livebooks blog

‹ Home

Soar to new heights with this month’s Spotify playlist! Whether your head’s in the clouds, you’re on a plane headed to your next business trip, or you just want great tunes to listen to while you work on your website, we hope there’s something in our August playlist for you.

Have a song stuck on replay? Share it with us now!

At liveBooks, we’re always looking for ways to improve our website building platform and we are very proud to announce that all liveBooks websites can now take advantage of HTTPS, the most secure protocol available for websites today. Below  you will find more information about SSL Web Hosting and HTTPS and what the added benefits are for both you, your business, and your visitors alike.

What is SSL?

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) creates a private session between a web browser and a website. During the session, the browser and the website use a cipher to encrypt data before sending it to the other party. The website and the browser being used to view it use a decryption key to decipher the data. Without the key, the data looks like a random jumble of letters, numbers, and symbols.

What are the benefits of SSL Web Hosting?

By having SSL, you allow your website and your website’s visitor to communicate and share data without the possibility of someone intercepting and reading the data. This is a great added feature to your website, especially if it gathers personal information such as credit card information, phone numbers, or passwords.

How does SSL benefit users?

There are many network connections between your computer and the websites you view. Your computer sends information to your network router. From there, the information travels through your network router. The information then travels through your broadband modem, your Internet service provider and various network backbones and data centers before finally reaching the website. At any one of these connection junctions, a malicious individual could theoretically intercept and read the transferred data. However, with SSL, reading the information is nearly impossible without the decryption key.

How does SSL benefit website owners?

SSL gives website owners an advantage from both a security and SEO standpoint. Analysis of more than one million search results supports the conclusion that SSL is a fairly strong ranking factor on Google and is steadily becoming more important. Having a HTTPS website shows search engines and web users that you value security above all else.

Web browsers and SSL

In January 2017, Google Chrome began displaying a warning pop-up that let users know when a website they were browsing did not support SSL but asked for personal information, such as passwords and credit card information. Having an SSL-enabled website ensures that your users will never see the “Not Secure” message and allow visitors to make purchases confidently as well as give you personal information needed for transactions. Overall, having an HTTPS website may improve your website’s conversion rates by giving website users a safer website experience.

Contact liveBooks Today

Contact us today to learn more about this exciting new feature and start your 14-day free trial to see how easy building a secure website can be. Are you a current customer that wants to switch over to SSL? Follow our easy instructions found through this link in our support library for more information.

Born in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, Joshua Holko is a full-time Professional Nature Photographer who specializes in polar photography. Joshua is a fully accredited AIPP Master of Photography and member of the Australian Institute of Professional Photographers (AIPP). He has won countless awards for his photography including being names the 2015 Global Arctic Photographer or the Year.
Joshua is officially represented by Philip Kulpa and the Source Photographica Gallery in Australia and Aspen, Colorado. To see more of Joshua Holko’s work visit his website: www.jholko.com.

I am extremely excited and proud to be releasing my new short film – Ghosts of the Arctic. The product of more than two years of planning Ghosts of the Arctic was filmed exclusively in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard in the depths of Winter. It is my hope that the film will impart some of the haunting beauty of this incredibly precious and endangered polar wilderness; as well as give you some insight into my life as a Polar photographer. I hope you will take six minutes out of your day, set your display to full screen, turn off the lights, crank up the volume, and allow Ghosts of the Arctic to transport you away to one of the world’s most spectacular polar regions; in it’s rarely seen winter veil. Please enjoy.

My most sincere thanks to both Abraham Joffe and Dom West from Untitled Film Works who worked tirelessly for a week straight putting in eighteen hour days in freezing temperatures to shoot and produce this film. My thanks and gratitude also to my friend Frede Lamo who likewise worked tirelessly with good humour and whose assistance with expedition logistics simply made the impossible, possible. Without the dedication of this team, this film would simply not have been possible.

It would be remiss of me not to also provide a little insight into what it was like to make this short film. During the Winter shoot we experienced temperatures that were never warmer than -20ºC and frequently plummeted down as low as -30ºC + wind chill factor. We were exposed to the cold and elements for up to sixteen straight hours a day. Many days we drove over two hundred kilometers on our snow mobiles in very difficult terrain and conditions as we searched for wildlife. The bumpy terrain left us battered, bruised and sore. We experienced three cases of first and  second degree frostbite during the filming as well as a lot of failed equipment and equipment difficulties as a result of the extreme cold. We had batteries that would loose their charge in mere minutes, drones that wouldn’t power up and fly, cameras the wouldn’t turn on, steady-cams that would not remain steady, HDMI cables that became brittle and snapped in the cold, frozen audio equipment, broken LCD mounts, broken down snow mobiles and more. We existed on a diet of freeze dried cod and pasta washed down with tepid coffee and the occasional frozen mars bar.

It is hard to put the experience into words, but just the simple act of removing ones gloves to change a memory card in these sort of temperatures when you are exposed and exhausted comes with serious risk of frostbite. In my own case, I removed my face covering for one three minute take and suffered frostbite (from which I have not fully recovered) across the right hand side of my face. And whilst not all of this will come across in the film, I think I can safely say it was without any shadow of doubt the toughest film shoot any of us have done.

For the technically inclined: Ghosts of the Arctic was shot in the 2.35:1 cinema ratio in true 4K High Definition with Canon, RED, Sony and DJI 4K High Definition camera systems.

Absolutely no wildlife was interfered with in any shape or form during the filming and everything you see is totally natural behavior.

Jon Alderman is a commercial photographer based in Vermont, U.S.A. He has dedicated a grand part of his career to capturing military-related photography. Additionally, he devotes his time to photographing architecture, people, food, and landscapes. To see more of his liveBooks8 website, visit: www.jonalderman.com.

I first picked up a camera (Canon AE-1) as a military “brat” living overseas in Italy. At the time, I did not think it was something I’d end up doing as a career. I just knew I had a passion for making photographs. I enjoyed the allure as well as the challenge of working with film – right down to the mystery of what will come off the film I was capturing…that even includes whether it came out or not. It did not dawn on me until I moved back stateside that this “hobby” that I loved so much more than the various jobs I had at the time – could actually turn into a lively hood. So I pursued an education in the arts to dive much deeper into this world of photography and “develop” my passion into a marketable trade. Coming from a military family, I always had a fascinating and respect for the individuals who serve this country; their sacrifices, dedication and service. I guess this aspect of my personal life has flooded into the commercial side of my business as a majority of my work is related to military advertising. I feel very fortunate to capture and work alongside amazing military members while showcasing their very unique occupations and capabilities for my viewers.

Q: How would you describe the aesthetic of your website in three words?

JA: Clean, elegant and simple – the good kind of simple.

Q: How often do you typically update your website?

JA: You know…it varies, depending on my workload and new imagery. No major updates – as in layout overhaul, just refining image selection/sequence. Why change a great layout design?

Q: How do you choose the photos that you display on your homepage?

JA: Honestly, they choose themselves. The wow factor plays a big role in this selection. As the photographer, I am sometimes “too close to the fire” so I have some peer input to help me when I am struggling to decide.

Q: What is your favorite new feature of liveBooks8?

JA: I’d have to say my favorite new feature, and it may not be a feature but more of a bonus, would be the new design templates. Well thought out and plenty of options to personalize how you’d like to present your work. That paired with a great, easy to understand back-end user interface, wins it for me!

Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d offer to someone designing their website?

JA: Sit back and think about how you’d like to view your work and how you’d like your clients to. liveBooks offers plenty of options to hit the ground running. It may feel overwhelming at first but just take your time learning the back-end and familiarize yourself with all the features and tools you now have access to.

Have a website you’d like us to feature? Email us at social@livebooks.com.