Blog (Archive Year: 2012)
Can Technology Save the Overworked Sys Admin?
IT workers are being asked to do more with less compensation. Can technology offer a solution to alieviate your over-loaded schedule?
Posted by Alertra, Wed, 16 May 2012
Control access to Wordpress Content with Restrict Access
If you’re looking for a simple, easy way to restrict website content to logged-in members, then consider the Restrict Content plugin.
Posted by Alertra, Wed, 16 May 2012
Drupal's Path to Easier Development and Adoption
In an interview with Business Insider published just a day after DrupalCon 2012, Dries Buytaert discussed Drupal and the huge following it has. Almost 800,000 people in 228 countries contribute to the open source CMS platform.
Posted by Alertra, Tue, 15 May 2012
Kindle Fire: Dancing to the Beat of its Own Developer Drum
On the heels of hearing the Amazon Appstore for Android is more profitable for developers than Google Play, we decided to do a brief overview of developing for the Kindle Fire.
Posted by Alertra, Tue, 15 May 2012
Windows Phone: Can Microsoft Convince Consumers and Developers?
It’s no secret that Microsoft and its manufacturing partners have struggled to gain traction in the mobile market.
Posted by Alertra, Tue, 15 May 2012
Corona SDK: One size fits all?
Choosing whether to develop for iOS or Android can be a tough decision for some.
Posted by Alertra, Tue, 08 May 2012
Stopping Hackers on Your WordPress Blog
There are few things worse in the online world than getting hacked.
Posted by Alertra, Mon, 07 May 2012
Should You Worry About Someone Hacking Your Website?
With recent high-profile arrests of computer hackers across the world, perhaps we should all be doing more to understand this activity.
Posted by Alertra, Thu, 19 Apr 2012
High Up in The Cloud: How Safe is Your Data and Website?
With cloud computing more and more of our lives are being stored in the cloud. But have you considered the safety of your website and your data?
Posted by Alertra, Fri, 13 Apr 2012
How Does the Internet Work?
Have you ever considered how the internet actually works, about how all these machines talk and share information with each other?
Posted by Alertra, Thu, 12 Apr 2012
What do you do when your website goes down?
When you're sure there is a problem, the very first step should be to implement your social media PR plan for website downtime.
Posted by Alertra, Wed, 11 Apr 2012
The CMS Wars: Why WordPress is Winning
Not that long ago anyone who needed a content management system (CMS) had to shell out a ton of money for a custom developed system.
Posted by Alertra, Tue, 10 Apr 2012
ReCAPTCHA: Making the World an Accurately Known Place
How reCAPTCHA works and Google's new experiment.
Posted by Alertra, Thu, 05 Apr 2012
Top 3 Windows Text Editors for Developers
Text editors have come a long way from the basic note taking software years ago (or Windows Notepad).
Posted by Alertra, Wed, 04 Apr 2012
Monitoring Mobile Websites
If you don’t know about mobile websites by now, you must have just been rescued from Gilligan’s Island.
Posted by Alertra, Thu, 29 Mar 2012
To Android, or Not to Android. That’s the Developer’s Question
Keeping with the mobile theme this week, we’re going to talk about Android. Particularly Android development.
Posted by Alertra, Wed, 28 Mar 2012
5 Must Have System Admin Apps
In our last blog post we offered some ideas on how to get your boss to buy you, their ever reliable systems administrator, an iPad.
Posted by Alertra, Tue, 27 Mar 2012
How To Get Your Boss To Buy You A New iPad
It’s new, it’s cool, and you want one. But you just can’t find a way to justify a new iPad purchase.
Posted by Alertra, Mon, 26 Mar 2012
Server Monitoring Amazon: EC2’s Thursday Outage
At Alertra, we knew EC2 had an issue in just 15 seconds. And that's when we started notifying our customers with servers in Amazon's cloud.
Posted by Alertra, Tue, 20 Mar 2012
Radar Detectors and Bug Bounties
Generally the consensus is that the more the companies know about bugs, the quicker they can fix them, and create a safer environment for us, the users.
Posted by Alertra, Fri, 16 Mar 2012
The White House Floppy Drive
It was 2009 and the first African American President took office in January. The new CTO of the White House started that same day.
Posted by Alertra, Thu, 15 Mar 2012
Has Microsoft Done it Again?
The consumer preview of Windows 8 has been out for a few weeks now. Long enough for users and reviewers to start offering opinions based on experience vs. rumor.
Posted by Alertra, Wed, 14 Mar 2012
Google Strives for World Domination
A world without borders, nations, or citizens. Just friends and interests.
Posted by Alertra, Mon, 12 Mar 2012
3 Takeaways from the RSA Security Conference
Security is always an important topic, made more so this year as several large profile security organizations were hacked including RSA Security and Verisign.
Posted by Alertra, Fri, 09 Mar 2012
Why You Should Care About Supercomputers
Later this year at Oak Ridge National Laboratory the world’s fastest supercomputer will be turned on.
Posted by Alertra, Tue, 06 Mar 2012
Philosophy of Web Development
Are you a scripter or a coder? Do you take exception to being called either?
Posted by Alertra, Fri, 02 Mar 2012
Server Monitoring, the Last Line of Defense
You’ve been hacked! You feel violated, angry, and frustrated.
Posted by Alertra, Thu, 01 Mar 2012
Alertra Offers 30-Day Free Website Monitoring Trial
With Alertra's 30-day free website monitoring trial, get notified when your site goes down. The trial package includes monitoring websites, e-mail servers, routers and any other servers or hardware connected to the Internet.
Posted by Alertra, Wed, 29 Feb 2012
Is it Really a Question of Tape vs. Disk Backup?
A DTI/PricewaterhouseCoopers study revealed that 70% of businesses that suffered a major data loss went out of business within one year.
Posted by Alertra, Tue, 28 Feb 2012
A Sampling of IT Humor
You know all this IT stuff can get awful serious sometimes. Training, deployments, integration, technical support, development schedules, monitoring – I’m tired. Are you?
Posted by Alertra, Fri, 24 Feb 2012
A Revolution in a Can
Imagine a world where cellular broadband is available everywhere – no dead spots due to geography or lack of infrastructure.
Posted by Alertra, Thu, 23 Feb 2012
SQL Server 2012 Release Date Approaches
Though the final beta for SQL Server 2012 has been out for some time, IT admins and users are anticipating the new release.
Posted by Alertra, Wed, 22 Feb 2012
Website Monitoring in the Cloud
Just like an ISP that monitors their hardware and connectivity, cloud hosting providers do the same – but neither will keep track of your internal processes, protocols or website availability.
Posted by Alertra, Fri, 17 Feb 2012
Systems Administrators: Are you plagued by a tech-savvy workforce?
It used to be that systems administrators expressed their frustration over tech novices by recounting tales of users asking about the cup holder on their desktop- you know, the CD drive.
Posted by Alertra, Thu, 16 Feb 2012
The Risks of Green Data Centers
The push to be green is everywhere. When it comes to IT, what that means is a little bit unclear.
Posted by Alertra, Wed, 15 Feb 2012
Mozilla Makes Plans not to be Left Behind
Battling a steady decline in usage, Mozilla is gearing up to make Firefox a native Windows 8 Metro application.
Posted by Alertra, Tue, 14 Feb 2012
It’s in the Cloud, Man
You’re rushing to put together a brief for the CIO on the new IT outsourcing projects and you realize you don’t know where your company data is.
Posted by Alertra, Mon, 13 Feb 2012
Developers are lining up to create new apps for Windows 8. Aren’t they?
After Microsoft’s BUILD conference last fall much of the buzz around Windows 8 was generally positive.
Posted by Alertra, Fri, 10 Feb 2012
Website Uptime: How Important is Your Website?
Your website is important to your business, right? It's either somewhat important or it's crucial, depending on what you do.
Posted by Alertra, Thu, 09 Feb 2012
Server Response Time - How Much Does it Really Matter?
It’s easy to see how uptime or page load time can impact a visitor’s experience. Server response time though, is just one component of each of these higher level metrics, one possibly overlooked when optimizing a website.
Posted by Alertra, Tue, 10 Jan 2012
Website Uptime, Your Reputation, and Your Bottomline
Your customers and prospects are online and they are comfortable completing sales online. So what happens when your website isn’t available?
Posted by Alertra, Tue, 10 Jan 2012
What Can Cloud Computing Do For Your Business?
If you haven’t heard of the term ‘cloud computing’ yet (where have you been?), think of the cloud as simply a metaphor for the internet. It’s a catch-all term for storing data or completing tasks through off-site servers.
Posted by Alertra, Wed, 04 Jan 2012
Social Media PR: What to do When Your Website Goes Down
Website monitoring is essential in our digital age. If your website goes down your audience is just a few clicks away from influencing a large number of potential customers.
Posted by Alertra, Wed, 04 Jan 2012
