Newsletter

Happy New Year!

This month we're doing a deep dive into privacy. Privacy for website owners, privacy for you, privacy for the world. To cap it all off, we have a special Privacy Tune-up offer to make sure your privacy policy is accurate and covering your assets...

And if that's not enough, it's a big week for Drupal -- see below for why!

Hi,

At Freelock we're kicking off our long-anticipated "Vision" program, a series of newsletters, blog posts, and videos about website effectiveness. Before we get into the meat of things, we're setting the stage with the question, "How do we know if it worked?" And the answer is -- data.

So this month we're looking at a primary source of data, Website analytics.

The world of the web has changed a ton over the past decade. Websites that show one page at a time with no animations or interactions can feel stale and outdated.

... that counts. Results matter. What results are important for you? What are you trying to accomplish with your website?

Starting this month, Chrome users are going to start seeing a lot more sites flagged as insecure. Google is firmly on the technologist side of the encryption war, and it wants to make encryption something regular people care about. Why?
Not using encryption is like sending everything you visit/everything you do, scrawled upon postcards, with stops in all sorts of places, passing by people you would not want seeing everything.

[Update: a few days after I published this, Vector.im rebranded as Riot.im. It's the same project, just a new name...]

In 5,000 years, will anybody be able to read (or even access) things we put online today? Here at the dawn of the information age, we are creating the archetypes that have big implications, possibly for thousands of years. There's a bunch of recent science fiction stories that imagine various futures, written with the perspective of today's web, extrapolating where things might go as humanity evolves.

Today marks the release of Drupal 8, and the birthday of its founder, Dries Buytaert. This release is more than just a new digit, it's an entirely new platform with something for everyone to love, but it's particularly big for web site owners.

What's the big deal? The biggest, most powerful, one of the most successful open source projects in the world has two major, fundamental changes that change everything you thought you knew about it.

Well, not everything. Lots of the things that people love about Drupal are getting some nice improvements:

... this statement applies to just about any endeavor you can imagine... I've mostly heard it associated with education, the idea that you can get a good education anywhere if you work diligently at it and learn what the teacher has to teach -- and likewise, you can often skate by in good schools without coming out the other end with much learned.

Heartbleed. The end of XP. Zero-day Internet Explorer attacks. April was a tough month for security on the Internet -- are the days of safe browsing over?

Probably not. But it is time to make sure you have good password management processes -- or learn how to do it if not.

Years ago I wrote about Smarter Password Management, and how to more easily create secure passwords. It's time for a brief update, as the environment has changed a bit.

In a few short years, dot-com will be a quaint throwback referring to a couple of economic booms, and not something to indicate a web site. Like the Great War -- everybody now calls it World War 1, since we've had another great war... Why? Because the floodgates are about to open on domain names, and so we're about to see the rise of dot bike, dot plumbing, dot gifts, and even dot dentist.