Yep, it’s time for the monthly newsletter (published semi-randomly).

For those of you who are using WordPress as your CMS, there’s a new version out: 2.5 It was just released this weekend. I’ve upgraded one of my sites to use WP 2.5, and I’ve been poking around to see how it works. This upgrade includes some major changes, so I’m going to suggest that you not upgrade unless you really know what you’re doing. It’ll take a while before I’m ready or able to offer any tech support for this version, so if you do choose to upgrade right away, you’ll be on your own for a while.

Speaking of WordPress and upgrades… I couple weeks ago I said I’d be doing some upgrading of this site and pulling it all into a WP CMS. Well… I got distracted and spent my time helping clients, so that didn’t get done all the way. Today is a cold rainy day with nothing going on, so I’m going to work on getting that completed today. If you find any problems with the site, please let me know. Also… If you have any suggestions on how to improve the site, please send them my way. One of the suggestions that we’ll be implementing is a page for current customers. This will have links to log into your control panel and billing accounts.

Over the past few years, we’ve gained a couple customers who are infamous for “breaking things” or finding the limitations in our system. This happened again last week. We discovered that the system breaks down if you try to purchase 2 packages on the same account. If you would like to do this, don’t worry. We can accommodate you. We just have to go in and tweak a couple things by hand. Just let us know you want to do this, and we’ll make sure that it’s set up and ready to go for you. And, of course, that goes for any problems or “non-standard” situations you might find yourself in with our service. We’re more than happy to tweak things in order to make it work better.

One big piece of news from behind the scenes: Parallels (the people who make the Plesk control panel we use) have just bought ModernBill (the billing & sign-up software we use), so there’s a good chance that the integration will improve and make things faster and easier for both us and you.

Thanks to all of you who’ve chosen Geek Niche.

–
M Blaze Miskulin
President & Town Crier
Geek Niche, Inc.

Okay… I’m a little late. But at least it’s here!

We’ve been busy while we’ve been gone. We’ve been adding new clients, helping existing clients expand, and doing the stuff we normally do. We’ve also been expanding. There are two new Geek Niche projects out there. Both are fledgling projects, so there’s not much there, but they are up and running and ready for customers.

The first project is PhotoNiche.org Photo Niche is a specialty site designed for photographers and models. It currently has 2 versions: the Gallery and the Light Table. The Gallery is for showing off photos to everyone. It’s a great way for models and photographers to have an inexpensive site where they can store and display their work. The Light Table is a special storage site that allows photographers to upload images for specific clients only. If you don’t now the name of the file, you can’t see it.

The second new project is VoteNiche.org (are you sensing a theme here?) Vote Niche is a political site dedicated to local and state elections and candidates. Candidates can create a well-crafted and easy to update web presence without needing any knowledge of code. Integrated blogs allow the candidates to present their ideas and platforms, while the public forums allow both candidates and voters to debate the topics at hand.

These projects are just two more ways we’re tying to take over the world provide useful niche products for our customers.

–
M Blaze Miskulin
President
Geek Niche, Inc.

Happy September!

(Did that work? No? Rats!)

I know that it’s been a long time since I’ve written one of these. For September and the first half of October, nothing was going on, and I figured you didn’t want to sit there and read my silly ramblings. Then… things started to change behind the scenes, and I wanted to wait until various details were worked out before talking about them.

Your Account

First off, Paul has been doing some serious work on upgrading and improving the quality of the invoicing section. For those who don’t remember from the original e-mails you received when you signed up, you can look at all your invoicing, pay an invoice, change contact and credit card information, view your account details, and more.

It’s all available on your ModernBill Account Page. The username and password should be the ones you supplied when you first signed up.

Also, as full account holders, you have a lot of control over your account; e-mail addresses, databases, subdomains, web-user accounts, Ap-Vault installations…. the list is rather long. You can access all of this via the Plesk Control Panel. Again, the username and password should be the some ones you supplied when you first signed up.

If you can’t log into either of those sections, please let us know. We can provide a temporary password to get you into these sections. You should then be able to set a new password.

The emergency page has moved.

In the very rare occasion that the Geek Niche servers are all off line (tsunami, nuclear apocalypse, breaking of the 7th Seal, etc.) we’ve set up a Geek Niche emergency page. This page is entirely independent of our servers and even our data center (the place where all our servers are kept). I have generously offered the pathetic excuse for “web hosting” offered by my ISP as our emergency page (it’s not like it’s good for anything else). Well… I’ve changed ISPs recently, which means that my “personal web page” (pardon me while I stifle my giggles) has changed, also. The new Geek Niche Emergency Page is located at: http://webpages.charter.net/geekniche

If you have reason to believe that our servers have been taken over by hostile alien invaders (or something) check the emergency page for information.

A new addition to the family

Geek Niche is always looking for more an better ways to serve the needs of our clients and our potential clients. As part of this, we’ve launched a new site dedicated to photographers and models. It’s called PhotoNiche.org Currently, it offers a couple very simple, but effective, solutions to models and photographers who are looking for a web presence that offers more features, customization, and security than the various free sites out there.

PhotoNiche is still in its infancy, but we expect it to grow into a strong and vital member of the Geek Niche family.

On a more serious note

The biggest news (and the most important reason this newsletter has been delayed for a while) is a change in our roster. Barry Bonds will be replace by Brett Favre as the goalie…. oh… wait… I’m getting all confused. The real change is that Jason has decided to step down from his position as Vice President and owner. His resignation will take effect January 1st, 2008. Jason’s put a lot of hard work into this company, and still believes in it, but has decided that his family comes first (especially since it seems to be growing faster than the company). He’ll continue working with us for a while as a consultant and secondary administrator, however, so things will continue on smoothly during the transition.

And in conclusion….

…I’d like to thank the Academy… oh…. wait…. wrong speech.

So… yeah… Umm… Have a happy holiday season.

–
M Blaze Miskulin
President & Royal Scribe
Geek Niche, Inc.

Hello once again.

As usual, the summer months have been fairly quiet. And, as usual, we consider that to be a good thing. Personally, I figure that the less you hear from us, the better things are.

There’s been a couple upgrades and tweaks going on behind the scenes which you might want to be aware of. First of all, Plesk as been upgraded again, and that means that some of the items in the Application Vault have been upgraded as well. It doesn’t look like there are any new applications, however.

In regards to applications and upgrades: An unfortunate aspect of the internet is the evolution of annoyance. There are a lot of people out there who are too smart and too bored for their own good. They spend their days thinking up new ways to attack websites and the servers that host them. And once they find a way, they tell their friends… and pretty soon it’s out in the wild for any punk with a computer to try out. This means that applications which were perfectly secure a year ago are now wide open to serious attacks. Those attacks affect everyone on the server. While we’re continually vigilant about what’s happening, we can’t be everywhere at once. As owner of a website, it’s partly your responsibility to keep your applications up-to-date.

Right now, our biggest dangers are Gallery and phpBB. If you aren’t running the latest version of either of these, I strongly encourage you to upgrade. If we find that one of your applications is presenting a security risk to the server, we may have to delete it. We really don’t want to do that. Just go to the website of the application, download the latest copy, and follow the instructions. Usually, it only involves uploading the new files over the top of the old ones and then clicking a couple buttons.

As part of our recent security upgrades, we’ve setup some new “rules” for the servers to follow. This could possibly affect some of the applications you’re running. If you notice any problems with any of your applications, let us know and we’ll tweak things to make it work.

Other than that, I hope your summer is going well.

See you next month.

—
M Blaze Miskulin
President
Geek Niche, Inc

Hey there!

I hope you’re all keeping cool during this sweltering start to the summer. I live in Wisconsin; we’re built to handle 40-below temperatures and feet of snow. This hot & muggy stuff is brutal.

I actually have some things to talk about this month. Isn’t that a shocker?

We’ve had a few “black hats” sneaking around in the digital alleyway spray-painting the walls and throwing stones at the windows. Paul & Jason have been on top of things, however, and beat off the intruders with virtual baseball bats.

Hacking is a serious problem. Every server out there is constantly being hammered by everything from script-kiddies to serious threats. Last week the Department of Homeland Security revealed that they had 800 successful incursions into their servers over the last 2 years. We’ve had 3. And in each case, it was discovered within hours and shut down with little or no damage. If you look at it mathematically, we’re 266.6 times more secure than the Dept of Homeland Security!

If you ever suspect that your site has been hacked contact us right away. Catching the hack early not only means minimizing any damage, but also finding out how they got in and plugging the hole. The fact that we’ve been able to catch every one of the hacks within hours, and only 1 actually did any damage is a testament to the diligence and skill of the two guys handling the technical side of things.

In happier news: Geek Niche is going public! For the last 2 years, we’ve gotten almost every customer by word of mouth. That we’ve gotten as many as we have is a big boost to our egos. Well, on July 3rd, we’re running our first public advertisement. We’ve bought the sidebar ad on Something Postivive. The fun part is that we have no idea what it’s going to look like!

For those of you that don’t know, Something Positive (S*P) is a webcomic. It’s a cynical, scathing, sometimes rude and always funny webcomic. The author does custom-designed ads using characters from the comic. When I contacted his advertising manager, I gave him information on who we are, what we do, and what our attitude is (”we’re not afraid to make fun of ourselves”), and told him to do whatever he wanted.

Okay… I’m just a little bit scared.

Even though we’re doing the whole “real advertising” thing, word of mouth is still our best advertising. And we’re willing to put our money where our mouth is: we have our kick back rewards program in place. Recommend someone to us for hosting and, after 3 months, you’ll get 10% of their hosting fee credited to your account. They just have to e-mail us and let us know who recommended them to us. If you like what we’re doing for you, send your friends our way–you could end up getting your hosting for free!.

Happy Independence Day to all you Americans. And for those who don’t care to celebrate that, may be one of the other holidays this month will be more your style…

Fireworks Safety Month
Light the Night for Sight Month
Anti Boredom Month
Baked Bean Month
Hot Dog Month
National Ice Cream Month
July Belongs to Berries Month
Purposeful Parenting Month
Recreation and Parks Month
Tennis Month
Adopt a Rescued Rabbit Month

Therapeutic Recreation Week (1-7)
Coral Reef Awareness Week (15-21)

Or any one of the many many holidays celebrated around the world.
(Check out the Earth Calendar for more holidays)
–
M Blaze Miskulin
President
Geek Niche, Inc.

Yay! Summer is here! (Unless you’re in the southern hemisphere, in which case: Yay! Winter is here!).

Last weekend marks 2 years in business for Geek Niche. That’s like 397 in web-years. I’m very proud to say that, of the few customers who have left us, not one has said it was because we weren’t doing a good enough job. It’s a simple fact of business that you can’t make everyone happy, and some people are going to complain no matter what. The fact that we haven’t a customer like that in 2 years is really impressive. Thank you.

There’s been a number of little tweaks going on behind the scenes in the last month. Nothing huge, just minor upgrades and improvements. One weird side-effect of this has been some “wonkiness” with the billing schedule. Some of you may have noticed that you received two invoices rather close together within the last month. This is a result of our billing software finally catching up since the major upgrade we did earlier in the year. Because of the timing of some invoices and our desire to make sure that things went as smoothly as possible for you, some people weren’t invoiced between late February and Early April (this would be the March billing cycle). The billing software did a little bit of catch-up in May, and this resulted in the May and June invoices coming rather close together. If you think you’ve been billed in error, I’d ask that you first check your credit card statements to see if you may have skipped a payment earlier. If you don’t have your records, or have questions about your billing, let me know. I can give you a list of payments received over the last 6 months.

It looks like smooth sailing for the next month. We don’t have any major upgrades or changes planned.

On a completely unrelated note: Congratulations to our partner Jason and his wife, Thea, on the birth of their 2nd son, Johnathan.

Now… it’s summer… shut off your computer and go outside! You know… That big room with the blue ceiling? Yeah. That one. GO!

Well, it’s May 1st now, and not a whole heck of a lot is happening at the Geek Niche ranch. So I won’t bother rambling on like I normally do about obscure things. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, it’s spring time, and we should all be outside enjoying the spring weather… the sun, the flowers, the random storms, the occasional hurricane…. y’know… all those things that make spring time special.

Until next time, here’s hoping that your month properly proportional of sun and rain, and that your life doesn’t get too interesting in the wrong ways.

–
M Blaze Miskulin
President
Geek Niche, Inc.

Yes, I know I’m late with the April newsletter. I blame it on Daylight Savings Time being a month early. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

There have been a couple of changes in the last month that you may or may not be aware of. As you may recall, we upgraded our billing software. As I mentioned, this is not a painless process. The change is a major one, and the consequences very high. Because of this, we’ve been playing it very safe when there were any doubts. We noticed some quirks with invoices and rather than have mistakes made, we’ve held back sending them out until we know that they’re right. I apologize if this causes anyone any problems. If it does, please let me know, and I can manually generate an invoice for you.

Another part of the change over is that we now use eNom as our registrar, rather than GoDaddy. There are a couple reasons for this. First, eNom is built into the billing software, which makes it simpler and easier for our clients to sign up–no more going to a separate site and then coming back. Secondly, while neither we, nor any of our clients (to my knowledge) have had any problems, GoDaddy is starting to get a reputation for being less than supportive of the rights of their clients in cases of controversy. There are a lot of accusations flying around, and I don’t know which are valid and which aren’t. When it comes to the protection of our clients, however, all of us at Geek Niche prefer to play it safe.

One thing to remember is that you own your domain, and you get to choose who your registrar will be. We supply access to a registrar based on several factors, including cost, reputation, and simplicity of use, but we, in no way, require you to use the registrar we provide. This is just one of the ways in which we help you to protect your own reputation and your investment in your domain.

Okay… so this past month has had some excitement. See? The boring months aren’t so bad now, are they?

For those of you who missed all the action, read that [points down]. However, a few good things came out of all of this. With a relatively damage-free attack, we were alerted to some vulnerabilities and were able to patch them fairly quickly. This sent us off on an upgrade mission. We’re now better protected and more up-to-date on our operating software. The research into this stuff also pointed out some other stuff that needed to be upgraded. I believe that all of you who are using WordPress now have the latest version. If you don’t, I recommend that you upgrade. If you’d like us to do it for you (for a small fee of $5), just drop any of us an e-mail, and we’ll do it for you.

In the midst of all this upgrading, we decided to finally bite the bullet and upgrade our billing & finance software. This is far from a painless process for us. You’ve probably noticed that you’ve gotten some duplicate invoices. Hopefully, you’ve gotten the e-mails explaining them and telling you not to panic. We’re watching what’s going on very carefully, and we’ll make sure you’re not over-billed.

As we head into the height of tax season, I’d just like to remind any of you who use your websites for business, that you should be able to list your payments to us as a business expense. If you need a receipt showing what you’ve paid for the 2006 tax year, let me know and I’ll send you one.

That’s all for this month. See you in 30.

—
M Blaze Miskulin
President
Geek Niche, Inc.

Yeah, yeah… I know. I missed the January 2007 Newsletter. But it’s not my fault. Honest. It’s Stella’s fault. Stella Artois. Far too many pints of Stella Artois. But… to massacre a cliche: “When in Canada, do what the Canadians do.”

Now, some of you may get picky and point out that I’m late with the newsletter for this month, too. Nope. I planned it this way (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!). You see, today is the Feast of St. Blaise. So, to celebrate, I’m writing the newsletter.

So… anyway… It’s now February (Happy New Year!) and things have been going well here at Geek Niche. While there hasn’t been anything huge or “flashy” going on, there have been some tweaks and adjustments and minor upgrades behind the scenes. Most notably, we’ve upgraded Plesk again. Included in this version were some changes to the Application Vault. There have been some upgrades and additions to the applications in there, so you may want to take a peek and see if there’s anything new or interesting.

A couple random points:

• I got a question from one of our clients recently regarding a letter he received telling him it was time to renew his domain. Being fairly sure that I hadn’t done any somnambulist mailings, I checked it out. It was, as I suspected, a ploy by another company to steal his business away from us (and charge him twice as much for it!). Geek Niche uses GoDaddy as it’s registrar. If you’ve registered through us, the only notices you should pay attention to will come from Geek Niche or GoDaddy.
• Many of you us WordPress on your sites. Over the past year, the WordPress team has been working very hard to improve their product, and they’ve released a number of updates. The latest “stable” release (meaning it’s passed all the testing stages) is 2.1 (Ella). To find the current version of your installation, log into your Dashboard and scroll down to the bottom of the page. It should say something like “2.0.2 — 0.13 seconds”. The first part of that is your version number. If it’s less than 2.1, I recommend upgrading. If it’s less than 2.0, I strongly recommend upgrading. To upgrade, all you need is the ability to FTP to your account. Just download the new version and follow the instructions that are included. It’s easy to do and will make your blog more secure. If you have any questions, just e-mail me.
• As always, if you’re looking to do something special with your site, Geek Niche has designers and programmers for hire. Whether it’s a custom WordPress theme or plug-in, an e-mail submission form, or an online database, drop us a line and we’ll find someone who can handle you project.

That’s all for this month.

–
M Blaze Miskulin
President
Geek Niche, Inc.