In the course of marketing our services, occasionally I come across banks that host their web site with a hosting company that is a general hosting provider.  I have to shake my head when I find this out.  A couple of weeks ago, we were doing some business development with a community bank, and I noticed their web site was down.  When I asked about the problem, I learned that the hosting company they use had been hacked and therefore the bank’s web site was down.  This went on for more than a day.  How can a bank afford to let this happen?  If you are in charge of a web site for a financial institution, what possible reason can you have for hosting at a company that doesn’t host other bank or credit union web sites, and has the necessary security controls in place.

According to this Ektron knowledgebase entry , eWebEditPro is incompatiable with FireFox 3.

eWebEditPro is does not appear in Firefox 3.0. Do not upgrade to Firefox 3.0 . We will continue to monitor the development of Firefox and work with the maker of the Esker ActiveX plugin.

According to this post on the Ektron DevCenter forum, this problem has been known since early June.  For now, Ektron recommends delaying the use of FireFox 3 until further notice.  Subscribe to the RSS feed to be notified once this issue has been resolved.

Right now, Technorati is currently tracking over 58.5 million blogs.  In August, David Sifry posted an article about the state of the blogosphere.  Key points from his article:

• The Blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.
• About 175,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day.
• Total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second.
• The most prevalent times for English-language posting is between the hours of 10AM and 2PM Pacific time, with an additional spike at around 5PM Pacific time.

Here are a few blogs (out of the universe of 50 million+ blogs) that I read on a regular basis and recommend highly.

• How to Change the World - Guy Kawasaki is best known for being an Apple evangelist; however, what many of you may not know is that he also started a company called ACIUS, best known for a product called 4th Dimension.  Right now, Guy is a managing director at Garage Technology Ventures, a seed-stage and early-stage venture capital fund based in Palo Alto, CA.His blog focuses on two things that he’s done and knows very, very well: What it’s like to be an enterpreneur and What it’s like to be a venture capitalist.
• Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO - Matt Cutts works for Google and is well-known in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) community.  His blog is an insider’s look into the important, but sometimes fuzzy, world of search engine optimization.  In addition to his blog, Matt has produced and posted a couple of video clips where he answers questions from readers or discusses the search engine topic du jour.
• ScottGu’s Blog - Don’t read Scott Guthrie’s blog unless you’re a real Microsoft geek (or want to be one).  Scott is a General Manager in the Microsoft Developer division and runs the development teams that build products like the .Net CLR, Atlas and IIS 7.0.  If you don’t know what all three of those products are, don’t read Scott’s blog.  If you do know what those three products are and are looking for the latest, well-written technical news about Microsoft development products, I would highly recommend keeping a tab on his blog.