Back in Melbourne on a pleasant Sunday morning it seems appropriate to share some reflections on WordPress versus Joomla versus Drupal.

These are the "self-maintainer" (easy to update your site) web platforms – well known and most common "CMS" systems freely available, and make up a huge proportion of the internet with organizations from the Whitehouse (Drupal) through to your neighbourhood grocery store using them.

In particular, WordPress use has exploded to the point where it now has many million websites – estimates vary from 10 million through 50 million, depending on how it is measured. There is no doubt it is the most frequently used website platform software, but why has it grown so fast? And is it actually any good? Read the rest of this entry »

White Dog Green Frog is moving our offices a few kilometres to:

9 O'Grady Street
Clifton Hill, Vic 3068

Our phone number stays the same – the only thing that changes is our postal address!

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An interesting development in Google's ranking algorithms is that Google is now checking for Over Optimisation on sites!

This means that if you have hired unscrupulous SEO people to optimise your site using unethical techniques (of which you might not even be aware!) you may end up getting penalized in the near future.

The good news, though, is that you won't be penalized if you've got a site that has good content and you haven't done too much SEO.

The idea is to even the playing ground a bit so that smaller sites with excellent content still get a chance to rank well.

The original article with details for those interested has a few more details and is well worth a read:

http://www.business2community.com/seo/will-your-site-be-flagged-for-over-optimization-0153729

(Thanks to Meri Harli of Meriwords for this link!)

A number of security researchers have provided a way to craft HTTP requests which take down a PHP-based web server completely.  The idea is that essentially a specially constructed set of POST variables can completely put any web server into a never-ending CPU spin.

It's important to remember that images uploaded for the web actually need to be resized – often an image from the camera will be something like 1.5 – 5mb – which can take up to a minute to download when viewing a web page.  If you put these images on a webpage at full size, the browser will often shrink them so you can't see them at full size, which makes it very hard to see what's going on. Read the rest of this entry »

It's amazing we've been able to keep it under wraps for so long. I feel like an excited young parent on Christmas Eve willing the clock to move faster so we can hurry up and open presents! It's time to open the presents!

After a 3 month upgrade and expansion program affecting many of our servers, we’re super excited to be able to announce that we will be doubling our disk space allocations on all hosting accounts, both new and old. Read the rest of this entry »

Steve Jobs – an icon in our industry

A quick snippet that came across our desks today, talking about Steve Jobs the man – just a lovely article … Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most important functions of an eCommerce site is accepting payments on the web. Surprisingly, very little is written about this and it seems very hard for beginners to find basic information needed to outline the possibilities, and to clarify the benefits and costs of the various approaches. Read the rest of this entry »

We had been offering a simple website building product called Fido Sitebuilder since 2005 however we are phasing out Fido Sitebuilder as a product and to offer you a heavily discounted conversion from Fido to the industry-standard WordPress system.

When we chose to use Fido 6 years ago it was 'state of the art', but slowly over time it has became lacking in several areas some of which are listed below:
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Let's face it, I'm not a cat person (at all) but this is pretty darn funny!