The Athens Olympic Games have been pretty good for Central Queensland. No doubt about it. With Rockhampton’s Jamie Dwyer & Mark Knowles winning gold with the Kookaburras in Hockey, Gladstone’s Amanda Doman picking up silver for softball, and Anna Mears collecting a gold and a bronze in seperate cycling events - Central Queensland has collected:

• 2 Gold
• 1 Silver
• 1 Bronze

If we competed as a nation oursleves, we’d have finished in 36th position - better than Argentina, South Africa, Switzerland, Israel, Ireland, Mexico and India, just to name a few.

If you’re curious, check the full table and see for yourself.

Fantastic! :D

A recent story reported in Australian IT reveals that Queensland University has developed a firewall that stops spam. The story explains:

“The filters are fighting a losing battle because by default they will let everything through and must be told to block what you don’t want.”

One of the biggest dangers with conventional spam filters is that they could easily block legitimate email if it happens to score enough “points” to be blocked. But with this new spam firewall:

“We recently completed a successful trial of a key layer of the spam firewall and it processed the emails at 90 messages per second, misclassifying only one out of 25,000 emails,” he said.

“We are hoping to go for better than one in 100,000, if not more.”

The university is hoping to have a product on the market within six months of finding some funding, and make this rather bold statement:

“If it is as good as it has been in the lab, it will put an end to spam.”

Could it be true? An end to spam?

Yet another article about Windows XP security, even after the new Service Pack 2 has been installed.

It’s hard to know what to do with all these warnings! I guess it comes down to the same old advice:

1. Keep your antivirus software up to date
2. Make sure you have a firewall running

Service Pack 2 does enable Windows Firewall by default, but I’m not sure I completely trust it. Consider installing a third party firewall like Zone Alarm.

And be careful!

Every now and then I read or hear about a website that recorded so many hits last month. If you knew what that number meant, your response would likely be the same as mine: “So what?”

It’s important to keep track of how your site is doing - one of the big advantages of a website (from a Return-On-Investment perspective) is that you can tell exactly how it performs. Such results are not so easy to measure with conventional media. But you need to understand what you’re actually tracking.
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It was fantasic to see Anna Mears pick up Gold in the 500m time trials last night - and in world record time too! I was really surprised by how much Rockhampton got mentioned every time her story was covered. Does everyone’s home get mentioned so much, or have I just noticed it because I live here too?

For the record, here are a few stories:

• From Foxsports
• From Sportal
• From the Sydney Morning Herald
• And from the official Australian Olympic site

Congratulations Anna!

A day in the life of Almost Anything Desktop Publishing…?

Sorry, I just couldn’t help myself!

Sometimes a website redesign is less about what you can see, and more about what you can’t.

If you’ve visited Rural Property Services lately you might have noticed a slight change to the design. Not a complete redesign, more a bit of a “tweak”.

More important that the minor graphic changes, is the work we did “under the hood”. The code has been completely rebuilt using what’s called a “tableless” layout. In English, this means the following:

1. The page size is smaller, so it will download faster
2. It will be easier to update, so that brings maintenance costs down
3. Search engines have less code to wade through, which should improve ranking
4. The website is more future-compatible

Future-compatible?

You might have seen ads on TV for “Internet Refridgerators”. Don’t laugh - these sort of appliances are coming. Given the speed at which Australians take up new technology, within a few years they will be far more common. So it’s important to create websites now that are ready for viewing on things other than traditional computers.

Traditional methods of website design tend to focus on working on computers with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. That’s fine for now, but eventually this sort of website will need to be rebuilt. All of our websites (since late last year) are built using these newer methods.

It doesn’t cost any more now, but it will save you money later!