Technology on Jon Griffin's Site

Using irFanView to batch edit images

Mon, 06 Sep 2021 22:45:51 +0000

I recently decided to repurpose a product and turn it into a book and Kindle version. The Kindle version had no real issues with images since they get down sampled anyway, but the printed book needed to have the images at at least 300 dpi (dots per inch). If not the images would almost certainly be grainy, and I don’t want that. Most screen capture software saves the images at 96 dpi or sometimes 72 dpi. I started using Photoshop and taking each image and making it 384 dpi by using the bicubic sampling functions. It was a pain. First, change the image type to indexed color, then upscale, downsize (the images get really big), then change back to RGB. Do that for 50 images, well, you get the idea.

Amazon Collections

Fri, 16 Aug 2013 20:43:00 -0700

We’re going to talk about a little feature that Amazon has included in August of 2013. In August 2013, Amazon quietly released a new feature that will be of interest to marketers called Amazon Collections. It’s a direct competitor to Pinterest. There’s some significant differences though. Why Amazon even matters. First, a quick recap for those who don’t like or use Amazon. I know you’re out there. One reason Amazon’s very important, especially to the men reading this, is that Amazon has a very diverse audience. It’s not a heavily female-dominated site like Pinterest and some people have already declared Collections the male Pinterest. So that should peak your interest a bit.

Amazon Web Services access keys tutorial

Tue, 30 Jul 2013 08:59:00 -0700

Hello again. This is Jon Griffin. I just want to talk to you about a little change in your Amazon Web Services account that you may or may not have noticed. That is that your security credentials are changing. It’s not that they’re going away or anything has to change, but there are no longer going to show you, online, what your secret code is.

Responsive design for WordPress video

Mon, 22 Jul 2013 09:09:00 -0700

Tweetables

Does your blog video display correctly on mobile devices? … click to tweet Use WordPress? Do your videos play at the right size on all devices? … click to tweet

Transcript

Hi, Jon Griffin here with another little tip, brought to you by mayulienterprises.com.

Simple Wordpress Fix For Security

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 20:37:00 -0700

Well, technically not Wordpress, but your hosting is probably vulnerable.

From http://www.darkreading.com/database_security/security/attacks/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224300052&cid=nl_DR_DAILY_2010-04-13_h if you want to read the whole thing.

There was an attack on Wordpress blogs hosted at Network Solutions, but your host is probably guilty as well.

The gist of what happened is the wp-config.php was readable by the world and the crackers got access to the database passwords and logins which are stored in that file in plain text.

Using WinSCP

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 21:04:00 -0800

This is part 4 of the No Plain Text Passwords series and is about using WinSCP.

Transcript

OK, so what we’re basically going to do now is create a directory that we’re going to put our key in. So all you have to do in WinSCP is go to F7 down here create directory. Make sure that you’re on the server side not your local side. (You can tell by the color change).

Using PuTTYgen and Pageant

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 20:47:00 -0800

This is part 3 of the No Plain Text Passwords series. To make your life easier and more secure you can setup your computer using PuTTYgen and Pageant to not use any passwords when you login.

Transcript

OK so basically after you install the programs WinSCP and Putty, you can go up to your programs and find here… first thing we want to do is go to the putty menu…and you’ll notice there’s a lot of stuff. We’ve got P agent and PSFTP, putty, putty manual, putty website and puttygen. For today for this lesson all we really need to worry about is P agent and puttygen.

Get PuTTY

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 20:53:00 -0800

Transcript

All right so basically the first step of this is to get putty. I’m not going to go into setting it up. You can either read it or I’ll put out some other information later.

But what is putty? It’s basically a Telnet/SSH. An SSH stands for Secure Shell. It comes from the old Unix days but it’s a way for windows users to securely log-in to their Unix box; which is what most hosting companies provides.

Get WinSCP

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 20:50:00 -0800

Transcript

All right so what we’re going to do here is get what we call WinSCP or Windows Secure Copy Protocol.

Basically you could replace filezilla with this program.(This is what I do. Kind of forces me to use the correct secure protocols even though filezilla I know does SFTP there. I’m just not sure because I don’t use it, all the ins and out. So I’m going to show you the way I do it.)

Secure FTP

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 21:00:00 -0800

Secure FTP or No Plain Text Passwords Please

One of the first things anyone should do when they are transferring files is stop using plain text passwords. What are plain text passwords? Simply, they are passwords that are not encrypted in any way. This makes it childs play for the bad guys to login to your server (or in the jargon of the day, to own you or root you).

Finding bad links with Xenu’s Link Sleuth

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 21:15:00 -0800

Transcript

If you’re like me, you’ve had websites for a while. One of the things that happens is the links start to stagnate. Some of your links don’t work. Maybe you changed servers or done things to your server. I just recently had that happen and it reminded me of this problem. So I shot this little video that’s going to show you an easy way to find these links that are not working. Then you can either change them, remove them or forward them to a working link. You can check on both internal and external links, because your external links are important as well. In my case, I transferred a blog to a new host, and the server name was different on the two servers. Then the problems began, but I found a great tool; Xenu’s Link Sleuth.

Automatically post to Twitter

Thu, 12 May 2011 21:21:00 -0700

DEPRECATED

Use at your own risk.

Twitter is a good way to get publicity, but the biggest problem (at least for me) has always been keeping up with my tweets.

Well, back in December of 2009, Google quietly added a feature to FeedBurner that allows you to connect your Twitter account to your RSS feed through FeedBurner. This is helpful since your posts are sent out to your Twitter followers almost instantly once you publish the post. Not to mention the backlinks which can’t hurt.