Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
If you are thinking about a new media device. DLNA looks to be a really good home audio/video network standard.
Streaming video from the Internet is very cool, costs much less than cable and can only keep getting better.
It was the least expensive box I could find. I’ll let you know once it gets here.
PlayOn also works on XBox PS3 Wii. Otherwise I recommend the VuNow player.
Some pics from my walks this winter in Highland Park
<Previous – Next>>
I recently helped get rid of some malware from a site. Bad stuff was inserted into every page.
In addition to the crap in the site’s 16 pages there were over five thousand extra pages with malware. Apparently it was there for quite a while.
We deleted the bad stuff and secured the site and when I was done the owner asked me how to know if this kind of thing ever happens again. Coincidentally Google has just come out with a free service to help. Follow changes to any website is a very cool service that notifies you when a website page changes. Not just a blog, but any page.
Everyone with a website should check this out.
It’s pretty easy to sell things from your website these days.
I get requests to connect websites to an in store POS system.
I believe it’s probably best if they’re both the same system.
Otherwise, I would recommend not connecting them.
That doesn’t mean you can’t have a good free online shopping cart.
All you need is to be able export your part numbers to a flat file (and maybe a little excel).
The entire online cart can be updated, anytime in one simple upload.
I find that it works best if you give a list price. Discounts can be individual customers or store wide.
Most of my customers are small businesses and just about every one asks me how to get lots of free traffic from the search engines.
I wish I had a magic formula that would get top ranking for the keyword of your choice, but alas there is no such thing. It can take a huge amount of work. It can be a full time job just monitoring your results and my customers don’t have the time or resources for that.
My advice pretty much always has been the same.
You get search engine traffic from inbound links that come from other good quality sites.
You get good inbound links from having content that people want to link to.
Lesson = write your content to appeal to your human visitor.
Here’s a good new post from Google about optimizing your site.
One of your best promotional tools is your personal email. If you don’t overdo it your sig file can be a real help to your business. It’s free, could get passed around and after it’s set up it takes no extra work at all.
A while ago I got an email from someone who is in the promotion business. Their sig file was one picture. You couldn’t copy and paste the name, click on the website address (or phone number if you are on a smartphone) because the picture wasn’t linked to anything.
You want to make it as easy as possible for everyone to contact you and see your promotions. Use plain text and inline CSS in your sig file copy and links and don’t assume that the person reading it is on a computer.
Send an email to your computer or better yet to your cell phone and try to see the things that you are promoting.
I got an polite email request from someone who is selling an icon pack. They wanted me to promote their site.
I have a previous post about icons and if you know me, you know that I’m all about good free stuff. So I found this…
30° today. WHOO HOO! Perfect conditions for GIANT Icicles on my house.
I recently wrote a post called New Year’s Recommendations
Here are a few more of my favorites.
I like The GIMP
It’s a great photo editor with many more features than I’ll ever use.
As good as any professional program, it works on almost any machine and it’s free. How cool is that?
Irfanview is not open source, but still freeware and I have been using it for years. It’s a viewer, not an editor, and plays almost any picture or music file and is still my favorite program for sideshows on my computer.
Even with Windows 7 I use the ZoneAlarm firewall for my computer. There are other products they sell, but their free firewall is still the best one out there. Many products like this will only monitor traffic in one direction, not both ways and some require you to tell them what not to allow. ZoneAlarm monitors traffic both up and down and only allows what you permit. You can allow programs access on a one time or all the time basis. This is especially important because so many things out there you don’t know are threats and many more that haven’t been invented yet.
