At around midnight last night the Arbu.biz server went down. No, let’s be accurate here, the providers Bluehost.com took the Arbu server down. Why? Well, someone or somegroup has hacked into our ftp accounts and uploaded a little bitty .exe file along with some supporting images and such. And what was it’s function this ickle bitty file? Hmm? To insert trojans onto unsuspecting PC users’ computers.

The next question is “How did they do that?” A neat piece of software which exploits the fact that (a) cpanel webservers (like Arbu’s) have anonymous ftp accounts set up (b) that sysadmins use three letter abbreviations for their subdomains and (c) that cpanel has reached such a level of ubiquity that firing a specific request at servers to upload to ‘images’ folders works often enough for the effort to be worth it.

So the effect? Well aside from costing several of my sites and my clients’ sites 12 hours of downtime, impugning my reputation with Bluehost and stressing me to the eyeballs? It has shown me how easy it is for the black hats to take advantage of everyone else, especially those who don’t protect their pcs and don’t update their browsers. Here’s a shocking grab of the referrers to the hacked directory:

The top entries are most revealing and show how the South Americans have used the directory to attack anyone with a live.com email. Evidently, a spam email referring to the .exe file. And how did we rid ourselves of this lurgi? We deleted it, and every other exe file on our server, all the images associated with it, and finally we discontinued our anonymous ftp service (sorry to those that use it) its too much trouble.

If you have had a similar experience let us know, or if we should be doing something more to protect ourselves and our server, let us know.

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Thoroughly sick of MPs like Hazel Blears attempting to control the message and spin their way out of trouble, intrigued by John Naughton’s article extrapolating C. P. Snow’s theory on our divided society into the networked world and reminded of cyberpunk icon R. U. Sirius’s Open Source Political Party (ars technica) for the American duopoly, it seems to me that there may be space in the political landscape of the UK for a new kind of open source party, one whose manifesto is a wiki, whose policy discussions are a forum, whose membership is a social network and whose progress is monitored on a blog. In other words a networked construct which is the antithesis of the present political system, based upon lack of control, lack of political ambition, lack of personal prejudice on the part of that party’s representatives who could only reflect the opinions and policies of their networked contributors and lack of any need or impulse to spin, or control the message because everything, even the warts and all policy discussion is already published.

Although all political parties pay lip service to the idea of transparency, there seems to be very little actual connection with the voting public in any meaningful policy-forming way. And this is a mark of the distance that the present political classes maintain or allow to be maintained by the media and their party political machines. Here in Scotland there is a slightly different modus operandi being attempted, most particularly by ministers like Jim Mather who has held a series of consultative seminars on a variety of subjects across the country. While the result is to be collated by Mr Mather’s department, these seminars are as open as the present political system allows, in that anyone in that industry or interest group can attend. But it is so time-consuming, especially for a topographically challenged area like the West Coast, isn’t it far better to render distance immaterial and do the whole thing via the network?

…. and do the whole thing via the network. For internerds like myself, bells ring here: reminding me of that halycon ideal where we all sit down at 8pm precisely and vote on the policy of the day as a nation – a proper, inclusive democracy, enabled by existing technologies (the TV, the remote and the red button) and which precisely because we’re lazy, indifferent or have better things to do, wouldn’t work. No, retreat from that slightly, offer an open membership site with all of the elements mentioned above, make sure there is some way of aggregating views, perhaps using some form of rolling polling system and ask people to contribute ideas for issues which need to be addressed and their thoughts on those ideas. See how it goes.

Maybe an organisation like mysociety.org should be attempting an OS political party rather than engaging with the present system – afterall there’ll need to be a moderator with excellent open source credentials.

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… or Arbu designs the most visited websites in Argyll!

So you’re about to commission a website, you’ve got a competitive tender going and you need some sort of objective criteria to measure the expertise of the companies and individuals quoting. Difficult for SMEs who are focussed on business and products, near impossible for associations and organisations without in-house web expertise. There is an answer though.

Alexa.com ranks websites worldwide on how much traffic they get and how long they retain visitors for. The stats look like gobbledegook at first, but once you see the rankings it becomes much easier. I now have the Alexa Firefox plugin which allows me to see the rank of sites as I visit them. The ongoing battle for number one spot is fascinating, but what’s more useful is seeing how successful Arbu’s site designs are in terms of the traffic they pull in.

As you’ll have gathered from this blog, we work on ForArgyll.com, the region’s premier news service, and top website, and it is this site which has really made us pay attention to Alexa’s very useful stats. Here’s how things looked the week beginning March 2009 with a random selection of other websites from across Cowal and Argyll (Arbu’s websites are marked in bold):

1. forargyll.com’s rank this week is 346,703
2. Lochfyne.com has a traffic rank of: 357,874
3. Argyll-bute.gov.uk has a traffic rank of:  546,984
4. Arbu.biz’s rank this week is 596,532
5. Dunans.org’s rank this week is 1,101,285
6. Colglen.org’s rank this week is 2,204,430
7. Watermill-glendaruel.com has a traffic rank of:  3,545,293
8. TheWalkingTheatreCompany.com’s rank is 4,469,314
9. Cowal-dunoon.com has a traffic rank of:  5,008,692
10. Bumbleargyll.com has a traffic rank of: 5,571,596
11. Philippaelliott.com has a traffic rank of:  5,694,181
12. Katesbigchair.com has a traffic rank of: 6,149,160
13. Dunoon-observer.co.uk has a traffic rank of:  7,737,864
14. Argyllpublishing.com has a traffic rank of:  10,479,940
15. Cowalopenstudios.co.uk has a traffic rank of:  17,706,517
16. Aboutargyll.co.uk has a traffic rank of:  18,078,371
17. Glendaruelcaravanpark.com has a traffic rank of:  22,858,198
18. Cowalfest.org does not register

This is NOT a definitive list of websites across Argyll, but it does show how the hierarchy of business turnover or local visibility is completely undermined by the traffic visiting these webpages. For example, there is no way in a sensible world that the ColGlen website should be over three million ranks higher than the main site for the Dunoon and Cowal Marketing Group, but it is. Similarly, and probably more incredibly, a small (but luxurious) B&B run by Michael and Sandra Webster is 15 million places higher than their local friendly-neighbourhood Caravan park.

How do these things happen? Well, aside from saying that Arbu knows what it is doing in terms of attracting traffic, it is probably sufficient to say that a lovely design isn’t as important as knowing how the web works.

So, if you are thinking of commissioning a website in the near future and you want a directly comparable way of measuring how your tenderers’ previous commissions stack up, or if you would like to check these ranking out for yourself, click here

A final thought: if you have a web designer, and you’re wanting a quick thumbnail of how they’re doing in terms of traffic, put their website into Alexa.com – you may be surprised!

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We’re working with leading Scottish hypnotherapist Kate McEwen at the moment on her new hypnotherapy blog, Kate’s Big Chair. It is an interesting project as the idea is to get Kate blogging, which she is on a daily basis, and then as she explores the paradigm, to add layers of complexity to the project.

We’ve set up the site with the default theme, no SEO extras, no stats package, just a name and version 2.6.5 of WP. What the project is doing at the moment is highlighting the necessity of good quality writing which Kate really can do. There’s a great post on drinking water and habits, as well as the beauty of exercise.

The latest strategy to market accommodation is to go mobile. The rest of the world has, but perhaps not the less technology-driven sectors of the tourist industry, particularly B&Bs. The Watermill’s owners Michael and Sandra Webster gave Arbu the brief to promote their business as widely as possible, and one of the strategies we have come up with is to make their website, watermill-glendaruel.com, mobile browser-ready. How did we do this? A combination of WordPress, javascript and a little template trickery. The result below, is a ‘thin’ version of the site which carries some all important information on the front page: the phone number and the postcode. The former for the mobile phone to make the booking and the latter for the satnav so no instructions are needed. We’ll be putting the GPS up as soon as possible too.

Philippa Elliott has recently taken a series of very striking and very haunting photographs of Polphail, the modern abandoned village on the southern tip of the Cowal Peninsula. Commissioned to house workers for a new North Sea Oil Platform manufactury, the whole project was scrapped in the 70s oil crisis. Half-finished the village was left. This desolate and incomplete urban landscape sits uncomfortably in the beautiful wilds of Argyll where it creates a stark juxtaposition with all the cleared and uninhabited settlements from centuries before.

We’ve just uploaded the entire collection to PhilippaElliott.com and taken the opportunity to tweak the lay-out on this unusual WordPress install. Here’s our favourite from Polphail, Number 5:

This year sees the launch of the first ForArgyll.com Awards. These are voted for by everyone and anyone without let or hindrance — which should mean that they’re truly reflective of the best and most used sites. As ForArgyll’s in-house design people we were asked to come up with a logo to tie in with the style of the site. We wanted to suggest a button, create something impactive and ensure the basic message couldn’t be missed. We nailed that, and have something which will adapt over the years as well. At the moment we have a Nominee logo and a Vote logo, the latter is displayed on the ForArgyll site and the former should be displaying on Nominee sites very soon.

As you’ll see from the Developing OFTA blog, the whole endeavour has kicked off a traffic spike, as well as earn both ForArgyll.com and the nominees (and therefore Argyll) some well earned publicity. We wish our clients luck: The Walking Theatre Company, ArtsFeastCowal, The Kames Hotel, Philippa Elliott Photography and Colintraive & Glendaruel Community Website.

The new version of the Sports Consultancy website was launched today, not that you’ll notice much of a change visually – it is more about Search Engine Optimisation. As you’ll no doubt be aware a constantly updated site will attract more attention than a straightforward static site. While you can change pages regularly, it is also better to create additional content and pages. The challenge for the Sports Consultancy is updating the site while they are on the road and leveraging their expertise in a rapidly changing business environment. The answer is to update via email using the excellent plugin Postie which (delightfully) attributes posts to the correct user from whatever device they’re using at the time, be it Mac, PC, PDA, Mobile or Blackberry. We now show two news items on the front page, and have a fully featured post page which fits in beautifully with the very sharp TSC look.

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In piping circles one of the biggest challenges to travelling abroad is transporting the instrument. Unfortunately, because pipes are made of wood, hemp and other variable material, the changes in air pressure and moisture mean that on landing in distant parts the whole thing has to be re-fettled (or fettled or something …), otherwise it’ll play out of tune. Robin Beck of Cowal Bagpipes has produced a (truly beautiful) small Scottish Bagpipe which does not need to be re-fettled on arrival in said distant part. The reason? Because, like the latest MacBook Pro, the instrument is made of Aluminium, solid blocks of it. It is a truly beautiful object (more so than the Mac I’ll venture, because it is made by hand and is so shiny). Here’s a picture to prove it:

And why, you might ask, are we talking about bagpipes on this design site? Ah well, we have just produced the CowalBagpipes.com website, selling, not only the aluminium Small Scottish Bagpipe, but the innovative Beck Valve and sundry other piping accessories. Here’s the grab showing the conventional version of the pipes made of blackwood (the type that needs re-fettling):

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Splogging or Spagging or Blamming?! Not sure of the right term evidently, but I mean those ‘blogs‘ which take RSS feeds from others’ blogs and reproduce content verbatim in order to make an income from the traffic gathered therefrom. There ain’t no excuse for such laziness eh? We should be looking at banning such practices surely … ?

Well, there are times when it is justified, for example when a blogger has several blogs, in different contexts and wants to draw them together to create an über-feed. I have just done this. At charles.dixon-spain.com I have collected all the feeds from the various blogs I run or contribute to, as well as added my Twitter, Facebook and (eventually) Flickr accounts, and have created such a feed.

I am not sure whether this will be interesting or not, but I am feeling relieved that somewhere there’ll be a comprehensive listing of my output (which is not inconsiderable).

There’s a codisel to this though. The likes of google.com will positively discriminate against splogs, spags or blams and this discrimination may leak into their listing of the original site. Why? Well sometimes it may be difficult to work out which is the original story given the technical expertise of the blammers. I’m not sure on this one really, so while I research this issue I’m not going to let search engines know about the site.

Here’s the über-feed, go on! Subscribe, do!

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