the sephone blog

Today we continue our twice-yearly look at browser market shares on Sephone sites. Web developers use statistics about browser statistics to decide what features are safe to include on the sites they build; newer browsers (like IE8, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome) support many more features than older browsers (like IE7 and, infamously, IE6).

Here’s what our Google Analytics reports showed for six of our most-visited sites in real estate, tourism, news, education, and other markets:

It’s been another eventful period for browsers. The largest shift we saw in the first half of the year was a continued adoption of Internet Explorer 8, most likely due to upgrades from previous versions of IE (6 and 7). The market shares of those versions dropped across the board. IE 7’s share now ranges between 16.7 and 21.7%; IE 6 has dropped to between 4.7 and 8.6% (last December, it ranged from 7.0 – 10.3%; a year ago, 15.3 – 17.1%).

The percentage of users on Firefox either dropped or remained constant over the last six months on every site we surveyed. That’s likely due to gains by the WebKit family of browsers. There were modest Safari increases on most sites (Safari includes browsing on iPhones, iPods, and iPads), but the real story is Chrome. Google’s advertising campaign seems to have sparked some interest, and its browser share leapt around 50% over the last six months on some sites.

We posted these links back in December, but we think they’re important. We’ve previously introduced each of the major browsers and have explained our position on Internet Explorer 6 support. Please consider reading those posts for more information.

Read on to see the full report data with percentages and methods, or read our reports of traffic from December 2009 and June 2009.

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We know, we hear it all the time, social media is making you feel like you are about to go “over the edge!”

Everyone you know is on Facebook, people on TV are asking you to follow them on Twitter, you email inbox is full, your kids text you when they need a ride home – yes, it is okay if you want to scream — we get it (covering our ears).

We can help.

Twitter

If you are a larger business, you need to know what your clients, customers or former customers are saying about you.  Because believe us they are saying it.  Just because you dont hear it, doesnt mean it isnt being blasted about the internet, perhaps a TV station or newspaper has a story about you or your company.  It is being tweeted all over and you have no control over it spreading.  You do have control over it, IF you know what is being said and how you can communicate to address it.

If you are a smaller business – even tho you know that Facebook is FREE, how do you fold that into your all ready full day of work?  You are out there trying to generate revenue or wait on customers – this is the last thing you want to mess with, right?

We are social media JUNKIES.  We know that every social media strategy isn’t the same, just like all businesses and situations aren’t the same.  What works for one, may not work for another.  One size NEVER fits all. And maybe it isn’t even Facebook that you need (gasp!)

Let us help.
Give us a call, we love to hear your dreams and your goals.
Then of course, help you on the road to get there!

If you are like most of us, you probably have one (or more) of the following:

• A monthly sizable cable bill or perhaps satellite
• A netflix account
• A bank of movies stashed someplace for a rainy weekend.

I know for me, there is nothing more frustrating in cruising through the channels and seeing nothing interesting or even worse those darned infomercials!

If you have a computer, smartphone*  and a connection to the internet, then I have a couple things to share with you.

Hulu.com describes itself as “Watch your favorites. Anytime. For Free.”  Alex Baldwin had done some commercials around superbowl time, so you may have heard of it.  There are a variety of channels, Home and Garden, Games, Sports and lots more.  There is even a tab where you can see the most popular ones.  You create a profile, (user name – which is your email address) and a password and it is free.  After you tell it your interests, (during the profile process), it will even suggest things for you to make your search easier and you may get a suggestion of something you never thought of!

Then there is another thing that I really enjoy and that is called USTREAM.tv.  These are LIVE feeds that you can watch on a variety of things one of those things is that awful oil leak that is spewing nearly 5,000 feet below the surface of the ocean.  But not all of it is bad, there are some great wildlife LIVE cams, one of my favorites are the Peregrine Falcons that are up here in Maine it is managed by the Biodiversity Research Institute. Now, keep in mind there is no editing, these are live cameras.  AND there is the opportunity to chat in a chat room next to what you are watching if you want.  But again, there is no censorship, so keep this in mind, if you are watching with kids. I can honestly say, there hasn’t been anything too bad, except this BP Oil gusher seems to have “unleashed the hounds”  in the chat rooms.

AND if you would like a LIVE Broadcast of your own, your son or daughter’s soccer game or recital, you can have your own shows.  For those of you with iPhones, you can film right from the event and tell your distant family members and friends and they can enjoy what is happening LIVE!  Once you stop filming it stops broadcasting.

So give it a try, there will be a lot of summer events worth sharing and rainy days may make for some down time to check out Hulu and USTREAM.tv

*check your plan for potential data charges.

We wanted to let you know about a change we’ll be making to our hosting environment over the next few months and how it will affect the sites we host. Remember, each site on the Internet is hosted – or stored – on a server computer, and whenever someone visits a site, the computer where the site is hosted sends the page to the visitor’s web browser so that they can see the page.  Most of the sites we develop here at Sephone are hosted on Sephone Managed Servers.

What’s changing and why

Since our inception in 2001, we have owned and managed our own datacenter in Maine. Most of our clients host with us, and some host elsewhere, and that’s o.k.!   Today we have two hosting environments for our sites, one here in Orono, Maine and the other at another datacenter through another service provider that we trust explicitly.   Over the next several months we’ll be moving the sites and email from our Orono datacenter to our other environment.

We’re doing this for a couple of reasons. Our #1 reason is pretty simple: we want to do everything we can to make sure your site serves as fast and as reliably as possible. By using a separate service for hosting, we partner with a devoted team of people who continue to ensure that your site is up and running all day, every day. We’re also able to use some advanced tools to make sure everything is serving correctly, and if something does happen, we can normally resolve the problem much more quickly. Finally, our tests have shown that sites serving at the new location are as responsive or serve much more quickly thanks to the additional resources available.  And if you need more space or computing power, we can more readily accommodate your sites needs.

What this means for your site…  It’s all good!

We’ll be moving sites and email from Orono to our new environment between now and July.  We’ll update our Status Dashboard at status.sephone.com with dates and times of upcoming moves as we migrate our servers between environments.

There may be a short amount of downtime on some servers as we move each one.  But, as we will be doing most of the moves during off-peak hours and will provide updates on the Status Dashboard as we work., we’ll try to limit downtime as much as possible during the process.

As always, if you have any concerns – or if you would like more information about this change – please contact us via our support center or give us a call. We’ll do everything we can to provide you with the best answer we can.

Sephone has and always will be a solutions provider.  Our solutions are software based and they all need a place to live.  Owning a datacenter is nice, but managing  the hardware isn’t nor is it necessary.   That’s why we decided to reconsider where we want our services like datAvenger.com, maine-shop.com, broadcasternow.com, resourcemls.com, hulacart.com, happenings.us.com (maineevents.com, njhappenings.com, flhappenings.com, mahappenings.com, pahappenings.com & more coming),  and niteclerk.com; that you have become to depend on to reside here too.   This move allows us to focus on our software development – and leave the hardware maintenance in the hands of those who focus on that.

Rest assured, Sephone is very involved in the operations of the environment, we are able to manage the servers and respond to conditions as needed. Your sites are your business and we are committed to providing the best environment possible.  The biggest difference is that we are not the first to respond to networking, routing, A/C, power and other hardware failures that may happen.  This is the responsibility of dedicated partner resources who are on-site 24×7x365 and are committed to US to provide the best environment possible!

Sephone has and will maintain a presence in Orono to support existing co-location clients who manage their own servers and bandwidth.  We provide remote hands services and space in these cases and no changes in these agreements are to be experienced.

Lastly- this is a growing trend.  Most design and development firms in the area (& the U.S.)  have done this already or are also going through the same steps.  With companies like RackSpace and Amazon making highly accessible and robust facilities available where it is extremely efficient in both time and costs to scale up capacity- there is no doubt this is a good move for Sephone and our clients.  Beginning our 10th year and looking forward to the next 10, Sephone is excited for what is in store for us and our clients.

Back in June of last year we published a report of browser market share for some of our most visible sites. As we explained then, these statistics are really helpful for web developers in order to find what people are using to view sites and, in turn, what technologies developers can use to create those sites.

It’s been six months, and we wanted to go back and look how the usage stats in December compared to those in June. As we did in our first report, we looked through our Google Analytics reports for six of the most-visited sites we developed and maintain in real estate, tourism, news, education, and other markets.

Here’s a look at the trends of browsers over the last six months:

And a look at market share by reporting period:

The past six months have seen an overall loss of market share for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and a gain across the board for Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. In addition, Internet Explorer 8 usage more than doubled over the last six months on all of the six sites we surveyed. Safari’s spike in market share may be due to the popularity of iPhones, which run a mobile version of the browser. Google released a version of Chrome for Mac and Linux systems which may have contributed to its increase in usage in December. And web developers everywhere can rejoice: in our survey, the Internet Explorer 6 market share we found ranged from 7.0 – 10.3% as compared to 15.3 – 17.1% in June.

We’ve published an introduction to the major web browsers in the past as well as a post about our views on Internet Explorer 6 support. Please consider reading those posts for more information.

Read on to see the full report data with percentages and methods.

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Was a comment on one of my report cards in 1st grade.  It was also followed up with something like,  “…but sometimes her concern for others getting along and cooperating interferes with her own work.”

Who’da thunk it?

My friends, family and business partners can attest for it, but what about in Social Media areas?  How do people know that you REALLY CARE?

Or better yet, “How  do you know who doesn’t and is just pretending to care?”  It seems like these days 60-75% of my work time is dedicated to doing something in Social Media and it is increasing every week.

Social Media brings us together and yet distances us all at the same time. Periodic non-visible online interactions take longer to sort out who is real and who isn’t.

I recently attended a conference where Chris Brogan spoke (it was my first time meeting him and I was sooo excited)  Mike Volpe also made a great presentation.  If you don’t know Chris, he is amazing you should follow him.  He is as real as they come and in person, he can make you laugh so hard that your sides split.

Mike Volpe of Hubspot fame was a lot different than I thought he would be.  I watch their podcasts religiously and read their blogs and I would recommend anyone feeling intimidated about social media and applications you can lurk around on any of these sites and learn a ton.

What did I mean when I said Mike Volpe was different than I thought?  I knew he was smart, I knew he knew his stuff.  His podcast partner Karen Rubin, is mega bubbly.   When I met Mike at the conference, what I met was a kind of shy guy.  Not what I expected.  He puts forth so much confidence on his sites and podcasts, I was a bit intimidated at the idea at the face-to-face.

Chris Brogan has this message that he calls “Be Human”, he has a great post here outlining what this means.  In fact, when you Google the term “be human” his blog entry comes up in the first 5 searches.  Rather than to reiterate what these captains of industry have to say, I included several links here so you can easily find them.

Clients will ask me, “Why do I care if someone’s eating high fibre cereal for breakfast?’ or “That their kids soccer game was a blow out?” Truth is YOU may not care, but one of the thousands of other readers may. If you were one of the people in the battle to fight cancer, you could provide support to many in different situations and stages just by seeing these buzz words.

This makes a “human” connection that is important to an often hard to connect with medium.  Some of us don’t use real photos as profile shots all the time.  Some of us are vague about how to find us.  Maybe our user names aren’t exactly intuitive. The internet is full of great people as well as weirdos.  That doesn’t necessarily make you a “Nervous Nellie,” but if someone is trying to learn about you or your business, you may seem a little less “human.”  What you have to deliver and say becomes that much more important.

First impressions can be misleading.  Establish yourself or your business as the someone you ARE.  Stick with it on blog comments, blog posts, other platforms.  Because after all, the keyboard doesn’t type itself. A HUMAN does!

We’ve had a few of our clients send us a copy of a rather official-looking email they received over the last couple of days. We’ve even gotten a couple of copies of it at our own addresses. So far, we’ve seen subject lines starting with “A new settings file for the…” and “For the owner of the…”

In short, it’s a phishing scam and you shouldn’t click the link. Here’s one version of the email:

Dear user of the example.com mailing service!

We are informing you that because of the security upgrade of the mailing service your mailbox (someone@example.com) settings were changed. In order to apply the new set of settings click on the following link:

http://example.com/owa/service_directory/settings.php?email=someone@example.com&from=example.com&fromname=someone

Best regards, example.com Technical Support.

Again, don’t click the link. Even though the link looks like it points to your company’s site, it will actually bring you to a site that tries to steal your personal information. A quick search brings up some results of similar emails over the last few days sent to people around the world, so don’t be surprised if you see a similar email sent your way.

As always, we’ll never ask for your personal information via email. If you ever have a question about the legitimacy of an email, give us a call or send us a note to check before you decide what to do with it!

The technology community on the web has been abuzz over the last few weeks over a couple of new hacking cases on well-known sites. What’s this mean to you, the everyday user of the web? Well, it serves as a reminder that security online is just as important as locking your door at home.

We know online security can be overwhelming, so in this post we’ll provide you with two simple things you can do to add an extra coat of armor online, right now.

1. Strong passwords are the key (or the lock)

What would you think if the combination to the safe at the bank was ‘12345′? Using your first name, your username, or words like ‘password’ as your password is the online equivalent of a bad safe password. The one most effective step you can take to secure your accounts online is to use secure passwords.

At Sephone, we encourage our customers to use passwords that are at least six characters long and have at least one capital letter and one number. I’ll be honest: some of our clients are frustrated at first when we tell them our policy. Believe us, committing a new password to memory is a lot easier than what can happen if your password is discovered.

Bonus tip: Hopefully your house key, your car key, and your office keys are all different. Make sure your online keychain is the same way by using different passwords on different sites. If a hacker discovers the password on one service and feels like searching, using the same password is an open invitation to explore the landscape.

2. Pick a good secret question

Remember back when hackers managed to find their way into former governor Sarah Palin’s email? Yahoo – the service where her mail was hosted – is one of the many sites online that use a “secret” question feature to help you remember your password if you forget it. Her email hackers found the answers to her “secret” questions online. As more information is posted online (birth dates, death dates, and yes, even mother’s maiden names), these password recovery questions become less secure.

What can you do to prevent this? If the service allows you to type your own question, create a question that only you would know how to answer. (This could be anything from “What make of car did Andy’s father buy from Dad when we were kids?” to “What was the code word to our snow fort?”) If it doesn’t give you space to create your own question, lie with an answer you’d remember. If the question is, “What street did you grow up on?” and the answer is Summer Street, answer Winter Street. The service never checks the validity of your answers, so create an answer that only you will remember.

Online security can be a hassle, but with a few short steps you’ll be much more secure than ever before. What else do you do to beef up your online security?

Photo by Steven Tom, released under Creative Commons.

One of the greatest challenges in web development is the need to cater to a number of different web browsers when developing a site. Although all the major browsers do essentially the same thing, each tends to have its own… well, quirks.

It’s difficult to paint a clear and accurate representation of the browsers people currently use. We can’t very well ask every site visitor, “Hey, you there! What browser are you using?” (Not everyone knows the answer to that question.) It’s important for us to know, though, because it shows us what people use to view our sites and how the trend may be changing over time.

Luckily, Google Analytics, a tool we install on many of our sites, provides a fairly good picture of browser usage. For the sake of transparency, I’ve gone through six of our largest sites and looked at browser usage among them. While this information may not be helpful to you personally, it allows developers make key decisions about the sites they build.

The data below is from six Sephone sites in June 2008 and June 2009. These sites appeal to a general population and include real estate, tourism, news, education, and other markets.

We hope to do this periodically to establish a better perspective of browser trending over time. Developers: are you seeing the same trends? Business owners: have you considered a browser switch?

“Hmmmmm, click, click, click, hmmmmmm, click, click, click…” repeat.  That is the sound of an over excited Marketing person in 2009.

Marketers have always had a tendency to jump on the bandwagon of some latest craze and pound it to death.  I can say that because I am one to the core and with the advent of social media the buzz is louder and the clicking sound is that of a smoking keyboard or cell phone with all of “those people” talking to each other agreeing and singing the praises of the ideas that are exchanged between them.

Sound familiar?  But are the Marketing people the only people “getting it?”  Is this all a fad that will fade away like the Cabbage Patch Doll?

Being from Maine, Maine folks are known for not appreciating a lot of “fluff,” also we adapt to things that most need attending to, like shoveling the driveway, taking a friend to a doctor’s appointment, making sure the bills are being paid.  IMPORTANT stuff.

Right now Social Media, just may not seem that important and it is okay to feel like that, but it is July (almost) and the snow shoveling is a few months away, make part of your summer reading articles in periodicals that can give you the quick info you really need to know!

First take a quick 3 minute look at this video.

Then here are 3 quick things to read that may help you make sense of it:

1. Twitter a 140 character exchange between people from the mundane to the very important.  This article is from the periodical “The Week.”
2. Something  from a “traditional” type media about Twitter is an article in Business Week and its effect on recent events in Iran, certainly one type of media did not change life in Iran, but the fact when used along with “the old fashioned way” of doing things it helps support what was all ready happening.
3. Facebook isn’t necessarily only something your kids use to keep track of their friends whereabouts, it is really creating some unique opportunities for businesses to advertise to “specific” demographics at very reasonable costs.  Business Week has an interesting article here.

We know you don’t have time for this.
We hear this all the time.

If you want to promote your business yourself and not pay for yellow page ads (which are becoming dinosaurs) and daily news papers, (depending on which one you read, readership has declined in some cases nearly 75%).  How do you know someone, the RIGHT someone even sees your ad?  Cash a bit tight these days? Think again about Social Media.

If you have a rainy day (which so far this summer, it seems like all we have had is rainy days), go to YouTube.COM and search for “How To” or use other keywords to learn about things you may have questions about.  YouTube isn’t just a collection of senseless videos, there really are great things there – and if your business wants to produce something that you want the world to know about, here is your free way to promote it.

Also, looking for something to talk about with your nieces and nephews, or grandchildren?  Ask them about their facebook page or about how they text to keep in touch with their friends.  You may be surprised what you can learn and where you can learn it!