I needed to see if I could use content posts with Smoothslider, so we could put things like videos in them. Apparently you can. Sweet.

Bogus. I take it back. It seems to create some sort of choice of text and images to put in a ‘featured image’ ‘featured text’ type mode rather than simply show content, and I don’t see a ‘just show content’ option. Blech.

Take a look at this great graphic…

If we lose net neutrality that’s what the internet will be like. You’ll pay your base fee like you do cable, but you won’t have access to everything. Want Facebook? That’s an extra $5 a month, otherwise it won’t load on your computer. Like to watch shows on Hulu? You’ll need to pay your ISP in order to get it streamed to you.

Like CNN for your news over Fox? Too bad. You have Comcast Cable, and Comcast has a deal with Fox. Fox loads FAST. CNN takes about a minute for every page to load, and forget streaming video from CNN.

—
http://techdailydose.nationaljournal.com/2010/09/net-neutrality-bill-gives-fcc.php

The above bill basically makes sure the FCC has no ability to regulate the industry which will essentially let the cable companies do the above. It’s a problem for so many reasons. Imagine if we didn’t have net neutrality back in 1999: Google’s Search Engine wouldn’t have loaded on people’s computers because they were new and had no deals with service providers like Yahoo or AOL had…. So Google’s ideas and superior search engine delivery would have been stifled before it even began.

Starting a new business on the internet now is easy for anyone, and it creates an amazing amount of innovation. If we lose Net Neutrality and don’t give the FCC power to enforce it, then making a new business on the internet will be as complicated as starting a new Television station, ie both difficult and cost prohibitive for most ventures.

Given that most businesses now and in the future rely on the internet and will do moreso with every passing month and year, it’s incredibly dangerous to lose it.

–

And there is precedent too. The phones. The phone lines were regulated. Companies weren’t allowed to not call someone on another company, or to provide a bad line to another company. Oh there were some pricing schemes certainly within companies, but they had to connect you, and the line had to be good quality regardless of who the other carrier was. They couldn’t trash the quality just because you were calling from ATT to a Bell South phone.

That’s what we’re looking at here. We’re looking at companies who are afraid they’re becoming ‘dumb’ pipes for information, and are trying to be more to save their businesses, but in doing so they’re endangering the most amazing parts of the internet that spur innovation, create jobs, and provide freedom for users to get their information or business from where THEY choose, not where their cable company has deals.

Every American should be fighting hard for the FCC to have full abilities to regulate this and maintain net neutrality. Otherwise the above graphic will become a reality, and while the ISP’s will profit, the American people, and our nation at a whole will lose.

Ok, I’m irritated at bad Forgot Password functionality. People still seem to do it in a variety of ways and when it’s not pretty standard, I just get angry.

Here’s what it should be:

The forgot password link should be near the login form, and be obvious, and say ‘Forgot Password?’ or something similar and obvious. Don’t get too cutsy. I like cutsy but when people forget their password it’ll just piss em off.

Then on the Forgot Password page, offer preferably one choice along the lines of restoring the password by entering your account’s email address. If they have an account on your site they need an email address. If they dont’ have an email address….Well jeez seriously? Then they’re not a regular internet user. Make sure you capture an email address on signup, and allow them to log in to your site via their email. Whehter you let them set up a separate username is up to you.

Anyway…just have a box for their email, and a submit button and then if that is an email in your database say “ok your reset information has been emailed to you” and if not then tell them to try again or that the email wasn’t in the system.

That way they need to control the email address as well, not just know it or get it from a keylogger.

Then the email should send a link to reset the password. It should have a one time encrypted key that gets put in the database for the user. That link then takes you to a page, looks at the key, compares it to the user table, and then loads in the resetting password information and wipes the one time key from the database. That way the link to that user can only be used once, from that email.

then just offer them a new and confirm password field, and have them submit.

I prefer then for the system to auto log the user in, but if you don’t want to do that then send them back to the login screen automatically (don’t make them click to it) and have them relog in.

But seriously, why not auto log them in at that point, they obviously want to get into your website.

That’s it.

I honestly hate sites that make you put in the name of your first car, or your favorite color, or your first pet, etc, in order to get your password. I get security questions, I really do, but is there really a lack of security to send people email? Do any regular internet users not have an email when they sign up for your site?

I guess it happens, I’ve seen it happen in certain places, but it’s so easy to get a free email these days, that maybe the person signing up who doesn’t have an email, needs to call you instead, or doesn’t need to sign up. I don’t know. It’s like someone saying “hey mail me that book I ordered, but I don’t have an address.”

Anyway…I think that if you need to handle people not having emails, then you obviously need to do something different than the above, but if you get everyone’s emails then you should just use those to do the forgot password, and make it quick and simple with no security questions, and no mothers maiden name, etc.

Maybe if you’re a bank you can add in extra layers of security, but otherwise…

Also don’t get me started on why my World of Warcraft account is more secure than my bank account… Hey Citizens Bank? Can I get a keyfob authenticator please?

I think it’s a valid question at this point. I remember the first stuff being sold online which seems like an eternity ago, but was only about 15 years. Maybe to some people that IS an eternity. It seems both so short a time, but so far away.

Actually I don’t want to write about that but seriously… Fifteen years ago I was an oddball because I had a computer and even odder because I had a modem. I remember when I went to Grad School in the fall of ’96 I had a laptop I brought with me for notes and people looked at me like I was a space alien. Most people hadn’t heard of the internet, and those that had thought it was spelled AOL.

Anyway I digress. Shopping carts. They’ve been around that long, and it seems on some websites they haven’t improved at all since those early heady days. There seem to be three types of Shopping Carts on the internet. The good, the bad, and the lazy.

The lazy ones are the ones like they were coded 10-15 years ago. I came across one of these just a couple days ago, and it spurred this blog post. I was purchasing season tickets to the Pitt Panther’s this fall, and the form was just godawful. The shopping experience itself was poor, and the shopping cart. Well it was just lazy. One big long form with every piece of information on it. Oh it wasn’t the worst lazy one i’ve seen. I’m sure you’ve come across them. You purchase something and there IS no shopping cart it’s just straight into purchase, and then it’s one form, and you fill it out and hit submit and the purchase is made, and they barely confirm it to you and you worry for a week that you got ripped off before the item hopefully arrives. Those. Lazy.

I guess you could call them Bad too, but I consider them more Lazy. It’s just not taking any time to learn what improves a process. The goal is to increase usability, but the reason is to increase sales, improve customer retention, and lower cart abandonment. Those are the three goals of all this. If you don’t care about any of that stuff, why are you selling anything at all?

Second. The bad. People who have put way too much personal thought into their shopping cart process without talking to users at all. You’ve probably seen these as well. Usually there is a big registration process to get you ‘involved’ in some way, and then there might even be complicated drag and drop processes to make your shopping cart all funky and cool, and things moving and confusing, and you don’t even know what you’re doing anymore. Those are bad. They’re not simply just refusing to learn what makes a site good, they’re changing what was, to something THEY think is good, without even thinking about the users. That’s worse to me than just being lazy.

Again, the goal here is to increase sales, improve retention, lower abandonment. Not show how cool your website is.

Ok so what simple things can be done, and proven to work by usability studies, to improve those three aspects of your shopping cart.

1) Before you even get into the cart offer some basic functionality on your site. Product searching is a must. Users expect this now. If they want a Terry Bradshaw signed football, then they should be able to search for one. Secondly Related items. Every item on your site should have related items, hopefully hand picked by you. If they like the Terry Bradshaw signed football, they might like his signed jersey to go along with it.

2) Call to action buttons. They need to be clear and obvious. Add to cart. Add to wishlist. View shopping cart. Proceed to Checkout etc. If it’s not blatantly obvious to a user how to add an item to his shopping cart, or to start the process to give you money you’re failing. This is surprisingly common.

Ok once they’ve picked up their two items into the shopping cart and clicked the very obvious ‘proceed to checkout’ button  what do we do….

3) Let them buy without registering. Don’t make them log in or register for your site. Don’t force them to respond to an email, or give you any kind of information. They want to buy. you let them. You’ll get information from them in the future, but right now it’s more important you get their money now. Forcing registration is one big way you’re going to have customers abandon their shopping carts.

4) Stagger the registration process. Don’t have one big long page with everything on it. People will abandon a form half filled, but not a process half complete. What I mean is that if you take a registration page and break it up into 4 or 5 chunks, if someone has completed 1 or 2 stages, they’re more likely to finish the process if they get interrupted, whereas one big unfinished form is easy to let go of.

5) Simplfiy. You don’t need to ask them marketing questions or find out where they normally vacation. You need to sell them something. Don’t try and do market research with your sales. Customers HATE that. They’ll abandon the cart rather than answer the questions.

6) Through the whole process be communicative. Address questions, explain errors, highight required fields. Hold their hand, and try and make it as easy and quick and painless as possible to get through it all. You don’t need to add barriers to sales, you need to remove them.

***

Ok so how would a good sales process look? Ok let’s assume that the user has selected the Terry Bradshaw football and jersey. They click proceed to checkout.

Stage 1: Identify Them. You want to capture two things on this page. Email and password. This is an effective registration as well. You can identify them by their email and get them into your system. Also they won’t hopefully forget their email. Don’t do usernames. People forget usernames. They’re a waste of time. As far as the password goes have the password field, and a confirm password field, just to make sure since they can’t see their password when they enter it, becuase you’re hopefully using a password field there. Also preferably have the constant check of the level of security of the password. You know where it says low medium or high security, and suggests things like adding a number or a capital letter, etc.

Once you get through stage 1 you’ve got their email. Even if they don’t finish the process you can send them a reminder in the future if they abandon the cart “hey we noticed you never finished blah blah blah….”

Stage 2: Shipping Address. If you’re shipping something, you need the address. If it’s an online delivery format, discern it here. This stage is about how they’re getting what you’re giving them. If it’s an online login you can skip this step and give it to them after the confirmation. If you’re shipping something to them though this is the enter your shipping address and pick your shipping type stage. Be sure not to piss off people from other countries too. A form that adjusts the fields per country you ship too will be appreciated. IE if you want to sell to Candians as well as Americans be sure your form handles it. Don’t just have american states in the dropdowns, or a 5 digit postal code.

Stage 3: Billing Information. Here you’ll need to capture their billing address, be sure to have it default to the same as the shipping address, and let them change it if they want to. Then grab their payment information, credit card, etc.

Stage 4: Confirm order for the user before you process the purchase. Show what they’re buying, all the taxes, etc, list out out like an invoice, hopefully with pictures to remind them of what they’re getting. let them click a final button to confirm the purchase. Make it obvious to the user that ‘if you click this button you’re buying it…right here.” Show your security. SSL, trust symbols, Verisign, your own thing. Whatever. Let them know that their purchase is secure and they’re ok.

Stage 5: You confirm to the user the purchase was made, you show them what theyr’e getting, confirm their information, tell them what to do if there is a problem. Hopefully you’ve also sent an email to them, let them know that you’ve sent an email, make them a confirmation notice, with an order number that they can print out a hard copy of and reference.

Then if you want to start doing market research on them you can. You can ask some more questions if you want, but only after it’s obvious that they’re done. Most people will leave at that point, but tha’t sok. You’ve got them to make a purchase, and you’ve got their contact information.

***

Anyway is that so hard? Can’t everyone just do that? If you’re not doing that you’re leaving money on the table, guaranteed.

http://gizmodo.com/5574821/uh-oh-adobe-porn-industry-prepping-to-ditch-flash

So looks like the biggest Porn house is going to stop using Flash tech as soon as IE8 starts supporting HTML5. (I won’t hold my breath, IE8 has really lagged behind the other browsers in supporting CSS3 and HTML5 but that’s nothing new. They’ve historically done things their own way…

The point though is that, whether people like it or not, Porn leads in technology. VHS Tapes? Porn. They got into VHS (and picked it over Betamax) before most people had a VHS machine in their house. They led that technology. Same with CD-ROM’s and DVD movies and High Def DVD’s. Blu Ray won partly because of Porn. 3 months before Toshiba gave up on the HDDVD format all the porn studios had stopped producing in it, and had moved strictly to BluRay.

The point is that where porn goes technology wise has been a pretty big indicator of where the rest of us soon will be, and one of the biggest houses in Porn just said “Flash, it’s been fun but…”

Throw on top of that the previous talk from Apple about how they’ll pretty much NEVER put Flash on their iPads and iPods and iPhones and iWhatevers….So companies interested in all those people and the growing alternate means of accessing the internet will be avoiding Flash more and more.

Honestly… I’m glad. I’ve disliked Flash for a decade. Oh I’ve done stuff in it, and I’m not going to get into every single reason I dislike the format, but I will say this. Adding Media to your site, adding content to your site…that’s a good thing… But locking it to a format that god knows how many of your customers won’t be able to see, is just dumb.

Like if you’re a restaurant. Why have a flash website? One of your customers might be trying to check out your website from their iPhone before lunch to see whether they should go there. Not only should you not have any Flash on your website, you should probably have been smart enough to pay additional money for a mobile version of the site.

“I want a flash splash screen that the user has to play a game on to get into the site, like nothing hard, but it’d be cool if they have to drag like say pieces of a puzzle together in order to enter the site.”

That’s a paraphrase, but it’s pretty close to something I once heard. Is the customer always right?

Lord no.

Flash crashes browsers. Flash is STILL not well read content and SEO wise by the search engines (it’s made forward strides in it, but it’s NOT as good as HTML) not to mention throwing in usability issues…You don’t want to make accessing your site and information on your site difficult.

I’m sure people will abuse HTML 5 to make poorly usable wesbites. It’s probably inevitable. Usability is important, and it’s tricky, but it looks more and more like the technology that will be used to implement usable solutions in the future won’t be flash, and I’m glad.

So I’ve been watching the World Cup alot. Gotta love a second monitor, ESPN3, and the ability to have the volume on without wearing headphones…

It’s been great. I love soccer/football. Played it when I was younger, played it when I was older, coached a club soccer team during grad school…Of course that’s when I was a player/coach and i had my ‘last’ knee injury which really prevented me from playing ever again…. but still.

Anyway this World Cup has had a ton of controversy over calls. Some people are for the use of technology to solve some of the problems, such as video instant replay like in American Football or a chip in the ball to tell when it went over the line. FIFA, the world governing body of football is against it, and has been for years.

One thing they claim is that it’s technology that wouldn’t be available at all levels of the sport, so it shouldn’t be in unless it could be.

Because my daughter’s soccer team this fall (her first…she’s old enough this year) REALLY needs video instant replay. I’m sure.

Other people say it adds to the drama and water cooler talk. Seriously? There’s plenty of drama without making some out of having unfair calls change the course of a match.

As you can probably tell, i’m for the use of technology, at least at the highest level. I think if there is a tool available to you to use, that can improve something, it should be used. If you can use a backhoe, why would you use a shovel? If you can carry a cellphone and be contacted in the field while you’re working, why would you not have one, and rely on checking in every day by payphone (if you can find one these days). The argument against the use of technology for technologies sake just irritates me.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t think we should use technology for everything. It’s gotta solve a problem. Technology for technologies sake is also an issue. It’s a balance with Luddites on one end, and the Borg on the other. It’s important to live life, to be human, and to enjoy the world as the people we are and not let technology dictate our lives…. but at the same time not reject technology for technologies sake, or any other BS reason.

If it solves a problem it should be used. If it creates new avenues to experieince life, it should be considered. If it’s just tech for tech sake…. It should be looked at warily.

I think in the case of the World Cup, goal line technology should be used. A chip in the ball, that works 100% of the time to determine if a ball is over the line…. It would remove the HUGE issue of goals going in that aren’t recognized. It doesn’t happen a ton, but when it happens at the World Cup it’s a big big problem. It wouldn’t affect or change the players, it would just help the Ref make a call.

Instant Replay… It starts affecting the game. How would it be handled? It would be for things like offsides. If Offsides is called it stops play, so you couldn’t award a free kick if it was a bad call. What if the offisdes is in the penalty box? I just think it would cause more problems and change than it’s worth, not to mention that it would stop the game for long stretches and it’s just not good for a game that so depends on the flow of the match. It should definitely not be like American Football when the red flag can get thrown at so many points to get a replay on so many things.

However it should maybe be more like Hockey. There should be a replay booth of officials watching on TV. When certain things happen, like say someone is obviously offisdes and scores a goal, the booth might see it before play resumes, contact the Ref and say “we’re overturning that”, and they restart from the center with no goal scored. Have it all up in the booth, and able to overturn the obviously bad calls that video replay can see. Why not?

Sorry. Rant off.

Well we’re almost there, but every time I think we’re in the future we’re back in the present. Of course then all that stuff is in the past…

The image above, if you’re hopelessly clueless, is from the movie 2001. The main character, who would be much better captured by the great Roy Scheider in the sequel 2010, has just taken a Pan Am space shuttle up to an orbiting space station where he’s going to get a connecting flight to the Moon.

Ok already it’s like….Damn…We’re really slackers when it comes to getting out into space…

Anyway he gets up to the space station, talks to some Russians and then goes to call his wife and daughter before he heads off for the Moon. You know….Like he’s in Denver or something. Anyway the phone booth is comfy and spacious, and the phone is a video phone.  Now, this is something that actually is all throughout the 2001, and 2010 universes. While they have regular phones, most phones have transitioned to video phones. Wall phones. Etc.

The thing is we’ve had video calls for awhile now. Video conferencing, etc. it’s not anything new, but for some reason it’s just not become big or caught on. People have made all sorts of explanations as to why like people don’t want to be seen, but I just don’t think that’s it. Yeah people like their privacy, and maybe sometimes they’ll want to keep their camera off, but look at all the webcaming. Look at the youtube and vblogs and whatever. People want to be seen. Especially people in the most targeted demos.

So why no video calling on a mass scale?

It’s been free for awhile now. most computers come with a webcam, or if not they’re super cheap, and then the software to webcam is free. But that involves knowing it exists, installing it, arranging someone else to log on at the same time and maybe tney don’t etc. It’s got alot of usability barriers. The technology is there though. And I think the desire for it is there.

Enter today, possibly, the iPhone 4. Word on the street is that it has a front facing camera. For video calls. This could be it.

Or it could not. It’s all about how it’s implemented.

If it’s something wher eyou have to use ichat and call someone else with iChat it’s not going to be huge. Oh they’ll TALK it up, and some people will love it, but if it means that you have to log onto ichat and someone else needs to log onto ichat and then connect up that way over wifi….well that’s a problem.

Still it’s gonna be neat.

But we need a video phone that you can call ANYONE. If I want to call my relatives in England who just have a regular phone it has to be the same app. If they don’t have video, then fine. No video. If I call someone who HAS video though over an iphone or something, then the video should be there (with a suitable warning so that I am not picking my nose).

However if it’s like Skyping with my parents now to show them their grandkids, and I have to call them to arrange it first, then really that’s just too annoying and not good usability.

As soon as there is a video phone though, which now means on a mobile device because that’s what phones are, and it has good usability it’s going to become the standard overnight and within 5 years everyone’s phones will be video phone capable.

That’s my 2 cents. It’s all about usability. Make the thing usable and people will use it. People WANT to use it. People are going out of their way to find work arounds. Keep it simple stupid, and you’ll make millions.

So I kind of took a way too long extended break from my blog. I’ve been working hard on our product sites, in particular oClubhouse.com which provides high quality CMS websites for Associations, Membership Clubs, and Organizations. It’s really a fun product and I know that our new customers are gonna love it. It really puts alot of emphasis on making websites work for membership clubs with just enough bells and whistles to grab them new members, and leverage the social web to keep their current members hooked, while not providing so much to get overwhealming for people. It’s a delicate balance.

We’re making a few other products as well, in particular oFitnessclub.com for Fitness clubs, Athletic clubs and gyms which is pretty cool, as well as oDaycare.com which I’m even more excited about. The ROI with oDaycare.com is pretty crazy. Any Daycare that has open spots and isn’t using oDaycare.com is missing out on money. For less than the cost of one student a month (alot less) they can really provide an extra level of service for their parents, as well as bring in tons of business.

Anyway that’s another blog.

This one is Captcha Captcha Captcha.

So as I said, I was being a bad social marketer and ignoring my blog. Well I come back after a couple of weeks and I have 179 comments. SPAM. Porn spam, handbag spam, bad english me like post and bookmark very informative i read again SPAM.

delete, delete, delete, delete, delete….

I can’t believe I didn’t install a captcha in this WordPress install. Talk about forgetting something major.

Captchas are those images or math problems or things you have to listen to in order to post in certain places. For instance if you try to post a comment on my blog here after your name and message it’ll have this picture of numbers and letters and you have to put them in a box. I’m sure you’ve seen them all over the internet.

The reason for them is that they, for the most part, prevent non-humans from posting spam. Computers have a hard time reading the images and figuring out what they’re saying, where the human eye does not. Of course they’re getting better, or some people hire cheap Chinese day labor, but still you’ll prevent a ton of spam posts from even going through.

I didn’t have one on. Big mistake. Everyone needs to use captcha. Sure it can sometimes be a little bit annoying for the user, but it’s worth it in the long run. Most Captchas are very inconspicuous and take a second or two to complete, and they clean up the internet for you and for me.

I can’t believe I forgot to put one on in the first place.

Ah well I hope this one works. I’m using the SI Captcha Ant-Spam plugin for wordpress which for some reason is hosted on a Long Beach weather website. That troubles me somewhat, but what can you do.

Every site that takes submissions or registers users should use captcha. It’ll save you the headache of deleting 179 spam emails when you go away for a couple weeks.

Ok so I mentioned this before, but I highly recommend NoScript as a plugin for Firefox.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722

I use Firefox as my primary browser, even though I have to look at everything for my work, I use it for most of my first looks, and as my personal browser. I do this because it’s become as close to industry standard as you can get on a Mac which my primary computer is.  Interestingly my primary browser on my PC is Google’s Chrome. I test on IE8 of course, but I really don’t like that browser for numerous other reasons I may or may not go into someday.

Anyway… Firefox has it’s problems, and generally the problems aren’t even with Firefox. It’s with all the scripts that people put on their pages these days. Scripts, more fully called ‘Javascripts’ are programming code that live in web pages.

Ok let me take one step back.

Ok no two steps back.

I’m going to simplify this for the layman a little bit, so if you’re a technogeek and you start sputtering at this, just relax. I’m not teaching a college class here, I’m trying to explain something to someone who knows nothing technical, so why confuse them…

Ok So lets have two things “Markup” and “Code”.

Markup is like…. well if you use a word processing program like Word and you highlight a word and hit the “b” button to make it bold. Back in the file itself it makes marks around that letter so that it will be displayed as bold. In HTML it goes from looking like this…

I took the bolder route to Boulder.

to this…

I took the <b>bolder</b> route to Boulder.

Now when your browser, or word processor, comes along and sees that it knows to make it look bold for you. It doesn’t really think, it’s all just interpreting how to display the file.

I took the bolder route to Boulder.

That’s what HTML is. It’s a Markup language. Hypertext Markup Language. All it’s doing is throwing in those tags into the text document that tells the browser how to display the text. You can add images, tables, layers, and lots of other words that make no sense, but most of what appears on the web is essentially just a text file that has markup in it that describes how to display things.

Ok so that brings us to the second thing, which is Code. That is, it’s programming language. In the case of browsers it’s Javascript. This is stuff that isn’t just display, it’s asking your browser to actually think, and run things with logic and different reasoning. It can be as simple as checking to make sure the email address you entered is actually formed like an email address, or it could be incredibly complex.

It could be thousands of lines of code, running massive mathematical computations in order to do something ‘cool’ on the page.

Or it could be something usefull.

Or it could be something that tracks you on the web and invades your privacy without you even knowing it. For instance some banner ad companies put a cookie on your computer, and then track it via scripts in the page to watch where YOU go across the web from one site to another.

But more often than not these scripts are written by, gasp, humans, and they’re not infallible and their code can be bad. I’ve seen it frequently. And when this happens your browser gets slower and clunkier and worse off. Scripts, particularly in Firefox, can slow down your browser, and even cause it to crash.

Now on top of this we have Flash. It’s ubiquitous on the internet thanks to Adobe, but it’s really just a piece of bloated crap. It’s bad on so many levels, and it hogs up your browsers system resources. Like code, it can be written so poorly as to bog down your browser, computer, and even crash the browser entirely. Plus it does annoying things like force music upon you when you go to a site, and it’s terrible for people who want Search Engine Optimization (I don’t care what Adobe says, I’ve never seen a Flash site with as good SEO as one without).

So Noscripts..

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722

It’s an addon for Firefox, that blocks all flash and scripts from loading on a page until you give it permission. You can whitelist scripts, or pages, and block other ones entirely.

You get something at the bottom of your browser that tells you how many scripts were blocked, and what they are, and you can allow them line item or you can allow all temproarily, or you can permanently whitelist entire pages, or entire scripts. It also stops flash from working automatically on a page. It puts the flash in place, but it doesn’t load it, and you can click it individually to load it up.

It takes awhile at first. Trusted sites you go to you can just whitelist, or cherry pick one script at a time until it loads the way you want. Even just whitelisting whole sites is good, because then if you click on a bad link, or get shunted somewhere you don’t want to go, the scripts don’t function, and you’re much safer. Ever get a popup you didn’t ask for? Ever go to a site you couldn’t get off of? This prevents that from happening.

Since I enabled this addon my Firefox has been 100x more stable, and I’ve felt more secure in using the web, and I’m pretty much at expert level.

I highly recommend this addon to anyone using firefox. It’s easy to install and use, just go to that link and follow the directions and then you’ll be good to go. It’ll be a little bumpy at first as you whitelist your regular sites, but after that you’ll be in great shape.

Well I need to spend more time on my blog and social marketing, and if that’s the case, I need to do it on a blog that doesn’t make my eyes bleed. Yet I don’t have the time right now to be putting all sorts of stuff together for myself in Word Press. I need to work on our sites because they currently suck for numerous reasons. So why reinvent the wheel.

Thank you Chris Prillo.

http://chris.pirillo.com/wicketpixie/

I installed the WicketPixie theme which has a ton of social media stuff tied in. I’m still getting it working the way I’d like, but I think it’s much better than before. And after uploading a brick tile for some background differences that feel more like me (exposed Brick….gotta love it) I’m closer to go.

And look! I’m blogging!