The Road Ahead

Following on from yesterday's post about backing up standard email accounts, we've just published a new knowledgebase article on how to backup Hosted Exchange accounts.

KB210 : Backing up Hosted Exchange Account

Some changes are afoot at Calzada Media. Some you’ll see soon with others appearing in the near future.

One of the first changes is to our free URL shortening service, LeafUrl. After careful consideration, we have decided to close LeafURL to anonymous users with immediate effect.

This does not mean LeafURL has ceased to be. Customers and registered users may continue to create and manage FREE short Urls through the customer portal. Go to My Account and then click on the LeafURL tab.

All existing shortened Urls created by registered users will continue to work. Urls created by anonymous users may be removed or pruned.

Love them or hate them - and most people hate them - CAPTCHAs are a necessity on websites nowadays. Without this Are you human? challenge, website forms like our contact us cannot detect the difference between a human visitor or an automated system.

An un-CAPTCHA'd form is a sitting target for any malicious automated system to exploit. Potential exploits range from just submitting endless junk data right through to attempting to force a security breach. CAPTCHAs don't protect against exploits, but they do significantly reduce the risk of exposure.

So this is why we use CAPTCHAs on our Contact Us, Get A Quote and other forms on the public side of our website.

Until relatively recently, we've been using an image-based CAPTCHA. This is one of the most commonly used approaches where an image is presented containing skewed and distorted text that the user has to read and then input. Technically, this works fine. From a usability perspective, it is awful. Sometimes the text was unreadable and it was next to useless on a poor screen or for the visually impaired.

So, we've replacing all the CAPTCHA with a new maths-based challenge designed and built in-house. Instead of reading warped text, you'll now need to be able to add, subtract, multiple or divide. To keep things simple, all answers are in whole numbers - there will be no need to grab a pen and pencil to perform long division. There is also no need to know you're thirteen times tables, as it only goes upto 10.

We've already deployed the Math CAPTCHA on the Contact Us and Get A Quote pages and it will be the default CAPTCHA in the next TaxiOffice update.

In the last few days we've upgraded our free URL shortening service LeafURL. As before, LeafURL is completely free to use, and if you register for an account, you are able to manage and monitor the performance of your shortened URLs.

In the next couple of months we will be enhancing LeafURL with improved and enhanced reporting and management capabilities for registered users. If you have any suggestion or ideas, get in touch.

Microsoft .NET Framework v4.5 is now available for all web hosting packages. Existing customers may use the framework by updating the compilation tag in your ASP.Net application's web.config to something like:

The Hosting Control Panel may not show ASP.Net 4.5 as a selectable framework within the Website Properties page. As long as you set the selected ASP.Net framework to version 4.0 and use the compilation tag described above, your application should use the new framework.

We do still support .Net Framework v1 albeit on a case-by-case basis. If you wish to use .NET Framework 1, please contact support for assistance.

If you require any additional information or have a question, please please contact support for assistance.