To recap, WordPress (www.wordpress.org) is an open source application which gives home users the ability to quickly and easily create [...]]]> Last week we were looking in to the powerful WordPress editor.  Those that missed my last article can view a copy either at the Herald Express’s website (www.thisissouthdevon.co.uk) or on my own online blog (www.computerarticles.co.uk).

To recap, WordPress (www.wordpress.org) is an open source application which gives home users the ability to quickly and easily create an online blog, a term used to describe a website which provides an ongoing chronicle of information.  After covering the basics last week we’ll now start to uncover the more advanced features that really make WordPress stand out from the crowd.

The term ‘plug-in’ is used to describe a small piece of software written by either the WordPress authors or a third party which provide additional features not found on a standard installation.  If a blogger finds that WordPress doesn’t cater for a particular requirement of his then in many cases a plug-in can be used to extend the functionality of the software quickly and easily.

To give you an idea, I’ve listed a couple of plug-ins that I find particularly useful:

Akismet – You will soon find that your blog gets a lot of spam comments, usually by automated systems trying to advertise male medical products.  Akismet checks comments in your blog against an online database in order to automatically remove any that it deems as looking like spam.

All in One SEO Pack – This provides a number of Search Engine Optimisations in order to make your blog more appealing to search engines such as Google.  Although Search Engine Optimisation is an entire science in itself, this simple plug-in will hopefully help to push you further up the results table.

Google XML Sitemaps – Creates a single file detailing every page on your site.  You can then request that Google download and analyse this file on a regular basis thereby helping them to improve the freshness and visibility of your pages in their search engine.

Sociable – Allows users to automatically add a link to a specific post on their favourite social bookmarking site, for example Facebook, Digg or Twitter.

Statpress – Analyses visitors to your site and allows you to see a number of reports including daily views, pages most visited and search terms used to find your site.  You can even use it to find out more detailed information about your readers such as the Operating Systems they use and their geographic location.

The ability to keep the software up to date it one of the things I admire most about WordPress; once you have performed the initial installation you will be informed whenever you log in to the control panel if a particular plug-in or indeed the entire installation needs updating.  Should you find that any component is out of date then it only takes one click for the appropriate files to be downloaded and installed on your web server automatically.

Such ease of use means that it doesn’t take a lot to ensure that you always have the most up to date version of the software installed as well as providing protection by allowing you to easily install any security patches as and when they are released.

As you may or may not [...]]]> This week I decided that enough was enough and that it was time for me to talk openly about online credit card fraud and the rather bizarre attitude that the police and card issuing companies seem to have towards it.

As you may or may not know, the Refresh Cartridges website is my primary source of income and it is this income source that I use to put a roof over my head and food on our table; as such I can get very protective. Earlier this week we had a number of people come on to the site and use card details which we later found to be fraudulent. At the time, the amounts weren’t exceptionally large and so being a company that sends out hundreds of cartridges on a daily basis we did the basic checks, thought nothing more of it and sent the goods.

I’d approximate that around £600 worth of goods went out the door over multiple orders and naturally you’d have thought that this would have been something that the police might have been interested in, surely? After all, if someone came in to the shop, stole over half a grand from the till then went as far as leaving me their address (remember, the online fraudsters provided us with a delivery address), I’m fairly confident that they’d be soon knocking on his door.

Instead, and rather bizarrely the police won’t even allow a merchant such as us to report card fraud to them anymore as they say it is simply too widespread for them to deal with. I find this attitude particularly interesting; surely if a problem is particularly widespread then as a police force you would want to do exactly the opposite of ignoring it in the hope that it’ll simply go away? To make a rather absurd analogy, let’s assume that illegal gun ownership becomes widespread in this area; would Devon and Cornwall constabulary then not allow me to report that I’ve just seen a man walking down the road with an AK47?

It would appear that ignoring the problem is having the predicted effect; apparently credit card fraud is the fastest growing form of organised crime and in 2007 it increased 44%. I have even seen a website just recently that sells stolen credit card numbers quite openly for the bargain price of $10 a card; you even get a discount if you buy in bulk.

This left me wondering quite why the police don’t seem to really care about the problem and I could only summarise that the reason is that individuals aren’t really affected. If someone has their credit card stolen they are completely protected; the card owner will report their card stolen, they will be refunded and the money will then be taken straight back out of the bank account of the company that sent the products in good faith.

Most people assume that in an instance of credit card fraud, the banks are the ones that cover the cost but unfortunately it is the companies and their staff that bear the brunt. To add insult to injury they are often charged an additional £25 per fraudulent transaction by the merchant bankers for ‘administration’, effectively leaving the banking corporations in profit.

It is clear that as a business we are targeted as the goods we sell can be high value and are easily resalable. Give one guy a hundred stolen credit card numbers, thousands of different Internet companies to buy off and in a couple of days he could have tens of thousands of pounds of stolen goods to resell.

It is a sad fact the 90% of the addresses given are in London and that every fraudster that I’ve spoken to so far (yes, I do occasionally call them) has been a young male with a foreign accent. I’m not going to join the dots for you but with the government currently so cautious about the incomes of such demographics, you wouldn’t have thought they would be casually ignoring this form of organised crime.

I recently [...]]]> I’ve recently received a couple of questions regarding last weeks safe shopping article in which I discussed the bases that you could cover in order to protect yourself whilst shopping online. Below I have printed one such e-mail which raised a couple of unanswered questions:

I recently read your article supporting Internet shopping with interest as I have always feared shopping online because I have had friends whose cards have been “cloned”. You mentioned a couple of interesting points regarding the protection your credit card company will extend to you however I only have a debit card and so in your opinion would this be equally safe to use?

I am myself aware of checking that the site has padlock symbol on the bottom of the toolbar and that its website starts with ‘https’ but are there any other checks which would help?

Seán, Brixham

This is an interesting question and one that I had to do a little bit of research on in order to find a satisfactory answer. In terms of the protection offered to you by your debit card company I discovered that unfortunately this is a little less than when using a credit card. Because there is no ‘credit’ involved when you purchase a good by debit card you are unfortunately not covered by the Consumer Credit Act and therefore if you are trying to retrieve any money off a company then the card issuer isn’t equally liable. With a credit card you would be entitled to claim the money back off the card issuer and they in turn will chase the retailer in order to obtain the money themselves. Although debit cards don’t afford you this protection there isn’t a huge need to worry as in the event of a non delivery, bankruptcy or a fraudulent transaction the financial institutions would claim the money back off the companies merchant bankers who in turn would be left to claim the money back off their clients.

With regards to checking out potential suppliers I would tend to suggest using simple common sense. As you mention; check for the padlock symbol when entering your card details as this means your card details are being securely transmitted but other than that you should be able to do your own research in order to establish how legitimate the company is. I tend to work on a number of factors and so far have never suffered a fraudulent Internet transaction.

- Does the website look professional? I would tend to trust a nicely designed site with my card details rather than one that looks like it was designed by a 5 year old, is riddled with errors and has a large amount of out of date, non rotating stock.

- Check the Internet for reviews of the company you are about to purchase from. Obviously take them with a pinch of salt but a quick search on Google and you should get an idea as to their customer service reputation.

- Install the Google and Alexa Toolbars – Although in no way a guarantee this will show you how important Google ranks a particular page and the Alexa toolbar will show you how popular the site is on the Internet. If Google rate it as PR0 (the lowest available) and according to Alexa no one ever visits it I would be cautious about giving them your card details. If a site has a large number of visitors and it doing a lot more business it is probably a lot safer to assume that they won’t be going out of business before your goods are delivered.

- Check for contact details and try phoning them just before you actually place an order. Be very careful about buying from a site with no phone number unless it’s a name you know you can trust.

- Don’t place too much importance on logos such as ‘ShopBuy’ and ‘ICOMMU’ – I have these logos on www.refreshcartridges.co.uk and know that it’s basically just a way for the logo issuers to make money off merchants such as myself. These schemes do very few background checks on a company and are very limited in how they can help should anything go wrong.

- Don’t pay by cheque; you have practically no protection in the event of a non delivery.

The above points are only my own personal methods of shopping online so don’t take them as gospel and whilst to the best of my knowledge the legal standpoint at the beginning of this article is correct, please do check with your debit card issuer. If you want to download last weeks article about protecting your card online or read up about the Alexa and Google please visit www.computerarticles.co.uk

I believe that once again it’s that time where I should talk once again about the my complete inability to be able to get broadband seemingly anywhere in Torbay; many of you may remember my problems in securing this always on, fast Internet access at my old address and the miscommunication I [...]]]>

I believe that once again it’s that time where I should talk once again about the my complete inability to be able to get broadband seemingly anywhere in Torbay; many of you may remember my problems in securing this always on, fast Internet access at my old address and the miscommunication I endured from department to department of BT. First they decided that I could have it, then that I couldn’t, then I could before eventually resting on the decision that I (probably) could not – A process which took several months.

I’ve now moved to within a kilometer or so of the main exchange (the tolerated should be 5.5km) and it still appears that because of the quality of the line coming into my house or the distance that the cable detours before reaching my house that broadband access is little more than a dream to me. Once again, first they decided that I could have it so I went ahead and placed the order, only to find that three weeks later I phoned up to check their progress to find that they had ‘lost’ the order. I re-ordered and this time they failed the line test but didn’t actually bother to inform me of this fact – When I didn’t hear anything, I waited in a telephone queue for 15 minutes just to be told that I couldn’t receive it.

Thinking that enough was enough, I started thinking about going over to Telewest Eurobell – I hadn’t considered it in the past because I was outside of a Telewest covered area but now it appeared that I was able to receive their service in my new residence. A couple of quick checks confirmed that I wasn’t in a contract with BT so I decided to move my phone service over to Telewest (purely out of spite as I was so annoyed with BT at this point) and signed up to the Telewest Internet Service which I’ve seen in action on several customers machines in the past. They confirmed that I was able to receive both of these services at discounted rates to what BT would have been charging me and arranged for my number to be ported over to Telewest Eurobell and the Broadband to be installed in a week from now, both taking place in the same visit. Whether all will go to plan or not is obviously an entirely different matter but Mark at Telewest who took care of my order sounded confident that we wouldn’t have any troubles and not only that, a qualified engineer would come around to my house and show me how to set it up. Obviously this isn’t an essential for someone such as myself but for those of you who aren’t entirely computer literate, having an engineer visit your house is sure to be helpful.

I therefore decided that this week I would cover the Telewest Broadband product for those of you who are either with Telewest for your telephone service and don’t want to move to BT, with BT for your telephone service and can’t get ADSL on your current line or finally those who are with BT who could get ADSL but fancy saving themselves a bit of money.

Currently, Telewest Broadband costs £25 for activation which is a one off charge and includes all the equipment you need to get started, you then have a monthly charge of £25 (or £29.99 if you don’t want a Telewest Eurobell phone line) for your use of the service and this gives you always on, unmetered Internet access and download speeds up to ten times the speed of a conventional modem whilst still giving you the facility to use the phone and the Internet simultaneously. To put this into perspective, for a similar style service on BT the cost would be around £30 a month with the equipment and activation costing £85. All you really need in order to use the service is a free USB socket on your PC so that you can plug in the network card which as I mentioned comes inclusive as part of the package.

With bad experiences of conventional broadband solutions plaguing my mind and which I hasten to add are all usually provided by BT via a third party such as AOL, Freeserve or Tiscali, I would recommend that if you are in a Telewest enabled area that you have a good look at their service first before making a final decision. Officially named ‘Blueyonder’, full information can be found at www.blueyonder.co.uk or by phoning 0800 499994.