We traded in the Corvette a while back for a bigger truck.. The horse trailer and everything else were just killing my Dodge 1500, so we go this Ford F350 Dually with the turbo deisel.. Wonderful truck.. Plenty of power and very comfortable..

But there is never really enough power..

So I had the guys down at Byron’s hook me up with a new Superchips programmer.. (Part#: 1805) Three basic settings, economy, towing, and performance.. We got it mostly for the econo setting.. Current gas mileage isn’t bad, but 13.6mpg on nearly $3/gallon deisel gets old real fast.. Since I just picked up the truck this morning I don’t have any new numbers yet.. But, it’s set on performance right now anyway so I doubt I’ll see much improvement there..

What I have seen is a huge increase in power.. I didn’t think it would be this notciable.. But I can now stand on the gas at a stop sign and spin the tires.. And not just a little spin, and whole lot of smoke and rubber spin.. With a dually.. That’s about 32″ of ruber contacting the road and it will still bust them loose and go..

This should be fun..

~Fey

This may seem obvious to everyone, it may even be something that you think you do every single day, but probably the single most important thing you can do as a small business owner is communicate with your customers.. It seems so obvious but some many of us forget to do this basic thing..

Take this recent post on one of the jewelry forums:

Hi I ordered a custom (ring) from …. and last contact with him was Sept. 21 stating payment recieved will be in touch soon….It’s been almost a month now and I have sent a few emails to him with no response. Anyone have any ideas how I should proceed…all I want is an update with an estimation of completion…I feel funny to email him again I don’t want him to think I’m some kind of crazy stalker…hehehe….Just worried the ring won’t be here in time for my wedding which is Nov. 12.

All she wants is for someone to tell her that everything will be ok.. At this point she isn’t even all that upset and thinking that she is the one at fault.. But you can see the stress starting to build..

Even first contact with a potential client requires an immediate response, even if that response is “I’m really busy at the moment, I’ll get in touch with you tomorrow.”.. It really is that simple..

You will be amazed at how much easier it is to work with your customers by simply talking to them.. Even when you are having problems with a project, falling behind schedule, unforseen issues, whatever, avoiding your customer is the worst thing you can do.. In fact, by picking up the phone and calling your customer to explain the issue, and more importantly, how you are adressing that issue, you will find that the vast majority of them are understanding and willing to work with you to reach that resolution.. They issues too and will understand yours..

If I have one complaint about the new internet age, it’s the lack of communication.. Email is great, but there are so many sites these days that offer no other means of communication.. In the example above there is no phone number listed on the website, and no phone number provided to the customer when they begin the project.. Yes, constant phone calls from customers can interrupt your work day, but without those customers you won’t be doing much work..

~Fey

Blocking access to your website by banning ip addresses and ip ranges is becoming more and more of an issue as the spammers get more and more agressive, especially with blog spam.. Blocking a single ip address is pretty much a useless effort, but it is possible to block wide ranges of addresses with a simple command in your .htaccess file..

First, your .htaccess file for blocking IP addresses should be in the root of your web space.. If you don’t have one, or don’t know how to edit yours, check with your ISP.. Making a mistake in the .htaccess file can cause your website to be unreachable..

Once inside your htaccess file you need to add this simple code..


# Ban IP addresses
order allow,deny
deny from 192.0.0.0
allow from all


With this command we are telling the system to denay access to the ip address 192.0.0.0.. You can add as many lines as you want or new by simply adding more lines..


# Ban IP addresses
order allow,deny
deny from 192.0.0.0
deny from 292.0.0.0
allow from all


You can also block larger pools of ip addresses by dropping the last octet, or more, of numbers..


# Ban IP addresses
order allow,deny
deny from 192.0.0
allow from all


This would block all IPs from 192.0.0.0 to 192.0.0.255.. This can come in handy when trying to block huge regions that harbor spammers such as parts of Asia.. You can go one level deeper and block at 192.0 and block all addresses from 192.0.0.0 to 192.0.255.255.. That is a lot of adresses (over 65,000)..

Just remember not to block too large of a range.. You could wind up blocking potential customers.. And, just to make things even less fair, it’s not hard to proxy your ip address and get around this block anyway.. But it can be helpful in slowing down some of the less intelligent spammers out there..

~Fey