Tropical Blogging

Copyright law seems to be poorly misunderstood by a great many people. I’m not an attorney, and I’m particularly not a copyright or intellectual property attorney, but I believe I have an informed layman’s understanding of copyright matters. Knowing the basics of copyright law and the legal issues surrounding the use of copyrighted material can help one stay out of trouble. I’ve had two recent copyright issues that might be helpful to discuss.

Full post: Copyright and Copywrong »

Official-looking e-mails appear to be from prominent registrars — they’re really attempts to steal your domains

Both eNom and Network Solutions, two very large registrars that handle millions of domain registrations, are the target of a major phishing attack. It is believed that the perpetrators’ purpose is to acquire the login details for victims’ domain registrar accounts and thereby steal or otherwise compromise their domain registrations.

Phishing warning posted on Network Solutions home page

A good many of my clients are Realtors, and a good many Realtors throw away money on ineffective pay-per-click advertising because they haven’t taken the time to educate themselves on the tremendous opportunity afforded by this type of advertising. Pay-per-click advertising (a la Google AdWords) offers a type of advertising that has never before been available in the history of the world: Individualized mass-market advertising.

A Realtor may be an expert at marketing and selling real estate — but that Realtor may not be an expert at writing AdWords advertising copy or managing an online pay-per-click campaign. Pay-per-click is an easy way to get targeted traffic to your web site without waiting for the long-term results of organic search engine optimization. It’s also an easy way to throw away lots of money without seeing any return.

We’ve put together a few tips to help you fine-tune your PPC advertising to help you get the most bang for your buck. This article focuses primarily on real estate PPC advertising, but the concepts are applicable to most any type of service or product.

Full post: Maximize Your Return in Your Pay-Per-Click Real Estate Advertising »

I voted. Had to hold my nose on some of my choices, but I did it. This would have been a good year to have NOTA as a choice.

Unbeknownst to me, my precinct moved since the last time I voted. I went to where I used to vote, but there was nothing there. Then I drove around aimlessly for a bit until I spotted the blue “Precinct 30″ sign.

Here in Punta Gorda, we use old-fashioned pieces of paper and have to color in little ovals with a pen. I hate that — I never could color inside the lines. Also, I officially have middle-aged eyes, and I forgot to bring my reading glasses with me, so I had to squint painfully at the printing on the ballot to read it.

The election workers were, as always, pleasant and helpful. Around here, they’re always old, too. When I get old maybe I’ll have time to work elections.

Just in the past few days I’ve responded to several e-mails from clients asking my advice regarding e-mails that they’ve received from NetBiz. Here’s my take on NetBiz:

I’m not a fan of NetBiz. They’re not necessarily a scam, but they do seem to be at least somewhat misleading in how they represent themselves.

Full post: NetBiz sez: “Get onto the first page of Google….” »

Tonight we’re enjoying our first fire of the season in our fireplace. It’s quite a cheery little blaze.

The only thing is, since we live in south Florida, it’s really not cool enough yet for a fire. We had to open all the windows and turn on the ceiling fan to get the living room cool enough to have a fire.

Full post: The Web: The Rules Are Different Here »

So I have a client I’m developing a website for. The client has been great to work with, and we’ve made good progress on the new site. But there was a problem: The client kept complaining that he couldn’t reach his site — he was getting “not found” error messages. He told me that he could, at one point, get to the site without the “www” — which was particularly strange because one of the first things I do on a new site is implement a 301 permanent redirect from the non-www to the www version of the URL.

Full post: Search vs. Direct Navigation »

I received a well-written, but completely absurd, spam e-mail yesterday. It started out by saying:

“I was looking at websites under the keyword face lift cape coral and came across your site tropicalwebworks.com. I see that you’re ranked #1 on page 18 in google.

I am not sure if you are aware of why you’re ranked this low but more importantly how easily correctable this is.”

Full post: A Face Lift in Cape Coral? »

WordPress version 2.6 just came out. I installed it from scratch on a new blog (Fix My Knee, a chronicle of my many knee surgeries). The installation went beautifully, and I liked the new Admin interface.

Full post: WordPress Upgrade »

This month I, along with thousands of other eBay affiliates, have been busy little bees converting all of our eBay affiliate links to use the new eBay IDs and format, thanks to eBay’s announcement that they were leaving Commission Junction and taking their affiliate program in-house.

Full post: Ebay and Linkbaiting »

It’s very satisfying to spend a great deal of time developing a new site from scratch for a client, taking pains to ensure that the site is search-engine friendly, and then to see that site do well in the search engines after launch.

But it’s also surprisingly satisfying to spend a few hours optimizing a small site for a new client, and then to see, almost immediately, improvements in that site’s performance in the search engines.

Full post: Minor SEO Changes, Major SEO Effect on a Minor Site »

Apparently I’m part of a small minority of web developers who believe that the developer has a level of professional responsibility toward the client, regardless of whether the client knows, understands, or requests same.

Full post: Ethics and Web Design - The Professional Responsibility of the Web Designer »

Daily newspapers have been fighting decreasing readership and falling subscriptions for at least a couple of decades now. More and more, newspapers are putting their content online. For that I salute them.

But the web is now about 15 years old, and I wonder why so many newspapers still don’t manage to get some of the basic things right.

Full post: The News Online: Usability is Lacking »

A page that’s about everything isn’t about anything.

Read my explanation here.

Sometimes, one of my clients wants or needs a blog. And the question always arises, should they use one of the free hosted blogging platforms, such as Typepad or Blogger or a hosted blog at WordPress.com, or should they download the WordPress software from WordPress.org and host it on their own site?

Full post: WordPress vs. Blogger »

“We had to destroy the village in order to save it, sir!”

That was basically the response of Network Solutions when it was caught with its hand in the cookie jar, registering domains for themselves that people had looked up in their whois registry. NetSol basically defended their contemptible practice by saying, “In order to prevent domain registration abuse, we’re committing domain registration abuse.”

Full post: Network Solutions Caught Front Running »

I recently had 2 diametrically opposite experiences with phishing. In the world of the Internet, “phishing” is when some entity (a scammer) — typically, a website or e-mail sender — pretends to be some organization that a user has a relationship with, and attempts to entice the user into providing personal and confidential information (such as passwords, bank account numbers, PIN numbers, etc.) to the scammer. eBay, PayPal, banks, and other similar sites are popular phishing targets.

Full post: Phishing and Phishing Detection »

I recently subscribed to a satellite tv package when I upgraded my DSL account — and I instantly got hooked on that adorable Animal Planet show “Meerkat Manor.” Just in time for the season ending. Then I started watching Orangutan Island, and while watching the 2nd episode I idly checked the whois for orangutanisland.com. That domain was taken, but orangutanisland.org was available, and I thought to myself, I wonder if I should register that and set up a forum for people to talk about these cute critters? So I did. I used the free phpBB forum software for the forum, and also created a small collection of static informational pages so that the site would have some content to rank for.

Full post: Forums (or Fora, for you Latin geeks) »

Poor hosting companies waste time and cost money.

I needed to set up a MySQL database for a client recently. The client hosts their website with a large and well-known hosting company, which advertises MySQL available with all hosting packages. It should have taken just a few minutes to create the database and assign the db username and password, and then I could get on with the backend programming for the site. Several days and several billable hours later, I was just getting started.

Full post: Bad Hosting Costs $$ and Wastes Time »

The amount of misinformation out there on the web is almost enough to make a person crazy. I ran across a few statements today that were so baldly wrong that I have to correct them here.

Full post: Correcting Bad Information »