One of the cool features in Google+ is “Hangouts.” Hangouts are basically multi-person video chats.
We have a few ideas for cool Hangouts on specific topics, but to get our feet wet and see what you might want to talk about, we’re going to host a no-topic virtual free-for-all Hangout on Thursday, February 2nd at 2 p.m. Pacific time. Mark your calendar and stop by.
What will it be like? What will we talk about? I have no idea. It could be cool, or it could be an #epicfail. Either way, don’t you want to witness it? Satisfy your morbid curiosity at our expense.
Scheduled to participate:
Frank (CEO/CTO)
Jaime (Technical support specialist)
Joe (Team Foundation Server specialist)
John (Marketing Manager)
Michael (Developer)
Ray (Technical support specialist)
Takeshi (President, VP of Marketing)
and yours truly (Director of Communications)
As you can see, we’re bringing out the big guns for this one, so here’s your chance to see and speak to some of the people who run this joint.
You have to join our circles on Google Plus in order to participate, so get yourself in there before the Hangout starts.
This weekend we will be at the SoCal Code Camp on the campus of Cal State Fullerton in Fullerton, CA. The SoCal Code Camp itself is two days with tons of talks, prizes and giveaways (don’t forget about the traditional Geek Dinner which will be on Saturday evening).
We will there on Saturday (not Sunday) and we will be there in full force as me, Takeshi, John, Michael and a few others from DiscountASP.NET will be on site, attending sessions, manning our table so come out, talk to us, ask us questions, buy us lunch 
Also, Takeshi will be presenting on Saturday afternoon at 1:30pm. The title of his talk is “Q&A with ASP.NET Web Hosting Provider, DiscountASP.NET“, so if you don’t get a chance to talk to us at our table, feel free to stop by and ask your questions.
I want to stress, his talk is NOT, I repeat, is NOT, a sales pitch. That is not the purpose of Takeshi’s talk. Personally, I hate when I go to a conference and the talk becomes a sales pitch. Don’t get me wrong, you can ask questions about DiscountASP.NET and how and why we do certain things, but this is also the time to ask questions about the hosting industry (and where it’s going), domain names, Microsoft, app development, deployment, etc.
Takeshi has been in the hosting industry since 1998 so he definitely has the experience (i.e. he’s old) and can provide insight into the hosting industry.
There is no reason not to attend this Saturday’s SoCal Code Camp. The event is free, tons of fellow developers will be on hand (think networking opportunities), there is no football this weekend, the weather is supposed to be good and we’re gonna be there. What more do you need?
When you run a successful business online, you are inevitably going to run in to the issue of people with, let’s say, less than altruistic motives, trying to impersonate you.
They typically do this to leech away customers, as in the case of a hosting company I worked for several years ago that had to deal with an exact copy of our site – but on a the .de domain. A lot of people contacted us assuming it was a legitimate German branch of the company. Sometimes though, the impersonation motivation isn’t that clear.
We’ve talked about embracing Google+ as a communication channel (some cool news to come on that front in a few days!), and we’re big fans of the way they’re doing things over there. But last night we found a user with the name DiscountASP.NET TOS.
None of us had created it, and since it was still empty, it was impossible to know what was planned for it. But what the plan isn’t really important. You have to be proactive in protecting the name of your business.
I was surprised to receive an email from Google less than 12 hours after we filed a report, informing us that the DiscountASP.NET TOS user had been removed.
12 hours? It took us three years to get a DiscountASP.NET knock-off Twitter account removed. So my hat is off to the Google+ staff. Their responsiveness only increases my confidence in the potential for Google+.
Is someone impersonating you or your business on Google+? Reporting the impersonation is easy:
First, make sure you are logged in to your Google+ page.
Click the “Report this profile” link:
When prompted for a reason for the report, select “Impersonation”:
After you hit “Submit,” you will start a questionnaire. You’re going to come to a question that asks whether you can add code to your web site:
If you have set up a Google+ page for your business and have used their code to add the plus “badge” to your site, this step is already complete, and you can choose, “Yes, I can add a snippet of code to our corporate website.”
If you aren’t using the badge there is another snippet of code you can add that links your web site and your Google+ profile. The link between the two is important. Without it, you will not be able to report impersonation.
If you cannot add code to your site, the removal process is going to take more time. When you select the, “No, I’ll submit verification instead” option, Google requires you to complete and submit their “proof of ownership” form.
Finally, simply complete a few fields to provide company information and submit.
The entire process only takes a few minutes if your site is already linked to Plus, and not much longer than that if you have to add the code snippet.
I can’t promise you a 12 hour turnaround, but if all the “i”s are dotted and the “t”s are crossed, you should see the impersonation site disappear pretty quickly.
Tomorrow some big sites are going to go dark in protest of the proposed SOPA an PIPA legislation.
Wikipedia, Craigslist, reddit, Boing-Boing, Tucows, all 50+ of the goofy Cheezeburger Network sites, and many others. There are some very big names there, but hopefully some even bigger players will decide to make the move (I’m looking at you, Google) and force people to learn more about the twin threats of SOPA/PIPA.
I say “force people” because up until now this has been, for the most part, of interest only to people who are among the technologically obsessed. But while we may know what’s going on and are working to put a stop to it, the vast majority of people who do not live and breathe tech may have no idea what’s happening.
Taking down their favorite lolcat site is going to make them say, “Hey, what’s this?” so I applaud every one of the mainstream sites that have taken the difficult decision to participate.
Are we taking part in the blackout? Yes.
Our site will not be down completely (customers depend on certain aspects of the site to maintain their accounts and get support), but we will be switching over to a different look for the day in order to echo the “blackout” theme, show our opposition to SOPA/PIPA and provide some informational links.
We will also be blacking out as much of our Twitter and Google+ accounts as we can. There’s not much we can do at Facebook, but no one goes to that site anymore anyway, right?
As important as it is for those of us already in the loop to continue to voice our opposition, it is equally important to try to get the less technologically obsessed among us to understand the depth of the threat we all face.
Read up on SOPA and PIPA so when your cousin or grandmother calls you tomorrow to ask where Wikipedia went, you’ll be able to get them up to speed.
Now that we are aware of how to run email reports like disk usage summary, I am going to show you how to schedule these reports to be sent to you via email.
- First log into your Smartermail web interface using any email account with administrator privileges.
- Then click on the Reports button on the left side bar.
- From here we will be creating a Custom Report, so expand the Custom Reports folder and click on Manage Custom Reports link.
- Click the New button at the top of the interface and you should get a screen similar to the following:
- Enter a Name for the Custom Report and set a Default Date Range.
- Now that you have named your report and selected a date range click on the Report Items tab at the top of the interface and click on the Add Item button.
- From the Report Item drop down select the report you would like sent out.
Keep in mind that there are Domain Reports and User Reports so be sure you are selecting the correct report in the drop box. Also email users without administrator privileges can run reports but only User Reports which are reports for their specific email address.
Here is an example of my Custom Report settings:
- Click on the Scheduled Email Reports link and click on the New button at the top of the page.
- Now select the report you just created from the Report Item drop-down menu, set the Frequency to Daily(or whatever you’d like).
- Finally enter the the mail address/es you would like the report sent to in the To and Cc Address(es) fields and set your Subject, Email Format, and Message fields to your specifications.
- Click Save and that’s it!
Your new custom report is now ready to be sent to your email address daily.
Note: If you would like to add more than one recipient to either the TO or Cc field use a comma “,” as a separator for each email address.
It is often said that if you do not want your information to be stolen, don’t put it on the Internet. However, the Internet has become an integral part of our lives, and we can’t help but post some kind of web site, blog, or forum. Even if you don’t tell anyone about your web site, once it is published it will eventually be discovered.
How, you ask? By robot indexing programs, A.K.A. bots, crawlers and spiders. These little programs swarm out onto the Internet looking up every web site, caching and logging web site information in their databases. Often created by search engines to help index pages, they roam the Internet freely crawling all web sites all the time.
Normally this is an acceptable part of the Internet, but some search engines are so aggressive that they can increase bandwidth consumption. And some bots are malicious, stealing photos from web sites or harvesting email addresses so that they can be spammed. The simplest way to block these bots is to create a simple robots.txt file that contains instructions to block the bots:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
However, there are a couple of things wrong with this approach. One is that bots can still hit the site, ignoring your robots.txt file and your wish not to be indexed.
But there is good news. If you are on an IIS 7 server, you have another alternative. You can use the RequestFiltering Rule that is built-in to IIS 7. It works on a higher level portion of the web service and it cannot be bypassed by a bot.
The setup is fairly simple, and the easiest and fastest way to initiate your ReqestFiltering Rule is to code it in your application’s web.config file. The RequestFiltering element goes inside the <system.webServer><security> elements. If you do not have this in your applications web.config file you should be able to create them. Once that is created type this schema to setup your RequestFiltering rule.
<requestFiltering> <filteringRules> <filteringRule name="BlockSearchEngines" scanUrl="false" scanQueryString="false"> <scanHeaders> <clear /> <add requestHeader="User-Agent" /> </scanHeaders> <appliesTo> <clear /> </appliesTo> <denyStrings> <clear /> <add string="YandexBot" /> </denyStrings> </filteringRule> </filteringRules> </requestFiltering> <authentication> <basicAuthentication enabled="true" /> <anonymousAuthentication enabled="true" /> </authentication>
You can name the filtering rule whatever you’d like and in the “requestHeader” element you will need to make sure you define “User-Agent.” Within the “add string” element you’ll need to specify the User Agent name. In this example I set it to YandexBot which blocks a search engine originating from Russia. You can also block search engines such as Googlebot or Bingbot.
If you want to see if this rule is actually blocking these bots, you will need to download your HTTP raw logs from the server and parse them to look for the headers User-Agent. If you scroll to the left and find the headers SC-Status (status code) you should see a 404 HTTP response. In addition the headers will also carry sc-substatus which will be a substatus code to the primary HTTP response code.
Here is a list of potential substatus codes you may see when you impose your RequestFiltering rule.
Just wanted to let you all know that our partner, Red Gate, will be offering FREE webinars during Jan-Apr 2012 on the topics of Database Version Control and Repeatable Database Deployments.
Check out the times and dates at http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-source-control/webinars
Their SQL Source Control product is pretty cool and Joe blogged about it previously.
Reminder: DiscountASP.NET customers can get a 20% discount on Red Gate’s SQL Source Control. More details can be found your control panel marketplace.
Dear hosts,
I know that you are all well aware of SOPA and PIPA. I know that most you want to do something, but you’re not quite sure what that something is.
There are well-meaning efforts afoot in a lot of different places, and our friends at SaveHosting.org have a long term view for creating a political presence for the hosting industry. My hat is off to everyone who has taken time to become informed and make their voices heard.
But what if that’s not enough?
Please take a minute to read this eye-opening article by Emily Badger and Miller-McCune. They explain much more eloquently than I can why we need to put ourselves in front of our representatives in congress. Why form letters and online petitions are not enough. As it turns out, in order to get anyone on Capitol Hill to listen, you have to be in the room with them so they know that you really exist.
So how do we do that? How do we all get together in Washington and get face time with our Senators?
Easy.
You know those big events we have? You’ve been to some of them; HostingCon, PubCon, Parallels Summit, Microsoft MIX, Macworld Expo, TED, SMX, Social Media Summit, BlogWorld & New Media Expo, things like that.
What if we moved all of those conferences to Washington D.C.?
Every one of them.
I know, I know – no one wants to go to Washington for a week and slog around through cold slush or swelter in summer humidity. And no one wants to spend their afternoon talking to their congressional representatives. It doesn’t sound like an appealing way to spend part of that annual travel budget, does it?
But imagine the net effect of hundreds (or thousands) of us, making appointments with our Senators weeks or months in advance, and then descending on the Capitol building on the same day.
Keynote: We All Walk Over To Capitol Hill!
It would be newsworthy, and you know that politicians love to be seen on the news.
And it doesn’t have to – and shouldn’t – stop there. Every time another industry convention is held in D.C. we have another opportunity to twist the Senators arms again. And again and again.
Is that really necessary? Well, consider who is talking to congress every day via lobbyists: The film studios. The television networks. The recording industry. The pharmaceutical companies. Publishers. They are in the Senator’s ears and contributing to their coffers, and we are not. So when it comes to issues like SOPA and PIPA, we may as well not exist.
I know what you’re thinking, “Hey, they vote on SOPA in two weeks! It’s too late to do anything.” While it may be too late for a group of us to converge on Capitol Hill to work against SOPA specifically, PIPA is just as brutal, and it is looming on the horizon. And should worse come to worse and both bills pass, this kind of direct, face to face action becomes even more crucial.
So, my dear friends in the hosting industry, do we dare make these conferences and conventions a little less like vacations and a little more like work? We should. The foundation that all of our businesses are built on is being eroded beneath our feet. Your singular actions are important! Keep it up. But together, we can be much more effective.
The United States Congress is not going to come to us. We have to go to them.
I would respectfully urge anyone who has input into planning any industry gatherings to seriously consider moving them to Washington.
Get the attention of the politicians, get our needs onto the table and into consideration, protect ourselves and our industry. Then we can all go back to Las Vegas and really tie one on in celebration. I’ll buy the first round.
- First log into your Smartermail web interface using any email account with administrator privileges.
- Then click on the Reports button on the left side bar.
- Now expand the Domain Summary Reports folder.
- Expand the Traffic Reports folder.
- Click on Disk Usage
From here you will see a report similar tot he following where each users current Total Disk usage and their Max Disk quota.
Twitter is a funny thing.
And by funny, of course I mean really weird.
Anyone who has been involved in supporting customers, or dealing with any large group of humans, knows that it’s impossible to please everyone. Think about the last time you tried to get five friends to agree on a place to eat dinner. Now multiply that by 10,000 and you start to get an idea of why it’s usually impossible for us to do something – anything – that everyone will like, appreciate or agree with.
Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus are great, and we’re really enjoying expanding our efforts in those areas, even though it’s not exactly an easy task. In fact, a cynic might say that we’re just opening up more avenues for people to complain. But the thing is, we want to hear complaints.
Yeah, I said it. Bring on the complaints.
Any business that ignores customer complaints is shortsighted, quite possibly crazy and most certainly doomed, and we are none of those things. Every time we deal with a complaint, or solve a service issue, the service improves for everyone.
Do you see a “but” coming? Here it is:
But – there are certain things that we are not going to discuss in public.
Ever. For any reason.
Those things include billing issues, why an account may be suspended, anything involving any personally identifying information, etc. We don’t talk about those things in public because they aren’t the public’s business. We take the privacy of our customers very seriously, and assume that every one of you appreciate that.
That doesn’t always seem to be the case, of course, but we can live with that. If someone on Twitter wants to tell the world that we suck because we refuse to address certain issues that we feel would violate our privacy policies – even if appears that the customer is initiating the conversation – that’s okay. I prefer taking a little flak to discussing a customer’s private business out in the open.
Why? Because a public breach of your private information is a “forever” thing. And we’re going to do all we can to prevent that from happening.
That’s just how we roll, you see.
Having said that, follow us on Twitter!
Become a fan on Facebook.
And join our circles on Google plus.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Here’s something to start your weekend…
It’s always cool to see what people’s creativity can conjure up. Microsoft saw the popularity of the Kinect and was smart to release an SDK for it.
Here is a music video by Tim & Joe for New Look’s song “Nap on the Bow” which was made using the Kinect camera.
You can check out what others are doing with Kinect at http://www.kinecthacks.com/
Ismail Hatipoglu asked on Twitter whether the SOPA and PIPA legislation will have any direct impact on our users now or in the future. That’s a good question, and one I neglected to address in yesterday’s article.
If one or both pass, they will unquestionably have a potential negative impact on the hosting experience for everyone.
However – don’t expect anything to change overnight. This is not the kind of thing that will have a direct impact on your sites.
But from the perspective of a host (and this applies to every host in the world, not just DiscountASP.NET), here are some things you can eventually expect to see:
- Increased new account set up time
- Periodic “site reviews” to insure that there is no infringing content anywhere
- Increased fees to support monitoring of sites and to offset litigation costs
- Periodic “blackouts” of all or part of everyone’s networks, caused by government-sanctioned IP redirection and DNS tampering
- Decreased tolerance for “borderline” or “questionable infringement” sites
PIPA would require “big brother” oversight of customer content, something we do not undertake now (nor is it something that we want to undertake). But that kind of oversight would be necessary to protect us from legal liability. We – and everyone else – would be forced to watch what our customers are doing a protective measure.
But again, there is no effect now, and if the legislation does manage to pass, I believe we can expect to see a great deal of resistance from some very large companies to enforcement of the vague and punitive aspects of the acts. The day a PIPA complaint removes, say, YouTube from the Internet (it is, after all, a vast repository of copyright infringement), well, I think things will get interesting.
To say the least.
We are always working to partner with leading vendors to help our customers improve their Application Lifecycle Management. So I’m very pleased to announce that our partner, Telerik has extended their offer of 15% off of TeamPulse and the new Ideas & Feedback Portal through the first half of 2012.
TeamPulse helps improve development productivity and with this tool, you can manage requirements, track progress and schedule releases of your applications. I’ve blogged previously about how our team uses TeamPulse for our own development management.
The Ideas & Feedback Portal is an extension to TeamPulse and is a web-based solution for managing customer ideas and feedback. With this tool you can efficiently manage feedback to help your development teams to prioritize and focus on the features that increase customer value.
Here is the coupon code that you can use to get this limited time 15% discount deal on TeamPulse and the TeamPulse Ideas & Feedback Portal:
TEAMCOU-QTWUZZ
This is a limited time offer that expires on June 30, 2012.
For your new year’s resolution, how about ALM productivity!
There has been a lot of talk recently about SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act (H.R. 3261), which, if passed as it stands, would effectively result in the blocking of web sites that offended the sensibilities of Hollywood movie studios or the recording industry (or anyone with a trademark or copyright and a lawyer).
It seems to go without saying that handing the keys to an Internet blacklist to commercial entities is wrongheaded and very dangerous. Especially considering the MPAA and RIAA‘s history of steamrolling the house to kill a termite. So it isn’t surprising that there is a lot of anti-SOPA action happening. We oppose SOPA as well, and encourage you to make your voice heard if you want to keep the Internet free.
PIPA
But perhaps less frequently discussed is another nasty piece of legislation that is also wrapped up in a name designed to mask its negative aspects; Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011, a.k.a. PIPA or the Protect IP Act (United States Senate Bill S.968).
PIPA has many of the same components of SOPA, with one notable exception. PIPA allows infringed upon parties to bring legal action against hosts over data on their servers, whether they are aware of its presence or not. Internet legal expert and SaveHosting.org founding member David Snead recently estimated the initial cost of the host’s defense of these suits at $50,000 per suit filed (“initial cost” being the operative term here).
Any way you slice it, that’s a large expenditure, and one that could be ruinous to a small host. Not to mention the fact that a host could be hit with multiple suits and be forced to defend themselves in dozens (or more) of such cases. You can see how quickly this legislation could become disruptive and destructive.
There are also a slew of fundamental technical issues the legislation introduces, issues that undermine the stability and freedom of the Internet as you and I know it today. We’re not going to address those here, but they are equally as important as the issues that we are discussing.
Hosting consumers get the shaft
To the point of how this affects you and why you should care, consider this: it is much more than an inconvenience when your host goes belly up. It’s a diminishing of your choices. If we stand by and allow every host that doesn’t have millions of dollars to spend on legal fees to be litigated off the face of the earth, the only choice that is going to be left to you is to buy hosting from one of a handful very large companies.
Not that all large companies are necessarily bad, but anyone with a cell phone or cable television service knows that lack of choice can indeed be a very bad thing. Do you want to live in a world where governmentally empowered multi-billion dollar businesses can control not only your hosting choices, but ultimately what you can access on the Internet? I sure don’t.
And that is not exaggeration or hyperbole, it is the inevitable result of the legislation as it stands.
Unnecessary legislation
Perhaps the most exasperating thing about both of these acts is that they are utterly unnecessary. We have had protection for trademark and copyright holders for more than a decade under the DMCA. The DMCA is a fair system, as the copyright holder is insured quick action when they make a complaint, and hosts such as ourselves are immune from liability as long as we take action against infringing materials in a prescribed amount of time.
SOPA and PIPA have no such “safe harbor,” and as I mentioned, PIPA specifically states that providers will be equally as liable as infringers.
It would appear that DMCA was not enough for the MPAA and RIAA, who want comprehensive and punitive control over sites they don’t like. Which, by some accounts, is no more than a desperate ploy by industries that were too slow and stubborn to adapt to a new world, and now see a massive wave litigation as a reasonable means of exercising control and forestalling inevitable change.
In other words, they have clearly been unable to stem the tide of piracy using technology, creativity or lawsuits against individuals (those suits turned into a P.R. nightmare for the record industry), so they are falling back on a sledgehammer approach of legally bullying the hosts (deeper pockets) and tampering with the DNS system.
Am I opposed to protecting the work of creative people? Absolutely not. I am one of those people, and I’m not particularly anxious to give my work away to pirates. But an objective analysis of the proposed legislation will lead most thinking people to a negative conclusion. The scope and effect of SOPA and PIPA are vast and frightening. It is very important that we do not allow the legislation to pass without opposition.
For more information, or to get involved, please visit:
AmericanCensorship.org
SaveHosting.org
I posted a video on Microsoft’s Holodesk previously and that was pretty crazy. But there is even more wild stuff brewing in the Microsoft Edison Lab. Check out this video from On The Verge:
