Target: November Stats, 2007

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Personal Stats

OK. Here it is. My own search for Financial Common Sense and Freedom.
Beginning Income (November 2006) US$179.88

PPP = 65%
Google = 5%
Stocks = 24%
Interest = 6%

Goal = USD$1,200
Target = 15% Achieved.

This is my initial target. I don’t intend to earn a lot of money through PPP as I don’t want to post more than once or twice a day PPP opportunities. However, we’ll just see how things go along.

I will clarify my ownership of these four revenue streams in future posts, sometime before January 1st.

Useful Password Tip #1

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Discussion for: Joomla Administrator’s Security Checklist

I may get flamed for this and maybe I deserve it….LOLI am not a big fan of telling people to have 10 different passwords they use…
Neither am I a fan of changing these passwords often. Changing on a monthly basis is not really effective as any brute forcing of the password won’t take that long. Unless you were changing it on a weekly basis it’s effectiveness is limited.

I tell users that they should have no more than 3 levels of Passwords and webmasters no more than 5! And each level must be completely unrelated to the others in terms of what is used.

He then goes onto describe his levels in detail. I would suggest an alternate (or additional?) tack. If you are a member of a lot of sites, esp. those without financially related details or other sensitive data, simply create a standard password that you can use with all of them. BUT to make each password unique, add a prefix of a couple of letters to differentiate that password for other words thus:

  • General Password: 123abc
  • Specific password for Payperpost could be: pay123abc
  • Specific password for New York Times could be: NYT123abc

Easily extendable and variable. If you decide to do this, you can separately record the list of acronyms somewhere separate from a generic password. If it’s retrieved it would not make any sense to anyone else.

IB

Shopping Carts – They’re not all the same!

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There are a tonne of shopping carts out on the market, some of them free, some of them not. Miva Merchant comes in at the top end of products for small business, Zencart, and OScommerce. In many ways, each of these is kind of top heavy on the learning, powerful, and not particularly flexible, esp. in the hands of SMEs who perhaps don’t have so much experience.

However, Avactis Shopping Cart makes it very easy to integrate your online store into your existing website, thereby making Avactis an easy and obvious choice if you don’t want to redo your entire website around your store (many people wouldn’t choose this route!). You can view a site made with Avactis here.

I tried OScommerce and found it very clunky. Without experience of using it, it was quite difficult (impossible for me) to integrate this with an existing website. I also tried Zencart which was easier, but still not straightforward.