I have probably deleted a lot of valuable emails.
Why?
Not because they are in the spam bucket, but because they look like spam. Like most business owners, I get tens to hundreds of emails a day. (Of course, having forty email accounts doesn’t help). Many of them are spam; many are not. The spam catcher does a decent job as it rarely gives a false positive on emails. But I digress.
In order to filter out more spam, I scan the ‘subject’ line and ‘from’ line of each email. If the subject line looks spammy, out it goes. If I do not recognize the ‘from’, out it goes…and therein lies the problem.
I have had many emails sent by legitimate companies both as initial emails and emails in response to one I sent. BUT, the ‘from’ name is unrecognizable. Most of the time, it is some person’s name. Period. Out it goes.
One innocuous example was I put a hold on a book at our local library. Several days later I received an email with someone’s name on the ‘from’ line who I didn’t recognize. I accidentally clicked on the message and it was from our library. I sent an email back to them explaining what happened and suggested they include the library name in the ‘from’ line. Next time I put a book on hold, the email notice had the library name included on the ‘from’ line.
Oh, if the email looks legitimate, I do check the ‘from’ email address. Knowing this can be spoofed, when I read the content, I check the links, if any. Sometimes the links will indicate one thing but link to an unknown, spam URL.
The Internet in 2009 brought us:
Email
- 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
- 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
- 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
- 100 million – New email users since the year before.
- 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
- 92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.
- 24% – Increase in spam since last year.
- 200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).
Websites
- 234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
- 47 million – Added websites in 2009.
Web servers
- 13.9% – The growth of Apache websites in 2009.
- -22.1% – The growth of IIS websites in 2009.
- 35.0% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2009.
- 384.4% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2009.
- -72.4% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2009.
Domain names
- 81.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2009.
- 12.3 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2009.
- 7.8 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2009.
- 76.3 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
- 187 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2009).
- 8% – The increase in domain names since the year before.
Internet users
- 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
- 18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
- 738 million – Internet users in Asia.
- 418 million – Internet users in Europe.
- 252 million – Internet users in North America.
- 179 million – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
- 67 million – Internet users in Africa.
- 57 million – Internet users in the Middle East.
- 21 million – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.
Social media
- 126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
- 84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
- 27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
- 57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
- 350 million – People on Facebook.
- 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
- 500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.
Images
- 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
- 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
- 30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.
Videos
- 1 billion – The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
- 12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
- 924 million – Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009).
- 182 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
- 82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
- 39.4% – YouTube online video market share (USA).
- 81.9% – Percentage of embedded videos on blogs that are YouTube videos.
Web browsers
The percent market share of popular web browsers:
| Browser |
Percentage |
| Internet Explorer |
62.7% |
| Firefox |
24.6% |
| Chrome |
4.6% |
| Safari |
4.5% |
| Opera |
2.4% |
| Other |
1.2% |
Malicious software
- 148,000 – New zombie computers created per day (used in botnets for sending spam, etc.)
- 2.6 million – Amount of malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc.)
- 921,143 – The number of new malicious code signatures added by Symantec in Q4 2009.
The statistics were brought to you from pingdom.com
I was debugging PHP and the error/warning messages did not concur with the source code. After a bit of sleuthing, I found out that I was stripping out comments when I was publishing the code. Turning off ‘Optimize HTML during publishing’ fixed the problem.
BTW, I was using Expression Web but this tip is applicable to most IDEs.
Microsoft released Expression Web SP2.
Download Expression Web SP2.
SP2 fixes a number of issues, the most important being erasure of PHP code while editing or copying.
Installation just takes a minute.
I started using Thunderbird portable so I could take it between computers and not have to keep recreating beaucoup amount of emails.
The problem was Thunderbird was using 100% of the cpu.
After a few frustrating hours of search and experiment, I finally figured out the problem: AVG antivirus 9.0.
I ended up disabling the email scanner; but it still scans the emails?!
Hopefully this problem will be fixed soon.
I had to install an msi file on Vista today. An msi extension means the file is a Windows Installer file.
When I right-clicked and selected ‘install’ it failed. So I right-clicked again, thinking it had to be run as administrator, and there was no ‘run as administrator’ option.
Fortunately, there is a workaround.
1. Open up the command prompt in ‘run as administrator’ mode.
2. Navigate to the directory where the msi file is located.
3. msiexec /a “The Big App.msi”
The /a will install the file as an administrator.
Smartlab Software hosting is featuring a part of its hosting package on a regular basis. Included is a detailed explanation of the feature and how it can benefit you. Fantastico scripts, security, domains, backups, email, software, services, and databases will be covered.
I found out my news feed was not working for my WordPress blog news.smartlabsoftware.com.
The feed is supposed to be directed to feedburner. The feedburner feed worked fine. But…
I typed in the feed path: news.smartlabsoftware.com/feed/ and whoa! A 404 not found.
First I blamed the plug-in. Not that.
After some research, I found out there was no .htaccess file in the blog’s root directory. Nor on my copy on my computer. I copied one from another blog site and the feed started working. I used the generic .htaccess that appears when WordPress is installed. I’m surprised WordPress did not recreate it. I’m on WordPress 2.9.
BTW, a nice feed to subscribe to is the FeedMedic alert. It is at the bottom of your home page for feedburner. It alerts you of any feed problems. Nice.
I tried to get a WordPress blog claimed on Technorati and it failed.
One fix suggestion was to remove the trailing slash from the feed and the blog URL. That did not work.
The next suggestion I tried was making the feeds full text instead of summary. That did not work.
Technorati says in its instructions to add the claim code to an existing post and the crawler will find it. Therein lies the problem.
I added the claim code to an existing article. The article updated but not the feed. I ended up writing a text post with the claim code on a separate line. I made sure I could see the code in the feed, the I claimed it. Successfully, I might add.
BTW, my feed goes to Feedburner which should not make a difference.
Here is the browser market share for Oct 2009:
| Browser |
Percent Share |
| Internet Explorer |
63.6% |
| Firefox |
24.7% |
| Safari |
4.4% |
| Chrome |
3.9% |
| Opera |
2.3% |
Opera, around since 1996, has not made any headway. Neither has Chrome.
