Birnam Designs Blog -- sharing tips, resources, ideas, and more on web development and design

One of the goals for any website is to be well-indexed by search engines. It’s called SEO, for Search Engine Optimization, and it’s both an art and a science. But it’s also possible to go the other way. Sometimes there are files that you would rather search engines didn’t see. There are methods of hiding these files from the search engines that play by the rules, such as using the robots.txt file, but the first rule is that if you don’t want something publically accessible, don’t host it online.

An article called Things You Don’t Want Google to Find, over at Silicon Valley Sleuth, outlines several points made at a conference on security. The speaker was George Kurtz, the Senior Vice President of the well-known computer security firm, McAfee. In his presentation, Kurtz shows several confidential files and pages that were found after simply searching for them on Google.

These startling finds included payroll documents, social security numbers, confidential files, passwords, even the configuration panels for personal routers.

So, the moral of the story is: if it’s online, it’s public. Please keep that in mind.

Note: this post has been imported and re-editing from a personal blog. Time-sensitive material may no longer be relevant.

Apparently “solopreneur” is the new buzzword for a one-person business. I love it! Granted, I’m not technically a one person business, since it literally wouldn’t be a business without Jen’s help. But, I still think we have the essence of a one-person business.

But I do think the term solopreneur is more accurate than entrepreneur. I might branch out one day. Would outsourcing freelancers (that aren’t employees!) count against being a solopreneurship? I don’t know, I just know I’m quite happy staying pretty small for now. I like — no, love — getting my hands dirty on all aspects of a project. And I think it’s an enormous benefit to my clients, who don’t have to pay for the time it would take to juggle tasks and manage multiple people. And the best reason of all: if I can handle all of the design and development aspects, why shouldn’t I?

Here’s somebody with 13 pieces of excellent advice on the matter.