Top Sites - Spam, Scam, and Identity Theft Links

If you use Facebook, you need to understand that every single third-party company and individual who makes those cute little games and gadgets gets all your personal data for no good reason. And I guarantee you there is essentially no security on the servers where that data is stored. Even if you delete your Facebook account, all your personal data is still out there in the hands of total strangers, unprotected and waiting to be stolen. On top of this, Facebook is still being criticized for having horribly inadequate data protection of their own, so you should be using fake personal info on the site for a whole bunch of reasons.

Anyway, here's their security page - Facebook.com/security.
And user safety page - Facebook.com/safety.
And inadequate - privacy policy.

Twitter users, you should be checking the spam/scam alert page.

How many of these email & phone scams listed on the RCMP Phonebusters site have you come across?

Here's a great internet intrusion/attack testing tool. It checks your computer's ability to deflect and ignore communication attempts. It's called Shields Up, from security company Gibson Research. No downloads or anything are required, get simple File Sharing and Common Port vulnerability reports in about 10 seconds.

(MySpace is beyond help as far spam, profile hacking, and identity theft goes, so I'm not wasting my time putting links here. If you still use that site for some reason, good luck.)

My Main Computer Hardware

For you techies out there, here are the details of my primary system:

MBD - Elite (A780GM-A)
CPU - AMD (quad-core Phenom)
RAM - A-Data (4gig)
P/S - Cooler Master (600w)
HDD - Western Digital (160gig)
Video card - ATI (Radeon HD 4650, 1gig)
Display - two x 22" (Acer x223w)
Keyboard - Logitech Access
Mouse - Logitech Trackman Wheel
Router: D-Link (DIR-615, wireless N)

And never a single hiccup with any of it.

More About Me

Here's a little info about me. The profile section on Blogger is sort of lacking, and I didn't want to make a whole page just for this. And one benefit of using a regular blog post is I can link directly to this message from elsewhere.

My name is Jeff. I'm the owner of Second Glance Digital Media, and author of this blog. I'm a Search Engine Optimization specialist with a proven track record, and have been doing web design and graphics for about 10 years. Lately I've been building sites for small local businesses and getting them top 10 rankings on Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

You can read more on the Second Glance Digital Media site.

I also trade forex, and enjoy bicycling and sometimes video games. My pet peeve is local (Peterborough) "web designers" who don't know anything about web design. Especially the ones who say they do SEO, yet don't show up in searches because they haven't even coded their own sites properly! I hate the fact that business owners are being ripped off by amateurs. GRRRR! So I try to educate people the best I can.

You should also know that my brother Scott is an online marketing specialist, with about 12 years experience. He'll organize an entire online advertising campaign, do testing and tracking of different strategies, generate leads, and take commission from the new business he brings in. He currently works with a select few clients as a marketing consultant.

My expertise is building sites and getting them ranked high through proper design principles, and understanding how both people and search engines look at websites. Scott's expertise is finding out where your customers are, advertising to them in ways they'll respond to, and driving them to your site. So between us, you can get maximum traffic from both sides of the equation: organic and paid advertising.

If there's anything on your mind you'd like some advice on, leave a comment or drop me an email.

Couldn't Function Without My Trackball Mouse

I realized the other day that most of my friends are still using the "classic" style of computer mouse, the kind you have to move all over the desk. I haven't used one of those in years.

It's hard to imagine having to physically move a mouse around to play games, trade forex, design graphics, or even surf the internet. Especially with two 22" monitors. I often need to move the pointer across an enormous chunk of space really quick, and having to move a mouse around on my desk would drive me mad. At least the newer optical/laser models had better sensitivity, and got rid of those ridiculous mouse "pads" from back in the day, and the dust-collecting rubber balls. Those seem like humorous relics of a different era. Stories to tell our kids.

Anyway, I just want you to know that my trackball mouse is awesome, and warn you about some issues with other models.

Honestly, a lot of trackball mice are horrible. The biggest problem is many of them require you to use your fingers to move the ball rather than your thumb. This is a very poor design if you ask me, having the ball where your fingertips rest. As you can see by looking at your fingers, they have hinged joints that move back and forth in a straight line, and will cramp after a few minutes of side-to-side motion. However, your thumb is jointed differently and moves in all directions. Fingers are better for clicking buttons, so why would you want them on the trackball?

The most bizarre design has the ball stuck right in the middle, under your palm, with buttons around the edges. Moving the ball around with your palm requires you to move your entire arm, which is no advantage over traditional mice. It's the most spastic way to move anything, ever. And since your whole hand is moving around to spin the trackball, your fingers are also moving around instead of resting on any buttons. If you see one of these, throw it in the nearest lake or river, quick.

If you want to try a trackball mouse, get the Logitech Trackman Wheel. When you rest your hand on this mouse, your thumb lands on the ball, and your 1st and 2nd fingers each rest on a button (with a scroll wheel/3rd button in between). You can whip the cursor across a vast distance instantly, yet you'll be amazed by the precise tracking. The ball pops out easily so you can wipe off your potato chip grime. You don't even need the included Logitech software, as your O/S mouse settings are more than adequate to fine tune it. Straight out of the box it works on any Mac or PC. It's a right-handed USB device, and also comes with a ps/2 port adapter.

Check your favorite online store, or go here: Tiger Direct

Some Sites Are Irritating On Laptops

Web sites should be designed so they are easy to use on all browsers, on all platforms, at all resolutions. But many sites are very irritating to use on a laptop.

The biggest problem is wasted space at the top of a page. A good example of this is mapquest.com vs. maps.google.com.

Along the very top, Google maps has a small line of text links and the search box, and about 3/4 of the page is a map. No scrolling required. Brilliant, since that's why you go to a map site, right?

On the other hand, I see nothing on Mapquest other than their huge logo and buttons across the top, some links that take you off the map page, several search boxes, and the top inch of a map. Plus a massive ad to the right, which literally takes up a quarter of the screen. So I type a location, but when the result comes up, I have to scroll down to see the map. Then scroll back up to search again. Then scroll back down. This wouldn't matter on a home computer, with a mouse and bigger monitor, but when I'm using my laptop in a car or other awkward place (the only reason I ever got a laptop), I don't have time to screw around scrolling up and down for no good reason. I'm not lounging around on a couch like some college kid. I want the map.

Another problem with some sites is when you have a page you sign into, and the cursor is NOT automatically in the text box. So you have to click the cursor into the box before you can type anything. Go to Twitter or Facebook and the cursor is waiting for you in the sign-in box. But go to Compete.com and there's no cursor at all. This site has 3 boxes where you type sites to compare, but no cursor anywhere. Pressing the TAB key does nothing, the cursor simply doesn't exist until you click within a text box. This can be solved with one line of code.

Now the unfortunate part of all this... I noticed that some sites I've built are pretty irritating to use on a laptop as well. When designing sites on a 22" monitor, it's easy to get lost in that environment and forget that few people have such a big display.

I went back through all the sites I've built over the past few years and reconsidered some things. I got thinking - how many visitors would be using laptops? This might vary depending on the site, and analytics show it's a small percentage of visitors, but I decided to err on the side of caution and make some simple changes.

I changed some sites so the header area was smaller, and more useful content was shown immediately. I made some text bigger, some smaller. Some navigation buttons were moved. Navigation buttons that work better down the left side are now nearer the top and visible without scrolling. These changes made a few sites easier to use on a laptop, but they also made them cleaner and more immediately useful on any size monitor. If you are a designer, I encourage you to use a small laptop display in your development, it's a good tool to help keep sites as simple and useful as possible for the end user.

An Inevitable Look At Google Wave

Google seems convinced that real-time communication will change the world. As opposed to the current, and absolutely intolerable, 3-second delay in uploading blog posts, emails, or tweets.

(Some of my friends have actually discovered something called the "telephone", which is truly brilliant for "real-time" communication. I've even heard tales of multiple people using this device to chat at the same time! Don't look up "Skype" or "iChat" unless you are prepared to be amazed.)

- OMG, they're having a live chat!? That's MAGIC!
- Build your own blog... you mean like Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, and a dozen others? Amazing!
- Embed stuff like videos, pictures, links, and feeds into your blog? Uh... you mean like Facebook, and Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, and a dozen others? Incredible!
- Share photos? Sure, I'll believe that when I see it! Wow, you people must be on drugs!
- Real-time collaboration tools? You mean like the business software that has been around for years, that only a tiny fraction of the market ever has, or ever will, use? Genius!

Sites like Plaxo and Friendfeed already aggregate your content from multiple other sites. Almost all of the blog and social sites I've joined have asked for a dozen other logins during the signup process, so I could do everything from that site without logging into the others. All my blogs, messages, pictures, video, audio, and friend updates from all over the web can all be organized by any of these sites. Kind of like Wave, except they really exist.

Pretty soon Google will "develop" something that is simply Skype, but they'll have a big press release, call it Google SpeakBonanza, and tell everyone it's groundbreaking for some reason.

Here's why I think Wave will suck by trying to cram everything you could ever do into one window:

1) If your browser crashes, everything you are doing crashes all at once. How dumb is that?
2) It takes away the freedom of being able to move any window anywhere on your desktop (two desktops in my case).

It won't make anything faster, or easier, or safer, or cheaper, or more fun. I honestly don't understand what they're thinking. It's lame, limiting, and a step backwards compared to what already exists.

Or maybe there's something I'm not understanding. We'll see what happens over the coming months.

Quick Update of Big News

Here's some of the biggest news of the past couple of weeks:

Facebook is implementing real-time search, and also just acquired FriendFeed.

Yahoo & Microsoft have formally announced plans to merge their Bing and Yahoo search services somehow. Everyone has seen this coming, but they've finally confirmed it.

Google's Webmaster Central team says of the "Caffeine" update: "It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions." As with every algorithm update, confusion and bizarre assumptions abound. Now Matt will spend a few weeks answering dopey questions as usual.

Macs At Twitter, Social CEOs, Gmail, Youtube...

Here's a look behind the scenes at Twitter, highlighting their exclusive use of Macs and Apple software.

Here's an article about how the elite Fortune 100 CEOs basically don’t use social media.

Gmail got some new features. The official Gmail blog has an overview. As usual, Google makes a huge deal out of another microscopic and potentially useless update, this time the ability to label messages.

YouTube lets you customize your channel page. So far you can change colors and add a header and background. Check the official YouTube video blog for more news.