With the Suffolk Business Exhibition fast approaching I thought it might be helpful to pull together a few hints and tips that we have learned over the past few years to help you get through exhibitions and still be smiling at the end of it!

For those who don't attend exhibitions, or attend as a visitor, you may still find some helpful tips!

Businesses are increasingly turning to Social media to communicate with their stakeholders - whether that be clients, potential customers, service users or investors. Business owners often find themselves feeling overwhelmed, or struggle to see how they could integrate social media within their business. I sometimes wonder if they are seeing the potential of how social media could influence their business or really exploring how it could inform their strategic development. The question I ask myself is why are some business owners not making the most of the easiest route of communication to their market?

The web is, undoubtedly, a wonderful resource, it allows us to quickly and easily find information on almost anything. When it comes to servers and websites, however, it can be incredibly dangerous if you (or worse, the author) do not know what you/they are doing.

I was browsing to see if there's a better way to reset a users password from PHP than the method I usually use, and stumbled across this tutorial. Quite frankly, my chin hit the desk at the advice being offered.

In all fairness to the person who posted the tutorial, they have attempted to mitigate some of the serious security concerns, but despite that, it's still a security nightmare. What makes it worse, is the comments below indicating that some users are blindly copying and pasting the PHP and following the steps without even a base understanding of how it works.

In this post we'll be looking at what the tutorial suggests, and why it's a bad idea.

So you set up your Joomla! site, made it live, and a few weeks/months/years later realised that you'd forgotten to enable the HTAccess file for SEF URL's. The end result being that rather than having a nice Search Engine (and user) friendly URL like /category/Blogs/post/, you instead have /index.php/category/Blogs/post/.

You could just enable the HTAccess file, but all the old URL's will return a 404. Not great if your site has already been indexed by search engines, even less great if you've got lots of inbound links on other sites. 

It's actually incredibly simple to resolve, and in this post I'll be showing you the two easy steps you need to take to configure your site to redirect the old /index.php/* URLs to the nice SEF ones you want.

Tools such as CPanel/WHM or Plesk make managing a server far easier for those who don't know how to use the shell. Arguably, they allow those outside of the tech sector to manage their own servers effectively and with minimal effort.

Where this falls down, however, is when setting a new server up. It's very easy to be lulled into a false sense of security, leaving your server potentially vulnerable to miscreants. In this post, I'll explain what the issues are, and why you should always seek help from someone familiar with configuring servers running your OS of choice (whether that be Linux, Windows, AIX or anything else!).

If you're on shared hosting, this article won't apply to you, as your host will have configured things for you, and even if they've done it wrong you lack the power to change it!