HelloARI logo: vinyl signs and identity design web design«    sign design«    blog«    contact« 
USE MY IMAGINATION
web design and wordpress development 94114

san frnacisco web design

1Password vs RoboForm

By Ari Salomon | Published: August 9, 2011

Remembering a different password for each site is an impossible task. If you use the same login credentials at most every site you are just asking for trouble that will eventually catch up to you. I started with a text file that had passwords that were partly obscured with a clever formula that was actually too easy to figure out. Eventually someone will steal your laptop or hack into your computer and do an automatic search across all your files to find that goldmine of passwords.

Encrypting a text file as a Word doc is a step above. Using a Google doc is an interesting option since Google docs are encrypted in the browser but still doesn’t offer many features compared to a real password manager.

A password manager is a simple concept. It is software that stores all your usernames and passwords to web sites, applications, and more in a local encrypted database. That database is protected by a single “master” password.

Let me tell you about both and why I prefer 1passwd.

1Password Review: The Mac OS X Password Manager

Here’s the key list of features:

  • Stores logins to all online accounts. Logins are available in all browsers on all your different computers (Mac and PC) and smart phones (iPhone and Android).  DropBox sync lets you  edit your data in one place and it becomes updated in all the other locations.
  • Stores “secure notes” (any text information that you want to save securely). I really like this feature – in fact I put my old password text file in here so I can mine it for old data that I have not yet manually added as individual logins.
  • There are special areas to store software licenses, serial numbers and product codes.
  • There is also a “wallet” area to store credit cards and passport and other information – you can even save a scan of those kinds of documents.
  • The real power of 1Password comes when you put the database itself in a shared environment like DropBox.com. that allows you to sync all your logins in all your browsers on all machines (laptop and desktop) as well as all mobile devices. It’s all backed up and synced all the time. Welcome to the future – now if they had a workable biometric option in the iPhone i would not have to enter my long master password so often and that would smooth out the process.

This software works really well. I can’t really say if RoboForm or 1Password is better for your unique situation but I think 1Password is more actively maintained and provides broader support and a wider range of features. They both get the job done without having to think about them.

Password Manager Pricing

I learned about RoboForm years ago but they didn’t have a Mac version. My brother used it and I was really impressed. RoboForm is free for up to 10 saved logins – then you need to by a license for each Mac/PC you use. Now it’s $10/year – not alot of money but of course you have to keep paying. See below for more options. 1Password starts at $31.99 $49.99but that’s a one time payment and you get a regular stream of free updates that give you access to lots of new features.

Roboform versions

  • RoboForm Desktop for Mac: $29.95 one time fee. Well, after years of only being made for the PC now Roboform is available for the Mac.
  • RoboForm Desktop 7: $29.95 one time fee. This is for WIndows 7.
  • RoboForm2Go 7: $39.95 one time fee. An interesting option – store your Roboform data on a USB stick.
  • RoboForm Everywhere:$9.95 yearly subscription.  If you want to use Roboform on your iPhone/iPad/Andriod then you need this version. The mobile apps are free but you must use the desktop app to create content (Logins, Identities, Safenotes). RoboForm for iPhone/iPad cannot Save or Edit Logins

1Password versions

1Password is available for Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad, and Android.  1Password is totally compatible with OS X 10.7 Lion and the 10.8 Mountain Lion as well as 10.6.

The team at Agile that makes 1Password is very active about staying on top of all the changes in operating systems and browsers so everything works everywhere all the time.

Make sure and search Google for the terms 1Password Coupon — you can sometimes find significant discount coupon codes (Desktop apps or bundles only, generally these are not available for iPhone/iOS apps)

Bottom Line: Review of 1Password and Roboform

  • RoboForm is less expensive but not as fully featured as 1Password
  • Some users out there might want both – one for sharing work passwords with a work group and one for sharing personal passwords with family. At this point neither product allows for separating logins into groups.
  • If you have one of these tools it’s worth upgrading to sync the various versions together
Posted in Product Reviews | 4 Responses

WooCommerce, WPEC, Gravity Forms and other WordPress Plugins for Ecommerce

By Ari Salomon | Published: August 2, 2011

Updated 4/2014

So many options out there – how to choose? First, educate yourself on the difference between a self-hosted Ecommerce solution (an Ecommerce plugin like WPEC or a dedicated solution like Magento or Zen cart) vs a hosted Ecommerce solution (like Shopify, Volusion, Bigcartel, Tictail) and decide what features you really need before you select a product. Each option has a different cost structure.

Hosted Ecommerce solutions
Most  hosted solutions charge all the transaction fees associated with a payment gateway plus extra fees – they take their own cut of each transaction. Shopify offers that option but also can act as it’s own gateway so you can avoid the extra 1% fee they used to charge to all users. Hosting and other monthly fees are generally higher than self-hosted solutions but up front and maintenance costs are much lower. Also, hosted solutions usually have final checkout take place off your site (on a subdomain like mysite.shopify.com) – some do this more gracefully than others but it’s not ideal. I mention Shopify since they have much better templates than most other similar services I am aware of and now offer the option of hosting checkout on your own URL for “plus” level users (custom SSL certificate are part of the $995/mo plan so it won’t be relevant for most shops).

If you want a fully integrated self-hosted solution then a WordPress plugin might be a great option. You get all the power of a WordPress site without having to “tack on” the store with a separate software package (like Magento).

WooCommerce and WP e-Commerce (WPEC)
These developers both offer the basic code as a free plugin. You’ll need to pay to have a fully featured store but by offering the free option they are sticking closer to the spirit of Open Source software and, most importantly, the plugin will get more community testing and input so that’s a good recipe to grow strong over time.

I used WP e-Commerce for 4 projects and Woo for 8. WPEC is outdated and feature-poor compared to Woo. There are some bugs and the code is evolving slowly.  To me WooCommerce is the platform with the most momentum behind it and I use it exclusively now.

Both platforms have a similar set of useful core features (but Woo executes them all with better design, usability and consistency):

  • Different pricing (and stock control) for variations of one product
  • Tax options are strong but do not support tax variations by city. That is a big issue here in California. there is a new paid subscription option to solve this issue offered by TaxNOW but it’s really expensive at $.50 per transaction – that is what they charge to calculate tax for you.
  • there are many free plugins and more paid ones out there.
  • Lots of shipping integration options
  • Lots of gateway connection options (I usually use PayPal Pro – it has a simple fee structure)

WooCommerce is  more expensive since most sites need to buy a few extensions (@$79 first year and half that for subsequent years for most) with recurring yearly fees and WPEC just needs the one time  $47 “gold cart” payment.

Other Options: 

Gravity Forms
If you just need an order form but not a whole shopping cart then this is a really simple solution that can easily accept and manipulate other kinds of non-purchase information since it’s got all the easy-to-use form building elements right there. You can even make ‘buy now” buttons that will prepopulate the form from other pages (although not like a cart where it will remember those settings from one page reload to the next). Gravity forms can do fancy things like connect to a MailChimp account so users can automatically sign up for a mailing list. Or even turn a purchase into a post – that would take custom code  to do in a real Ecommerce system. This solution is limited to a fairly small number of products although if you can design a compact form or split the form into pages (a built-in feature) then “small” could mean hundreds of products. Payment gets finalized at PayPal or stripe.

UPDATE: Gravity Forms now supports PayPal Pro so you can take credit card information on your site.

Examples of how I’ve used Gravity Forms:

Shopp
Seems to be the main competition to WPEC. There is no free version. I see an equal number of complaints about bugs but I have never used it.

PHPurchase
This one lets you enter some products and easily add a “Buy Now” button you can put on any page. It doesn’t have category-based layouts so it’s not really for managing a full store. There are a few plugins out there that will automatically generate PayPal buttons also.

Jigo eCommerce
This is a new offering. These folks were tired of working with Shopp so made their own system. Seems feature rich for a 1.0 version but I have no experience with it.

Some lists to learn more

The best place to buy Ecommerce WordPress themes for WPEC is Store Front Themes. I have used a few of their themes and they are really clean and modern.

***

Namecheap.com

Posted in Web Design, WordPress, WordPress WooCommerce | Tagged , , , | 2 Responses

Yelp: How to Respond to Negative Reviews in an Age Yearning for Authenticity

By Ari Salomon | Published: July 30, 2011

 

I’ve had a couple clients recently who came to me with the issue of how to deal with negative reviews on Yelp. Yelp is such a powerful resource for consumers and can be a really great tool to build your business. It’s brought me alot of work and I appreciate that.

But negative reviews suck. We are are talking about small businesses—real people with real feelings who have alot of “skin” in this game.

I’ll briefly touch on 3 important points in dealing with negative reviews:

First important point is that no one trusts all positive reviews. So it’s ok to have some negative reviews in there.

Second important point to remember is that negative reviews won’t last forever. Reviews (both good and bad ones) filter on and off a Yelp business profile based on a secret formula. The formula is all about assuring  the authenticity of the reviewer and authenticity is what Yelp has built its entire business around. No one knows exactly what that formula is but here are some factors…

Yelp Filter Triggers – for removing reviews. Some of these are from my direct observations of my account (today I’m at 19 reviews with 22 filtered) and my clients accounts and other are from reading other postings

  • Status of reviewer – The biggest reason a review will get filtered is if the reviewer is a new Yelp user and doesn’t have an account that has been around for a while. Related factors:
    • Number of reviews (You don’t have to be an “Elite” with 1000s of reviews but that gives a sense of the scale)
    • Timing of reviews (If there are 5 at once that is not as authentic as 1 per month for 5 months)
    • Number of friends/followers
    • Profile photo (did the reviewer upload a photo of themselves)
  • Status of review — If a review is marked as “useful”, “funny” or “cool” by other authentic users it may stick around for longer.
  • Time-distribution-based – If a business recently got a negative review and then starts quickly receiving positive reviews, these reviews may be filtered
  • Location-based – A user’s location can trigger a filter. For example, if a business is located in San Francisco and received reviews from New York it is possible Yelp will filter this review
  • Frequency – Yelp Businesses that receive small quantities of reviews and then have a quick increase in positive reviews may trigger the filter

It’s never easy to read negative things about your business on the Internet.

Third important point(s): some advice from the Official Yelp blog on how to respond when it happens:

  • Step 1: Stay Calm. Give yourself a cooling down period.
  • Step 2. Respond Privately If you haven’t already, unlock your business listing on Yelp.
  • Optional Step 3. Respond Publicly

via Yelp Official Blog: Tactics for Responding to Online Critics.

Posted in Product Reviews, Web Design | Tagged | Leave a comment

Site Speed – Analytics Help track WordPress pageload speed

By Ari Salomon | Published: July 22, 2011

My favorite plugin for tracking analytics is Google Analyticator. I noticed today it has an update that enables the new Google Analytics feature called “Site Speed”.

I will report soon on how (and how well) this feature works as more data is gathered but for now my big tip is that you have to enable the “New Version” of google Analtyics in order to even see the speed reports. I spent some time banging my head against that brick wall – so now you don’t have to. Look for this:

 

The Site Speed report measures the page load time (latency) for a sample of pageviews on your website pages. It appears in the Content section of the Analytics reports. With this report, you can see which pages load the fastest and which ones are slower. You can also analyze your overall site speed along other important dimensions in order to learn how your site speed relates to a variety of factors.

via Site Speed – Analytics Help.

Posted in WordPress | 1 Response

Eco-friendly office products at EcoVerte

By Ari Salomon | Published: July 18, 2011

A standard plastic pen takes 1 million years to decompose in a landfill.

That was a sobering thought for me as I consider how to sell the remainder of the plastic pens I made for the  SFMOMA ShadowShop show.

EcoVerte has a better alternative.

Our Biodegradable Collection is made from a material called Polylactide (PLA), which is derived from the roots of a potato plant. While it feels and performs similarly to plastic, it has a significant advantage: it is biodegradable and compostable. In about a year, a majority of the components will biodegrade in soil or home compost (Under the following conditions: 133 – 140° F and 80 – 90% humidity).

I have not tried their prodcuts yet but they are recommended by carbonfund.org — let me know your experiences shopping for green office products. I recommend this 100% post-consumer recycled paper from Amazon.com (I have no affiliation with Amazon FYI).

Posted in Inventions | 1 Response

How to Flush the DNS cache in Mac OSX for WordPress

By Ari Salomon | Published: July 11, 2011

Mac OSX uses a time-saving DNS cache. It’s generally invisible ot the user and helps speed things up a bit. If you are setting up a new WordPress self hosted site (or other CMS like Drupal) this can prevent you from being able to conenct to your new site – you might have to wait many hours after configuring that new DNS nameserver. This is more of an issue when moving a site from one host to another than setting up a new site.

The cache will still serve the old ip address of the site, even if the DNS server already has the new ip address in its configuration. To override the cache, and request the latest information with the authoritive DNS server, you can flush the DNS cache.It will quickly rebuild itself

To flush (or empty/delete) the DNS cache, open a Terminal window and enter the following command: sudo dscacheutil -flushdns

note that “sudo dscacheutil -flushdns” does not work.

the old mac os command was
sudo lookupd -flushcache

but you will get a response of:
sudo: lookupd: command not found
with any Tiger OS (or older).

In Leopard, dscacheutil replaces most of lookupd‘s functionality. It allows you to do many things: flush or view caches, view Directory Service configuration information, and evaluate cache statistics.

Posted in Web Design, WordPress | 1 Response

Go Daddy concurrent processes and Apple Mail

By Ari Salomon | Published: July 5, 2011

Can someone say “SlowDaddy”?

WPMU has an interesting article about how using Apple Mail (aka mail.app) can slow down your site since it keeps a connection to the server open all the time. It might be a hint at why my iPhone mail app only works on 3g and not on WiFi but that problem is still not resolved.

I’ve had lots of problems with Go Daddy and WordPress and I wonder if this issue of concurrent processes is part of that problem.

I called Go Daddy and found they offer 50-300 processes depending on what kind of account you have. Much better than the numbers mentioned in that article: “1&1 shared hosting packages allow for 16 simultaneous processes. BlueHost limits IMAP connections to 20 at a time. Site5 only allows for 5 processes at one time”

Go Daddy limit on concurrent processes (or “concurrent connections” aka “web processes”)

Linux Economy: 50 connections
Linux Deluxe: 100 connections
Linux Premium/Unlimited/Ultimate: 200 connections
Windows limits are similar

4GH (ALSO CALLED “GRID”) accounts allow many more connections. This number varies, but is at the following minimum amounts:

Linux 4GH limits:
Linux 4GH Economy: 150 connections or more
Linux 4GH Deluxe: 300 connections or more
Linux 4GH Premium/Unlimited/Ultimate: 600 connections or more

more details here

BTW I got a nice description of what their new 4gh “grid” hosting is about: it reads data from multiple sources at once kind of like a “Strip” configured RAID array. Also referred to as “multi source reading and redundancy”.

 

Leave a comment and tell me your experience with Go Daddy in general, Go Daddy and WordPress and concurrent connections (vs concurrent processes vs  simultaneous processes).  If you are an elephant lover (or an elephant?) you should know about Go Daddy’s Bob Parsons infamous elephant hunt. It made me want to switch and I was recommended to try elephant-friendly namecheap. so far I like them – they have far fewer marketing annoyances when buying and managing domains.

 

also: a great post about GoDaddy and WordPress security

 

Posted in Web Design | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

TiGr Bike lock

By Ari Salomon | Published: July 2, 2011

Check out this really innovative new bike lock. It’s longer but much lighter and stronger than a common U-lock. They have a fun video where they attack it with many kinds of tools:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbodIOMJfcE

Sounds like it will be available soon. More at tigrlock.com

Posted in Inventions | 1 Response

WP fix: Strange “’” characters appearing in WordPress

By Ari Salomon | Published: June 23, 2011

I recently had encoding problems with apostrophes (‘), quotation marks (“) and hyphens (-) as well as double spaces. They’d be displayed as question marks or “’” or “”.

Mr Chow has an easy fix that worked perfectly.

Turns out that the fix is really simple. By default, the WordPress config files now set your character encoding to UTF-8. The solution is to open up wp-config.php file and located these lines:

define(’DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);
and either remove the “utf8″ string so the first line becomes:
define(’DB_CHARSET’,”);
define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);

at the same time i took a moment to update the secret keys in the wp-config file with ‘salt‘ to bring that security layer up to date.

via Strange characters after WordPress upgrade | Trevin Chow.

Posted in WordPress | 4 Responses

Prey: Free anti-theft solution for laptops

By Ari Salomon | Published: June 20, 2011

 

Stop “praying” and instal this great free app that helps you get info on yhour stolen laptop (and other devices).

It will give you location info and take images with the built in camera so you have a chance to track down the thief.

It’s similar to “Hidden” but better since there is a really useful free version.

I installed it and did a test and it seems to work perfectly.

Prey lets you keep track of your phone or laptop at all times, and will help you find it if it ever gets lost or stolen. It’s lightweight, open source software, and free for anyone to use. And it just works.

via Open source anti-theft solution for Mac, PCs & Phones – Prey.

Posted in Product Reviews | 1 Response
© 1996 - 2025
contact  |  links  |  rss