Client:

Bounce Broadband

Type:

Website – Full Content Management System

URL:

www.bounce-broadband.com

Description:

The aim of Bounce Broadband is to bring high speed internet to rural Ireland. Using WiFi (wireless internet) technology Bounce Broadband are able to deliver a better, more reliable product to their customers without the limitations of DSL (e.g. phone line rental)

Bounce Broadband needed a fresh new design for their website, also giving them the ability to update their content. It was important for them to be able to change prices, quickly and easily add news updates and have their coverage map reflected as they expand their network.

Client:

Stitch Films

Type:

Website – Full Content Management System

URL:

www.stitchfilms.ie

Description:

Stitch Films are a film production company based in Ireland that have been producing stunning films and music videos since 2006.

Stitch Films needed a new website that reflected their style as well as giving them the ability to add news items and update their showreel section with video clips as projects are completed.

Client:

Pauline Solon

Type:

Website – Full Content Management & E-commerce System

URL:

www.paulinesolon.com

Description:

Pauline Solon is an artist whose work is reflected in the way she has lived and continues to live her life’s journey.

Pauline Solon needed a website that would allow her to manage the sale of her prints in an easy to use system. The new website and e-commerce system allows Pauline to add new items, remove items, change prices and do everything required for the running of an online shop as well as having galleries and a news section.

Client:

WM Windows

Type:

Website

URL:

http://www.wmwindows.ie

Description:

WM Windows & Doors Ltd offers home-owners, developers and architects an incredible selection of aluminium and uPVC windows and doors as well as decorative stained glass options, garage doors and conservatories.

WM Windows wanted a brand new website where they could inform potential csutomers of their services, allowing people to browse their galleries to see some of the products available as well as being able to request a free quotation.

Client:

Airappz

Type:

Website – Full Content Management System

URL:

http://www.airappz.com

Description:

Airappz has evolved out of more than a decade of experience in the world of wireless data communications and services. Some of the services they offer are: captive portal advertising, wifi networks, wifi hotspots, wireless hot-zones and point-to-point wireless data links.

Airappz needed a fresh clean website redesign to be able to provide information about the variety of services they offer. They also required an easy to manage content management system enabling them to create news posts quickly and easily as well as being able to display their Twitter posts allowing for their site to have regular updates.

Client:

Reel Festivals

Type:

Print- Series of printed promotional material – Flyers, posters, programme

URL:

www.reelfestivals.org

Description:

Reel Festivals run an annual festival of film, music, art, lectures and more, and this year are focussed on the culture of Iraq.

As well as needing a new website for this years festival, Reel Festivals required a series of printed promotional material to distribute around to advertise various events during the festival. The printed material included an A6 flyer, DL flyer, 2 different A3 posters and a 36 page A5 festival programme.

1. Secret Keys

When you first install WordPress you need to edit your wp-config.php file to make sure it’s got the right information for accessing your WordPress database. As has always been the case the information in wp-config-sample.php shows you what needs to be filled in. By editing this file and saving it as wp-config.php you’ll be ready to install WordPress.

However, since WordPress 2.6 there’s been a new set of security keys which help keep your WordPress install more secure.

define('AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('LOGGED_IN_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');
define('NONCE_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here');

If you’re not sure what to put in here, just visit the handy Secret Key Generator at wordpress.org to generate your own special lines of secrecy. Below is an example of the output which can just be copied and pasted into your wp-config.php file.

define('AUTH_KEY',        '_f{,Ez(@SWSTGq~]p7mMu/zsSQ9%Aj;43db|:OjWUlUFJ5Ge{u%T-dx4>u1{_szU');
define('SECURE_AUTH_KEY', 'RQT-|bmNY).USI6vo2khHm<6N!6`x/ri]g-0VNN1t^<b]seB;H*Q=..h<,F@-}% ');
define('LOGGED_IN_KEY',   '{,C+JN*x_sj:iAp3|p~a@HI0:<.KnrS(thDV*[u_kY$xbolk[aiqx${|:Y2L^+{ ');
define('NONCE_KEY',       'Ek@(Zw#<CipmijGZw67b:drxRb*JiQ#+q5bJ|5/NGeEyHGWpSB- .V1{3U_Gi80|');

I should mention, just in case, do not use this above example! Just visit the generator for your own unique code. Also, if you're interested in further reading check out the WordPress Codex article regarding wp-config.

2. Change Your Admin Password

I've talked about the importance of password security in the past and thankfully WordPress generates a fairly random password for the "admin" user when you first install it, but I feel happier by generating my own even longer password for that extra peace of mind.

Personally I use the excellent password generator that's included in our favourite password management web application - Passpack - something I strongly recommend checking out¹, but there are a multitude of free password generators available. A good one I came across is www.freepasswordgenerator.com which allows you to choose whether to include string letters (a..z), capital letters (A..Z), digits (2..9), special symbols (!, +, ], ?, etc) and the length of the password. It produces wonderfully complicated things like:

a^cYj+csV)MifQhc,66s

Again, for the sake of safety I'd suggest signing up to Passpack to store this password nice and securely. Don't write it down!

3. Change Your Admin Username

Keeping things secure is all about making life more difficult for a potential hacker. The default username for the wordpress administrator is "admin", and that's a first step covered for a hacker. Whilst you can't change WordPress usernames through the admin panel, you can change it by editing your database.

As we're security conscious here at Pixelapes, we only access our server through "Secure Shell" meaning that any database interaction is purely command line based. Hence the below example shows you what to do to change your admin user name.

mysql> USE your_database_name;
Database changed
mysql> UPDATE wp_users SET user_login="new-admin-user" WHERE user_login="admin";
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
Rows matched: 1  Changed: 1  Warnings: 0

It's as simple as that. If you have a GUI tool installed on your server, such as phpMyAdmin, you can follow the simple steps in this guide to change your admin username.

1. You can read our detailed review of Passpack here

If you are utilizing Postfix and hosting virtual domains it’s likely you will want an overview of inbound and outbound email activity pre domain.

This sort of statistical information can be of huge benefit when running your own server, especially if you need to get an idea of where you bandwidth consumption is going.

Linking Awstats to Postfix

You can achieve this by using AWStats, but first you must run a few scripts in order to present the log file in a format that AWStats can work with. If you are using Amavis and/or Spamassassin, you will notice additional lines similar to these appear due to re-injection:

Apr 14 19:47:58 mailserver amavis[23740]: (23740-02) FWD via SMTP:  -> , 250 2.6.0 Ok, id=23740-02, from MTA([127.0.0.1]:10025): 250 Ok: queued as DAB321264FE
Apr 14 19:47:58 mailserver amavis[23740]: (23740-02) Passed CLEAN, [192.168.0.10] [192.168.0.10]  -> , Message-ID: <49E4D9FA.4020100@receiverdomain.com>, mail_id: J9-AzDhzWfe0, Hits: -, 160 ms

In order to avoid this, you must use prepflog to process the mail log before it is passed to pflogsumm or AWStats. This script will disregard the lines relating to the re-injection of messages into Postfix.

Once this is completed you will need to use maillogconvert. This is a mail log preprocessor that converts a mail log file (from postfix, sendmail or qmail servers) into a human readable format. The output format is also ready to be used by a log analyzer, like AWStats. The maillogconvert script is provided in the AWStats tools directory.

So let’s look at the configuration. Prepflog documentation says to set the following in the AWStats configuration file:

LogFile="/usr/local/bin/prepflog.pl < /var/log/mail | perl /usr/local/awstats/tools/maillogconvert.pl standard |"

However, we wish to only grab mail from one domain so I altered the setting to this:

LogFile="cat /var/log/mail.log | /etc/awstats/prepflog.pl | perl /etc/awstats/maillogconvert.pl standard | grep interestingdomain.com |"

After the log is striped of unnecessary re-injection entries, the specific domain is grepped, it is then pushed to maillogconvert.pl which outputs a friendly format as follows:

2009-04-14 20:38:03 sender@senderdomain.com receiver@receiverdomain.com 192.168.0.10 - SMTP - xxx ?

You must ensure that the AWStats configuration file is set-up to parse mail logs. I followed the formatting suggested by the AWStats documentation. Your configuration file awstats.mail.interestingdomain.com.conf will now look similar to this:

LogFile="cat /var/log/mail.log | /etc/awstats/prepflog.pl | perl /etc/awstats/maillogconvert.pl standard | grep interestingdomain.com |"
LogType=M
LogFormat="%time2 %email %email_r %host %host_r %method %url %code %bytesd"
LogSeparator=" "
SiteDomain="interestingdomain.com"
HostAliases="interestingdomain.com"
LogType=M
LevelForBrowsersDetection=0
LevelForOSDetection=0
LevelForRefererAnalyze=0
LevelForRobotsDetection=0
LevelForWormsDetection=0
LevelForSearchEnginesDetection=0
LevelForFileTypesDetection=0
ShowMenu=1
ShowSummary=HB
ShowMonthStats=HB
ShowDaysOfMonthStats=HB
ShowDaysOfWeekStats=HB
ShowHoursStats=HB
ShowDomainsStats=0
ShowHostsStats=HBL
ShowAuthenticatedUsers=0
ShowRobotsStats=0
ShowEMailSenders=HBML
ShowEMailReceivers=HBML
ShowSessionsStats=0
ShowPagesStats=0
ShowFileTypesStats=0
ShowFileSizesStats=0
ShowBrowsersStats=0
ShowOSStats=0
ShowOriginStats=0
ShowKeyphrasesStats=0
ShowKeywordsStats=0
ShowMiscStats=0
ShowHTTPErrorsStats=0
ShowSMTPErrorsStats=1

It is important to remember that you will need to set up a crontab entry to process the mail log. Your crontab entry should look similar to this:

/usr/bin/perl /usr/lib/cgi-bin/awstats.pl -update -config=mail.interestingdomain.com

Finally, below is my configuration for Apache 2:

###### AWSTATS ######
Alias /awstatsclasses "/usr/share/awstats/lib/"
Alias /awstats-icon/ "/usr/share/awstats/icon/"
Alias /awstatscss "/usr/share/doc/awstats/examples/css"
ScriptAlias /awstats/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
Options ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch

Now you will see a tidy graphical view of all mail traffic for your virtual domains using AWStats. If you have any questions or comments on how you go about generating stats, please fill in the comment form below.

Client:

Reel Festivals

Type:

Website – Full Content Management System

URL:

www.reelfestivals.org

Description:

Reel Festivals run an annual festival of film, music, art, lectures and more, and this year are focussed on the culture of Iraq.

Reel Festivals needed to expand their website substantially from the 2008 Reel Afghanistan festival to include more information on festival events, past festival archives, a private forum for use by the festival organisers, multiple mailing lists, and much more. The redesigned website offers a complete content management system.

Prices span from paltry figures such as €5 a month to top of the range dedicated machines for €2,000 a month – although the majority of the competition in the market lands in the price bracket of €10 to €100 per month.

A huge portion of providers openly advertise offers of enormous quantities of bandwidth¹ and hard drive space² for fees that are too good to be true, even going as far as claiming that by signing up with them you’ll have unlimited bandwidth and hard drive space.

For a few euro a week you’ll get all the web space, bandwidth and email addresses you could ever dream of. So, what’s the catch?

The fine print

The truth is to be found in the “Terms of Service”. Excerpts from the fine print of certain well known providers highlight the nasty clauses  they mysteriously  forgot to mention on their front page. Below we reproduce a fine example of one such clause.

we reserve the rights to terminate any account found to contain file streaming such as audio, radio and video streams (AVI, MPG, MPEG, MOV, MP3, etc)

Most reasonable people would assume that they would be allowed to put their own videos and music on their website but in the case above this could result in account termination. It is likely that the above clause would not generally enforce this part of their terms of service, but that wouldn’t provide you with much consolation if they suddenly did decide to enforce it.

You get what you pay for

So your site only contains text and photographs. Your budget can easily sustain the ‘Business package’  for an attractive figure of €39 per month. There’s nothing stopping you  from signing up and having a hassle free Internet presence. Beware, you’re not out of the woods yet.

An increasing amount of providers practice the bad habit of overselling. When you look at the technical details of your virtual server, the marketing & sales people will avoid at all costs mentioning the ratio of customers per machine. Many hosts will create as many shared hosting or virtual private servers on a single physical server as possible. They gamble that all the customers on this machine won’t use the available resources at the same time.

There are well known hosting companies squeezing  over a thousand websites on one server. This means you have to compete for bandwidth and processor time with 999 other websites and all of their associated visitors. Inevitably this will result in your website slowing down and your web visitor’s sessions can even time out. Not a pleasant web experience for your customers.

So be careful what you sign up for or you may end up spending more resources migrating to a reputable host and you’ll wish you had ignored the hundreds of  “amazing offers” you saw when you first went looking for web hosting.

1. Bandwidth is the amount data transferred by network traffic – such as people downloading files from your website
2. Hard Drive Space means the amount of allocated space for you to store files on your website