Web Hosting for Designers

Web hosting for designers, sounds good right? It’s exactly that. I made the transition from GoDaddy to Site5 and couldn’t be happier. GoDaddy’s interface was sluggish, confusing, and at most times… completely pointless. A friend recommended that I try out Site5 for my hosting. The prices were higher then GoDaddy (price is the only thing that kept me there) and I couldn’t find a whole lot of user reviews on it. But after spending a few minutes poking around the interface, easily finding my way, I saw no problem in paying a little extra for reliable web hosting.

The biggest catalyst to the move was the simple migration that they will do for you. I had a lot of trouble switching over my DNS on GoDaddy and even more trouble migrating my information once the site is down. Site5 handles all that for you (for absolutely free) and takes the worry about out of moving your stuff.

Site5 offers packages that make it easy to install WordPress or other popular CMSs, get direct SSH or cPanel access and even IMAP and POP3 email options. All said and done it was a lean $40 to get my site off of garbage GoDaddy and to a web provider that was worth the money. Check them out here.

A virus is any kind of malicious code written to benefit another third party, or sometimes even disrupt your computing experience. Most people assume that a virus can damage their computer physically and permanently, but this is not the case. Even in a worst case scenario a computer infected with a virus can be returned to its original state one way or another. What a virus is most likely to do, is run in the background, so that you can’t detect it, and benefit some other 3rd party in some way. Sometimes this is financial. Imagine a virus that pops up an advertisement every hour on your computer, you can’t stop it, you don’t know why it’s happening, and every once in a while you accidentally click it. This means the person who wrote the virus to show those ads, is making money off of you. An even worst virus could secretly connect you to a chat room with the creator of the virus and anything you type will be sent to them. Meaning any credit card conversations, chats, or documents you may have had open could be vulnerable.

Now a lot of people will be surprised as to how one actually gets a virus. Thanks to movies a common interpretation of a virus is a digital worm flying through cyber space that magically infects your computer. This is wrong. Most often people infect themselves. Whether by downloading another application from an illegitimate source such as p2p networks that has been turned into a virus, or sharing files with friends that are infected or have downloaded such files. Also installing various toolbars, and games that may have such functionality built in. More often then not you will not even know you have a virus.

Now Mac’s are inherently more secure than Windows machines do to the way they are designed, but this does not leave you 100% protected. You are still vulnerable to downloading an infected file or receiving one from someone you know.

Below is a list of the top options to protect yourself while on your Mac:

1. Norton Internet Security MAC Edition – The most trusted brand in online protection. Symantec’s Norton Antivirus is an all in one solution to keeping yourself and your information safe online.

2. Norton Antivirus MAC Edition. A more light weight and affordable version of the above, perfectly acceptable slightly slimmer version of the above. My personal choice in protection for my Mac.

3. ClamXav. A free and open source antivirus. Doesn’t have the advanced protection features of Norton, nor the active monitoring. But decent enough to use if it’s the only option you have.

4. iAntiVirus. A new shareware antivirus program for Mac which offers competitive protection compared to ClamXav.

Though some would say you could get away without using an Antivirus program on your Mac, it is often better to be safe then sorry. If anyone has any other recommendations feel free to leave them in the comments and i will add them to this list.

Check out the Ignite Realtime Openfire webpage and download the server. Once you install the app you will have an additional control panel in the “System Preferences” pane for Openfire. There you will be able to administrate your Openfire server.

A common issue that people have while installing Openfire, is that once installed the administration panel wont let you login. The fix to this is simple, just restart the Openfire service, and then restart the system. Once you’re back in you should be able to login without any issues.

Good luck and let me know what you think of this service in the comments.

Last.fm is an online radio/”scrobbling” app. Basically in addition to providing great internet radio, it also keeps stats on everything you listen to. First lets look at the online radio portion of the service. Last.fm has made available an app that will sit in your dock and allow you to play music just like in iTunes. Create a customized personal radio station for yourself by first defining a “tag” or an “artist” or maybe even just based off of your current listening preferences. Last.fm will go out and retrieve a small playlist of playable songs. The best part though, you can skip unlimited amounts of times, and even replay songs that you’ve already listened to (to a certain extent). The sound quality? …it’s good! No worse then Pandora or any of the other big competitors. The scrobbling aspect of Last.fm is also pretty convenient. Since it tracks everything you listen to, eventually it will generate weekly charts with your current favorite artists and suggestions. In my opinion, the AI for “recommended music” based off of your statistics is pretty good.

Lets be friends.

Go to the Dropbox website, and download the client. Fortunately it is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, meaning you can share your files regardless of what platform you’re confined to. After you install the client just enter your username and password and you’re set. Do this on all your machines!

You can also set up shares with friends. Think of how easy it would be to share pictures, movies and music!

BitTorrent

Most likely the largest and most widespread form of file sharing on the internet at the moment, BitTorrent allows users to find Torrents on specially designed Torrent Search engines and download software from users sharing that Torrent. Very simple to use, and our personal favorite. Here are our favorite BitTorrent Apps for Mac.

µTorrent

µTorrent is a tiny easy to use powerhouse of a BitTorrent client. Seriously, it is so light weight and fast that you will probably never want to use anything else. Get it here.

Tomato Torrent

A Torrent client that is built on the original BitTorrent client, Tomato Torrent is very small, and allows customization of nearly all of the available Torrenting options. Get it here.

Transmission

Transmission is an open source client written entirely from scratch. Its popular among the community and has a great support base, with clients available not only for Mac, but for *nix as well. Get it here.

Our favorite Torrent Trackers: isoHunt and TorrentBox

Gnutella

Available originally from Nullsoft, Gnutella has been around since early 2000 and is technically the largest file sharing network on the internet, with an estimated market share of over 40% (figure from 2007).

Acquisition

A much more noob friendly App for file sharing on Macs. Once connected to the Gnutella network you will have access to literally billions of files. This client has been around for a while, is constantly updated and is a true Mac App, being elegant, simple and fast. Get it here.

FrostWire

A simple, free and open source Gnutella client for Mac. Integrates with the OS very well, and provides all the features a user would want when browsing the Gnutella network. Did we mention its beautiful too? Get it here.

If you have any suggestions for this list, let me know in the comments.

This post doesn’t just apply to Mac users, but anyone out there using the Google Chrome browser. If you switched over to Chrome from Firefox, or any other browser for that matter, you probably were disappointed by the minimalistic features that come with Chrome. Good news is there is no need to be sad anymore, Google Chrome has support for extensions, though it may not be obvious. Here’s how to trick out your browser.

Head on over to Google Chrome Extensions, find the extension you like, and hit the “Add to Chrome” button. Chrome will prompt you if you would like to install the said extensions, and that is it. That’s all there is to it. Here are some of the extensions that i found most useful:

• Kuber PageRank Checker – Get any websites Google PageRank next to your address bar.
• Rocker Gestures – Add gestures to your browser, just like you had in Firefox!
• Custom New Tab Page – Customize your new tab page.
• AdBlock+ – Remember the Firefox AdBlock plugin? Get it for Chrome!

Feel free to post your favorite extensions in the comments.

Have you heard of Google Chrome? It’s the new browser from Google. Available on Windows for almost a year now, yet us Mac users have had to live with a information screen telling us that it will be available shortly. Well, its time to stop waiting, and jump on board the gravy train because Chromium is available now, and it is fast, user friendly, and in my experience significantly more stable then Mozilla Firefox. Plus, the install wont take you more then a minute, i promise.

UPDATE: Google Chrome Beta is officially out now! Get it here.

Okay to get started, head on over to the Chromium website and learn about the browser so you know what you’re getting into. If you’re too lazy to do that, which i would be so don’t worry about it, here is a quick overview of the features Chromium provides:

• Speed: Fast to launch, fast to load web pages
• Simplicity: Designed for efficiency and ease of use
• Style: Themes to add delight to your browser
• Google: Google power, what more could you ask for?

I’ve already told you that Google Chrome is not out for Mac just yet, but Chromium the open source project on which Google Chrome is built on provides daily builds for users which are stable, and have all the features of Google Chrome. You can use the same themes as Google Chrome, and will generally not notice a difference between the two browsers, except for the usage of the word Chromium rather then Chrome.

To download Chromium, head on over to the Mac Chromium build repo, scroll to the very bottom and click on the folder right before “LATEST”. Then download the chrome-mac.zip file and install it as you usually would any other program. Chromium will automatically import your Safari or Firefox settings so the transition will be smooth and pain free!