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The Global Door Opener for Misuse of Your Privacy - Facebook Security Issues and Concerns

January 3, 2009 in divers, social networks | No comments

Do you also have concerns regarding the use of your private data by Facebook applications?

It’s up to you to share your details with an application, but if you do not want to share your information, can you be sure that a friend that adds such an application will not pull your data without you knowing? I believe that no one would consent that a third party can agree on what you’re disagreeing to. This should be illegal but the terms of use and privacy policy from Facebook speak a quite different language (please find them below).

There is a natural risk with all social network platforms. Even though you’re not allowing to be tagged in pictures, but if your friend on the picture is tagged and your friend belongs to the network of your boss, parents, neighbours etc., you will be recognized (hopefully not in a compromising situation) without you knowing it. This is how social network work by nature (works as designed) and the only way of avoiding this risk is that you carefully avoid anyone making picture of you in a compromising situation (by the way you better should have ensured this behavior since your birth ;-) ). A phone call or an email to the person who posted this compromising picture should ensure (assuming that you have a social environment outside of a social net platform) that this picture is deleted. However, a look at facebook’s policies (again, please see below) stating that the Company usually backups every information once posted, makes it in theory impossible to get the right for the secure deletion of your information. The net never forgets anything …

fb_danger The Global Door Opener for Misuse of Your Privacy - Facebook Security Issues and Concerns
There is one group page Let’s BOYCOTT The FACEBOOK TROJANS (or they call them APPLICATIONS…) on facebook trying to convince people to be very careful in the use of application and to ban them. But obviously not too many people are interested in and as such the danger of compromising your data will persist.

Nick O’Neill posted an interesting article on this flaw in Facebook’s privacy and he calls the phenomena “The Facebook Peer Group Effect“.

Besides the facebook application there is an increased risk of computer viruses, specialized in social network platforms. KoobFace is still active and facebook users should all be aware of it.

virus The Global Door Opener for Misuse of Your Privacy - Facebook Security Issues and Concerns
Social networks will be the new breeding ground for viruses and an excellent article on this subject can be read here. Programers of computer viruses have always been concentrating on high available platforms (e.g. Microsoft Windows). Social platforms will definitely be an extended area for them in 2009.

If you ever wanted to delete your facebook account (not only getting in closed, means putting it into an invisible frozen status), it might be worth to read this article (showing you what a nightmare it might become).

The following article is at least interesting enough for further information if the CIA gets in Your Face(book). Data mining is in general a hot topic and I do not believe that it will stop at our facebook contribution. Without getting paranoid, I feel a little uncomfortable as I do not know if they are interested in general anonymized data only. As one argument found the following contribution, which however is difficult to get confirmed. I’m looking forward to getting more information from people who already made some research on the credibility of this video, please feel free to use my comment page to post your thoughts or comments.

Personally I must say if this is true, so what? Every time I place something about me on a site, a blog, a forum, I’m accepting that it could be used in some way for other data purposes, and more than likely it is, is that something I should care about, is that just the way the modern world works? I’ve not personally researched the story behind the video, nor will I, as I’m not bothered, isn’t it the point that I’m sharing I’m an atheist, or I’m straight, or I am male, or I like music, with everyone?

However I’m concerned about the fact that someone who believes that he’s not spreading any personal information of his friends is basically exactly doing the latter. This is the main purpose of this posting, and I’m looking forward to hearing your voice on this matter. I’ll continue to be part of the facebook community - already for the sole reason to know what is happening on this platform - but I’ll be very limited (more limited as I have been) on the information I’ll share.

Excerpt of Terms of Use (version from 23rd September 2008):

§User Content Posted on the Site
You are solely responsible for the photos, profiles (including your name, image, and likeness), messages, notes, text, information, music, video, advertisements, listings, and other content that you upload, publish or display (hereinafter, “post”) on or through the Service or the Site, or transmit to or share with other users (collectively the “User Content”). You may not post, transmit, or share User Content on the Site or Service that you did not create or that you do not have permission to post. You understand and agree that the Company may, but is not obligated to, review the Site and may delete or remove (without notice) any Site Content or User Content in its sole discretion, for any reason or no reason, including User Content that in the sole judgment of the Company violates this Agreement or the Facebook Code of Conduct, or which might be offensive, illegal, or that might violate the rights, harm, or threaten the safety of users or others. You are solely responsible at your sole cost and expense for creating backup copies and replacing any User Content you post or store on the Site or provide to the Company.

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content. Facebook does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.

§Third Party Websites and Content
The Site contains (or you may be sent through the Site or the Service) links to other web sites (”Third Party Sites”) as well as articles, photographs, text, graphics, pictures, designs, music, sound, video, information, applications, software and other content or items belonging to or originating from third parties (the “Third Party Applications, Software or Content”). Such Third Party Sites and Third Party Applications, Software or Content are not investigated, monitored or checked for accuracy, appropriateness, or completeness by us, and we are not responsible for any Third Party Sites accessed through the Site or any Third Party Applications, Software or Content posted on, available through or installed from the Site, including the content, accuracy, offensiveness, opinions, reliability, privacy practices or other policies of or contained in the Third Party Sites or the Third Party Applications, Software or Content. Inclusion of, linking to or permitting the use or installation of any Third Party Site or any Third Party Applications, Software or Content does not imply approval or endorsement thereof by us. If you decide to leave the Site and access the Third Party Sites or to use or install any Third Party Applications, Software or Content, you do so at your own risk and you should be aware that our terms and policies no longer govern. You should review the applicable terms and policies, including privacy and data gathering practices, of any site to which you navigate from the Site or relating to any applications you use or install from the site.

Excerpt of Facebook Privacy Policy
§The Information We Collect
When you visit Facebook you provide us with two types of information: personal information you knowingly choose to disclose that is collected by us and Web Site use information collected by us as you interact with our Web Site.

When you register with Facebook, you provide us with certain personal information, such as your name, your email address, your telephone number, your address, your gender, schools attended and any other personal or preference information that you provide to us.

When you enter Facebook, we collect your browser type and IP address. This information is gathered for all Facebook visitors. In addition, we store certain information from your browser using “cookies.” A cookie is a piece of data stored on the user’s computer tied to information about the user. We use session ID cookies to confirm that users are logged in. These cookies terminate once the user closes the browser. By default, we use a persistent cookie that stores your login ID (but not your password) to make it easier for you to login when you come back to Facebook. You can remove or block this cookie using the settings in your browser if you want to disable this convenience feature.

When you use Facebook, you may set up your personal profile, form relationships, send messages, perform searches and queries, form groups, set up events, add applications, and transmit information through various channels. We collect this information so that we can provide you the service and offer personalized features. In most cases, we retain it so that, for instance, you can return to view prior messages you have sent or easily see your friend list. When you update information, we usually keep a backup copy of the prior version for a reasonable period of time to enable reversion to the prior version of that information.

You post User Content (as defined in the Facebook Terms of Use) on the Site at your own risk. Although we allow you to set privacy options that limit access to your pages, please be aware that no security measures are perfect or impenetrable. We cannot control the actions of other Users with whom you may choose to share your pages and information. Therefore, we cannot and do not guarantee that User Content you post on the Site will not be viewed by unauthorized persons. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the Site. You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of User Content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other Users have copied or stored your User Content.

Any improper collection or misuse of information provided on Facebook is a violation of the Facebook Terms of Service and should be reported to privacy@facebook.com .

If you choose to use our invitation service to tell a friend about our site, we will ask you for information needed to send the invitation, such as your friend’s email address. We will send your friend an email or instant message in your name inviting him or her to visit the site, and may send up to two reminders to them. Facebook stores this information to send invitations and reminders, to register a friend connection if your invitation is accepted, to allow you to see invitations you have sent, and to track the success of our referral program. Your friend may contact us at privacy@facebook.com to request that we remove this information from our database.

Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (e.g., photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience.

By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States.

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Facebook and Security issues - 12 Golden Rules

December 31, 2008 in social networks, software | 1 comment

All social network platforms have by nature the embedded risk of getting your personal data stolen or misused. Copy & Paste is just too easy not to speak about digital “methods” for an automatic sniffling of personal data. It is a personal decision if one wants to post his data or not - I personally prefer to see my posted data on the net rather than finding any surprises on Google posted by someone else or related to an individual with the same name.

I believe however that it shall be a human right that everyone has full control over his data and knows exactly who has the right to get legal access to them.

One of the major reasons of Facebook’s success story is the wealth of applications users can easily add to their profile pages:

Quizzes, little games, IQ tests, polls, etc. - there are thousands of these gadgets available. And once you have added an application, your friends are encouraged to add it too. Most of today’s users (at less 90% of my friends/contacts) do not avoid spamming and they send out a recommendation for each and every application they install. Facebook growth is currently around 100K users a week(!) and almost everyone of them (including myself) has installed one of this applications.

I spent some time yesterday to have a look at the programming interface for Facebook. It’s not true that anyone with a basic understanding of web programming can write an application, but I have to admit that it is not too complicated. I was quite surprised to see that the self programmed applications have to run on your own server and not on the Facebook platform. Even though this is a quite modern approach with the benefit of an excellent workload balancing, it has the clear risk that data are leaving the Facebook platform and can easily be stored outside of Facebook without the enduser really realising this fact. - I know that Facebook themselves teach their users to analyse very carefully which application to install, but let’s be honest, how many (especially non technically interested) users are influenceable by these footnotes and hints?

The issue and the danger of this gadget applications is that you can’t know what they are doing in the background: whatever they might look like, in the background, they can collect personal data and most important those of your friends, storing them in an own database on an own server or sending them out by emailing them to a different server.

When people add an application, unless they say otherwise (and again I bet that more than 99.9% of the users won’t decline), it is given access to most of the information in their profile. That includes information you have on your friends even if they think they have tight security settings.

Did you know that you were responsible for other people’s security?

I’m not a guru programer but I’m developing programs as a hobby and even though I do not know about any application misusing data it seems easy - really easy - for an average developer to do so. Because the applications run on a third-party serves, not run by Facebook - it is difficult for the company to check what is going on, whether anything has changed, and how long applications store data for and what they do with it. Facebook’s terms and conditions contain a warning that this could in theory happen, and offer the option to stop an application from accessing your details, many games and quizzes would not work if this option is engaged.

In fact, the only way we can see of completely protecting yourself from applications skimming information about you and your friends is to erase all the applications on your profile and opt to not use any applications in the future. If Facebook is right that they have efficient mechanisms in place to check for unusual behaviour of an application,an insecure application can spread like a (computer virus) and it might be too late waiting for a detection by Facebook.

  1. Don’t subscribe to social networks ;-)
  2. Assume that the personal information and photos you display will be publicly available and not just available to specific friends. Make your choice what to post based on this Golden Rule.
  3. Strong Passwords, always! - It may seem obvious but make sure you use a strong password for your account. Also, I suggest to use a separate password for fast growing platforms like Facebook. The people who want to offend you are using successful platforms.
  4. Secure your birth date - Birth dates are often required to validate your identity. Under Profile, you can choose to not display your birthday - you should at least not post your year of birth.
  5. Privacy Profile Settings - I suggest setting the Profile Privacy > Basic to “only me” for items: Education Info, Work Info and Profile Privacy > Contact Information to “no one” for items: Mobile Phone, Land Phone, Current Address, Email. You may want to display your website address for advertising, but be than aware what further information your have already published on that platform.
  6. Privacy Application Settings - Each Facebook application has similar settings to those of the Privacy settings. New applications are being added everyday. Its difficult to define a set policy. However, I suggest you remove any unwanted applications and/or limit there settings as required. It might be very useful in future to have spend this extra time on carefully reviewing the rights you give to an application.
  7. Privacy Search Settings - Depending on your use of Facebook, you may not want to be publicly visible or you may want to limit what information is available to all users (i.e. your picture, friend list etc.). We recommend changing the search settings from “everyone” to “friends of friends”. You may also want not(!) to tick “view your friends list”.
  8. Privacy News Feed and Mini-Feed Settings - Control what stories about you get published to your profile and to your friends’ News Feeds. You may not want to display information such as joined groups etc.
  9. Joining Groups & Networks - be cautious when joining groups and which authorisations you give to the group.
  10. Think carefully about who you allow to become your friend. Once you have accepted someone as your friend they will be able to access any information about you (including photographs) that you have marked as viewable by your friends. You can remove friends at any time should you change your mind about someone.
  11. Show “limited friends” a cut-down version of your profile. You can choose to make people ‘limited friends’ who only have access to a cut-down version of your profile if you wish. This can be useful if you have associates who you do not wish to give full friend status to, or feel uncomfortable sharing personal information with.
  12. Disable options, then open them one by one. Think about how you want to use Facebook. If it’s only to keep in touch with people and be able to contact them then maybe it’s better to turn off the bells and whistles. It makes a lot of sense to disable an option until you have decided you do want and need it, rather than start with everything accessible.
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SSL secured admin panel access

November 14, 2008 in browsers, cms, linux, w3, wordpress | No comments

Finally found time after months to secure my wordpress installation. I installed tonight openSSL on my Linux box, a GeoTrust certificate and enabled Secure Socket Layer. Now the access to the admin area is secured via SSL access and the password transfer is not transparent anymore.

It does not make sense to SSL secure the whole blog, due to performance aspects and the fact that non-secure content are embedded anyhow.

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Firefox 3.0.4 for Mac OS X released

November 13, 2008 in browsers, os x, software, w3 | No comments

Firefox 3.0.4 fixes several issues found in Firefox 3.0.3:

  • Fixed several security issues.
  • Fixed several stability issues.
  • Official releases for the Icelandic and Thai languages are now available.
  • Beta releases for the Bulgarian, Esperanto, Estonian, Latvian, Occitan, and Welsh languages are available for testing.
  • Updated the internal Public Suffix list.
  • Fixed an issue where the IME input tool used to enter Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Indic characters was covered by the “Add Bookmark” panel. (bug 433340)
  • Enabled additional EV root certificates. (bug 451305)
  • Fixed an issue where some passwords saved using Firefox 3.0.2 did not work properly. (bug 457358)
  • In some cases, Firefox would not properly save proxy settings for protocols other than HTTP. (bug 446536)
  • See the Firefox 3.0.3 release notes for changes in previous releases.

See the complete list of bugs fixed.

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SVN for Wordpress and its plugins

October 5, 2008 in cms, linux, shell scripts, software, w3 | No comments

Go to the root of your webserver and type

svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/ .

You need to have svn installed - if not yet done the following command should do this for you.

aptitude install subversion

If you want to update your Wordpress plugins remotely through your linux server, you have to install them through SVN. Go to your plugin-in folder (ususally: ../wp-content/plugins/) and type

svn propedit svn:externals .

(Please note that the period at the end is important).

Your editor of choice should now open and you have to integrate your wished plugins. Find below one example:

akismet http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/akismet/trunk/
flickr-slideshow-wrapper http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/flickr-slideshow-wrapper/trunk
sociable http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/sociable/trunk/
google_sm http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/google-sitemap-generator/trunk/
lightbox-2 http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/lightbox-2/trunk/
wp-security-scan http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/wp-security-scan/trunk/
snapshot http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/snap-shots-for-wordpressorg/trunk/
syntaxhighlighter-plus http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/syntaxhighlighter-plus/trunk/
twitter-tools http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/twitter-tools/trunk/

Please not that I’m using here the ‘trunk’-version, which are the latest development and might contain bugs. You can alternatively specify /tags/XYZ/ - XYZ being the release version you want to install.

After having saved your new entry you have to go back to your root folder (e.g. by cd ../..) and then please type:

svn up

The system will now download the latest version(s) and you only have to (re-)activate your plugins within Wordpress.

A regular updating with ’svn up’ will keep your plugins updated.

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Tiny URL the way to short links

October 5, 2008 in tools, w3 | No comments

Are you sick of posting URLs in emails only to have it break when sent causing the recipient to have to cut and paste it back together? Then you’ve come to the right place. By entering in a URL in a text field tinyurl will create a tiny URL that will not break in email postings and never expires.

Tiny URL has as of today 74 million of links stored and gets over 2 billion hits/month.

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Social Networks and Cultural Differences

September 29, 2008 in social networks, w3 | No comments

Where do you want to go today? It’s today not anymore a question about the used operating system, it’s more about the social network you want to use. People talking about Web2.0 and all its benefits are for sure right that the navigation and user-friendliness improved already pretty much, but how does it help if I have to maintain a couple of these networks to stay tuned with my friends and colleagues around the world? I’m talking here about business social networks only, not mentioning facebook, orkut and what else appeared in the market the last years in terms of private social networking.

In regards of business related social networks LinkedIn is still the 1st worldwide and in Europe but it has less market dominance in Germany and in France. In Germany former Open-BC not called xing.com is the market leader, as for the French the prefer former viaduc, now called Viadeo. Both have links to the Asian market and especially a lot of contacts to China, but there is little to no mapping with the users you can find in LinkedIn. India has to many local idioms, common language is English, Indian business community can be found on LinkedIn. For private networking India and Brazil are the only two big countries using orkut, more or less unknown to the rest of the world.

LinkedIn announced that they want to kick off a German version by the end of 2008. It will be interesting to see if they will achieve to convince xing users to move to their platforms. As xing has the better price offer and a lot of their users having a paid account I would be surprised if LinkedIn can easily win the battle. Furthermore I believe it will all depend if LinkedIn will develop an interface to smoothly move the profiles from one platform to their own one.

This kind of interface is offered by the quite new platform konnects.com. This had the consequence that I was sending out a real “invitation mass bomb” last week. Funny side effect: my profile clicks exploded on both platforms: LinkedIn and xing.com, almost every invitee clicked on my invitation to have a look who the fancy geek might be, who sent them an invitation to a new social network …

I’m interested to see which social network will make it in the next months. Even though competition is good in general and that there should not be a monopole in this are, I’m getting bored by too many social networks and I strongly believe that I’m not the only one with this perception. The only way the platforms could solve the issue is by clear extension of their API’s and allowing cross-platform contact linking. But this feature does not be part of any of their business plans and strategies.

Plaxo.com is at least a platform (with reduced social networking functionality) but trying to bundle a lot of social networking components and one of their best feature is the synchronization of address books (Outlook, iCal(endar), Google, Yahoo, etc.). I tried to use it already from day one, but at the beginning it was as buggy as the other software tools claiming to offer perfect synchronization. The newest release from plaxo.com however works like charm. besides that they do offer only one-way synchronization from google mail to plaxo, the two-way synchronization works obviously without any issue for all the others platforms. You can even synchronize your twitter, pownce and jaiku accounts. Having talked to one of their developers the two-way synchronization towards google obviously still fails due to changing interface description with google. I believe that unclear interface definition will continue to cause challenges for all software developers in the future.

Average customers should not have to care about the cause of these challenges, hence we can only hope that all the competitors will implement interfaces to their competitors and that they will concentrate on winning the battle by better and new functions rather than growth of their customer data bases only. At least the may-be benefit of social networking is these days killed by too many applications and redundant maintenance of profiles. Excellent to confuse head hunters but with limit use for the individual user, and especially boring to the paying customer.

The need for a market consolidation is obvious. Unless it’s clear who will most probably make the game, we as end users will most probably have to continue to maintain several profiles, with all the mess we are aware of.

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Flightstats

September 27, 2008 in business, tools, w3 | No comments

On flightstats you can track flight status, airport delays and other flight and airport information. Database entries go back to early 1993.

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Plaxo Pulse Issue With Twitter

July 27, 2008 in business, social networks, tools, w3 | No comments

plaxo_pulse Plaxo Pulse Issue With Twitter

I’m using plaxo.com to synchronize my phonebooks through all my PCs, different MACs and accounts like Google Apps. The solution,even though quite buggy a couple of years ago, works today like charme.

With the pulse stream you are even able to consolidate all your social network services within plaxo.

However I’m waiting impatiently for the announced 2-way-synchronization of my Google Account. Furthermore I never achieved to get my twitter.com implemented and hence synchronized.

Being a premium member, I made use of raising a ticket with some strange responses, the last being that everything is now working fine. Surprisingly the button to add twitter as a shared service is now completely gone. I hope people @plaxo.com are aware about this issue and will come back with a twitter solution pretty soon. If anyone does know about a workaround it would be great to see your solution posted in a comment to this article.

Update: Twitter issue seems to be solved now (04-10-2008).

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ExpressionEngine One Of The Best CMS Systems

July 9, 2008 in cms, eengine, w3 | No comments

Finally I achieved to move my whole blog to expressionengine.com technology. I bought the full license already a couple of years ago, tried in a sandbox and have to say that I always gave up after a couple of hours as you do need some leisure time to understand the logic of the software. So most of the time I reinstalled wordpress, drupal or joomla and sometimes played with offline tools like rapidweaver for Mac OS X or even dreamweaver. All these tools (and there are more, see following review to get an impression: http://www.openjason.com/) have th big advantage that you get quickly productive. Installation is as smooth as ExpressionEngine is, but you get faster very promising results with wordpress for example. ExpressionEngine (although some templates available) is a tool which overs you ALL possibilities but with the limitation that you’ll not get a fancy homepage out of the box by simple installation of the core platfrom.

expression_engine ExpressionEngine One Of The Best CMS Systems

I was first attracted to Expression Engine because it appeared to offer a solid all in one package. Seamlessly integrating multiple pieces of software to bring a site together can be at best a laborious task and at worst impossible. Even once it’s done you then have the hassle of one login for every section of the site, whether it’s the gallery, the news section or the downloads area. The idea that I could configure every aspect of my site through the same templates and then make updates through the same login made EE an appealing purchase. It includes a forum, a gallery and even a small e-commerce module for basic functionality.

Being a closed software platform it offers less modules, plugins and extensions than the open source alternatives mentioned above. However, before my purchase years ago I was already impressed by the quality of their customer service, the good documentation and the strong community - really everyone is polite and helps you as a newbie to go through the difficult steps of a learning to navigate through a new environment.

You have to get used to the templating philosophy. But once you did, you’ll be impressed by the possibilities. It’s just great that expression engine separates CSS, RSS, etc, means the layout with the dynamic content. You’re building your sites as you would do with a tool like a dreamweaver and you only replace your content mainly with variables and loop “through dynamic content statements” to get your content show up in the templates you defined.

For each of your content sections you can define own input fields, mandatory fields, categories, etc. You as the owner keep the control over the whole content management system. This means that a different selection of fields can be displayed, depending on the blog being posted to. For anyone who has plans to ‘hand over the keys’ so to speak and let their clients update their own sites, this is a very useful feature as each field can be clearly labelled and configured to suit.

ExpressionEngine is a full content management systems which can display as well only a blog, but you have the whole power in and this makes it especially for people who only want to implement quickly a blog less convenient than most of the above mentioned tools. But(!) … even though I have to admit that installation of wordpress is much easier at first glance I was always disappointed about the speed of the software and I was tired as well of hacking away at core files and scouring the net for essential third party plugins or even to develop own ones as I did with flickr-slideshow-wrapper for wordpress.

Having now implemented expression engine successfully I know what the biggest advantage is and why it was worth spending my leisure time in the learning curve: SPEED, SPEED, SPEED!!! I’m just amazed how fast expression engine renders my pages (with comparable functionality) to my former implementations with joomla, wordpress, drupal or rapid weaver (the last one being very fast compared to the other, due to its static page concept).

Nevertheless, tools like wordpress, joomla, drupal are today commodity. Download, install and start blogging. For expression engine you need some time. I’m not affiliated with ellislab.com the company behind ee, but I can only suggest their software expression engine to any blogger, who does not want to compromise with any may be limitations. Expression Engine can really do whatever your design dreams are.

Ryan Irlan (http://www.ryanirelan.com) made some absolutely fantastic videos which will give you a fantastic deep dive-in into expression engine philosophy. Although building in his casts an example “news” page, you’ll easily understand the philosophy behind ee, and with only some basic CSS, HTML and programming skills you’ll get tremendous benefit out of his lessons (worth each penny, and again I’m not affiliated to Ryan either ;-) ).

The only thing I’m missing is a plug-in for http://www.websnapr.com/. If any reader has a hint or a workaround (easy to implement and to use) I would appreciate if you could add a comment to this posting with your advice! Many thanks in advance.

Update: Since 4th october this blog is again running on Wordpress, mainly for the reasons of a long delay of the Expression Engine 2.0.

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