TerraMedia | Website design in Lismore, Ballina, Byron Bay and Lennox Head through to Brisbane.

If you come from a Windows/Linux background, you will be used to boot loaders and boot keys for performing particular functions on bootup. Key's to access the BIOS, boot to Safe Mode and more.

While the Mac OS X boot process is streamlined and it hides the actual processes that are run, it does still include a number of special keys that you can use during the boot process to perform a range of useful functions.

These commands work in Leopard through to Mountain Lion. I'm sure they probably work in earlier versions and will likely work in later versions too.

Boot from a CD/DVD

Press and hold the C key as soon as the white boot screen appears or the startup sound plays to tell your Mac to boot from the optical drive.

Ever needed a PayPal API signature to receive payments through your website? Normally this is only needed if you plan to use PayPal's Express Checkout instead of the standard checkout, and the process to get your API signature can be a little confusing if you don't know where to look. You can get them in just a few clicks though, here's how:

Ever needed to update the database name, user or password for your content management system? The most common time I find I need to do this is when I'm moving a website from one server to another. Sometimes you can replicate the database details exactly, sometimes you can't.

I work predominately with Drupal, Magento and Wordpress content management systems. So where do you find the configuration for the database in these systems?

Drupal

File location from document root: /sites/default/settings.php

Every website is different, but no matter what your site is about, there are 13 things your website should have to allow you to to make the most of search engine optimisation on your website, and improve it.

All of the content managed (CMS) and e-commerce websites we build either include these things or include optional support for these things.

There are always new statistics coming out showing how much online sales, or e-commerce, is growing. More and more retailers are getting online and selling. The flip side of this is that credit card fraud through online sales is on the rise too, so what can you do to spot fraud and protect your business from it?

Common fraud identifiers

In my experience there are a few very common ways of spotting credit card fraud:

Why find out?

Finding the busiest time of day for your website is important because it can impact the response to new content. This is especially important where your website shows time sensitive content such as promotions in your latest blog article or if your newest products are shown somewhere prominent, be it on the front page, an excerpt in a sidebar, or somewhere else altogether. Promotions that might only be valid for 24 hours published right before the busiest time of day for your website will get a much bigger response than at any other time of day. This makes it very worthwhile to work out.

What is Google's PageRank system?

Google have developed a system that allocates a score between 0 and 10 to every website on the internet. This is known as PageRank and can be very useful in determining the online importance and impact of any website.

When the Google Spider (the robot that crawls the internet to find websites) visits a website it applies an algorithm that is constantly changing and improving to assess the relevance of the content it is accessing.

How does it work?

If there are 1000 websites all competing for one term, the ones that have the highest PageRank will usually appear higher in the organic Google search results than the websites that have a lower PageRank.

I received an email earlier today that is quite sneaky, and has been fairly well put together to scam people.

If you have a subscription to an anti-virus or security suite provider, such as AVG, Norton, McAfee, CA, Trend-Micro or any of the numerous others, then you will quite likely receive emails on an annual basis letting you know that your subscription needs to be renewed, or offering you upgrades, or some other deal.

If you have a look at the screen shot below of the email I received, there are a few things to look out for:

^{Photo by BionicTeaching / CC BY-SA 2.0}

A recent post by Ed over at Oz Domainer got me to thinking about this particular topic a bit more. Who is managing your domain names, and in particular, who is making sure that they get renewed?

Domain names are a vital asset for your business online. Whether you use a single domain name for all your business dealings, or whether you have a number of them, it is extremely important that they are managed properly, otherwise you could find your website isn't accessible, your email doesn't work, and you are losing potential business.

As of today, we have increased the quota's on all new and existing Hosted Exchange email accounts at no extra cost!

You absolutely will not be charged extra for this, it is a completely free upgrade.