- Copies of each of applications that have been installed on computer. If your applications came on CD, then keep those in a safe place. If you downloaded applications, then store a copy on a writeable CD. In addition, you will need to keep copies of any patches or updates to these applications on writeable CDs.

I like to keep a box with all of above items in a safe place. I call box my "crash cart", as it contains everything that I need to restore my system to health in event of a software error.

In addition it's a good idea to keep following in crash cart:

- A sheet of paper with a list of people and companies you can call for help in event of disaster. This may include technical support numbers of computer manufacturer, operating system company and any applications providers.

- A log of all of changes and installations that were made to computer system. This will be invaluable to determine what to recover in what order.

- All of documentation that came with system in original box.

- Another sheet of paper with network information (TCP/IP addresses and such), modem settings and other control panel values. This will be important if you ever have to type it all back in. Some of most important information is any settings or values provided by your ISP which allow your computer to get on internet.

When you have a few spare minutes, when it is raining out and television is showing nothing good at all, when kids are in bed and husband or wife is asleep, when you are totally bored out of your mind ... then recover those manuals that came with system. You know which ones I'm talking about ... ones you have buried in your closet under five feet of clothes behind Christmas tree.

Now, open books and read them. They will usually have some instructions on how to recover your system in event of failure. This is information that you need to understand, and it's better to spend couple of hours up front reading than it is trying desperately to figure it out one evening - day before that term paper is due, of course.

And in worst case, if you have all or most of above items you will have materials that computer geek in house down street will need when you come begging for help at his door...

Some HTML editors already set this while it creates a page, but those of you who have older HTML editors or like me, like to code page from scratch will need to include following line in our HTML pages: < META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=IS0-8859-1"> It should go as high as possible on your webpage, I normally place it just after < /head> tag, before < title> tag. This META tag tells browser to use "ISO-8859-1" character set, which is suitable for most Western European languages, rather than let browser choose it's own character encoding, which may or may not be ISO-8859-1.

Why is it important to explicitly set it? The character encoding basically tells browsers how to display a particular character. For example, in ISO-8859-1character set, "A" represents letter "A" while "©" represents copyright symbol "©" (You can try this out by typing < p>A< /p> or < p>©< /p> in a html file then call it up on a browser). Some character sets, have more than one representation for special characters such as "<" or ">", so your filter program may not toss out all representations of character you have asked it to exclude. So when it serves a new page back to browser, browser, because it has not been told what encoding to use, can still read malicious script intact.

So there you have it, 3 steps that should be incorporated into every website. Use them as a base to further build on. Because every site is different, you (or security consultant you hire) will need to assess your site's own vulnerabilities and implement appropriate security measures. To do this you need to take into account your site's risk factor, your budget and your available resources.

On a final note, I'd like to stress importance of keeping up with latest threats and developments in site security. A good site for checking out security alerts is CERT Coordination Center http://www.cert.org/nav/index.html or better yet sign up for their Security Advisory that is sent via email.