A Chip Off the Viking Block

…or should that be Brock?

Distractions: a fun little game

Weewar is a simple turn-based game, allowing you to take minutes–or months–to play against an opponent.

Dreamhosts, Passwords and Security

Dreamhost, who do/did host a number of Miva Merchant stores, recently announced that some 3500 FTP passwords were leaked. Ouch!

And speaking of passwords, we get to see a lot of, er, interesting ones. Although many banks and other sites have instituted frustrating login systems, forcing you to change your password frequently, use a mix of numbers, letters and mixed case, remember a bunch of security questions and the like, there is a good middle ground for your own site and store passwords. Don’t use any of the most obvious passwords, your sitename for both the login and password, and, if you’re generating a password for temporary use, don’t use “temp” “support” or, one of the best that I’ve seen–login: “help”, password: “me”. Personally, I don’t like the auto-generated OpenUI passwords either, as they have the same format, only changing a few digits. And, of course, regardless of the quality of your password, you shouldn’t be storing credit card numbers on the server. A defaced site can be fixed, losing your customers’ card numbers cannot.

Javascript corners and other effects

Here’s an interesting javascript effect for corners, shading, and other image-related effects. Could be useful for snazzing up your product images.

We’re going to Rails Conf, May 16-21.

We’re heading out of town from May 16 and should be back online on the 21st or 22nd. We’re attending Rails Conf in Portland, OR. If you haven’t heard of Rails before, you’ll find a good introduction at the Ruby on Rails site. Basically, it’s a slick web development framework. We hope to use it with some Miva Merchant related projects in the not-too-distant future.

Online Insecurity & Trickery

Three stories regarding online security today:

1. Jen from Hostasaurus describes an incident where her gmail account was improperly accessed for use with Google checkout
2. BoingBoing gives an account of Astroglide exposing their customers, er, preferences by putting confidential information in web accessible directories. The wonderfully named Homeland Stupidity has more details. Needless to say, it’s never a good idea to store data in a public area.
3. BoingBoing also covers an issue where online buyers are slipping orders past unwary online stores using some address trickery. You might want to make your shipping department aware of this one.

35 Designers x 5 Questions

Here’s some great info on design from Smashing Magazine.

Welcome to the Viking Log

We’re activating this blog as a means to let you know what we’re busily hammering away at in our workshop. Sometimes we get a little too absorbed in that and forget to let you in on the secrets. But those days are no more! We’ve got a lot of modules under development–both new and upgrades for Merchant 5–and we have some major projects scheduled.

For starters, here’s a list of our current schedule for Merchant 5 upgrades:

• Soft Goods 5 - currently under development, will do away with the need for the php bridging script needed for the earlier version
• Affiliate Manager 5
• ELM Statistics 5
• USPS Advanced 5

The order is somewhat fluid–sponsorship and/or high demand tends to drive a module up the list.

We are also seriously considering a template system for Merchant 5 and would like you feedback on this. Our initial focus will be on current users of our Merchant 4 template modules, allowing them to get the same look in Merchant 5. But let us know–Are you satisfied with Merchant 5’s inbuilt templating system?

In case you missed it, Phone Order Manager 5 was recently released, joining our stable of popular upgrades from Miva Merchant 4. USPS Advanced soon followed, rounding out high-level shipping modules for the most commonly used shipping calculators. We’ll have a 5.x version out later in the year.