that is repetitive, often biased, and sometimes just plain wrong.

First about that bias. While I understand that folks in publishing tend to use Macs and to be Apple-centric, when I want to read about Macs, I'll buy PC World's sister publication Macworld. Hey guys and girls, let's stop proselytizing and start reviewing. And while you're at it, please stop the childish Microsoft-bashing. It's so 1990s. Review, not stew. We want food for thought, not clever jibes.

And then there's the formulaic repetition of boring content. I don't need more articles about what's wrong with Vista. Or column after column about the latest "holes" in Microsoft products. You only know about the holes because Microsoft patched them, and guess what. They're patched on my PCs, too. And frankly, I'll scream if I you spend yet another page exhorting me to be careful opening emails, and not to visit unfriendly websites. Geez, am I the only nerd in the world who's kept his or her PCs virus and malware free by safe-surfing and by choosing and using competent software?

Now it is true that almost every techie product out there includes a microprocessor, but cameras, HD TVs, and audio are NOT PCs. Really. When I want competent and complete reviews of these products, I go elsewhere. Reviewing these products just isn't your forte.

But most insidious of all is just plain getting it wrong when it comes to products and software. Particularly software. In the last few months, I've installed more than a few applications that didn't come anywhere near performing as described. It's obvious the reviewer never tried them. And ditto for websites. I know you're not responsible for sending readers to a website that delivers a viral payload -- but surely you can tell whether a website actually lives up to its press releases?

PC World feels a lot like a high school science fair. Lots of projects done to get a grade. The rare project that makes it all worthwhile.

Being a self-starter and self-refresher myself, I've never been on a retreat. But maybe that's what the PC World staff needs. A little time away from the grind to review their mission and renew their means.

Take ten.

AOL's Ugly Webhosting Shutdown

AOL could take a lesson from our lame-duck President and go out in style.

In its favor is the fact that AOL email can now be collected via IMAP. Yeah! (No folks, I don't use AOL myself, but I still have clients who believe they'll lose contact with the world if they close their AOL accounts.) But on the negative side of the ledger is the way the Information Technology Specialists that populate AOL's decimated Virginia offices have phased out their webhosting services.

Once upon a time, every AOL subscriber got "free" software, dial-up access, and "free" webhosting at http://members.aol.com/Screenname. Over time, that free software became bloated adware, laden with network problems, and PC "maintenance" tools that slowed user's machines down to a crawl. Meanwhile, the dial-up service that propelled AOL's growth became a Model T, found only in extreme backwaters.

Today, the software's been discontinued. No loss. AOL as ISP is history. No problem. AOL no longer charges for its "services," having long since morphed into an ad-supported business model. Nothing for nothing. And as of 10/31/2008, AOL's webhosting has shut its doors.

And there's the rub. AOL didn't just shut down the servers and disappear. That wouldn't have been nice, but it wouldn't have been awful either. And AOL didn't offer subscribers with websites on their servers a forwarding service. That would be the professional thing to do. No, the folks at AOL decided to send all links to Hometown Has Been Shutdown (HHBS).

The problem with that is twofold. People who have the old AOL address for a website won't know if it's moved or defunct. And if they use a search engine to locate a moved website, the results page will continue to show the AOL address, leading folks back to HHBS. Round and round we go ...

Dear AOL. I know it's probably too late and/or too much trouble to provide the folks who paid the bills all those years with forwarding for moved websites. But it wouldn't be hard to deliver an error 404 page for removed websites. That's the standard protocol and would eventually get search engines to drop the defunct AOL website URLs. Delivering a live and changing page (HHBS is a live blog with comments) causes search engines to maintain the erroneous listings.

So, dear AOL, if you can't provide forwarding, and won't follow WWW protocol by delivering error 404 pages, how about writing the search engines -- heck there are only a handful left -- and asking them to stop indexing any URL that includes members.aol.com or users.aol.com or hometown.aol.com?

Geez, if Bush can do it gracefully, so can AOL.

FTP Client: FileZilla

Like many website designers, I used and relied upon Ipswitch's WS_FTP file transfer software for many years. It's the "industry standard." It's modestly-priced -- now about $55 -- shareware that's frequently updated, versatile, and secure. And over the years, I tried other freeware and shareware file transfer clients, mostly for clients with less rigorous needs, and found them slow, lacking features, or just plain ponderous.

Recently, faced with rebuilding my primary desktop and another Ipswitch paid upgrade pending, I decided to sample the alternatives again. I looked at CuteFTP, SmartFTP, Core FTP, and for a while even used FireFTP, a Mozilla Firefox add-on. All were suitable for limited-duty. But none satisfied this old nerd's hunger for a speedy, well-behaved, small footprint FTP client with just enough features and security.

As you know from the title of this post, that was then. FileZilla is now. It's well-supported (wikis, forums, bug and feature requests) open source software that's lightning fast to load and to function. Hey, fast is important when you're updating more than one or two files at a time. It's frequently updated with security patches, bug fixes, and small new features. That's like tweaks, not bloat. It's intuitive for both right- and left-brained types. It never crashes. And did I mention, it's fast?

Three things I especially find helpful in FileZilla:

• Cross platform support means I can use the same client on pretty much any machine I'm working on.
• Easy to use site manager makes adding a new site simple, selecting an existing site, simpler.
• Remote file editing so I can do quick fixes for a client on the fly.
• Drag and drop support is built-in, not quirky like some, and not slow

If you try FileZilla and find yourself loving it as I do, don't forget to support it. It's free to use, but not a throwaway. It's a thoroughly professional project whose developers deserve to get paid for their efforts.

Google Chrome

Google has taken its eye off the ball with its too-hasty release of the Chrome browser. While its handling of each tab as an independent entity is just what's needed in an imperfect Web 2.0 world --and hopefully will be emulated by IE and Firefox developers -- Chrome falls short of implementing the usability that has long attracted users to Google products.

Because of a non-compliant proprietary JavaScript engine, Chrome does not work with many websites that IE and Firefox handle gracefully. For shame!

But the deal-breaker for me is that Chrome doesn't work with the widely-used Roboform password manager. Yes, Chrome offers to save passwords. But I've got literally hundreds of site-specific passwords and (a) I need portability from browser to browser and PC to PC, and (b) I'm not trusting my passwords even to the worthies at Google.

Chrome is clean, and quick. But without Roboform, it's stupid.

Why Vista Gets a Bad Rap

I know, it's cool to bash Microsoft. And sometimes, it's appropriate. Windows ME was truly bloatware, and Internet Explorer didn't really shape up until the competition showed the way. But Vista is a worthy extension of XP, and all it gets is grief.

As an old gray beard who's been a geek tweaking PCs since before the words "geek", "tweak", and "PC" took on meaning, I'm amazed that the armchair techies -- whose jobs depend on the existence of Gates, Microsoft, and Windows -- can find nothing to like in Vista.

And then it hit me. Every negative comment or review about Vista carps about (a) cost and activation, and (b) UAC -- User Account Control. And that's because they're techies, not end users!

Techies have multiple computers and like to switch systems and play. Software that's not free and not authorized for multiple machines, is a pain for techies, who are notoriously clever but impecunious.

And techies, almost by definition, are continually downloading, installing, configuring, and reworking new software -- all conditions that trigger the UAC pop-up in Vista. For a techie, UAC is a toothache that smarts with every chew.

But for the great mass of users -- one machine, and very infrequent technical changes -- Vista is fast, fun, sexy, safe, and stable. Would they like it to be free? Sure, but what a silly idea. In the real world, users expect to pay for their cars, their combs, and the computers, including the operating system.

Now that it's out of the starting gate and over the speed humps, what's not to like about Vista?

Network Solutions Scam

As if you needed another reason to avoid the high-handed, high-priced offerings at Network Solutions (NetSol), here's another quirky NetSol scam masquerading as a service.

Catherine Palmiere is the President of Adam Personnel and Adam Temporary Services, one of New York City's premiere employment agencies and staffing services. Catherine asked me to register a new domain name for her company and point it to the Temps page on her primary website. She suggested www.adamtemporaryservices.com and www.adamtemps.com.

We decided on the latter, which I promptly checked for availability. To my surprise, it was taken. Looking further, I noticed it had been "taken" just moments before her email to me. Wow, what a coincidence. But wait, lighting struck twice! The other domain, too, was taken. And guess who had 'em both: Network Solutions, LLC. Both were "registered" for one year, with nameservers set to reserveddomainname.com.

It turns out the domains are actually available, but with a catch. The domain records say "This Domain is available at NetworkSolutions.com, 13681 Sunrise Valley Drive, Suite 300, HERNDON, VA 20171 US." You can't directly register these domains with another registrar, say GoDaddy or Tucows, unless you fork over fees to a go-between or domain name broker. But you can register them directly at NetSol -- and pay their inflated fees.

In case you haven't guessed yet, what happened here was that Cathy at Adam had checked availability for these domains on the NetSol website and NetSol immediately registered the names. Since Cathy has a NetSol account and was logged in when she checked availability, this sort of made sense. She's their customer and reserving the names for her made sure she'd have them available.

But wait. NetSol will also let me -- or you or anybody -- register those names, as long as we do it through NetSol. So maybe the preemptive, protective reservations weren't for Cathy's benefit, but for NetSol's. To test this, I used a no-cookies PC to check the availability on the NetSol website (without logging in, of course) of a silly domain name, viz. cranberryham.com. I don't know if cranberry ham is Kosher or not, but I do know that (a) I'm not a NetSol client, (b) I researched the domain first elsewhere, and found "no registered match", then checked at NetSol, and (c) as of today, it's now reserved by them for a year*! And that ain't Kosher for sure.

The problem here is simple. It's called conflict of interest. The company which issues domain names -- in the public's interest -- shouldn't be allowed to register, reserve or otherwise control any names other than the ones it needs for its own website and email. It's time to get the fox out of the henhouse. And let the cranberries propagate without grafting or layering.

* Although the record shows an expiry one year after the creation date, the "registration," is probably set to expire in five days. After all, NetSol is tricky, not stupid. Registrars can create a registration, then delete it within five days at no cost. The five-day grace period was designed to allow them to fix mistakes without penalty. The scam is they're using it to penalize clients!

P.S. Others have discovered and commented on this Networks Solution scam as well.