Dwayne Coots

Posts Tagged ‘free information’

I’m not famous for losing things. Sure I’ve misplaced a set of keys once or twice but I do chew through eyeglasses at least a couple times a year. And if not lost then they get broken. It’s just the way it is, always running to the next meeting or standing in line. If you wear glasses you know how expensive that can get.

This morning I came across a cool review at fellow Examiner Eric Hammer’s site. It was about a company called Zenni Optical and the details made me click over to their site.

Zenni really has their act together. They offer a huge line of high quality eyeglasses at a discount prices. Their website is easy to navigate, but the show stopper is the selection and price.

One the second page of frames I found a near perfect match for my $250 frames for only $29.00 – I almost cried. So just to go apples to apples I checked the Titanium Alloy category — the reason my frames were so expensive, at least that’s what the salesperson said – and found a flexible titanium set like mine for a whopping $39.00 (they’re model #3742 if you’re curious).

You can compare your frame styles (they have a super selection of sharp looking frames) and you’ll have your glasses delivered in about two weeks. Shipping costs are minimal and if you buy several pair you’ll save even more.

Kelly Asks:

Dwayne – You seem kind of like a guru on the online shopping stuff. My husband and I want to try and make some extra money by doing something online. We both have jobs but we figure we can spend about 3 hours on each weeknight and one weekend day to make a go of selling something on the net. We have a few hundred (maybe $500) to put into it. Can you suggest anything? We see the wholesale and dropship ads all over. Does that work?.

Answer:

Howdy Kelly;

Okay that is a great dream and a nice nest egg to start with. First you’re not going to replace your day job any time soon with a $500 investment, but with a little elbow grease and several weekends you can parlay that into something that will pay a car note and maybe create some mad money to boot.

First while I urge you to look into wholesale and dropship options, don’t just leap into anything just because of a sales pitch. Remember that landing page sales copy can be very persuasive and is designed to separate you from your money before you have time to carefully consider. So look into these options then come back and ask for any further advice once you find one you like.

Wholesale or Dropship products:

These are fun. There are aggregators like Doba and Simplix who you pay a fee to and they give you access to many ’so-called’ wholesale products. Be careful because they are usually closer to 25% off retail so not really wholesale. Read the rest of this entry »

Dwayne,

I set up this little site for the Indy Falcons group. (volunteer). www.indyfalcons.com
If you go there, you will see I have embedded the webcams which are sponsored by the Indianapolis Star.
My question is this: if people come to this page and watch the webcams, does that score a hit on the Star site? I know one of the reasons they support the webcams is the number of hits they get during the season. If embedding the cam removes those hits, I need to take it out and find something else to put there….
Thanks
Susan

——-

Hi Susan;
Happy new year! That’s a good question and a worthy cause.

I looked at the page and checked your code to see what’s what and you are using an iframe to embed these cams onto your page. Since the iframe is just pulling their page into your page it will register as a hit from the visitor computer — your website will not be cited in their logs unless you have some other clickover kind of content.

So to their system it does register a visitor hit so it justifies their supporting the cams. But don’t forget to add some content onto your page also so it can be regarded as important enough to be indexed. If your home page is nothing but an iframe embed from another site it does not qualify as valuable content to search bots. This makes it hard for the site to gain popularity and get ranked so more people can find it organically.

Hope this helps.
Dwayne

Another death blow to free speech came on the morning of October 5th, 2009 as the Federal Trade Commission voted unanimously to enact revisions to 16 CFR Part 255.

Revisions to this 81-page FTC guideline document — innocently tagged ‘Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising’ — were aimed squarely at web bloggers. The changes define thinly sliced examples of how web endorsements can be defined and how each can stray into the territory of advertisements. It also heralds stern punishment for offenders who write product or service reviews and saddles the blog author with stiff penalties should they fail to divulge that their review is a paid or barter endorsement, or if they make any claims about a product that does not prove true. According to the document available in PDF form here: http://www.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005endorsementguidesfnnotice.pdf these new regulations will be enforceable starting December 1st, 2009

Sadly, this attack on free speech also endangers countless bloggers who depend on income earned by product reviews.

So what? It’s about time somebody took control and closed down these bloggers clogging up the web with their reviews and cheesy info sites full of affiliate links and questionable testimonials!”

That seems to be the mainstream response, however, those who closely follow the ongoing battle between corporate media and the independent bloggers will see more sinister intent here. Bloggers have made a huge dent in corporate media consumption and advertising revenue. In the early days of the web, corporate media satisfied itself first by stiff arming web publishers as unimportant and amateur — basically not worth following. Then as more consumers flocked to the Internet for information rather than just amusement, the mainstream press turned up the heat with an endless cycle of scare pieces about the dangers of the web and how harmful it could be to surf.

Then amazingly, once the corporate powers had positioned themselves on the web, they proceeded to (attempt to) extend their authority into the new media. Now any news outlet who wishes to survive must maintain sites with interactive Web 2 aspects and social media components. Now they seemed to suddenly embrace the web and everything about it. Every news page and program had the corporations web branding and URL. The web is ours! Bwah ha ha!

The migration of major media onto the web is now complete. Sadly they seem to have brought all their bad baggage along with them. Corporatist slant, raging hyperbola, and elitist globalism still clog their message. So nothing has changed for the better, but at least they can compete in the free market right?

Wrong. Instead of a heads up competition, mainstream media does little else but complain about bloggers and independent news outlets because they are not accountable. More learned media experts point this fact out but also acknowledge the counter point: that bloggers and independent news sources represent the very last resource for information that has not passed through a corporate filter. Professional bloggers make up the huge diversity of information and opinion we now have available to augment or challenge globalist groupthink news outlets.

So no, it is not a heads up competition. Now comes the price. Apparently, the talking heads at big news cannot convince their consumers that unregulated bloggers should be struck from the web by the mere wieght of negative spokesmanship. So the FTC has been called in to begin its little campaign of regulation. It will not escape the informed reader that the FTC is made up of 5 presidentially appointed commissioners, who come to their 7 year post directly from, (you guessed it): corporate law firms. More pointedly still, is how former FTC commissioners are reshuffled back into the corporate law miasma.

Okay so does this mean the end of free speech on the web?

No, but it is another brick in the wall.

##

Recently a client reported the heder.php exploit had infected their website. They needed help with the cleanup, so we got them back online, but they had questions like, “How did these files get onto my site?”

First understand that heder.php is just one type of site trojan. There are many flavors of this type of site exploit and they have some things in common, so it might be worth a blog post to cover them.

These kinds of exploits compromise your hosting account. Then they install malicious code into your html pages. They also add some entries to your htaccess file to redirect incoming traffic to the payload. Usually the payload is a version of the same exploit so the code can spread to the next victim.

So now we know how you get it… Basically, this exploit is usually dropped onto your machine when you visit an infected website. It will overwrite a Microsoft ActiveX file on your machine — which is how it hides from your antivirus. (Yes as usual it’s a Micro$oft exploit).

So what does it do?

In the background it scans for usernames and passwords. If it finds them it steals then and uploads them to the hackers. If it finds FTP credentials it uses those to upload itself to your websites and inject some code into your home page and write some backdoor ssh access files into your server space.  This is how it spreads – once it is on your website, anyone who lands on it gets the new code and the process starts attacking their machine.

I have anti-virus software so I’m safe right?

Nyet! Most Antivirus software cannot find it because it is more like spyware. Also it hits your machine via php and javascript code and those are functions your web browser uses all the time — so a firewall is useless to prevent this. Since it hacks an activex helper it hides really well from scanners.

Okay so why do people do this crap? Why me? What do they get out of it?

The hackers make money by retrieving your other credentials (usernames and passwords to banking sites, credit cards etc…) as well as personal info (your SSN, address, phone numbers, etc) and then it uploads them to a public board in encrypted form that only the original programmers have the decrypt key to. So all your data is uploaded to a public forum and the hackers pull these files daily and decrypt them. Then they:

• Sell your email address to spammers
• Sell your personal info to identity thieves
• Sell your credit card details to fraudsters
• Share your exploited ftp details with partners who now have write-privilege to install other payloads to your website…
• Then they post teaser code to boards to help other hackers develop better code.

As a webmaster you should always keep a close eye on your security — particularly ftp credentials. FileZilla is one popular ftp client that is taking a big hit because it stores your credentials in unencrypted format. So if you manage 10 websites for clients and use FileZilla for FTP – you could be at real risk. FilaZilla is an excellent Windows FTP client, but please do not store your passwords in it. (Uncheck the “Save Password” box in the FTP profiles and keep a separate encrypted list of site credentials.)

Hope this helps…

Web publishing clients often ask us to help them find the best way to convert old documents and presentations into content for their websites. Many of them have lots of content pertaining to their niche but it’s trapped in MS Word documents or Powerpoint or some other proprietary format.

Of course we go around the block with them as they try to publish those files directly to their site, or worse yet, they try to use the built in converter in MS Office – YUCK. Once we clean that mess up we have to manually convert them to PDF or Flash (for presentations) then publish them as embedded links.

Now we have new solutions to work with and recommend. About a year ago we stumbled onto a great document converting, hosting, and embedding service and wanted to share it with you.

I want to recommend to you one of the best way to convert, host, and embed documents into your website. As you may know a large part of our expertise is focused on SEO and website promotion. With that in mind we always try to recommend solutions that take the promotion of your website into consideration. That way you can climb the SERPS (search results) as quickly as possible without spending too much money to do it.

With that said I want to recommend a free web2 enhanced document service called Scribd. (scribd.com)
You can sign up for a free account there and use scribd for several critical services to enhance your website and your sites search authority.

Scribd gives you a free way to convert word docs into pdf presentations. In fact it will convert word, pdf, powerpoint, etc into embedded presentations that you can embed right into your website or wordpress blog — the same way you embed videos. Not only does it provide the conversion and embeds, but it also provides you with hosting for the document on their website that provides links back to your website. (This is perhaps the greatest benefit of all because scribd is a very high ranking website, if you have links on it to your site it will help your site gain authority and rank very quickly.)

Hope this tip helps. Drop us a line and let us know where you use it.

Still following the folks at Q-Based and this week they are unveiling their brand new version of the dermatechrx.com website. No longer an ecommerce site, now Dermatech has been retooled to be a free and comprehensive research center and media library covering all manner of skin ailments and research into cures for such things and carpal tunnel syndrome, scabies, skin parasites, arthritis, and more.

For several years DermaTechRx was the brand for Q-Based products. Now they have expanded into their All Stop line of products are making the best use of the newly designed DermaTechrx website to help people learn from their research and experience in skin related problems, topical pain relief, and human parasites.

Read the rest of this entry »