One of the important applications of QR Code is printing, in which the code images are required to be in much greater resolution. For a QR Code to be printed in 10″ X 10″ by offset printing, each side of the code needs to be at least 3,000px!

Enlarging directly a web-generated QR Code has a big disadvantage. Since it is in RGB color mode by default, during enlargement the interpolation process from the imaging software will insert gradation between black and white borderlines and soften the edges. It will result in lower accuracy during snapping. Keep in mind the following procedures you can, however, create large format QR Code images from  web-generated ones with razor sharp quality:

1. Generate your QR Code in 300px or above
2. Download and import it into an imaging software such as photoshop or the free IrfanView
3. Convert the image to 1-bit image (Photoshop calls it bitmap, IrfanView calls it 2 Colors image, others may call it pure Black and White image)
4. Now you can enlarge by re-sampling it to as big as you need without losing the data bits
5. Convert the image back to RGB or CMYK color mode if you need to colorize it, or else it will be good to be printed or inserted into other artwork material

Easy, isn’t it?

The details on Ajax may sounds too complicated to business decision makers or users like you. But there is a key advantage of deploying Ajax that you should know. We call it a “rich” user experience.

You probably remember that in the old days while you clicked and submitted a “contact us” form from a web page, your current page was then reloaded or you would be redirected to another web page. It’s indeed annoying if you are working on a web application, say an online accounting system, with such a lot of page reloading actions via your browser.

“Rich experience” refers to the situation that the users can interact with web apps without page refresh at all. It’s like working on desktop applications inside a browser. Think about Google Maps, you can interact with the map by pointing and dragging it without any page-reloads at all and you can even jump to any location in the world almost instantly by typing its name. Actually Google Maps is one of the most significant and powerful Ajax applications on earth so far.

We also made an Ajax free service web app called skit.tl. It’s a URL-shortening service just like bit.ly or goo.gl. Give it a try and you’ll notice that the site is working with just one single web page.

A URL shortening services using Ajax to interact with users

A WordPress site heavily spammed with junk comments does not harm directly as what hacking does, but it will affect its professionalism and reputation seriously. A step further, if the comment spam contain links of bad or phishing websites it may get you in legal troubles too.

Keep the following house keeping tasks should help you get rid of comment spam:

Install a spam filter

Install, activate and configure a spam filtering plugin such as Akismet or Defensio Anti-Spam. It builds the first barrier to spammers even without on-going admin intervention at all.

Configure a desired discussion setting

From the Dashboard, go to Settings > Discussion.
Other comment settings: Make sure “Comment author must fill out name and email” is checked. You definitely need to know who left the comment.

Before a comment appears: You should check “An administrator must always approve the comment.”. As an additional gate keeper, you can consider to uncheck “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” too.

Comment Moderation: The text box for “Hold a comment in the queue if it contains [ ] or more links” should have a “1″ in it. It blocks all attempts to seed any links in your website.

Below that box, you can also add some spam catcher words, names, urls, e-mail, and IPs. WordPress official website maintains a suggested list of such words. You can check it out at:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Spam_Words

Comment Blacklist: You can fill out the text box with the content, name, url, e-mail or IP you want to blacklist from your website.

The above provides the most stringent spam filtering mechanics for a WordPress site. I’ sure it will turn away some positive comment authors too. What you should do is to keep observing and tuning the above settings to find the most optimal one for you.

As far as infrastructure and administration are concerned, the following are crucial:

Never use “admin” as login
It’s too common to use the default “admin” as administrator login. It gives hackers 50% additional win chance for brute force attacks. The workaround is easy: chance it right away to something else.

Strengthen and secure your password
Choose a password far away from a dictionary word and anything related to your personal particular. Use a mix of letters and numbers is even better. No matter what it is, never write it down and post-it it on your monitor.

Use .htaccess
The .htaccess file is available by default in your web folder. It helps to protect some vital directories by default on a fresh installation. However, you can also use it to block the website from certain invasive IPs and domains etc.

Protect the wp-config.php
It’s the heart and soul of your WordPress and putting the following in your .htaccess file will keep it safe:
<Files wp-config.php>
order allow, deny
deny from all
</Files>

Use SSL Encryption
Though WordPress store the password encrypted in the database, the login process is transmitted using plain text. However, if SSL is enabled in your hosting you can use the following option in wp-config.php file to turn on SSL encryption for admin access.
define (‘FORCE_SSL_ADMIN’, true);

Update, Update and Update
Keeping your WordPress updated always. It helps to keep your site free from newly discovered threats. You’ll be notified automatically from the admin console and it only takes just a few clicks to do so.

Back-up always
Back up is a vital solution to keep you away from natural disasters, server failures, compromising of system or any other kinds of bad things. Make it a scheduled task (e.g. by cron job) and save the back-up file in another media and location will give you additional peace of mind for sure.

Using WordPress as a CMS has the following key benefits:

Low cost
WordPress itself is free, and you can grab free themes from the web easily too. Optimo Asia can help you to install, to customize the design or create an entire new one to your need, as well as creating start up content which make your website friendly to visitors and search engines like Google and Yahoo.

Easy to maintain and update
You can easily manage on-going content for your website. So you can focus on creating attractive contents instead of drilling into techie things.

Flexibility
Wordpress is a very flexibile CMS. You can insert almost any kinds of information or content into it: text, image, Flash, video or other external resource etc.

Search engine friendly
Wordpress is born to be search engine friendly. With some minor treaking, it’s not difficult to make your website rank on the first page of Google, Yahoo and Bing for the business you are in.

Optimo Asia is your best companion if you are considering using WordPress as Content Management System (CMS).

Now your visibility will be governed by a new algorithm called EdgeRank. Except those insiders working on the algorithm, nobody knows exactly how it works. From statistics, however, the following were deducted:

EdgeRank comprises the following 3 major factors, in priority as below:

Affinity
If a certain friend make you interact with him often, such as making you like his posts or comment on his posts, he is having a high affinity towards you. His post will have a higher priority to be shown on your wall.
Someone who are not very close to you but has a large friend base with lots of responses will have the same effect too.
On the other hand, the current Facebook interface allows you to “turn off” affinity immediately by using the dropdown menu from the right corner of each post.

Post Type
The type of post has great effect on visibility too. It’s natural. Facebook always tries to make your wall full of interesting contents to maintain its stickiness.
In simplest terms the preference is:
Video > Photo > Link > Text status-update

Frequency
Do you think you’ll be like a hot potato if you post as if you’re tweeting? No, sorry.
One of the major changes in visibility algorithm is the frequency factor. Posting too frequently will now have negative impact on visibility to others.
Research found that the optimal grace period for each post is 3 hours.

So no matter you are an individual or a marketer, make sure you do the following to make your posts highly visible:

• Be interesting and response-arousing
• Be rich in content
• Be updating at a right frequency

Officially brought to the world by W3C back to mid-90′s, CSS keeps evolving and nowadays most people are working with CSS 2.0 and CSS 3.0.

Though we are not talking about the tech side or the details of the language itself, it’s good to know the beauty of CSS especially in the following aspects:

Design:

• It makes many fancy text and graphic effects a piece of cake: usage of facny fonts, drop shadow and glowing text effects, round corner tables, image opacity and blurring effects, just to name a few.
• It separates the “makeover” part from the coding part, so web designers can focus on inspiration and design works and collaborate with developers in parallel.
• It keeps a consistent look and feel across pages in a website, thus delivering a well consolidated corporate image.

Management:

• It centralizes the management of page layout and design in a few files. As such it enables change-onces-and-apply-to-all “skinning” across the whole website.
• Owning to the cascading nature of CSS, a webpage can be applied with several style sheets in an “overlaying” manner according to the sequence they are applied. It gives flexibility in managing the presentation of particular objects in the website.

Technical:

• CSS is a human-friendly language and born with an intuitive structure. It facilitates the communication between developers and designers.
• It’s well supported by almost all contemporary browsers and helps to save times in design treaking and testing.

As time goes by,  nowadays ISAPI and php are working like a handsome couple and in reality, you can even deploy a whole suite of WAMP (Windows + Apache + MySQL + PHP) as your native web services under Windows server environment, though some people may argue why one should stick to Windows under such a circumstance.  On the other hand cost,  after all,  is still one of the most important concerns while considering Windows platform.

So our suggestions are:  If your company is engaged to Windows servers already, or your top management is really keen on a “branded” server environment in spite of the higher cost of ownership, Windows won’t be wrong at all. Otherwise our recommendation is still Linux because of the stronger community supports, flexibility and of course, its open source nature.

  Web Hosting (Linux only)

• Storage: 1G
• Mailbox: 10
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• Intel i7 server with raid 5

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• PHP version: 5.X
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• Storage: 10G
• Mailbox: unlimited
• Database: 10
• PHP version: 5.X
• Intel i7 server with raid 5

HK$ 280 / month   Virtual Private Server (Linux) Basic VPS package:

• OS: CentOS or Ubuntu
• Dedicated RAM: 512M
• Dedicated storage: 10G
• Dedicated IP (V6 ready): 1

HK$ 380 / month Advanced VPS package:

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HK$ 550 / month Ultra VPS package:

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HK$ 980 / month   Virtual Private Server (Windows) Standard 2008 VPS package:

• OS: Windows Server 2008
• Max no. of domains: 10
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• Please contact us for service subscription or requesting more information

First of all, be frank, our core strengths are in server-side open source technologies especially php and perl, Flash is not a must-have in our key services offering. More importantly, there’s a big consumer revolution in recent years in which people migrate from desktop computer to mobile phones and tablets.

One of the major implications is that many fancy Flash contents are now rendered unviewable on tablets, or at least being turned off by default.

Though you may heard that Steve intentionally dropped the support for Flash during the launch of iPad, the real underlying reason is in fact the battery drainage problem. Flash consumes considerably high CPU power and bandwidth to render its animated content, leaving the batteries dry faster than expected always. This dramatically reduced the interests of tablets and mobiles OS and software developers to give Flash supports.

There are, however, good substitutions which can deliver functions pretty similar to those of Flash and are gaining popularity in recent years. The most significant ones may be the video players and slideshow players, which are now usually deploying with HTML5 or Ajax.

It’s still a long way for Flash to be completely obsoleted, but as a developer we need to keep in mind always that it will happen some days.