Category: <span>Tech Talk</span>

Don't Take Any Wooden Nickels
Don’t Take Any Wooden Nickels

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

It seems like the Internet scams are coming thick and fast now-a-days. I rarely go more than a couple of days without some asshole trying to scam me. People are continually trying to sell me Medicare plans, performance-enhancing drugs, or buy my house. Self-described hot young women send me their pictures offering to marry me or sell me even more awesome sexy pictures.

But then there’s the really offensive people who out-and-out try to defraud me. Like the latest email from some asshole pulling an online exhortion attempt with an email announcing, “You’ve Been Hacked.”

Family Stories Tech Talk

Train wreck at Montparnasse 1895
Train wreck at Montparnasse 1895

My frequent visitors may have noticed some issues with this website over the past couple of weeks. In fact, my very frequent visitors may have even noticed this website was not available for about three days, and usually looked completely crappy.

Missing images, no themes, wrong pages loading, and “website not available” error messages, are all indications that a website is experiencing technical difficulties. And wow, did we ever experience technical issues, including all the above. But, welcome back. We’re still standing. Mostly. Warning – Tech Talk Ahead!

Tech Talk

A Bold New Website Look
A Bold New Website Look

So my regular readers dropping in for a visit might momentarily think they come to the wrong blog. I can assure you, if you were looking for “The Charest Family on the Web” you dropped in on the correct website. After several years I’ve given my humble blog a bold new look.

I did this for several reasons, partially driven by learning a lot of User Experience (UX) principles over the past year of graduate school. Partially because my former theme had a few quirks I didn’t care for. Partially because, it was time for a style refresh.

Tech Talk

Programmer At Work
Programmer At Work Improving This Site

My regular readers (at least three) may have noticed some changes to this humble piece of cyberspace over the past few months. Well, that would be because I have tinkered around making, what are hopefully, improvements to this site. 

Tech Talk

Expanding into Cyberspace with a Genealogy Website
Programmer At Work

Over the past few weeks I’ve performed a major upgrade to my small home on the Internet in the form of a genealogy section. This is a project I’ve been wanting to do ever since I re-launched this website, and finally took yet another plunge. It’s already turned into a big project, but one that’s well worth doing.

Tech Talk

Programmer At Work
Programmer At Work

Regular readers of this humble website might have noticed that over the past few weeks we’ve gone through several changes in our look. Astute regular readers might have also noticed that on frequent occasions the look of this website was “Basic HTML,” a look where the actual layout was sucky basic lists of posts and navigation with no apparent effort made in layout.

There are reasons for all this.

Tech Talk

Editor at work migrating data files
Editor At Work

I’ve spent the past week on business travel in Southern Florida. As business trips go, this one wasn’t bad. The workload was relatively light and the weather here beat the hell out of weather in Washington, D.C. (for anyone who only wants to see ice in a drink, not on a road). The downside is that I’m not home, but Winnie always seem to take our temporary separations in stride.

Tech Talk

Hello World In Several Languages
Hello World In Several Languages

This is the first post in our new “Charest Family on the Web” website. We have a new look, and lots of new functionality, while eliminating the bugs and chunkiness of the old site. Also, hopefully, eliminate most of the security holes in the old site that seemingly encouraged hackers to engage about every six months with spammers constantly hitting.

Tech Talk

…And Other Comments on Spammers and Hackers

My rant on being hacked and spammed
Programmer At Work

When I started this website over two years ago, I envisioned a comfortable family-type website that could help our far-flung family keep in touch.  I wasn’t a newbie at running websites as I had operated a “commercial” website for the five years prior to my divorce (commercial in the sense that I had hopes of making money off it, not that I actually did make money). 

I was well aware of the threats from hackers, and the annoyance of getting hundreds of daily spam e-mails offering everything from increased site traffic to earning thousands, even millions, of dollars overnight using whatever money-making system the particular spammer was pushing. It was about three years between the times I shut down my flagship “RCM TravelSite” to the time I started “The Charest Family on the Web.”  I have been shocked at how the Internet community has changed over those years.

Tech Talk