Email Address on the Web?

October 30, 2006 | 2 Comments

Do you post your email address on your web site?

Almost all of us do — we almost have to do this — but that makes it easily harvestible by spammers’ spiders.

There are some tricks you can use to make your email address available to visitors but not for the robot spiders…

First, you can use one of several JavaScript encryption systems. These are designed to have your encrypted email address within the JavaScript, but to use the visitor’s web browser to decode and display the address.

This works fine when the user has JavaScript turned on… but doesn’t work at all if she has turned off JavaScript (ActiveScript in Internet Explorer) for security reasons.

The second method is the one that I normally use — it’s called Spam-me-not. Although the web page says that it uses JavaScript, it really doesn’. It simply encodes the individual characters of the email address into mixed decimal and hexadecimal HTML character codes.

For example, the character “t” can be coded as “t” or as “t” or as a “t” — and the web browser will understand, decode and display a “t” character.

Fortunately, for now, the spiders aren’t that smart…

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Advertising, Affiliate Marketing, Blogs, HTML, Traffic & Linking, Usability, Visitor Experience

Powweb’s $5.77/month October 25% off Special

October 13, 2006 | Leave a Comment

Looking for web hosting?

Powweb’s One Plan offers 13+ GB traffic per day, 20 GB space, wizard to install software packages, 650 email accounts (webmail, POP3 and SMTP!), unlimited email forwarding, spam filters, 5 MySQL databases, Perl, PHP, FrontPage Extensions, daily backups, toll-free support and a lot more…
Regularly, it’s only $7.77 per month.

Right now, Powweb has an October 25% Off Special for New Subscribers

Get Your Package for Only $5.77 Per Month!

That’s right - only $69.24 per year for this great package!
Special expires October 31st. Get it Now!

This blog, like all my other sites, is hosted at Powweb.
Wish I’d gotten that price…

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Apache Web Server, Blogs, CSS, HTML, PHP Scripting, Server Side Includes, Web Hosting

Giving Away the Empire!

October 10, 2006 | Leave a Comment

Today was the launch of Joel Comm’s new Instant Adsense Templates VRE Empire package. http://terryscomputertips.com/IAT

VRE is short for Virtual Real Estate — a.k.a. web sites for making money on the web.

So, I went to look at it out of curiosity. I bought the earlier release of IAT and was happy, and I just knew that I didn’t need this one…

Boy, was I surprised. This guy just kept piling on the features and more features, and then started adding bonuses, too! He’s setting a new “high” in quality and content and a “low” in prices for a package like this.
http://terryscomputertips.com/IAT

150 Niche Topics — HTML templates, WordPress templates, XSitePro templates, HyperVRE templates and phpBB forum templates for them all. Adsense integrated into all of them!

Plus 50 pre-built niche web sites. Oh, yeah — and private label content, too, so you don’t have to have author bio blocks with links leading off your site!

Plus, the graphics files in JPG and Photoshop formats. Plus 400 Private Label Articles, already formatted in three formats: plain text, HTML file and HyperVRE format.

Ebooks. List building information and 10 squeeze pages! 10 private lable reports that you can use, give away or sell — with matching graphics.

Who needs web traffic? The package includes three books on how to get more traffic to your site. Not enough? How about another 2 as a bonus?

Software — the CB Text Ads Generator package so you can embed Clickbank affiliate ads in your articles with ease. And, several more packages, too.

15 Tutorial videos!

When I saw what was in the package — and what I’d get as bonuses, too — I gave in pretty quickly. This deal was too good to miss…

http://terryscomputertips.com/IAT

Couldn’t find a reason not to buy, especially at that price.

And, that brings up a very important point — this is a limited quantity offer — and the price is going up $25 per day. Look quick and get it quick. If you’re interested in a web-based income, this can be a huge opportunity for you.

And, a bunch of other bonuses, including a copy of Joel’s “What Google Never Told You About Making Money With Adsense.” I’ve bought the 1st, 2nd and 3rd editions of it — it’s been that good and improved that much with each edition. And, it’s included as a package bonus.

http://terryscomputertips.com/IAT

Enough of that — the price goes up $25 per day for the next few days.

ON THE OTHER HAND, when the limit is reached, it comes off the market.

His earlier Instant Adsense Templates package sold out in only 36 Hours!
Check it out now… I did … I thought I didn’t want it — but I did, when I saw it. The package was just too good and the price couldn’t be beat.

http://terryscomputertips.com/IAT

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Adsense, Affiliate Marketing, Blogs, HTML, Internet Marketing, Monetizing Your Site, SEO, Traffic & Linking, Visitor Experience

A Package With It All

October 4, 2006 | 1 Comment

I recently installed XAMPP on my notebook computer, which is my main web development platform. In the Linux world, the term LAMP or LAMPP means “Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl and PHP” — in other words, the main web server, database and scripting packages used in the web development world.

XAMPP, then is Apache, MySQL, Perl and PHP for “X” — multiple operating systems. XAMPP is a single downloadable package that installs all of these. Of course, you can configure them individually once they’re installed.
Previously, I had installed Apache and PHP on the notebook. But, after a hard drive failure with no image backup (that’s resolved now), I remembered reading about XAMPP.

The installation went very smoothly. The challenge was some of the customizations that I wanted to do, mainly not storing my “htdocs” folder in the place XAMPP had configured. It turned out to be easily solvable, once I realized what was happening (more on that later in another post).
The other thing that was non-obvious was that one of the relatively normal Apache modules was “commented out” by default in the httpd.conf file. Since I use the mod-rewrite.so module, I needed to delete the “#” sign from the beginning of the line

#LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so

in httpd.conf, stop and start Apache — and all was well. I use this module and the httpd-vhosts.conf file to be able to handle multiple “hosts” in my installation — my own “shared web hosting.”

By the way, the earlier versions of XAMPP mentioned that it was set up insecurely by default and that it should not be used for servers on the Internet. Based on my quick look, they’ve added a bunch of optional security tests. I haven’t spotted the same warning, but be sure to check carefully before using it for real-world web serving. It makes a great way to test web pages before making them available to the public.

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under Apache Web Server, HTML, Web Hosting

Should I Create a Web Site?

September 16, 2006 | Leave a Comment

Do I Need A Web Site? Should I create one?

Web sites have become a necessity for almost every kind of business. Companies, businesses, and individuals need a web presence to show that they are “up to date.”

Sometimes, the web sites are designed for e-commerce, the selling of goods via the web site. Other times, they’re designed to guide prospective purchasers into buying the seller’s goods off-line or to provide technical and customer support after purchase.

Individuals of almost all ages have created personal web sites with their respective purposes, be it for profit, or for entertainment.

However, before creating a web site, we have to consider a number of issues, such as purpose, design cost, site maintenance, use of the site, and a web hosting service.

Cost is often a very important issue. We must find an affordable web hosting service, not spending too much, nor being too frugal. A cheap host may damage your site’s credibility via poor service or poor uptime. On the other hand, and expensive host may provide the features you need, or they might be just high priced.

Search the web for comments on individual web hosting companies. When you do that, consider that negative postings are more likely than positive ones. After all, who is reading the review sites and newsgroups and posting? Mostly, the people who aren’t happy!

Also consider personal recommendations from others that have or manage siimilar sites. It’s easy to advertise services, while it’s much harder to actually deliver them.

Could hiring a design professional be affordable? Is it the best option? For simple web sites, we could always pick up the coding, or even use free or inexpensive WYSIWYG design programs such as NVU (www.nvu.org) or Microsoft FrontPage.

While many hosts provide a “web page builder” wizard, designing your site this way will likely make it appear non-professional and also make it very difficult to move to another host.

When it comes to more complex web sites, when you want it to do even a little more than just providing static information, hiring a designer may be the best way. Not only in terms of design, but security is also a key factor in assuring a quality web site.

If the web site also acts as an e-commerce portal for businesses or individuals, security of visitor/customer information will be a critical issue.

So, having considered the things to do before building a web site, do we actually NEED one?

If creating a web site will create or boost sales, then by all means, go ahead.

If your web site can be a positive reflection of your self, don’t be stopped by the efforts — you might find that you’ll like the creation process. Depending on your needs, a blog at a free blogging service may give you all you want or need.

Above all, design a good looking, functional site.

Not too cute. Not too stark. Just right…

Posted by Terry Stockdale | Filed Under HTML, Usability, Visitor Experience, Web Hosting

Serendipity vs WordPress, day 1

September 15, 2006 | 3 Comments

All my other blogs are running the blog software Serendipity, rather than WordPress, which Drawing on the Web uses.

Both Serendipity and WordPress are free for use.

WordPress is released under the GPL. Serendipity has its own custom license, which also allows free use and redistribution.

As I started configuring and posting to Drawing on the Web, I immediately noticed the some differences between Serendipity and WordPress.

Themes

Serendipity is distributed with about 20 different themes (layouts), while more are easily downloaded and added from within Serendipity. WordPress, on the other hand, is distributed with only two themes.

With WordPress, you download themes via your browser, unzip the files, move them into the WordPress themes folder and then upload them to the web site.

Advantage: Serendipity

Interface

WordPress has a much smoother, more powerful interface than Serendipity. WordPress makes it easier to do the things it can do.

Advantage: WordPress.

Capabilities

Serendipity has a lot more functions built into it.

With WordPress, I’m still searching for plug-ins by visiting web sites and blogs — and don’t know if they exist or not.

Advantage: Serendipity

Distribution

WordPress is far more widely used. Many more people are developing plug-ins for WordPress and there are many more sites to use as examples.

Advantage: WordPress

Search Engine Optimization

WordPress uses a SEO-poor URL stucture for individual blog entries, for example, http://www.drawingontheweb.com/?p=5 .� Fortunately, although this is the default, it can easily be changed to one using the date and entry title as keys in the Permalink.
Serendipity uses Search Engine-friendly URLs like http://blog.terryscomputertips.com/index.php?/archives/334-My-new-PC-security-blog.html that include the title of the blog entry.

Advantage: Serendipity

Customization capabililies

If you can do HTML and CSS, modifying WordPress’ web pages is easy. Serendipity is more of a challenge, as it has been structured in a more obfusticated manner.

WordPress uses .php files. Serendipity uses .php files for programming and .tpl template files for all display functions. Unfortunately, .tpl pages can not include PHP scripting, just static HTML code.

However, Serendipity has a plug-in for SMARTY markup in templates, which will allow calls from the .tpl pages or from blog entries to PHP scripts in a special template file.

The Final Answer:

Advantage, ease of use: WordPress
Advantage, power: Serendipity

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