Arts Festival publicity

Homecoming year for Scotland based on Robert Burns and the number 250 means that publicity for events in Dumfries and Galloway region will be tied into this initiative to some extent.

I guess the pound is weak so Scotland is as attractive a place as any for non-UK visitors, especially ex-pat Scots looking for a reason to return to the homeland.

That aside, the site has had some updates and now validates properly. The big Christmas pagerank bonus also saw the dgartsfestival blog site get a cheeky 2.

Virtuo So?

Working in conjunction with Smash IT in Edinburgh brought about the Virtual Office Services website that launches in January 2009.

The services include secretarial, receptionist and office administration all in a virtual sense so that businesses can outsource that aspect of their projects to concentrate on client facing activities and networking.

One thing Callisti likes is the backup services image for Smash-It!

Numerology

So long to 2008. No mega message but glad to see another year categorised safely into the mega system backups archive with all client data and Callisti details safe and snuggled up for the New Year.

Our online shop experiments are trading well and all our clients seem to getting what they need from our services without too much ado.

Can't say fairer than that...

See you at the London Search Engine Conference in February!

Opening the next gateway

Recently been looking at the Scottish Enterprise "Grow your business" initiatives. One of the challenges of working in the web/IT industry is that teams are often too busy to allow time for a clean development and testing environment pressure.

The now fragmented LEC now has a localised wing called Business Gateway to further spread the quango funding but their website does have a section of funding opportunities for development.

New Year, new thinking. Well, we'll see, but now that the set-up period for Callisti is mostly sorted and administration is ticking over nicely, it's time to look further afield to the world of possibility.

Video lackey

What better way to spend the day than working through a script and shot sequence for a DVD production project.

Getting out and about in the fresh air, meeting people, developing skills, intermittent manual labour, knocking off around 5pm,... sigh, sounds like a proper day's work.

Callisti is producing the Forest Sawmills Health and Safety Training DVD and we hope the new callisti website will feature this soon in the first quarter of next year. The website has been serving a very limited role since it's inception in quarter 3 of 2008 but we will be investing time in a more fitting web presence in the coming weeks.

Virtumonde malware

Watch out for the virtumonde trojan that's kicking about this festive season.

This infects using holes in Sun Java and gets into Windows registry and System 32 files. If you notice a randomly generated dll file name it's worth checking.

Common symptoms are pop up windows usually saying that you need to download software to fix the problem! Don't click on these popups!

This can be a sticky problem to remove as the infected dll's start when you boot up your machine.

Best solution if you're not sure, aside from checking your security settings, is to run Spybot to see if anything turns up, but this doesn't always remove the problem permanently. You should also try ATF cleaner to remove all temporary files on your computer and then run Malwarebyte's Anti-Malware. If any problems come up ensure that you check them all and 'remove selected'.

On restart the system may be slower initially but this will recover. You should then run HiJackThis to generate a log file and submit this along with the Anti-Malware report to an appropriate forum, such as Safer Networking.

You will get the best and most thorough advice from the experienced teams on these forums.

Using blogs for SEO

All the basic entries are now added to the Arts Festival diary on the wordpress blog and this has now been 'pinged' using PingMyBlog. Loosely, this is the blog equivalent of search engine submissions.