Where the magic happens: part trois
More desk action today - this time from Karine Joly, of CollegeWebEditor.com, HigherEdExperts.com and writer for University Business magazine.
I’ve worked with Karine a few times for HigherEdExperts.com which was educational and fun. She’s also interviewed me a several times for her UB columns, which are always topical and informative. I’m looking forward to her keynote at EduWeb in July.
Karine has added notes to the photo, click on the picture to see them.
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SmugMug Rocks the Cloud
I’m a big fan of SmugMug and CEO Don MacAskil. Their use of the cloud for storage and processing is really interesting to study, and it’s very cool that Don keeps a blog about their software development.
Yesterday, Don announced that SmugMug will now store whatever you throw at it. Seriously - anything.
They’re accepting JPEGs, PSDs, TIFF, RAW files, and raw video. You can also store XMP sidecars, PDF files, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, video archives, and anything else you might want to store with your photos.
That’s very cool, but this is all possible because of their use of the cloud. The storage costs alone for this type of service could easily stretch into the millions of dollars. By using Amazon S3, they can offload the hard stuff and just keep throwing data at the cloud. The software development process is much quicker as well since you don’t have to worry about building and scaling the infrastructure.
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Do you have an Extended Validation Certificate?
Are you using Firefox 3? Cool, me too. See where the favicon is for this site up there in the address bar? Did you know it’s clickable?
That area now presents security information about the site you are visiting. Firefox is calling it the Site Identification Button, and it’s taking the old padlock icon to the next level. No longer will you be able to just see if the site you are visiting is secure, you’ll be able to learn more about who the site owner is. Identity will be shown via three icons. If you see a red icon, leave the site immediately.
The gray button says that the site doesn’t give out any identity information. The blue button shows the site you are visiting is encrypted and the domain has been verified, but the actual owner of the domain has not been identified. A green button shows the site is encrypted and the site has fully verified ownership.
I used this tool on one of my secure domains and here’s what it showed:
As you can see, we haven’t (yet) put an Extended Validation Certificate into place for our site. This will complete the identity process and ensure site visitors we are who we say we are.
This extra certificate isn’t just for Firefox. If you have this extra certificate in place, users will also see a green address bar in Internet Explorer.
These new EVC’s are available from a variety of vendors and it will be interesting to see how fast they are adopted and what their use rate will be in higher education. Dria.org has more about these certificates and the new security features of Firefox.
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