Archive for January 16th, 2010
Avoid Being Taken By Surprise When Running A Home Business
January 16th, 2010 | 
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Few things are harder to stomach for an entrepreneur than sudden unexpected turns of events. This may pertain to a sudden unexpected bill that comes in the mail or the terse reminder of your friendly local taxing authority that you are behind in filing your quarterly business taxes. Since your home business is not only your bread and butter but also quite literally tied into the livelihood of your personal home, your ability to absorb risk and surprises is much decreased. Thus you will need to take special care to ensure that your financial health is protected all the way around. Should your business suddenly experience a growth spurt, you need to be able to keep up; if a change looms large all of a sudden, perhaps due to a catastrophic turn in the economy, you need to be able to respond to it. By taking three simple steps, you will ensure that no matter what happens, you will know how to handle the unexpected and will not be taken by surprise when running a home business. First and foremost, it is vital that you are insured. Not only does your home need to be insured, but your business may require certain liability insurance policies as well. Check on this matter with an experienced insurance agent and then find the coverage that most adequately protects you and your business. Then, should you fall ill, become injured or disabled, or just have to deal with a malfunction of your home of business equipment, your home business will not fall victim to the problems but instead will receive the funds necessary to maintain the status quo until you once again take the reigns firmly in hand. Secondly, remember that in cases where you will host clients in your home, there is always the possibility of someone sustaining and injury. Thus, you will need to have adequate liability insurance that will protect you in case a customer slips and falls or is otherwise hurt. Liability insurance that protects you against claims arising from the use of any product you might be selling goes hand in hand with this kind of insurance policy and once again your insurance professional will be able to advise you on your needs. Last but not least is the kind of protection that you yourself may not enjoy, but that will spell the difference between being taken care of and abject poverty for your family: life insurance! Protect your business and your family from going under by having your life insured so that your loved ones will be able to have their needs met should you die unexpectedly. This will also permit your family to take over the business should they desire to do so. By creating an operation manual you will leave them not only the funds needed to run the business but you will also enable them to continue running it and profiting from it just the way you did!
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Automated Website Testing
You just finished building your company’s website. You have tested it yourself and had other company employees test it. The website now goes live. A few weeks later you start getting emails from irate customers who complain that they are unable to place their orders because certain steps in the “Buy Now” process give errors. You quickly fix the problem. A few days later you get complaints about some other issue and you again react quickly to fix the website. This continues for a few months till the complaints finally halt and things stabilize. At this point you make some enhancements to your website. A few days later a customer email alerts you to the fact that in the process of making this enhancement you “broke” something else on the website. Again you spend time to find and fix the problem but by now you are perplexed and not a little frustrated. These issues have cost you many customers in the last few months and potentially spread ill will across the broader customer community. It seems to you that the only way to have detected these issues before they went “live” was to have employed a large army of software testers, something your company is unable to afford. Enter automated software testing. While nothing can replace good human testers, broad test coverage requires some degree of software automation for it to be economically feasible. Automated testing tools can provide a huge workforce multiplier and do a very good job complimenting human testers. Every change to your website no matter how small requires thorough testing to ensure that nothing else was affected. This becomes very time consuming very quickly due to the large number of possible cases to test. A strategy whereby tests are automated using software becomes an economic necessity. There are two classes of automated testing tools. The first kind, functional and regression testing tools, helps to make sure that the website behaves as it should: for example if a customer clicks on button X, page Y is displayed without errors. Functional and regression testing tools are able to automate a large number of scenarios to ensure that your website works as intended. The second type, load testing tools gauge how well your website performs when subjected to a large stress, such as a large number of simultaneous users. I will be discussing load testing in a separate article. I will now give you an overview of the basic characteristics of functional testing. Before you can begin any kind of functional test automation you will need to identify the test scenarios you wish to automate. Once this is done, you will need to generate test scripts that cover these scenarios. A functional testing tool will typically record user interactions with a website. As you perform various operations on your website or application, the tool records every step. When you finish recording, it generates an automated script from your interactions with your website. Alternatively you could use the tool to construct the script by hand. Typically testers tend to do a combination of the two. They will use the recorder to generate the basic framework of their scripts and then tweak the scripts by hand to incorporate special cases. Scripts can be graphical and/or text based in nature. A good functional testing tool does not require users to have a programming background. Users not proficient in programming will work predominantly with graphical scripts. In most tools graphical scripts will typically show all interactions in a tree structure and users can edit any node of the tree to modify the script. Some users however, who have programming backgrounds may wish to program their scripts. These users will typically work with a text script written in a standard language such as JavaScript or VBScript. Once you have generated your script you will need to insert checks in your scripts to test if your website is functioning correctly. Such checks are usually called checkpoints. A checkpoint verifies that values of a property obtained when testing the website match expected values. Checkpoints enable you to set the criteria for comparing expected values with obtained values. The expected value of a property is derived from recording interactions with the web site. It is viewed and modified from checkpoints. The current value is retrieved during replay (i.e. during the execution of the test case). There are many different kinds of checkpoints. A page checkpoint verifies the source of a page or frame as well as its statistical properties. You can check for broken links, verify link URLs, image sources, the hierarchy of HTML tags or even the entire HTML source of the Web page or frame. You can also set thresholds for the loading time of a page. A text checkpoint verifies that a given text is displayed or is not displayed in a specified area on a web page. A web object checkpoint verifies the properties of a web object e.g. the value of an HTML INPUT field. A database checkpoint verifies the contents of a database used by your website. When you replay a test script, the testing tool will open the recorded application and perform the recorded steps in the same sequence they were specified in the script. As it replays the script it will also run through all the checkpoints you have inserted into the script. In addition, you can test your application’s behavior with varying data inputs. For example you can try to submit a page after entering different values in the edit box of a web page. At the end of the replay a detailed report is typically be generated. Functional test automation allows you to automate the repetitive testing of a large number of scenarios across your website. Functional testing tools are an important weapon in your development arsenal whose use provides a huge productivity gain and allows for small testing groups to accomplish significantly more work. There is a very strong economic case for the use of Functional Testing Tools as part of the development and deployment cycle of a website.
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Posted in Internet Business | 
Tags: automated testing, functional testing, quality assurance, regression testing, software testing | 
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Create A .htaccess File Without Referral Spam
At present, there is a growing nuisance for users and administrators alike of sites that ruin web servers and more particularly, blogs. This nuisance is being referred to as comment, trackback and referrer spams. Various solutions have been proposed with some being applicable to even two of these forms of spam using a single solution. What is Referral Spam? A referrer request-header file allows the client to specify the address (URI) of the resource from which the request–URI was obtained. It is a way for an HTTP client to send in the headers, the URI of the page that sent them there. This is especially handy for a site administrator to provide insight as to where the traffic on his web server is coming from. It is also depended upon by the most popular web server log analyzers in providing statistics on the most common referrers. The HTTP Referrer: header is very useful but it is also completely arbitrary. Any web browser or HTTP client is free to send a forged Referrer: header with any request to a web server. Spammers have taken advantage of the fact that there is no provision for authentication in SMPTP and have used the existing openness to specially craft request with their website in the Referrer: header. Most people will find it difficult to understand why someone would bother spamming something which only the site administrator will see in the logs. One probable motivation pinpointed is the boosting of search engine ranking. Another is simply to show-up in any stats published by the site. If a site being spammed runs a web server log analyzing software, access to the URL in the top referrer’s section is handily obtained by the spammer. A serious consequence of referrer spam is that the process is often performed via an HTTP “GET” or “POST” request which retrieves the entire body of the document being spammed. A 30k document, for example, will have all the 30k transferred across one’s Internet pipe. This results to not a small amount of traffic in the web server which could be very costly since bandwidth is not cheap. Referrer spam wastes CPU and disk space and can be a source of endless annoyance to server operators. It is being actually fought by search engine developers thus its initial effectiveness in boosting a site’s ranking has been considerably lessened. However, the problem persists and much has to be done to conquer it. Some recommended practices in countering the threat of referral spam include the non-publication of referrers by bloggers, inclusion of the page in robots.txt when referrers have to be published, use of the rel=”no follow” attribute and gathering a cleaner list of referrers using JavaScript and beacon images. Some bloggers have begun fighting referrer spammers at the .htaccess level. Others have even taken steps to automate this. Blocking Users by Referrer Notes A very useful feature of .htaccess is the ability to block users or sites that originate from a particular domain. When there are tons of referrals from a particular site with no single visible link to one’s own site from the said site, the referral probably isn’t a legitimate one. The other site is most likely hot linking to certain files such as images, CSS file or other file. The blocking access by referrer in .htaccess requires the help of the Apache module mod rewrite to be able to make out the referrer first. There is a fear that spam would still come in even as .htaccess continue to grow. Blacklisting certain referrers in .htaccess is another option, the effectiveness of which has been greatly diminished due to the ease by which spammers are able to register thousands of domains and rotate them as quickly as they are blacklisted. The .htaccess generator to prevent people from certain IP addresses, domains or even countries from gaining access to a site or to specific folders can be used. The full IP address has to be typed to block a specific IP. The use of a partial IP address is required to block a range of IPs. Blocking a particular domain can be done by typing the domain without the www. The tail extension is to be typed when blocking a country. There is no limit to the entries that can be added one at a time. The “add” should be checked after each entry while the generated code is to be copied and posted into a plain text file. This file is then named .htaccess. The “.” Before the file name should be noted as well as the absence of any tail extension. If there is already an .htaccess file in the root of the docs directory or the folder where it is to be applied, the generated code shall be added to the end of the current .htaccess file, taking extra care not to disturb the existing code. It will then be uploaded in ASCII mode. The rel = “no follow” solution A coalition of blogging and search engine companies have joined together to support an HTML attribute designed primarily to combat comment spam but have high potentials as well for effective use against referral spam. This attribute is known as the rel =”no follow” is being praised by many bloggers as the ultimate solution for the prevailing problem. The idea is simple enough with the hardest part being the matter of convincing the major players such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN to agree on it. Tagging a link with rel =’no follow” attribute would prevent any contribution to the site’s PageRank. This means that comment and referral spammers will not be rewarded for their illegitimate activities on websites that implement the attribute. The problem gets solved partially but this solution is unable to end it. This truth is sought to be explained by the fact that it is impossible to reach a 100% adoption thus there will always be an incentive to spam. Spammers essentially do not care whether their techniques are specifically effective as long as they are generally effective. They need no particular reason to hit any site and will do so as their main target is the blogosphere as a whole. It is also quite unfortunate that the resources required to fight spam, particularly referral spam, is far bigger than the resources needed to create it. Referral spam is an HTTP request. The client doesn’t even need to acknowledge the response. All it may need is a simple packet with formatted text. Spammers take pains to make a request look legitimate. The user – agent string would look very much like MSIE. It used to be that spam came from a single IP but things have definitely gotten more complex since then. Filtering referrer IPs against spam blacklisting can also be done. Listing the referring URL in any section of a site’s web stats should be avoided if the IP is blacklisted. Do not pursue query once a given site is identified as a referral spam host name.