The past few weeks have concentrated minds around the world as companies have looked closely at their disaster recovery policies and plans and found that most are woefully slack. Swine Flu (or Influenza A/H1N1) has become the first pandemic of the 21st century. Not much worse than the common cold and certainly not as deadly as bog-standard seasonal flu (for the moment), the escalating news stories and attendant tension, forced many firms to add pandemic to the list of possible disaster scenarios along with airplanes landing on facilities, dirty bombs and terrorist attack panics. Interestingly pandemic looks to be a far worse, and far more certain, disaster than many of the other normally considered scenarios. The problems, though tend to come with second and third order issues when staff can’t get to work. Read more...

Apparently the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) caught a virus! According to The Register, it seems hackers uploaded malware infected files onto the podcast section of the CDC website. The site was taken down and, presumably, cleaned and inoculated before it was opened up again. And they say Americans don’t get irony; well perhaps not on purpose…

Apologies for those who have commented that we haven’t been eating our own dogfood by keeping *our* site updated often. We’ve been quite busy in a bit of an upgrade and migration project moving from one system to another. We thought it would be simple, and on paper it is, but the best laid plans and all that…. Read more...

Many is the website that was coded and uploaded, saying exactly what the owner wanted to say….and hasn’t been touched since. It’s nothing more than a brochure for the person or organisation and if their message changes then they will change their website. We believe this is a fatal mistake in website management. There are two reasons for this: 1) people buy from human beings, not fancy slogans or the right typography and graphics, and 2) most people find sites via search engines and search engines LOVE dynamic (changing, or developing) content. Read more...

I got a bounced e-mail notice from a good friend who had tried to alert me to something on one of our sites (and not that our access control was out of control!). The e-mail he sent to us had bounced and he was worried something was up. I sent a couple of test e-mails which worked fine and let him know that everything seemed to be in order and to just re-send. Read more...