Domain name squatters are a pain in the arse. You spend days, weeks even, researching and building a new project and along the way find that your preferred domain name is taken. To make things worse, it’s squatted – no content on there of any value whatsoever, just a few ads and a script to auto-generate a few links.
Twitter has gone the same way. I’m not the only designer who wants to hook into the phenomenon that is Twitter, but finding a decent username that isn’t squatted is becoming more and more difficult. Often these accounts have a single tweet or none at all. At the very least they will have been inactive for months.
I recently launched a new site and wanted to add Twitter functionality. The first three usernames I tried – variations on the site name and the service it provides – were all taken and inactive. One of the accounts I checked hadn’t been used since 2007 – what function does that serve? And because it has been dormant for so long, getting in touch with the owner isn’t guaranteed either.
A friend who wanted a username for another project received a non-committal response designed to nudge him into making a cash offer for the account name. An account name the ‘owner’ got for free!
Twitter really should implement a system for releasing dormant usernames back into the available pool – it would help ensure the site doesn’t stagnate and that fresh content is constantly generated on all accounts. In addition, squatters.
Update: It appears that Twitter does have rules against account squatting and inactive accounts, but for some reason they are not enforcing half of them. This page goes into detail on what does and does not constitute a violation, but the rules are simply not being enforced right now. “Accounts that are inactive for more than 6 months may be removed” and “Selling free usernames is also a violation of the Twitter Rules” are both areas that need tightening up.
A friend of mine checked his online bank statement recently and found an unauthorised transaction for O2(UK)LTD PREPAY for £30.00 nestled amongst his porn charges and World of Warcraft subscription. Since he hadn’t used an O2 phone in over a year, this was quite a suprise, and a spot of Googling turned up more than a few people with the exact same problem.
So what is this O2(UK)LTD PREPAY? For starters, it’s a genuine debit on your card made by O2 – formerly BT Cellnet. The problem, of course, is that you didn’t actually make such a purchase, and you’re so paranoid about Credit Card Fraud that you keep your cards in a tinfoil envelope, so how did someone steal your credit card details?
The answer is… they didn’t. Credit Card numbers are generated using an algorithm which makes it possible to easily check their validity before submitting it to a payment processor. Unfortunately, that same convenience means that anybody can whip up a simple program to test 16-digit numbers that pass the validity checks.
So now you have a valid card number, the next thing you need is the expiry date. Since there are only 12 possible expiry date values per year it’s trivial to check until you get a hit. Most cards only last a maximum of five years so you only need check 60 combinations. If you get a hit, congrats – you have a card you can use for fraud.
But wait – surely the only way you can test a card number and expiry date is to actually go ahead and try to buy something? And even then, don’t you have this Verified by Visa step to go through where you have to enter your password? Well ordinarily, yes you would, but if you happen to find a company that is pathetically lax with in the way they accept Online Credit Card payments – for example O2 in the UK – then you can enter just these details and see if the card works.
The O2(UK)LTD PREPAY that you see on your statement is a fraudster testing your card number and an expiry data and getting a hit. If you do not cancel your card straight away, you will soon find your card statement filled with purchases you didn’t make, things like TVs, cameras or more phone topups.
O2 are not the only company who allow anyone to enter any card details to top up any phone. Keep an eye on your bank or credit card statement for any of the following:
O2(UK)LTD PREPAY SLOUGH
ORANGE (A/PG/01) , DARLINGTON
iTunes Purchases
Tesco Mobile Topup
If you didn’t make these purchases, call both your bank and the business involved immediately. Ask the bank to cancel your credit or debit card and issue you with a new number, and ask the business listed on the statement to investigate.
Worryingly, we’ve heard that the bank/business will tell you not to bother contacting the police over the matter. Whether you do or not is up to you of course, and if you get your money back without problems (aside from changing your cards) then you may not want the extra hassle, but the fact remains that a crime has been committed and those businesses with lax online card security have no incentive to improve matters if people don’t complain. I would suggest getting a crime number just for peace of mind – it at least helps you prove to the bank that you are serious about the fraud even if the likes of O2, Orange and iTunes are not.
So why don’t O2 etc put a stop to this? From their point of view, why should they? Airtime actually costs very little for mobile phone companies to provide, so if they have to refund £30 to someone’s card, they actually lose a lot less than that. Add to this the unknown number of transactions that you can guarantee are never spotted by the card owners and you’ll come to understand that O2 are making a profit from this scam.
People should really be complaining to Visa and Mastercard, petitioning them to threaten O2 et al with the loss of their credit card processing facilities unless they tighten up online security. There is absolutely no reason, in this day and age, for this kind of lax attitude to be permitted – they are enabling fraud on a massive scale, profiting from it and appear to have no intention of changing things.
There is a portion of the web design industry that just doesn’t seem to ‘get’ etiquette and proceeds to treat website visitors like cows to be milked for all the clicks and information possible. Don’t get me wrong, clicks are good and information about the visitors to your site is even better, but more and more websites (or rather, the designers behind them) are making a complete pig’s ear of the website experience and alienating visitors in the process.
So, without further ado, here’s a list of ten things to avoid as a designer:
Popups are Bad.
This should go without saying now, but people still have popups opening (or trying to open) when a visitor lands. Consider it this way: A visitor to your site wants to see a page and read some information and that it all. Popups ‘break out’ of the page they are trying to read and annoy the hell out of your visitor.
Site Surveys.
An increasing number of sites are showing in-document popups asking visitors to take short surveys or share their thoughts. Nothing wrong with that, but when the popup appears as soon as the visitor lands, obscuring the very content they want to read, they’ll get annoyed.
Don’t prevent the user from leaving.
Your customer has just finished reading something and decided they don’t want to go any further so they click ‘Back’ or close the window only to receive a requester imploring them to stay. “Are you sure you want to leave this page?” Please don’t insult your visitors’ intelligence like this – they have finished with your site.
Intrusive ads annoy.
I realise that many ads are pulled from a pool, and that designers cannot always decide on what ads are shown, but if you fail to check the kind of ads being shown on your site and your visitors are driven away by distracting, bandwidth-hogging video or seizure-inducing strobe-fests, you have only yourself to blame.
Infected ads annoy even more.
As the website owner, profiting from the showing of ads on your site, you have a responsibility to check that you are not damaging visitors’ machines with trojan-laden ads. Read the news, check the ads on your own site occasionally and stay on top of things.
There is no Jump.
This is mainly US writers that have moved from print to online media. The phrase “After the jump” does not apply when the item you are talking about appears right after the very words describing it.
Test your site in all major browsers.
Until recently, Expedia UK still had issues displaying skyscraper ads on a 1024-wide screen in Google Chrome. This isn’t Chrome’s fault since other sites manage just fine, it’s lack of testing. By default your site should work in the last two full versions (not just point releases) of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera. You don’t even have to mess about loading different browsers – BrowserShots.org will do the hard work for you.
Don’t spread your article to show more ads.
If your article is a whopper, then by all means break it up into logical sections with proper titles to aid navigation. Spreading it over multiple pages titled 1, 2, 3 etc just to show increase your ad impressions is a dirty, dishonest trick, however.
New windows are for external sites only.
When linking to another page on the same website, you don’t need to open it in a new window – if the user wants that to happen, they can do it themselves with a right click, a control click or whatever their browser supports. When you send a visitor to another website, then you should open a new window – emphasising the fact it is separate from your site and outside your control.
Don’t Bait & Switch.
Another ad-related no-no – more and more posts on social media sites are linking to a page which then goes on to link to the article the visitor thought they were getting – again, all in the name of ad impressions. It’s another dirty trick – don’t do it.
These tips, rules, does and don’ts etc are all about improving the visitor’s experience. A happy visitor is one that will return, an annoyed one will remember your site and choose to go elsewhere.
I’m sure you’ve all seen it, that annoying, unskippable advertisement from whichever anti-piracy outfit is infecting your particular country. It focusses on a teen girl in a bedroom downloading something or other from a site titled “Feature Films”. The dodgy, shakey-cam style titles read:
You wouldn’t steal a car.
You wouldn’t steal a handbag.
You wouldn’t steal a television.
You wouldn’t steal a movie.
Downloading pirated films is stealing.
Stealing is against the law.
Piracy. It’s a crime.
All well and good, except that downloading pirated films is not stealing, it’s Copyright Infringement. Piracy is where you board a ship out at sea and make off with it. Rum may be involved, and also planks.
But the best bit, the kicker, is that these ridiculous ads only appear on the legitimate, paid-for version of these films because pirates strip them out. Not only that, they serve to remind the buyer that they could have downloaded the film instead of paying for it, and without the annoying Anti-Copyright-Infringement ad on the front.
And yes, if I could download a car that had all the crap stripped out, but which was otherwise identical to the original, then I bloody would “steal” one.
After watching The Gadget Show a while ago I got the hankering for a pair of Salomon Cosmic 4D GTX Boots which the show had for £130.
But where are they?
The closest are on this Salomon Boots website but these are the Ladies version – certainly not the funky red ones that Brian Blessed was stomping around in.
One thing that always annoyed with the Gadget Show’s website was that you couldn’t just click to jump to someone selling the products they had on the show, and the Salomon Boots segment was no different – where are the boots? Where do I buy the boots? Where are these boots avalaible for this magical, mysterious price of £130?
Gadget Show, you are missing an opportunity to make more cash here. Be told.
Edit:
Just my luck, it appears the Men’s Cosmic 4D GTX is available from Salomon Boots after all.
Over the past few months I’ve been putting together a Tide Times website. Basically it scrapes the tidal prediction pages for 56 locations around the UK from the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory website (with their permission) and extracts the predictions for the next 28 days into a database.
Originally I simply plotted all 56 points on a Google Map. There was a minor detour while I had to manually correct a few markers which had similar names in the United States, but on the whole it worked fairly easily. Simply click on any of the markers to show the tide times for today’s date, and that was it.
From there it was an hour’s work to create a template page which would display the day’s tides for any of the 56 locations, and to add a calendar arrangement allowing a user to check the tides for an upcoming date as well. A simple RewriteRule allowed me to present 56 different pages to Google and some basic SEO ensured the pages ranked quite well.
Tidal predictions are available for Aberdeen, Avonmouth, Bangor, Barmouth, Blackpool, Bournemuoth, Cobh, Cromer, Devonport, Donaghadee, Dover, Dublin, Felixstowe, Fishguard, Formby, Harwich, Heysham, Hilbre Island, Hinkley, Holyhead, Ilfracombe, Immingham, Kinlochbervie, Leith, Lerwick, Limerick, Liverpool, Llandudno, Londonderry, Lowestoft, Millford Haven, Millport, Moray Firth, Mumbles, Newhaven, Newlyn, Newport, North Shields, Port Ellen, Port Erin, Portpatrick, Portrush, Portsmouth, Rosslare, Sheerness, Sligo, Southport, St. Helier, St. Mary’s, Stornoway, Tobermory, Ullapool, Weymouth, Whitby, Wick and Workington.
I decided, as well, to employ Twitter to spread the word, manually creating 56 accounts to allow people to follow an individual port. Next I created a cron job that ran for two hours early every morning, tweeting the day’s tides for each port to the relevant Twitter account.
There were a few niggles, such as an incorrect username causing the process to fail at a certain port in the list – the script would retry the same port over and over and leave those following it unchanged. Thankfully it was near the end of the list (Ullapool I think) and I spotted this one after a few days, so there wasn’t too much damage.
Another problem that cropped up was in the parsing of the scraped pages – if a tide was over 10m then the first digit would be dropped, causing high tides that were occasionally lower than low tides. Very odd indeed.
But eventually I managed to iron out all of these little niggles and the site has been ticking along nicely with no interaction from me. The number of visitors has been steadily increasing over the past month until we hit a new high of 180 unique visitors on the 25th October, with 25 followers on the most popular Twitter account (Hilbre Island, in case you were wondering). Even the minimal advertising on the site has helped a little, bringing in just over £10 so far for October.
Graph showing increase in Visitor Numbers
So what was the point of it all? Why did I do it?
Occasionally I take the dog out to Cleethorpes beach to let him have a run around and a swim, and it’s obviously better for both of us if I know what time the tide will be in at a certain location. Cleethorpes isn’t one of the locations provided for free by the POL, but Immingham is, and that’s only a few miles down the coast.
So I set about scraping just Immingham, then decided to see if I could do the whole lot. The POL kindly gave me permission to scrape the free pages (subject to their veto) and it kind of snowballed from there.
The site is available to use at www.TideTimes.org.uk and remains completely free. If you like it, feel free to link to it or follow your nearest port on Twitter. If you have any comments or suggestions, please leave a message here – I promise I’ll even read it.
“Where do I buy a domain name?” – that’s the question that eventually gets asked by anyone with more than a passing interest in the Internet. Traditionally, you buy one from a Domain Registrar of which there are loads. You can become a registrar yourself, but unless you can afford the bulk discounts you’re going to be paying a fortune for domains (as we found out back in the early days of Internet).
Just recently I’ve switched to Heart Internet, since they appear to have the cheapest domain names in the UK. They offer all the basic and advanced tools you need to monitor your domains as well as a slew of hosting packages.
Here are prices for the most popular domains – others are viewable on the website if you want more details. Prices are per year, and there are discounts for bulk buying as well.
TLD
1-4
5+
10+
25+
50+
.co.uk
.org.uk
£2.79
£2.78
£2.77
£2.76
£2.75
.com
.net
£7.99
£6.99
£6.49
£5.99
£4.99
It’s not just the prices, however – Heart recently came top in the PC Pro Awards Web Hosting category. After much research it appears they are both competent and respected – a winning combination there.
I was previously with 123-Reg, but after hearing about a friend paying for domain renewals that didn’t happen and for domains that someone had registered earlier that day, and finding that he was not alone in this by a long shot, I’ve decided to move all of my .UK domains – for free – to Heart Internet immediately, and will move the .com’s etc as and when they come up for renewal. Saving money on purchases and renewals is good, but better service is, well, better.
Sometimes, people just catch you on an off day, causing your usual cool exterior to crack and spew forth a torrent of vitriol and abuse. Today wasn’t one of those days, but ‘Patrick Nortoni’ managed to annoy me a great deal by posting his default spam email nonsense into the contact form on one of my sites:
We would like to get your website on first page of Google.All of our processes use the most ethical “white hat” Search Engine Optimization techniques that will not get your website banned or penalized. Please reply and I would be happy to send you a proposal. In order for us to respond to your request for information, please include your companys website address (mandatory) and or phone number.
Patrick Nortoni
patrick2316@gmail.com
SEO Company
000-000-0000
–
Sent at 21:36.21 on 22nd September 2009 from 122.160.99.22
Where to begin with this nonsense? He sends me an non-personalised email through a mail form using a GMail address and doesn’t even bother to include a real phone number. Hmm.. I wonder why that could be? Let’s take a look at that IP address…
Click to view Full Image
Now I’m sure that there are plenty of hard-working, honest IT workers in India, but I never seem to meet them. All I get are the spam emails for outsourcing my web design work or – in the case of Patrick Nortoni here – my SEO work.
A quick Google search for ‘Patrick Nortoni’ throws up comment spam. Lots of comment spam. Comment spam pimping his great SEO services on pages that have absolutely nothing to do with SEO. Presumably, these are his ‘most ethical “white hat” Search Engine Optimization techniques’. Whatever, I won’t be wasting my time with this fool, and neither should you.
Update:
It’s a funny old game. This post is now 4th 2nd on Google for ‘Patrick Nortoni’, and not a comment spam in sight.
Just recently there has been a spate of cold calls from 01274 900 834 and 01274 449 373 featuring India-accented people who claim to have detected that your computer is running slow as a result of a trojan infection and offering to fix the problem for you. It’s been reported that, should you be convinced enough to hand over your credit card details for the £54-odd one-year service fee, your card will be billed for over £200.
The company is called Support On Click and has a website at www.supportonclick.com/.co.uk – a quick check reveals the domain is registered to Pecon Software Ltd in India:
Domain name:
supportonclick.co.uk
Registrant:
Pecon Software Ltd
Registrant type:
Unknown
Registrant’s address:
EN-27, Salt lake city, Sector-V, Kolkata
kolkata
West Bengal
700091
India
The company calls from one of two Bradford-based numbers: 01274 900 834, 01274 449 373 but also have 0800 047 0653 on their website. If they have called, and you want to call them back, I’d suggest doing to on the 0800 number so as not to run up your own bill. You can then chat to them at length about how unconvinced you are about their service and demand your money back. (Edit: They’re also on Twitter).
More:
A posting on this blog claims that the caller asks you to set up remote access on your machine to that they can infect you with a trojan, then sell you software to prevent it happening again, said software being – you guessed it – another trojan/virus/whatever. It’s worth noting that this complaint is from Australia, so they really are targeting people on a global scale – presumably any English-speaking country is at risk.
Update:
Another blog has touched on the SupportOnClick fiasco – DigitalToast has an article here. Despite protestations from Mr. Shah, the dodgy calls continue to come, cold-calling and all. SupportOnClick are also on Twitter.
Does this sound familiar? I’ve taken the plunge and ordered a new, much faster and more secure server from UK2.net and started moving sites over. It should mean faster response times for websites (especially WordPress) and smoother running in general.
That’s not to say things have gone smoothly so far. I allowed BootBlock onto the new box and it promptly went a bit mad – intermittently refusing default documents, email and all kinds of nonsense. UK2 kindly wiped the box and started again at my request, and all went well the second time around.
There may be a brief period of unavailability across various websites, but I have a whole month with both servers, so I can take the time to get things right.
Domain name squatters are a pain in the arse. You spend days, weeks even, researching and building a new project and along the way find that your preferred domain name is taken. To make things worse, it’s squatted – no content on there of any value whatsoever, just a few ads and a script to auto-generate a few links.
Does this sound familiar? I’ve taken the plunge and ordered a new, much faster and more secure server from UK2.net and started moving sites over. It should mean faster response times for websites (especially WordPress) and smoother running in general.