How Could We Not Smile After Reading This Email?

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Apr 21, 2008

Now matter how many times we receive an email or phone call like this, it never gets old and always makes me grin like a chimp with new dentures. This email from Todd at Pesco Mold made my day.

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Cool Tool to Measure Server Power Costs

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Mar 6, 2008

Over the past couple of years, the InetSolution crew has become increasingly aware of our impact on the environment. We don't produce much traditional waste, such as paper or industrial byproducts, but we do operate a fleet of high-powered servers that drink electricity like it's free beer at a college party. Since we're adding several new servers to our bank and credit union hosting network next quarter, we've decided to configure our new servers using more energy efficient hardware that deliver more computing power with a smaller energy footprint. We found a nifty tool that helps us measure the exact energy usage of each device on our network and calculate that to actual dollar values based on our actual electricity costs.

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Prevent Google from Indexing Portions of a Page

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Feb 26, 2008

Today one of my clients asked whether it's possible to instruct Googlebot to ignore a portion of a web page when crawling and indexing his web site. This client shows product pricing on their web site, but would prefer that Google not index the prices so that they do not appear in search results. I was not aware of a directive that Googlebot would follow to ignore anything other than entire web sites, pages or folders, so I researched the topic and here's what I learned.

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Windows Live Writer Makes Posting to Blog Easy

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Feb 25, 2008

This weekend I downloaded the new version of Windows Live Writer to simplify posting new entries to this blog. It brings desktop WYSIWYG simplicity to your blogging experience. While it does not help improve the quality of content, nor make my posts any more entertaining, it's at least much easier now for me to publish the boring content that I do write.

Installation is a breeze and the product is free. If you post more than a few blog entries a week, then this tool is definitely worth the time to download and learn. You can be up and running in less than 10 minutes.

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Best Practices for Choosing Challenge Questions for Bank and Credit Union Web Sites

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Feb 21, 2008

Today I signed into one of my AT&T accounts and was presented with their risk-based authentication (RBA) setup page. The challenge question choices they presented reminded me how important it is to follow a few simple rules when choosing challenge questions for your users to choose.

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Post Online Surveys to Your Bank Website for Free

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Feb 19, 2008

One of the easiest methods to quickly collect customer feedback is via online surveys, posted either on your website or distributed via email. Since few website content management systems (CMSs) offer survey tools and third-party products can be expensive and cumbersome to install, not many small and mid-size banks and credit unions use online surveys.

Using a new feature in Google spreadsheets, anyone can easily create, distribute and analyze online surveys. Best of all, it's free! Let me show you how to get started.

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A Better Clipboard Alternative for All Users

By Jason Sherrill
Posted on Feb 18, 2008

The clipboard is probably the feature of Windows that I use more often than any other on my computer. There are two main problems I have with the clipboard:

1. It holds only one item at a time
2. There is no easy way to see what's in your clipboard

Today, Jeff Atwood's blog introduced me to a tool to solve both of these problems in one lightweight application.

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