Added share button to site

Posted on June 20, 2010 - Filed Under Blog, Events | Leave a Comment

I just added a new link to our web page, in the rightmost column, under Join Our Mailing List To use it, once you open an article for reading, just click on the Share button. This will take you to a page where you can select a social network to share it with.

Web site update

Posted on May 26, 2010 - Filed Under Blog | Leave a Comment

Conversion to Constant Contact is progressing well.

  1. I just removed 270 bad emails by clicking one button. That takes us from over 900 to a little less than 700. Impressive size, but we still have the problem that only about 200 of them are opened. CC has a very cool graph page that shows all kinds of statistics on what happens to our emails once they’re sent.
  2. Our database now resides on the CC servers, and I’ve added a box on the right hand side of the web site to facilitate joining our email list.
  3. I have changed the Register link on the web site to point to the CC invitation, instead of going to the old registration process on our web site. We can now see who’s registered, whether they’ve paid, and how they paid, in one place.
  4. I added a link for the SAS User Group.

Of course, I’m partial to the CC process, since I pushed us to go that direction, and the more I use it, the more I like it. I think I’m pretty much done with it, and I hope everyone else agrees that it was a good move.

The total cost is $45/month, but once I get the email list down below 500, we’ll save $15/month. There’s no point in having 700 emails sitting around if only 200 are ever opened. CC has a tool for asking people to “opt in” to our email list. Once I implement that though, we may lose some of the 200 that do open their emails. But, that’s the only way I see to get the list pared down to those who really want the emails.

Hack attack

Posted on July 3, 2009 - Filed Under Blog | Leave a Comment

You probably weren’t aware of this, but the AITP Richmond site was stolen on June 7. If you tried to go to the registration page Sunday evening (which was fortunate), you were directed to a hacker’s site. I worked with our host provider, hostek.com, to get the offending code off our server the next morning. The vendor got a little too carried away, and restored our data as of Saturday evening, so we did lose some registrations, but we didn’t lose anything we couldn’t recover from. Hostek is to be commended for their prompt actions, as this did occur late on a Sunday evening, and we got it resolved first thing Monday morning. Cherian Abraham gets the award for vigilance though, as he was the one that brought this to my attention.

The hacker used a simple trick that I wasn’t aware of, but Cherian figured it out immediately. The hacker used the comments section of the registration page to insert some ASP code (actually Visual Basic) in stream, as if it were part of some normal text. Once I realized this, I changed my code to intercept the use of certain characters in a comment, like an apostrophe, less-than symbol, etc. I tested it, and it seemed to work fine. And wouldn’t you know it, we got hit again about a week later. It didn’t work this time, though because of my code changes.

So, our web site is now a little more secure, and I gained a little knowledge about how to protect a site from hackers.

New web site

Posted on June 24, 2009 - Filed Under Blog | Leave a Comment

We have a new version of the Richmond AITP site. You can access it at aitprich.org/index.php. The extra index.php in the URL is a temporary address, and the URL will revert to just aitprich.org when we go live. Some of the new features are:

  • It has a search facility—doesn’t work right now, because of the contention with our current site, but it will once we go live.
  • RSS capability—people can get updates via an RSS feed page, like Google Reader.
  • Older articles get automatically archived, so we always have old info built into the web site.
  • Comments can be added by any of our readers, so we will get feedback on articles and events.
  • Administration functionality is built in, so we can assign privileges by email id.
  • Anti-hacking protection is built in.
  • I’ve integrated the Members and Officers Only pages from our current web site into the new site so we still have the functionality of our database and email list.