I haven't really blogged a lot about print for two reasons 1) Yah, still really busy 2) It seems everybody is running around with rusty exactor knifes looking to slash their wrists.

Ho-hum so sad too bad. However please note that this blog is about prepress, not printing. And I don't know about other old prepress dogs, but the sun has been shining on my butt lately (work-wise). Of course that's because I have been not doing a whole lot of prepress lately.

Now can a prepress techie make a successful transition to being a web designer. Well, let me tell you, you need to know the big secret about making semi-decent web pages: It's called Photoshop. But enough about that. That's not really the tip of the day.

The tip of the day, is that if you transition from prepress to internet marketing (and I highly recommend you do) you will realize that there a gazillion tools and a bajillion services offered on the web for you to do business. One of the tools that you will need is a decent email program. ALL of the decent email programs are online services who have made arrangements with ISP to be able to deliver mail without getting spammed to purgatory. But not all are created the same.

Having tried out about 4 or 5 of these services, I have been using Vertical Response for about 3 months and been pleased as punch. It's got all the features that you need (opt-in scripts, on-page html editors) and it's cheap, cheap ($15 a month for 1000 email addresses in the database, unlimited delivery). Plus they allow single opt-in delivery (if you don't know what that is, I'll spare you the details.)

Some of the other emailers are downright paranoid about being blacklisted, so even if you have a ridiculously low "spam" rate (under 2%), you run the risk of losing your account.

Anyhow, that's the tip of the day.

Yes, I know, a good internet marketer would put a email sign-up box on his blog. Yeah, one day. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Over the weekend, my ftp client was scraped by a Chinese trojan for access to my web sites. This was a pretty good trick as I wasn't on the computer the whole weekend because of the Olympics. Now I had passwords stored on the family computer in the kitchen which wasn't the smartest thing to do but hey, who knew?

Sunday night I was on the phone with my business partner and he was all of a sudden, hey what's up, the website is down! So I get on the phone and check with the hosting provider and every web site I own (or have access to) is getting knocked out.

So yeah, that's when I learn that there are Chinese trojans that scrape your PC looking for ftp clients like pureftp, coreftp, etc and if you store your passwords on them, they scrape 'em.

Then, once they get a hold of your passwords, they ftp in your account and download the virus that gets triggered if you use php in your website (and pretty everybody on Linux runs php on their web servers).

All yesterday, I was writing up tickets for web host support, trying to get all my web sites restored from backups. The clients sites got up first, with this blog not getting restored until early evening. So now you know why I was down yesterday.

So how do people know the Trojan is from China? Well the servers that load the virus (you can track the IP addresses in Apache logs) originate from China. Maybe in a few years, they will get as sophisticated as the Russians, who first write Trojans to get  PCs (outside their native country) acting  as 'bots for them.

I do know that the Chinese trojans are really annoying a lot of guys trying to make some coin on the internet. I've see (and used) block lists of Chinese IPs addresses, which basically deny access to your website to any computer that originates from China. That's how much of a pain these Chinese scrapers have become.

In the meantime, I have been resetting passwords on all my websites and making sure to NOT store them anywhere on the computer. Fun, fun, fun.

And now we will take a pause from attempting to write reasonably amusing blog posts to focus on the logistics of building and maintaining a web site. You may click away now.

Prepress Pilgrim was the first web site I ever built, apart from a blogger account (now closed) and some weird pay-for-hosting account that had the world's ugliest templates but promised to make you lots of money by advertising (it didn't). Since starting Prepress Pilgrim, I have built about 60 or so web sites, give or take a dozen. A great many of those web sites were "thin" sites, only 3 or pages, and more than a few have been discontinued ie not ever worth paying the $10 a year domain renewal fee.

The first sites I built for myself were an attemptto make money using Adsense and Clickbank and Ebay and a bunch of affiliate programs most of which I've dropped and forgotten. A lot of websites I built never made me a dime. But not all were failures.That's the beauty and wonder of the internet. There is stuff that people are not interested in, even if you think it's interesting. Then is stuff that other people find interesting and you wonder why. THEN there is stuff that people are so interested in that they buy stuff off your site or at the very least, they click on ads.

I've built some sites with very little time and effort that make money with only a few hours effort a year. Not a lot of money, but some. And as the years go by, little bits add up.

Additionally, by word of mouth, word gets out and people ask you to build websites for them and of course you get money for that. Now, building websites for people can be a real low-margin business. It's not just printers who are cheap, every small business out there watches costs like a hawk. So if you are not careful, you can get stuck building a $3000 web site for $300.  But not always.

Time passes. One day you log into your chequeing account and all this internet stuff that you are doing is no longer a hobby, no longer a dream. You're paying the mortgage, or at least you're paying the mortgage this month.

Prepress Pilgrim is not a money site for me. Well, not a serious money site. But it's still very useful to me as it's a good "authority" site and my most visible presence on the internet. For example, I can't remember the last time I sent out a resume. You want to know me, professionally, you read my blog. There's hundreds of pages of copy here, enjoy.

Another useful thing that this web site is good for is experimentation. Whenever I see a groovy new plug-in for Wordpress or I get the twisted urge to edit some php code, I don't do it first on my client sites or my money sites. That's right, it gets done here. Of course, that means that sometimes Pilgrim is at risk of going boom-boom, which happened at least twice in my first year of operation in this site. And it nearly happened last month.

Recently I developed the urge to build a large site. Really big, like thousands of pages. You can do that with database-driven web sites like Wordpress which backed by the MySql database. You find some good data and munge it into a CSV (comma separated values) file and use a special plug-in to import the data into Wordpress and voila, you have just created 3000 new pages. In this case, I uploaded parts and supplies numbers for pretty well every darn inkjet and toner-based printer since the Apple Laserwriter,

This was an experiment and it worked, sort of. I mean, the web site didn't blow up. But it wasn't a perfect experiment by any means. For one thing the posts entries didn't get a category assigned to them. This is important, as the entries won't get catalogued unless they are assigned entry and furthermore, unassigned posts don't make MySql very happy, or so the error logs were telling me. Thus, I had to spend more than a couple of hours going through each and every post to assign it to the proper category.

Secondly, the plug-in that generates the sitemap for Google indexing basically threw up its hands and packed it in when it was faced with the prospect of indexing 3000+ pages. After a little bit of poking and editing of the php.ini file, it would generate a XML that was corrupt. Fortunately I was able to find an another sitemap plug-in that did work but some damage was done. According to Google webmaster, this blog has about 6000 pages but only 350 were considered worthy of being included in the Google index. Before the plug-in blew up I had over 450 pages included in the index. But now that the sitemap is valid, the number of indexed pages should go up.

However, because Google is only indexing about 10% of my blog, that does raise another question: How can you actually find stuff on the blog? Like for example, if you are looking for HP C5069A ink cartridges, there's no way somebody's going to go the HP category and spool through the 500 entries on HP looking for that particular yellow ink cartridge. People want a search box so they can type in the part #, and away they go.

However, it's well know that the default Wordpress search box is not-so-good, so I replaced it with the Google engine about a year ago which worked pretty well. But with the parts catalogue loaded up, it's wasn't going to cut it anymore. So again it was back to the Wordpress plug-in library to install the search unleashed for Wordpress which has a module that will scan every last entry in the MySql database for whatever string you type in the search box. So you type C5069A and bang, it's right there in the search results.

Now of course, before being able to do that. I had to do some database maintenance and run an "optimization" script for the MySql database and build an index but hey, there were plugins for that too and I even read some of the instructions instead of charging ahead and pushing every button that I could find, which is my usual procedure.

All in all, the web sites now works reasonably well, no more MySQL hiccuping and the site comes up in the browser reasonably quickly, and if somebody want to actually order some parts or supplies off the website, they have a chance of finding it.

Mind you, there is still a ton of work to do. It would an interesting exercise to rearrange the linking structure within the web site to see if I could get more of the catalogue entries indexed in Google. And I only uploaded half of the database. That's right, there are another three thousand entries that I could upload if I ever get the courage to do so.

Mind you, why there is such an incredibly variety of inkjet and toner printers out there is almost worthy of another blog post in itself.

So anyways, if you were every wondering how much work there is behind the scenes at a web site like Prepress Pilgrim, now you know.

So seriously, how do they know that's the name of my frickin' blog? It's obviously some sort of localization algo, as they are showing queries that are relevant to Canadians in prepress, but how did they know to show my blog as #1.  It's not like I feature a lot of Canadian content either.

The server that host this blog is based in Vancouver. But even so, so what?

Creepy.

...Well, for one thing, I might have blogged more this month. As it is, I have spent most of December looking at HTML tags and CSS (cascading style sheet) declarations.

Good grief, how does anything look nice on the web with this crap acting as the glue? But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself, let's start at the beginning.

Back , way back, even before the world wide internet was born, there were a couple of guys from Xerox who tackled the problem of creating a computer language to describe the appearance of information on two-dimensional static media. These guys came up with a stack-based programming language called Postscript. Now Postscript has its drawbacks. Does anybody remember the Red Bible? That was the big heavy book that described the specifications of Postscript and just as important to us sys admins at the time,  it also listed all the error codes. We saw a lot of Postscript errors back in the nineties, in no small part because Postscript was not the easiest language to learn or master. However, it did have advantages. It was an open specification. It could describe a page in astounding detail with absolute precision. And most important of all, Adobe, Quark, Macromedia and a few other companies were able to build a robust ensemble of graphic design tools that ultimately were able to render the artwork in Postscript and thus able to be tranferred and output to any imaging engine in the world that had a Postscript RIP in front of it.

However, that was not enough. People were tired of trying to program in Postscript and so along came Portable Document Format which neatly avoided all the problems of Postscript and again was an open format and quite frankly, in my bigoted opinion, a coup should have mounted against the pointy-heads who were running the internet at that time and they should have been forced to embrace the awesome of  PDF to make it the language of the internet.

Instead, we have HTML and if you calm your mind and find a quiet place in a field far away from the bustle of normal everyday life, you can hear the angels weeping. Hyper Text Markup Language is a brutal spec, no doubt about it, and it's bastard step-brother CSS is not much better.

Now how can I make such an arrogant statement? Easy. Back in the early nineties, a good prepress sys admin had to know a little bit of Postscript to fix files here and there. In the very early stages of PDF, for maybe a six month period between '96-'98, you might have poked around in the innards of PDF just out of curiosity. Now? Nobody does and why would they? To do graphic design and/or page layout, you don't need to know PDF, you just need to know Illustrator/Indesign/Photoshop/Quark/Your Favorite Program and the only limit to what you can put on the page is your level of talent.

But even a complete rookie of a web designer starting out in year 2009 comes to understand very quickly that they need to learn HTML and CSS because web design tools totally suck when it comes to WYSIWYG design and editing. Why do they suck? Because HTML is such a loose and leaky spec. Understand, when the first page layout programs came out in PC, everbody hated them because the prn  (windows postscript) blew up at the rip more often than not, as the windows postscript drivers were terrible.

As the quality of the window postscript drivers improved, surprise surprise the complaining about the windows page layout programs tailed off so today most designers will insist there is no difference between, let's say Creative Suite on the Mac and the PC.

But can you take a static HTML file from a Dreamweaver-created web site and plop it in a CMS like Wordpress? Sure you can, but it won't look  the same. How about a Word doc exported as HTML? Actually, sometimes that works, trust me on that. Until you try to tweak the code just a little bit and then BOOM!! Because for one thing, you gotta find the accursed CSS file which carries all the formatting declarations. Secondly, some of the web browsers (okay I'm looking at you IE) don't follow the HTML spec, sad and pathetic as it is.

Gasp! I just ran out of bitter bile for tonight. Okay that's it. I'll never complain about the Adobe tax again aka releasing new versions of the CS suite  on a yearly basis. Back to web designing.

(Curse you you miserable mark-up validator, I did declare that statement in the style sheet).

Yeah. All...week... long. I've been trying to import a printer supply catalogue into the blog. The test run worked. The import command worked fine on another blog. But it doesn't behave when I run it full-bore on the blog and stay off the front page.

Gees, and it's december now with a busy weekend of social engagements. Whatever.

Ooops, tried to upload up 6 thousand records last night into my Wordpress blog. Funny things have started to happen to the blog, like disappearing sidebars and whatnot.

The purge command was not entirely successful. Oh, it's going to be a fun day.

Hey, they are tweeting about me

So I reviewed Kutano last April and I played with it again just awhile ago. They've really ramped up the Twitter integration, if you can see that from the sidebar. For example, I can see that there are 200 tweets about my blog in the last little while, which is sorta ego-boosting (well, maybe notso if I read some of the tweets, but I didn't). That's a nice little feature in itself. You can also tweet out with a link to the website you're looking at, as well as start a general discussion on the website that links back to the Kutano website.

You know, it's pretty amazing how fast this stuff breaks out and becomes a part of the culture.  I remember when I got laid-off five years ago almost to the day. As part of the severance, they enrolled me and a bunch of other ex-Creoites in a "find-work" course that ran for about 5 weeks. As part of the internet strategy for finding work, they gave us a list of web sites listing recruiters and jobs boards. There was no social media at all. No Twitter, no Facebook, no Linkedin.

Now if you want to stay in touch with people, if you want to network, then you gotta doing something on one of those applications. I know I would be, if I wasn't busy with blogging.

Warning: Only attempt this on a Friday afternoon, when you have nothing else to do. On a positive note, if the prepress manager catches you foolin' around with this, it looks pretty darn impressive. So he'll probably leave you alone.
Speeding up Firefox.

So blogging has been light for the past couple of weeks as I acquired a new client. Or perhaps I should say, the client acquired me.
I don't actively look for new clients. Actually, I'm trying to avoid the whole client thingie, preferring to work instead on my ecommerce sites while I stay home with the kids. Unfortunately, I really couldn't dodge this one, as I have known the guy for a few decades and he's even godfather to one of my kids. He was getting royally screwed by his tech provider.
My client runs a membership wordpress site. His customers pay a yearly fee to access financial reports on the site. He's doing been doing it for a year, and he's built up a bit of a following. He had not been happy with the marketing company for a few months as they had been somewhat unresponsive to his emails, but things came to a crisis when they messed up his subscription page. You know, the page when clients sign up and pay money. It stopped working. When I finally got access to the subscriber page code, I discovered that they had pasted a Microsoft Word document inside a Wordpress post. Yeah, they had used Microsoft word as a web design tool. So my client lost about $3000 of sign-up (conservative estimate) revenue because the e-commerce module couldn't execute among all the MS Word html crap or perhaps because the sign-up page was so damn ugly that prospects shied away in disgust.
It took me a week to get into the website because we played a game of "password, password, who's got the password." They wouldn't give me admin userid and passwords to the Wordpress install and to the cpanel. Maybe I should clarify: They thought they were giving me admin access but actually they gave user ids that had no permission access to important files. Fun, fun, lots of fun.
I'm still cleaning up the mess. For example I have a client centre for documents that's only supposed to be available for paid subscribers, but has open access to anybody who finds the URL. Another failure: The marketing campaign was using a third-tier publisher's network that is a running joke in the internet marketing industry because it's infested with bots. And the list of horrors goes on. At the very least, my client is making money as people are able to subscribe again. But it's no fun getting up every morning and reading another 5 or 6 panicky email and discovering yet another screw-up-du-jour.
So what's the moral of this story? Well if you are internet services provider, you need to stipulate in the contract that admin accounts for everything should always be available: Wordpress, cpanel, Adwords and Analytics. If the provider has a problem providing access to the stuff that you are paying for, then maybe you should find somebody else.