Web Hosting Blog From Pixel Internet » Steve

5 More One-Click Installs Added!

Steve — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 13:01:41 +0000

We are on a roll this month! Only a few weeks back we added 8 new editions to our 1 click install list…. Now we have another 5 to add to the list.

They are:

Piwik Analytics - website analytics (try online demo)
Simple Machines Forums - message board solution (try online demo)
Zen Photo - online photo gallery (try online demo)
Status.net - microblogging (try online demo)
Lime Survey - survey software (try online demo)

8 New One-Click Installs Added!

Steve — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 10:44:38 +0000

At Pixel Internet we always do are best to listen to our customers and the feedback they leave.

That’s why we’ve launched no less that 8 new one click installs following feedback and suggestions from our customers. These are now available to install, completely free via the customers Host Control Panel.

They are:

Open Cart - e-commerce solution (try online demo)
Open Web Analytics – website analytics (try online demo)
PrestaShop – ecommerce solution (try online demo)
TomatoCart – ecommerce solution (try online demo)
Simple Invoices – customer billing (try online demo)
Vanilla Forums – forum software (try online demo)
Pligg – create a ‘Digg’ style website (try online demo)
Moodle – learning-based content management system (try online demo)

Please login to your account and visit your Host Control Panel for more information on the products and how to install them.

Hosted Exchange now with 10GB mailboxes!

Steve — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 14:28:23 +0000

We are happy to announce we’ve upgraded all our Hosted Exchange mailboxes to a whopping 10GB! This upgrade is for both new and existing customers, what’s more we’ve upgrade the mailboxes for all our existing customers already!

For just £7.49 per month every Pixel Internet Exchange email hosting includes:

• 10GB storage space (was previously 4GB)
• Free Licenced copy of Microsoft Outlook 2010 (2011 for Mac users)
• Microsoft Outlook email Boxes
• Enterprise spam & virus protection
• Mobile phone access

Enjoy the freedom to securely access all of your email from virtually any browser, web platform or device, be from your PC, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry or web browser. Exchange Server 2010 gets your email fully accessible and synchronised. Further more if you are already using Exchange 2003 or 2007 elsewhere, you can easily transfer in your existing data without loss of up time or data.

Why not take advantage of this fantastic package and order Hosted Exchange from Pixel Internet.

Hype: Building Animations With HTML5 Instead Of Flash

Steve — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 18:26:39 +0000

“It’s pretty clear HTML5 is the future of the web” says Jonathan Deutsch, co-owner and founder of tech startup Tumult, who have just released the Hype app on Apple’s iTunes App Store, “The problem is that there are no good designer apps for creating animations in HTML5 like there are for Flash.”

The team hope to have solved that problem with Hype, which allows you to create complex, bespoke animations in HTML5 using an intuitive, easy-to-use interface. The app utilises WebKit to render pages, and is designed in such a way that it’s extremely easy to learn – allowing even beginners with a basic knowledge of presentation programs (such as Microsoft PowerPoint or Apple’s own Keynote) to produce impressive looking animations.

The application utilises drag-and-drop functionality, requiring no knowledge of coding. The user is initially presented with a blank canvas and an empty timeline, from where you can drag and drop images, text and video and arrange them as required. When it comes to animating the elements, you can either manually add, remove and re-arrange keyframes as required, or you can take advantage of Hype’s Record function, which will watch what you’re doing and automatically create animation keyframes.

“This is a very designer friendly process,” says Deutsch, “The intuitive recording interface means you don’t have laboriously place every individual keyframe. You just hit record, move your objects and go.”

The developers of Hype have also worked extremely hard to ensure that the created animations can be used for all forms of browsers, including mobile devices. Hype outputs not only in HTML5, but also in CSS3 and Javascript, giving an extremely high level of fidelity across all browsers – if the CSS3 transitions aren’t supported in a particular browser for example, the application will ‘fall back’ onto Javascript-based animations. In the rare instance that none of the fall back options are compatible, Hype will let you know via browser incompatibility warnings.

Hype is currently available for $29.99 via the App Store; although this price is set to increase in the near future.

No related posts.

WordPress Finally Drops Support For Internet Explorer 6

Steve — Mon, 30 May 2011 18:25:15 +0000

As Microsoft continues encouraging people to stop using Internet Explorer 6, yet another high profile web service – the hugely popular WordPress – has now officially dropped support for the outdated internet browser.

IE6 has caused a huge amount of compatibility issues for numerous developers, designers and online services (not to mention security issues for users), but despite this nearly 12% of people round the World were still using the browser in April of 2011.

WordPress.com announced an end to IE6 support earlier last week, with a spokesman telling the press that it was down to “increasingly complicated coding to make the WP dashboard work with IE6″.

WordPress users running IE6 will still be able to log into their WordPress dashboard, although they’ll now be greeted with a message warning them to update their browser:

The dropping of IE6 compatibility will be included in the next WordPress update (WordPress 3.2), which is expected to be fully rolled out sometime next month.

On top of the end to IE6 support, the new WordPress update will feature an improved, redesigned dashboard as well as a new ‘distraction-free’ writing mode. You can find out more about the 3.2 update via the WordPress.com website, or by downloading the 3.2 beta version now.

Premium Mail Box Storage Doubled

Steve — Wed, 11 May 2011 09:00:14 +0000

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve doubled the amount of storage for premium mailboxes, so you can now store up to 2GB of emails per mailbox! Our premium mailbox prices will remain the same at just £9.99 per year.

If you already have a premium mailbox with us, you’ve automatically been upgraded to 2GB of space and you don’t need to do anything. You can upgrade your regular mailbox to a premium mailbox via your control panel under ‘order add-ons’.

Order your premium mailbox today!

An Infographic Explanation Of Server Headers

Steve — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 17:19:56 +0000

For anyone new to web design, there’s a huge amount to take on-board – there are numerous different programming languages you can get involved in, a range of content management systems, experimentation with flash, javascript, HTML5, etc.

As a result, things that are relatively simple for experienced web designers can get overlooked; like server headers and their applications. The following infographic will hopefully help anyone new to the discipline looking to improve their grasp on the different server headers and their functions:

Creators: SEO Gadget

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Top Tips For Improving Your Site Speed

Steve — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 12:57:01 +0000

The loading speed of your website is a crucial element to the overall popularity, traffic and subsequent conversions of your site, for numerous different reasons. The speed of a website is an important SEO element, as Google (and other search engines) are reluctant to reward slow-loading sites with high rankings.

So your site speed can affect the amount of traffic your website receives, particularly from search engines, but what about when users reach your website? Research has shown that a significant percentage of people will click away from a website that takes too long to load, with the vast majority of those users never returning to the website after that one negative experience.

Even if a user is patient and waits for your content to load, it’s unlikely that they will wait for every page to load, and if you’re an ecommerce site they’re far more unlikely to trust your site with their credit card details if it’s slow loading.

With such an impact on the perception and usage of your website, you can see why a site with a low speed should be addressed as quickly as possible. So how can we go about improving our site speed? Here are some top tips for doing just that:

1. Find out your current site speed
You’ll need to figure out how fast your site is compared to other websites before you start addressing any potential issues; whilst general checks are a good way to judge generally, a lot of it could be related to your internet connection so you’ll need to use an external tool that can give you far more specific information.

The best tool for this is the site speed section in Google Webmaster Tools, as this is provided by Google and gives you an accurate idea of your site speed compared to the majority of other sites.

2. Combine and externalise CSS files
Your website is far more likely to load quickly if it can reference one external cascading style sheet (CSS), rather than a difference CSS file for each page. Combine them all into one and minimise the source code as much as you can.

3. Compress your content
HTTP compression can be an excellent method for reducing your site speed, as it combines all of your website data into one file, rather than needed to request and reference numerous different files.

4. Optimise your website images
This is an important element in improving your overall site speed and can have a surprisingly notable impact. Different file formats (jpg, jpeg, png, gif, etc) have a varying impact on site speed, with some file extensions causing a substantial increase in file size. Know when to use the correct formats and optimise your images with site speed in mind (for example, GIF files tend to load quicker than JPEG or PNG files).

5. Put your Google Analytics code in the footer or at the bottom
If your GA code is at the top of your HTML document, then the browser will load this information before anything below, giving the impression that the site is loading slowly. Move your GA code to the footer or lower down the HTML body to ensure that browsers load your page content before the analytics, making the page seem much faster to users.

Google Challenges You To Hack Chrome

Steve — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 10:26:25 +0000

In the current Internet based world, online business reaches new levels each year. For this reason, Internet security is taken ever more seriously. Every year new threats emerge that exploit either badly written or hastily put together code, and due to the pace of technological development, this is happening more often.
Hewlett Packard and Google are just two of the many big names that are investing in the would be hackers of the future, and exploiting their skills. Hewlett packard run an annual competition known as ‘Pwn2Own’, run from March 9-11 in Vancouver this year, in which contestants are challeneged to hack various devices and win prizes.

This year the challenges posted will have a mobile theme, and will include trying to break:

- Blackberry Torch 9800 running Blackberry 6 OS
- iPhone 4 running iOS
- Nexus S running Android
- Venue Pro running Windows 7

Although this may seem frivilous, and giving potentially dangerous programmers good practice, it does have it’s uses. It is cleverly used by large companies to test the durability of their soft and hardware. Having the best hacking minds in the business test their programs in a controlled environment gives invaluable information on the hardy-ness of the product. Google has been exploting the vast amount of interested users of their products as an army of testers for a long time now. They offer a reward program for finding bugs within their programs, so hope that no-one will be able to meet this latest challenge.

Google has added to the Pwn2Own prize fund with an extra $15,000 challenge. This is to hack the Chrome browser, using either a Sony Vaio, an Alienware M11X, or an Apple MacBook Air. Due to the unfinished nature of the Chome OS notebooks, Google put the proviso of the use of these other notebooks, and is fairly sure that no-one will be able to do it.

If you fancy a go, send an email to ZDI@tippingpoint.com and you’ll be allocated a random half hour slot to hack to your hearts content!

Twitter Scam Uses Goo.gl URL Shortner To Spread Virus

Steve — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 11:32:10 +0000

A new Twitter security weakness has been exposed today, in the form of Google’s own URL shortner, Goo.gl. Twitter think this happened through accounts being phished and then used to push out the fast spreading worm. This then infects the Goo.gl shortner and hijacks the redirection service, sending people to a domain with ‘m28sx.html’ included. This has been linked with fake antivirus software downloads and malicious software in the past.

This is the second occurance of this Goo.gl worm, the other coming in early December last year. This highlights the ease with which add ons to social media sites, developed by third parties, can be tampered with. This is already a big problem as they are mainly free serivces and used by millions of people on any one day, and are set to become more popular. Obviously if you see any of these coming from your own account then you should change your password immediately.

If you choose Pixel for your web hosting, you can be sure of virus and other malware protection. We have the latest security measures in palce to stop malicious software getting anywhere near your site.

The Era of Twitter