Ed Icionsub

One of the most interesting aspects of using the internet is that it is truly an international medium. I have been able to access newspapers all over the world, and participate in bulletin boards and discussions with people from a variety of different countries.

One of the most interesting bulletin boards that I found recently is based in India and helps the people having issues with various businesses as a public consumer forum.

One of my company’s franchisees is from India and he still has a lot of family there. He was in a meeting with me this morning and during a break he went online to check his emails and surf a few web sites. He showed me the consumer court India website and shared some of the recent posts with me. It was truly fascinating.

There are a variety of topics available for comments and discussions. I read the laptop computer forum and was very surprised to see how many complaints were lodged against all the major laptop manufacturers. It was a real eye opener and worth considering when shopping for a new laptop.

Thought it would be nice to send a free email card to some of my family over the weekend. I’ve always used the web site that Hallmark cards runs. They have nice designs and the site was easy to use.

But today when I went to Hallmark.com, I found out the they are not doing free email cards anymore. They want 99 cents for each email card, or you can sign up for a membership type thing and get unlimited cards for a flat fee each year.

I’ll have to think about that one. I like sending free cards and there are other sites that do it. But I don’t blame Hallmark for wanting to make a little money from their efforts. So I’ll think about it for a bit, and maybe sign up for the membership thing.

This morning I noticed a dashboard message advising me of another WordPress upgrade available. This upgrade is evidently another security patch to help protect blogs and servers from hackers who are exploiting a few particular weaknesses in the program.

A good friend of mine, Adam, has several web sites that he maintains for friends and family, and he has had ongoing problems with hackers this summer because of flaws in the WordPress programming. So I take the threat of security issues very seriously and upgrade as as soon as I see that a new version has been tested and released.

Last night I was feeling brave and had an hour to spend on the computer, so I went ahead and clicked on the link within WordPress that said to upgrade the version to 2.8.

They released the new version over a week ago, and I figured the dust has had a chance to settle by now. In fact, they did find a few more bugs and have already taken steps to fix those.

Just this past year, the improvements made to WordPress have been very impressive. It keeps getting easier, better, and more secure. I have to give big kudos to the volunteers working so hard for WordPress.

The upgrade process was very easy and took less than one minute and – knock on wood – everything seems to be working great! Thanks again to the good people behind the WordPress software.

Ediconsub is back! We had been waiting a while, planning, considering, testing, even plotting. and now we’re back. Hope you didn’t miss us too much! Get ready – this year we are doing big.

Earl is out by the way. He lost the password to renew the domain, then it became a huge hassle to get our domain back and the site online. Earl let the hosting bill go for so long we lost all of our previous posts. If you have any of our past writings please resubmit them. Earl has been no help with backups or anything, he has left the group.

It’s not in shambles, but it will take us time to rebuild.