Welcome to BrittleBit.org
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Computers have become vital and I’ve added more content to help you use them better. Articles address sofware, hardware, Web design and domains, and use by people with disabilities. Some specifications are included. There are, of course, many more websites with far more content than I’ve posted, but that was simply a challenge to add what may not be available elsewhere. Let me know what you think.
For Security, Retire Default Passwords
A big city revealed that the same password is being used by 46,000 of its employees for their email accounts. Also, they confirmed what password they used. That could be contributing to a citywide crime rate and terrorists and child pornographers could have a wonderful time with it, plus if someone wants a job promotion by getting someone fired it wouldn’t be hard to get them kicked off the payroll. As icing on the cake, the worker who has no idea what happened might even get escorted out by security. I wrote a warning and some advice.
Hosting Services that Techies Prefer
If you want a website, or have one, you need hosting. I have found what may be the best hosts in the industry. These are the kind of hosts I wish I had known about years ago when I needed one, and made a bad choice before I made an excellent selection, whose service I still use, but several other Web hosts may be better choices for you. My method of choosing the better ones should work for your needs.
Finding Authoritative Websites
You’re researching a subject you know little about. You’d rather not get stuck on some website whose author pretends to be the second-highest expert in the world but doesn’t know the difference between a coffee cup and a doughnut. That can be solved. Someone self-declares their expertise in an important subject and a search engine decides whether to believe this or not. If they don’t believe it, nothing is different in the search results. But if the search engine’s people do believe it, and if that website lists other experts in the same field, the search engine can boost all of them. For example, if Stanford University says it knows computer science, if Google believes this, and if Stanford’s website has a list of computer scientists and schools Stanford thinks are great, and if you’re searching for computer scientists who know their stuff, Google will rank those preferred by Stanford high in Google’s search results for your convenience. This way, the better ones don’t need a lot of incoming links to be highly ranked, but just one incoming link from a strong authority. What facilitates all this are some HTML metatags for this purpose: pro, pro-auth, pro-auth-field, and pro-auth-fragment. The specifications and an introduction to searching are here. Also, here are introductions to coding for top authorities and for other authorities the top ones like best.
Privacy? Um, Not Here, and Not There
What website privacy policies tell you is that you don’t have privacy. Not much, anyway, usually. They say your privacy is very important to “us”, but it’s just a policy, above that is law, law is what’s binding, and by law you haven’t got much privacy. I wrote about it.
Better than RSS or Atom is Due
Supporting RSS or Atom is a burden at a small website. So, I made a better system. It’s called Topper. It’s easier to keep up.
Accessibility: A Solution and Frustrations
I like accessibility. I support it. But some of it requires a lot of time from website authors and we need more transparency in acccessibility systems. On the other hand, I found a way to improve pronunciations for reading aloud.
Free: 98SE and SmartSuite
If you want, for free, Windows 98 Second Edition and/or Lotus SmartSuite and you represent a nonprofit or government agency, let me know.
Hardware that’s in Desperately Short Supply
Some things we need are disappearing from the market. We need them. Flash thumb drives with LEDs and Wi-Fi external adapters compatible with Linux out of the box are needed. I say why.
Getting Advertising Income From Your Website
I wanted to find someone who would supply advertising they get from advertisers, so I could run their ads on my website and maybe get some revenue. Google AdSense is good but they added a legal requirement that’s too hard for me to fulfill (compliance with the laws of around 28 nations), so I went looking for another supplier. I needed a big list of suppliers, but all I found were some short lists, and many suppliers won’t meet my needs, or I won’t meet theirs. So I compiled a long list of ad suppliers and you can use it as your starting point. I didn’t do much judging of their abilities; I leave that to you.
