Most everyone out there has gotten their share of spam e-mails and phishing scams. The problem is getting worse. Most of these messages are just annoyances, we get them, we delete them, we move on until the next time. But some of them, are potentially dangerous. Up until last week one of my clients was getting upwards of 3000 spam messages per day. PER DAY! Why? Because Ya**o created something called a catch-all mailbox. In the beginning it sounded to them like a great idea, if someone mis-spells their business e-mail address, they will still get the messages, but, as soon as the domain is listed in the e-mail lists for spammers they started getting thousands of e-mails sent to whoever@thierdomain.com.

More later on how to address this problem, and what you can do to get yourself off these lists….for good.

Social bookmarking is fast becoming popular and proving to be helpful for both users and SEO types. With the onslaught of SEO tricks, gurus are trying to get their sites listed in social bookmarking sites to add one-way incoming links to their pages. With sites like digg.com, del.icio.us, stumbleupon.com and many others, they are making an easy way to gain relative links.

On a personal note, social bookmark sites that offer private bookmarks, such as hurl-it.com, seem to be more useful to me. This way a user can bookmark sites just like they would add them to their favorites, but have access to them from any computer that has access to the internet. Way cool! Now we can work from home late at night, researching sites with the information that we need, and instead of trying to remember them, or sending a hundred e-mails to ourselves at work, we can just add them to these sites, login once we are at work, and access them like we have them stored in our own memory.

I find myself, not only bookmarking sites, but actually looking at sites that other users have bookmarked, and actually voting(digging, hurling, etc.) on them too. It’s like I have a vote, and it actually counts for something. (Small I know, but still…..!!)

 Check some of these sites out for yourself, and see what you think.

I have had an issue working on a website, where flash will not show up when the user is on the secure (HTTPS) side of the site. I found a solution, however, not by searching for it, just by trying different things, and it seems to work. All of the http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,19,0 needs to be changed to https://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,19,0, and all of the movie values and source values need to be directed to the absolute URL as in http://www.yourdomain.com/yourflashfile.swf, rather than a relative link such as yourflash.swf.

This works for all https situations in both IE7 and Firefox, and will avoid the”Big White Square” syndrome meaning Movie Not Loaded.

Keywords. What are they? Keywords are the common words or phrases that describe your business or products. Keywords can be specific brands that you sell, areas that you do business, phone number area codes, or a small group of words or a phrase that describes your business.

If you were a consumer, trying to find a certain product or service, what words would you use in a search engine to find them? Sure if you were looking for a webdesigner, you could type in “webdesign” and you would get a whole lot of companies offering this service. But, what if you wanted someone that you could talk to face to face? Can we say “Tacoma webdesign”?

Keyword optimization is just that, taking the best words to describe your business, and making them work for your company specifically.   
   
So, now you have all of the “good” words to describe your company. What do you do with them?
Use them. Use them in the text content of your site, use them as alternate text to your images, but don’t over-do it. Then you need to get them crawled by search engines.

How?

There are several websites that allow you to submit your site to minor search engines, you can request links from other sites, you can find blog sites that are a common thesme and ask them to link to you, or even pay them to write about you.

Okay, so in our shopping cart system which uses asp.net, we run accross the silly little pop-up from IE that tells us that some things on the page aren’t secure. Rather than explaining to every single customer (about 13,000 visitors per day, I’d hate to be the one answering the phone) how to set their security preferences in IE to display mixed content, I wanted to devise a way to switch back to the non-secure area of the site, when not visiting pages that require security. We are using Able Commerce, but I am sure this could pertain to any number of systems, although some of the coding would no doubt change.

Okay so the left navigation menu, calls the links to the rest of the cart system from the database, it calls them by using:

response.write(objLNMenu.getHTML())
objLNMenu = nothing

So what I did was this:

‘response.write(objLNMenu.getHTML())
dim strLinkHTML as String
strLinkHTML =  objLNMenu.getHTML()
strLinkHTML = Replace(strLinkHTML, “/shop/”, objStore.StoreURL)
response.write(strLinkHTML)
objLNMenu = nothing

Which basically took the regular value of objLNMenu.getHTML() which would be: /shop/productpage.aspx for example and then used that value and replaced the /shop/ with the objStore.StoreURL, which is: http://www.yourdomian.com/shop/. Thus ending up with an absolute link of: http://www.yourdomain.com/shop/productpage.aspx. Which in turn being an absolute link, takes the user from the secure side (HTTPS://) into the non-secure (HTTP://).

That way if you do have a few images, or iframes or whatever that are called with an absolute link from your domain, or another domain, the user will never get the annoying pop-up message, and you will never get the ever annoying e-mail or phone call saying that your site is not secure, when in fact it is.

There aren’t a whole lot of bands out there that I enjoy seeing. With a few exceptions. The Atomic Outlaws always put on a good show. (They better, er uh, we better, since I am the guitarist)

Dr. Webbs has entered the building. I will use this to post tips and tricks that I have learned, and use in my daily web developer position and in my self employed business as a web designer.

I primarily use PHP and ASP.net along with standard HTML, CSS, and anything else I can find.

I use a little flash, a whole lot of MS SQL Sever and MySql.