After Mondays DDoS attack that affected an estimated 5 million customers, I think everyone learned that we are all vulnerable and need to take the necessary precautions to protect our sites. Just like if you were to own a brick-and-mortar shop, you would be sure to lock your doors, hide your cash and possibly invest in a security system.

So what are your options in an online world? Here are a few things you can do to keep your site safe. Read the rest of this article »

Beanstalk provides private and secure hosting for version control platforms Subversion and Git. It’s great for collaborating on software and deploying to live via FTP/SFTP, removing the need for SSH access.

For deploying, the first step is to create your development environment.

This simply consists of entering your FTP details.

Once this is setup, you can then manually or automatically deploy to live.

Select your revision and the transfer will go into a queue and should take just a few minutes.

Support is great too, any issues that have cropped up were solved quickly. If you’re looking for version control with easy deployment, we highly recommend Beanstalk!

We’ve put together a Tumblr theme based on Back & Forth, take a look at Clean Detail, it’s a relatively customisable theme that’s clean and simple.

When developing a website it’s important to keep all your users in mind. It was only a few years ago when large companies would display the message, “you must use Internet Explorer to view this website”, thankfully those days are long gone. Most businesses now work hard to give all their users a consistent experience.

One PinchHost customer found that 20% of their visitors are using Internet Explorer 6, he was running the latest version of Internet Explorer, which at the time was version 7. Essentially his CSS was rendering adversely in IE6, the main content was pushed under the sidebar, presenting the page as primarily white space. He had therefore alienated over 20% of his visitors/potential customers. A lot of web designers refuse to make their website compatible with old technologies such as IE6. But the fact is, people are still using ancient browsers. If you’re running an e-commerce website, then you simply can’t afford to ignore these visitors.

There are simply too many browsers spread over multiple operating systems, all with long version histories. As a developer or website owner, you’d be mad to install everything internally for testing. Which is where BrowserShots.org comes in handy. Enter your website address and choose from a range of browsers which have been installed on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and BSD.

Processing usually takes around 30 minutes depending on the number of browsers you select. You’ll then be able to access your screenshots, quickly ascertaining which configurations are displaying abnormally.

The service even allows you to select a preferred screen resolution, allowing you to check your design on an 800×600 resolution (among others), which although seemingly redundant, 800×600 is still used by 4% of users according to W3Schools. The Firefox extension Window Resizer is also useful for testing your site in standard resolutions.

Safari on the iPhone is gaining traction, you can preview your design with iPhoney.