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INTERACTIVE AGENCY
Backups and the Web
Backup solutions and disaster recovery are a mainstay of technology, and they have been well-analyzed in the past — typically from an IT angle. But choosing a solid backup for a website is just as important, and it’s an oft-overlooked final step in the successful deployment of any web site or application. Backup technology has changed a lot over the years, and it can be a daunting task to figure out which solution works for you. This is not a technical guide — there are countless technical solutions to any given backup need. The intent of this guide is to help you understand the nature of your own website and data, and to narrow down the solution that is ideal for your needs. Without a proper understanding of what data your website has and where it’s stored, any backup solution has the potential to languish or be unrestoreable when the worst happens. Read on:
GMail/Google Calendar Integration
Google, why hast thou forsaken us? A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, GMail had this great feature that was a defining reason in my switch from my previous mail provider (me). That was that if you ever got a message that had any sort of “event” — various combinations of a date, time and place — gmail would detect it and automatically create a link on the right sidebar to “Add to calendar”.
siteground’s braindead spam-filtering
We have a customer of ours who pays us both for e-mail/web hosting as well as our anti-spam/anti-virus relay service, Swirbo. Swirbo is a service that filters mail by having mail for a domain sent to it first, via MX records, and then relayed to its final destination.
Recently, this customer began reporting that she was unable to receive e-mail from certain people. Some investigation yielded this information from Swirbo, while attempting to deliver a legit e-mail message from someone on aol.com:
Jun 14 10:50:10 mta1 postfix/smtp[5285]: 90D0D834038: to=
, relay=redacteddomain.com[1.2.3.4], delay=3, status=bounced (host redacteddomain.com[1.2.3.4] said: 550 SITEGROUND Faked AOL, so you must be spam. (in reply to RCPT TO command))
Comcast is Not a Business ISP
Recently we had one of our regular (every couple of months) Comcast Nightmares. These happen now and again, and by now our entire company is fairly used to the “Comcast is down — go work from home or a coffee shop” routine. This time, however, I wanted to detail a bit of what we experienced, and talk about what it means for us. First, a rough timeline of our original problems:
Google and Greylisting
We’d have a recent spat of complaints from our Swirbo customers regarding their inability to receive mail from certain Google apps — i.e. if you invite someone to view a blog, or docs.google.com document. Today I got an example of the actual error they are getting:
Technical details of permanent failure:
TEMP_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 13): 450: Recipient
address rejected: Greylisted for 5 minutes
Anyone see a problem? The error we returned was 450, yet Google seems to think it was a permanent failure. Here’s a bit from the SMTP RFC (2821):
Firefox 2.0
I just read a quick review of Firefox 2.0. I am not terribly impressed — with Firefox itself, or the review for that matter:
The first thing that stands out in the new Firefox is the more modern, snappier look and feel. Everything is more shinny, more playful and more clickable.
Can anyone tell me what this means? This is followed by:
Tabbed browsing was a major browser innovation that Firefox popularized
ACS SEO
Early this year, we posted the story of a spammer that left a comment spam on our site — circumventing the spam protection (Wordverify) manually.
This week, their director of marketing contacted me asking to try to clear up the situation and convey their side of the story. I told him I wouldn’t amend the original post (barring for any inaccuracy), but that he was welcome to e-mail me an explanation. In the interest of fairness, here it is:
LiveJournal Jabber
Are the seemingly never-ending Instant-Messaging wars finally coming to a close?
Jabber/XMPP has gotten another big shot in the arm this week, with the announcement that Livejournal has launched a Jabber server for its users, complete with the friends-list pre-loaded as the Jabber roster. They will be incorporating s2s communication, along with lots of other features.
This comes on the heels of Google Talk, which last year launched its XMPP-based Google Talk service, opened it to XMPP s2s on the Internet. They also incorporated an (optional) user-friendly AJAX-based IM client into the gmail web client — look for Livejournal to do the same, as well as integrating the blogging/comment-notification functions into instant messaging as well.
Opera 9 Final
Opera 9.00 final is out, and they appear to have fixed the cookies bug. And there was much rejoicing.
Now I don’t have to switch to Firefox after all.
PHP Session Lifetime: An Adventure
We had a bit of a sticky situation here at the Centresource stomping grounds this past couple of weeks. We have a server with a multitude of environments served via our Apache webserver. It’s a fairly simple setup: we have a virtualhost devoted to development environments for all of our software developers, and then a plethora of virtualhosts for the various web-based applications we use: some home-brewed, some OSS web applications we use for various business functions (CMS, CRM, Groupware, etc..).
The mystery started when sessions started mysteriously expiring prematurely on two of our most popular web applications: DekkoTime, and our internal CRM/groupware application. It started about two weeks ago, with no discernable changes to our configuration that could be responsible.
So to understand what was necessary to track down this problem, we have to explore a little bit about how PHP session data storage and expiration works: