Here’s a link to 25 of the top common passwords:

Stop using these 25 passwords today

The article lists out the passwords and many common variations.  For instance taking a word like “hello” and substituting o for 0 (zero) and e for 3, like “h3ll0” is no solution either.  It’s just too easy for hackers to break.

A good rule of thumb is to always add some “randomness” into your passwords – like 315$ – I just made that up.  add that to a word like “hello” and you have something that is fairly difficult to break – hello315$.

That said, I wonder how many passwords are stolen using “social engineering” methods – like copying the post-it note stuck to your computer, or posing as a technical support person, and just asking for it.  I think the traditional “brute-force” approaches are less common today, because too many systems are safeguarded from those.

Anyway, it’s never a bad idea to implement secure passwords.  Too much critical information is out there.

Here’s a nice article on SEO, which lists the “durable” seo elements to focus on for your website:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2111842/8-Durable-SEO-Elements

An interesting revelation from Google CEO Eric Schmidt – google changes their search algorithm a little bit each day.  EACH DAY!  So jumping onto the latest hot SEO tip may backfire.

I’d summarize this article as follows – make your site user friendly and provide great content.  That’s it.  Serve your constituency well, and the search engines will reward you.

One great way to improve your search engine rankings is to get lots of backlinks.  These are links from other websites, preferably in your industry.  This has led many sites to buy links on “link farms” or pay SEO companies to set up dozens or hundreds of low quality links to their site.  However, the search engines, notably google, are starting to strike back.

Google recently implemented some search algorithm changes that caused a lot of sites to drop off significantly in the rankings.   Here’s a article that explains some of the changes, and shows you how to recognize a good link from a bad one:

http://searchenginewatch.com/3641987

-Jim

Here are a few recent examples of what happens when you hire an SEO firm to “improve” your search engine rankings:

New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google

and this one:

Forbes Accused Of Link Spam

Both of these highlight the dangers of paying for “inbound” links to your site.  In SEO, external links to your site are one of the big ways to quickly improve your search rankings.  But the search engines are increasingly getting better at “sniffing out” these links, and penalizing sites for them.  When you hire a company to do SEO for you, check into the methods they will use, and be careful.   Keep to the slow and steady, white hat methods to build traffic.  Otherwise, you may find your site blacklisted, and all your efforts (and money) lost.

Turnkey Web Tools has announced that they are working on a new version of Sunshop, their shopping cart product.

Here is the release link.

It’s another ‘from the ground up’ rebuild, which means the upgrade path will be rocky at best.  Here are some thoughts:

1.  No release date or feature list has been announced, so assume at least 5-6 months before it’s here.

2.  When you rebuild software, ALL the functionality has to be re-tested.  That means there is the potential for bugs in features that currently work fine.  So the initial release of the new version will likely have a lot of bugs (hopefully little).

3.  In that vein, don’t chomp at the bit to upgrade – let the first wave of users be the guina pigs.  After a few weeks / month, they will release an “update”, to fix all the bugs found by the first wave of users.

4.   If you are a 4.x user, consider if you really *need* to upgrade.  If the software is doing what you need, you can keep using it until you decide it’s time to revamp the store.