NEW YORK(CBSNewYork) — Think that you can pick your friends but not your family? Think again.
A Queens woman has created a website that allows users to build a new family. Chooseafamily.com lets users search an online database for the family members that they never had.
Creator Kim Parshley grew up in Astoria as part of a close knit, happy family. But when she was 13, her father passed away. Her mother was stressed and overworked, trying to provide for Kim and her sister.
Kim’s mother never remarried and much of what was once a large extended family began to move away.
After graduating college Kim worked in sales and eventually real estate. Her goal as a realtor was to take her mother out of her Astoria apartment and move her into a dream home.
But that dream never came true, Kim’s mother died of lung cancer in 2007.
Her mother’s death became the inspiration for Choose A Family.
“I spent many days feeling very lonely wishing they were still here,” she told 1010 WINS reporter John Montone.
The site lets users search for new family members anywhere in the world based on an endless variety of shared values and interests.
“It’s very easy, you go on the website and enter your own search criteria based on your own morals and values,” she said.
1010 WINS Reporter John Montone with Kim Parshley…
The site is for anybody who feels that there is a void in their family life. People who have lost a loved one, are geographically separated from family, or who have never had the brother or sister that they always wanted may benefit from the site, according to Parshley.
“I lost my own Dad when I was just seven years old. It would be nice to have someone to bounce ideas off. Friends are OK but sometimes family is better,” said user Denice Jaspers.
Parshley believes that no one should spend Thanksgiving eating dinner alone and hopes that the website will help fill in the empty spaces in other people’s lives.
In addition to family members, users may also search for friends and mentors. Interested web surfers can find the site at: www.chooseafamily.com/
What do you think? Will you be choosing a family? Let us know in our comments section below…
Posted in Building Websites by .
Jan 12
23
A New Year, A New Website..
The simple plan to ‘tidy up’ SkiddMark’s website over Christmas got a little out of hand as I added more requirements to our list of improvements. You see, like any website the design and functionality of SkiddMark has evolved since the last redesign leaving an untidy mess of redundant code inside that was getting in the way of publishing stories.
It’s never easy redesigning your own website – I usually find myself building a site, changing the design completely and then rebuilding everything in some sort of endless spiral of death, continually tweaking, changing and replacing functionality that may have taken days to build.
I’m well aware that a dark website is not to everybody’s taste, but that’s the style I adopted with Drivers Republic back in 2008 and I rather enjoy the challenge of making it work in an editorial environment rather than its more common use for portfolio sites. Besides, I’m a sucker for large colourful images and they always look best on a dark background.
We love our writers..
I had a number of objectives in mind during the redesign including giving greater prominence to our contributors.
I really wouldn’t enjoy SkiddMark half as much, if not for the reward I gain from getting into another writer’s shoes and seeing the world through their eyes.
I can’t thank the team enough for making it such a rewarding activity, so hopefully you’ll find it easier to understand the person behind each article and follow more of their activities outside of SkiddMark.
Responsive Design
For the interweb nerds amongst us, I’ll write a separate post about what’s under the hood. It still needs some fine tuning, but the basic principles I adopted were to embrace the latest HTML5 CSS3 web standards, follow a document structure that is semantically(ish) correct and find out how far I could go in developing a responsive design.
Responsive designs are the latest cool thing in web development and involve designing a site with flexible dimensions, fluid images and a layout that adjusts to suit large and small devices by its use of CSS media queries. You can get an idea of what I mean if you look at SkiddMark on an iPad and then flip between horizontal and portrait orientations.
Although not a panacea for device independence, responsive websites make a whole lot more sense for publishers than native apps (on iOS/Android devices).
Apart from the obvious walled-garden limitation of native apps, modern HTML5/CSS3 websites can deliver virtually the same dynamic experience but take advantage of the “build once, deliver everywhere” principle that should be at the core of any digital-first strategy .
Content First
Another feature of our new design is its focus on usability, namely making it easy to find and view the content with the least distraction and the fewest number of clicks.
You’ll notice a little icon at the top of each article that enables you to remove all distractions (including ads) when reading an article. This is our ‘Content Only’ mode and is especially useful when reading long-form articles (which we tend to focus on here at Skiddmark).
I’ve taken the same approach with image galleries – when you’re viewing the gallery of images for a new car I’m assuming that’s pretty much the only thing you’d like to do at that moment, so the focus is on making this a proper lightbox experience, without any distraction from other content (or ads).
This is what I like to think differentiates Skiddmark from other sites, content comes first, we don’t believe in walled gardens and adverts, if they’re good enough to promote a brand, must also stand muster alongside editorial content – if not, then they don’t belong on the site.
Anyway… the new site is now launched and I hope you like it. I’ll update this post with details of other cool new features during the next week.
I’m a great believer in doing what you like, rather than second guessing other people’s tastes (which frequently change). I am sure it’s not to everyone’s taste but hopefully a few more people will enjoy what we have to offer.
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Article source: http://skiddmark.com/2012/01/a-new-year-a-new-website/ . Build your own Website . Internet Marketing Website Free Website News
Posted in Building Websites by .
Johannesburg, South Africa – 3D Car Shows – Today Google South Africa launched a free website service for South Africans. If you live in South Africa and want to start your own business website you can now use the Google Business Sitebuilder to build your own site for free, with the Get your business online with Google and WozaOnline association.
We stumbled onto the new service accidently by opening the Google South African search engine site and noticed the text just below the Google logo saying “New! Get your business online”.
If you follow the Google link you will see that the South African Government the Department of Trade and Industry, Vodacom, The Human Resource Development Council of South Africa and Google are partnered in the project to provide South African Entrepreneurs and Business people with the means to create their own free business website online.
The website is not just a website, it actually offers you “Free Tools and Advanced Functions” some professional and Full time web developers still struggle to design and develop. These Professional tools make the Google SiteBuilder and WozaOnline system truely remarkable!
You do not have to know any coding to develop your own website and to add content and products to your site. We have tested the system and it is easy to use if you have a Facebook or Google+ account you will already be familiar with most of the functions in the Google SiteBuilder tool and if you can manage any of these Social Media sites, the Google SiteBuilder tool should be just as easy to use.
“You might want to get a professional graphic designer to design a high quality logo for your business if you do not have one already”
What is WozaOnline?
WozaOnline is an initiative to get South African Businesses online. In South Africa there are many small businesses and entrepreneurs that want’s to start their own online businesses but the costs involved are beyond their reach. The WozaOnline system allows these small businesses to start their own online business by making use of the Google Business Sitebuilder CMS system. Any business owner or entrepreneur can now use the WozaOnline site and Google Business Sitebuilder to start their own online business and website.
The Google Business Sitebuilder CMS system are an advanced system that allows users with little or no html, hosting and coding knowledge to build a professional business online for free. The system have advanced technologies built into it and users can point and click to get functionality on their sites.
Some of the advanced features include:
WozaOnline Workshops.
Free R500 Google Adwords Voucher to help you get started!
To further assist entrepreneurs and businesses with their online business Google have created a spesial offer for first time Adwords users. If you haven’t used Adwords before Google will give you R500.00 for free to use in their Advertising Network and get your business started. We recommend that before you take up this offer you learn more about Adwords and Best Practises when using Adwords. This will help you to get the maximum from your Free Google Adwords voucher.
If you use your Google Adwords voucher to market your Business online you will soon discover the power of beeing online. Google Adwords if used correctly can immediately help you to sell your products online, without the hassle of you having to search for clients. The Google Adwords Advertising system is one of the easiest Online Advertising Methods to drive clients to your business!
Vodacom South Africa
Vodacom one of South Africa’s major Mobile Telecommunication Providers have joined the WozaOnline site as an official partner and offer the first 10 000 people who join the WozaOnline services with a free South African Domain Registration. This will enable a WozaOnline Google Business Sitebuilder the opportunity to have their, own business domain name like airline-tickets.co.za or cheap-flight.co.za or whatever their business is called.
Entrepreneurs and business people who join the wozaonline Google Sitebuilder site after the 10 000 domains are gone will have a website address like: business-name.wozaonline.co.za. This domain name will be free to use. Alternatively WozaOnline users will be able to register their own South African Domain name.
Setup a shopping cart on your WozaOnline site using the Google Business Sitebuilder.
Only a few years ago companies paid webmasters thousands of Rands to develop online shopping carts for them. Today with the launch of the WozaOnline site and the Google Business Sidebuilder a basic shopping cart is included in the website. Entrepreneurs and Business owners who want to sell their products online can now do so with the latest Google Business Sitebuilder and WozaOnline website.
In your Google Business Sitebuilder Control panel you only need to activate your shopping cart and start uploading the products that you want to sell online.
To setup your shopping cart in your free website system is extremely easy and WozaOnline and Google Business Sitebuilder have instructions to make it easy for anyone to follow. For us here at 3D Car Shows who have been involved in web development since 1995 this is truly amazing to see how easy it has been made to start your own professional business online with the WozaOnline and Google Business Sitebuilder.
Make Money from Your Wozaonline site using Google Adsense
The Wozaonline service in association with Google allows for easy integration with Adsense. If you write compelling articles and your website receive visitors to your site. You can add Google Adsense as an alternative income stream to your Business website. Serving Adsense ads make it easy for you to earn money. Many advertisers will not be interested to pay you money for advertising on your site if your site only receives a small number of visitors.
We here at 3D-Car-Shows.com are very excited about the WozaOnline service and would like to congratulations all the parties involved with the launch of the WozaOnline pages!
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Posted in Building Websites by .
Johannesburg, South Africa – 3D Car Shows – Today Google South Africa launched a free website service for South Africans. If you live in South Africa and want to start your own business website you can now use the Google Business Sitebuilder to build your own site for free, with the Get your business online with Google and WozaOnline association.
We stumbled onto the new service accidently by opening the Google South African search engine site and noticed the text just below the Google logo saying “New! Get your business online”.
If you follow the Google link you will see that the South African Government the Department of Trade and Industry, Vodacom, The Human Resource Development Council of South Africa and Google are partnered in the project to provide South African Entrepreneurs and Business people with the means to create their own free business website online.
The website is not just a website, it actually offers you “Free Tools and Advanced Functions” some professional and Full time web developers still struggle to design and develop. These Professional tools make the Google SiteBuilder and WozaOnline system truely remarkable!
You do not have to know any coding to develop your own website and to add content and products to your site. We have tested the system and it is easy to use if you have a Facebook or Google+ account you will already be familiar with most of the functions in the Google SiteBuilder tool and if you can manage any of these Social Media sites, the Google SiteBuilder tool should be just as easy to use.
“You might want to get a professional graphic designer to design a high quality logo for your business if you do not have one already”
What is WozaOnline?
WozaOnline is an initiative to get South African Businesses online. In South Africa there are many small businesses and entrepreneurs that want’s to start their own online businesses but the costs involved are beyond their reach. The WozaOnline system allows these small businesses to start their own online business by making use of the Google Business Sitebuilder CMS system. Any business owner or entrepreneur can now use the WozaOnline site and Google Business Sitebuilder to start their own online business and website.
The Google Business Sitebuilder CMS system are an advanced system that allows users with little or no html, hosting and coding knowledge to build a professional business online for free. The system have advanced technologies built into it and users can point and click to get functionality on their sites.
Some of the advanced features include:
WozaOnline Workshops.
Free R500 Google Adwords Voucher to help you get started!
To further assist entrepreneurs and businesses with their online business Google have created a spesial offer for first time Adwords users. If you haven’t used Adwords before Google will give you R500.00 for free to use in their Advertising Network and get your business started. We recommend that before you take up this offer you learn more about Adwords and Best Practises when using Adwords. This will help you to get the maximum from your Free Google Adwords voucher.
If you use your Google Adwords voucher to market your Business online you will soon discover the power of beeing online. Google Adwords if used correctly can immediately help you to sell your products online, without the hassle of you having to search for clients. The Google Adwords Advertising system is one of the easiest Online Advertising Methods to drive clients to your business!
Vodacom South Africa
Vodacom one of South Africa’s major Mobile Telecommunication Providers have joined the WozaOnline site as an official partner and offer the first 10 000 people who join the WozaOnline services with a free South African Domain Registration. This will enable a WozaOnline Google Business Sitebuilder the opportunity to have their, own business domain name like airline-tickets.co.za or cheap-flight.co.za or whatever their business is called.
Entrepreneurs and business people who join the wozaonline Google Sitebuilder site after the 10 000 domains are gone will have a website address like: business-name.wozaonline.co.za. This domain name will be free to use. Alternatively WozaOnline users will be able to register their own South African Domain name.
Setup a shopping cart on your WozaOnline site using the Google Business Sitebuilder.
Only a few years ago companies paid webmasters thousands of Rands to develop online shopping carts for them. Today with the launch of the WozaOnline site and the Google Business Sidebuilder a basic shopping cart is included in the website. Entrepreneurs and Business owners who want to sell their products online can now do so with the latest Google Business Sitebuilder and WozaOnline website.
In your Google Business Sitebuilder Control panel you only need to activate your shopping cart and start uploading the products that you want to sell online.
To setup your shopping cart in your free website system is extremely easy and WozaOnline and Google Business Sitebuilder have instructions to make it easy for anyone to follow. For us here at 3D Car Shows who have been involved in web development since 1995 this is truly amazing to see how easy it has been made to start your own professional business online with the WozaOnline and Google Business Sitebuilder.
Make Money from Your Wozaonline site using Google Adsense
The Wozaonline service in association with Google allows for easy integration with Adsense. If you write compelling articles and your website receive visitors to your site. You can add Google Adsense as an alternative income stream to your Business website. Serving Adsense ads make it easy for you to earn money. Many advertisers will not be interested to pay you money for advertising on your site if your site only receives a small number of visitors.
We here at 3D-Car-Shows.com are very excited about the WozaOnline service and would like to congratulations all the parties involved with the launch of the WozaOnline pages!
COMMENT ON THIS STORY
comments
Posted in Building Websites by .
Most often quality of service is associated with the cost. In other words, your prices have invoked the “you-get-what-you-pay-for” idea into the minds of your customers and potential customers. They are fearful of what they might get for that low price.
Not all the time, but sometimes it is reasonable to think that if the price is cheap the work will reflect the price. Recently, my daughter was searching for a plumber to install a new kitchen sink. She told me that my plumber was too expensive, so she went looking for a lower-priced plumber. After getting several bids, she selected the lowest bidder. But in the end, she wound up paying both the plumber she had selected and also my plumber, who had to brought in to correct the multitude of errors the first plumber had made.
I met a man in the lawn care business who walked into a gold mine after repairing the damage of one lawn done by a cheaper priced lawn care company. After seeing how good his work was compared to the lower-priced lawn care company, almost everyone in that neighborhood signed up with the more expensive company.
I will assume that you do a quality job. With that in mind, maybe the person who refused to give you work based on your low price has had a bad experience with low bidders.
Setting prices too low can make you look like less than an expert. And yes, a janitor has a certain expertise that is used to get the job done correctly. There are many horror stories told by entrepreneurs and company managers about the sloppy jobs done by the janitorial companies they have hired. I won’t spend time with my own personal stories; however, I must have had at least a dozen cleaning service nightmares.
Another thing that you might want to consider is how you arrive at your prices. And, are your prices fair and correct for both you and the customer?
Several years ago my young nephew started a carpet cleaning business to help him through college. He was determined to be competitive, so he quoted the same price as other companies in his area – 30 cents a square foot. Turns out he didn’t know how to properly measure in square feet and consistently gave prices that were too low.
He landed a contract at a local restaurant. The owner questioned the method that he used to come up with his price and helped my nephew figure out the error of his calculation. This may be the reason that a customer has asked you to come back and do another walk-through: Maybe he wants to be sure you aren’t cheating yourself.
Here’s another story you might want to consider. I was visiting my mother last summer when a gardener she hired to trim two lengthy hedges came by to be paid. She handed him $20.
How long did it take to do this job? About two hours, he said. He felt $10 an hour was about right.
But what he didn’t consider was the use of his equipment, the cost of advertising and promoting his business, the cost of traveling to the site, various insurance policies and other expenses not readily seen. And most important, he didn’t take into consideration the woman back at his place of business who took my mother’s phone call, handled the appointment and mailed the bill.
My mother admitted after he left that all of the other people she had called wanted between $50 and $75 for the same job. Imagine that!
Many people who have left the corporate world to start businesses get confused when it comes to pricing. Some feel successful by billing clients for the same amount of money as they earned before. But they forget the added financial obligations they have taken on as a entrepreneur.
Have you reviewed your financials lately? Are you making a reasonable profit after expenses? When you created your price, did you consider all your expenses? Perhaps the time has come to consult an accountant to help you identify all of your expenses and to make certain all of them are factored into your pricing.
Gladys Edmunds’ Entrepreneurial Tightrope column appears Wednesdays. As a single, teen-age mom, Gladys made money doing laundry, cooking dinners for taxi drivers and selling fire extinguishers and Bibles door-to-door. Today, Edmunds, founder of Edmunds Travel Consultants in Pittsburgh, is a private coach/consultant in business development and author of There’s No Business Like Your Own Business, published by Viking. See an index of Edmunds’ columns. Her website is www.gladysedmunds.com. You can e-mail her at gladys@gladysedmunds.com.
Posted in Building Websites by .
When developing any type of website or web application in .Net there are plenty of tips to help make sure your creation is protected against hackers and scanners.
I have compiled a check list of tips and techniques that I have built up in the years of development in .Net – So I’m here to share them with you all – so that you can also develop more securely in your own projects.
1. Configuration – SSL and services
Once your website is live to the public, it’s a good idea if you have control of the server to uninstall or disable services that aren’t required. Anything other than HTTP/HTTPS left open to the public is a risk. Try to enforce SSL for parts of your website that you wish to encrypt the data for. The SSL connection will ensure the data between the webserver and the client browser is encrypted end to end. Normal situations for this include payment processing etc.
2. Deployment – Release Build
Once you have done your testing – make sure you only deploy a “release” build of your website. It will remove all the debug code that is automatically injected when you are normally testing the website. It means if anything does happen/crash, there will be less information displayed to the user on-screen.
3. Deployment – Exception Handling
Inside the Global.asax file that is generated with all website projects in .Net, put code in the Application_Error function to capture any exception that may occur that isn’t handled properly in the website code. There are always scenarios that we can’t/don’t test, and slip through the gaps. Get the code to log the issues internally, and display a User-Friendly error page to the user. Do not reveal any error specific information in the Error Page.
4. Database – Queries
When accessing data to and from the database, make sure you use Stored Procedures instead of generating SQL queries dynamically. Because the query is outside the code base – there is no potential for the query to be altered/re-written. It does happen in attacks through a series of different attacks like Cross-Site scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection. If there is potential for the query to change, you have to assume that it might happen.
5. Database – Sanitization
When storing any strings/data in the database – you should sanitize your data by using the built in Server.HTMLEncode/Server.HTMLDecode functions to store the data safely. It will remove any script injections from being readable.
6. Field Input – Sanitization
All fields on a screen can be changed, even if they are labels or disabled textboxes through scripts/man-in-the-middle attacks (MITM). All data inputted must be validated correctly for format, and for XSS/Sql Injection input. Microsoft provides a library that can help deal with this – called Microsoft Anti-XSS (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa973813.aspx). Funnily enough it’s been around since 2005/2006 and still hasn’t been incorporated into Visual Studio yet.
7. Password requirements
Ensuring users make it more difficult for anyone to guess their password; you need to enforce decent rules for a valid password. There needs to be a mix of upper/lowercase, symbols and numbers with at least 1 or 2 of each and a minimum length of 8-16 characters. The longer the harder it is to guess.
8. Login functionality
They should never reveal what exactly is wrong with the credentials – leave room for ambiguity. “Wrong Login or Password” is more secure than “Wrong Password for this Login”. Similar principle applies to Forgotten Password pages – never inform the user that the email/user specified was found – but more like “If the user/email exists, then a password will be sent to the user.”
9. Brute Force attempts
A method to prevent this from happening/affecting your website – Every failed attempt to login is counted by IP Address, once this hits a set limit (I used 3 attempts), does a lockout for the attack for 5 minutes. Each attempt returns the same error message “Invalid Login or Password” – even once the lockout has occurred. The user has no idea that the system isn’t even checking the login or password anymore since you have missed it too many times. Every sequential attempt during the lockout period restarts the lockout delay. This method prevents tools that are attempting brute-force attempts, as they keep trying different combinations and read the output on the page to understand it has a wrong Login/password combination. All attempts should be logged with Login attempted, date attempted and IP Address it came from. You can easily see when someone has attempted to brute-force your login system without gaining entry.
Take all those in account when creating new or building on existing Asp.net websites/web applications – and you’ll be helping provide a more secure and safe website.
Download a trial of Visual Studio 2010.
About the author
Stephen Aitchison is senior developer at Aura Redeye Security Ltd. You can find him on Twitter as @NZCoderGuy and on Geekzone as well.
Other related posts:
Consuming JSON web APIs with Visual Studio
Web.config transforms
Posted in Building Websites by .
