Wow, look at all the categories this one drops in to.

Just a quick note to let the loyal readership, all three of you, that I’ve decided to expand my company again and branch out from a single customer jeweler / web guy and hang out my developer shingle again..

Large Orange Pop is the name of my new internet marketing company and will be a sub division of SG Design Studio.. I’ll be offering internet market help, SEO, and web development as appropriate and needed.. While I have no real intention to stop “doing the jewelry thing” I find I miss the fun of helping build up a new business online and look forward to working 90 hours a week again.. Well, maybe not that last part so much..

I expect the marketing / SEO parts of this website to be absorbed in to LOP shortly, and hopefully this site will go back to being a little more fun with some geek stuff and generic weirdness..

I’m off to get my intravenous caffeine port hooked up -

Ok, so I may not be completely up to speed on all things Wordpress so a lot of people already know about and use this great title tool.. But I just discovered it and wanted to share the love a little more..

The SEO Title Tag plugin for Wordpress allows you to override the default titles for pages and posts, and allows you to have decent titles on your pages.. Best of all it can be used to strip the blog name from the individual posts and pages allowing for a much cleaner title..

SEO Title Tag for Wordpress

Tab Mix Plus

One of my biggest complaints with tabbed browsing in Firefox has been the inability to right click a tab and open it in a new browser.. Tab Mix solves this and several other issues for me..

Tab Mix Plus enhances Firefox’s tab browsing capabilities. It includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager with crash recovery that can save and restore combinations of opened tabs and windows.

Definitely a good add-on to add to FireFox.

With the recent release of Windows Vista a whole new world of potential, preinstalled, customers has been opened up.. The Vista sidebar gadget is an easy to install program that resides on the desktop and provides some small service to the user.. In some cases it may be a small program, an RSS feed, even an interface to a useful tool..

We decided to give it a run ourselves and hired the guys over at Gadget Spark to create an RSS feed gadget that pulls our Tip of the Day wedding and jewelry tips from bangles and brides.. So far we have been very happy with the results.. Since it was uploaded at the microsoft gadget site 24 hours ago we’ve had it downloaded and installed right at 200 times.. And it is driving traffic.. Our jewelry forums have seen more guests than ever.. Now if we can just convince them to sign up and join the community.. .. ..

Ok, so this really is funny.. Wil over at http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/ post this a couple days ago and I thought it was too funny not to share..

Let me start off by saying, yes, I know that the data collected by Alexa is only slightly better than useless for determining anything about ranking or positioning when it comes to Search Engine placement.. That said, there are a lot of people that use Alexa and it’s worth taking even a couple of minutes to verify and correct things listed there..

A couple weeks ago I got a call from the guys at ForTheWeb letting me know that they got a call from someone wanting to advertise on one of my websites.. Advertisers are cool, but why call my ISP, and how did they even get that number?? It seemed to me that hunting down an ISP and calling them when the contact info is right on the website was rather tedious.. Well, it turns out the guy uses the Alexa toolbar..

You can click on the info button on the Alexa toolbar and it will spit out names, addresses, and phone numbers for the website you are on.. The problem is that they scrape that info from the domain registration.. Which in many cases is your ISP, your registrar, out of date, or whatever.. The folks at Alexa, realizing that their semi worthless data is constantly made even more worthless with misleading data like this has also provided a way for you to update that info yourself.. It’s pretty straight forward actaully..

Head over to Alexa Site Information Editor and enter your URL.. Then upload the info.txt file they provide and let them crawl your site.. A few days later your site contact info should appear properly in the Alexa toolbar..

Is this going to have huge repurcussions on your website?? Probably not.. But it would have made it easier for at least one advertiser to get a hold of me.. And for that alone I think it’s worth the 5 mintues to check and update your sites in Alexa..

~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

or - Where is the line between the letter and the intent of the law?

PhilC over at SEO Forum threw a mini tantrum over at Web Pro World about getting so many “spam” emails from them and iEntry (WPW’s parent).. The thread, as many things over there do, got heated, closed, and then moved from public view.. But, out of curiosity I got invovled because several months ago I had added all iEntery addresses to my spam filter because I got tired of trying to stop the “Sponsor Updates”..

Within an hour of unblocking iEntry I got my first sponsor update.. It was probably just good luck on my part.. This led to a discussion at WPW with Mike about how they manage their mailing lists.. Apparently WPW is following the letter of the law when it comes to being removed from their mailing list.. You get removed one sponsor at a time.. Not from the whole list.. Does this make sense??

Here is the reasoning.. They seperate each advertiser into a seperate list (presumably) and as you “opt out” you are opted out for that sponsor only.. But all the others are still fair game since you didn’t opt out of that “other” sponsor.. All the rest are fair game and you keep right on getting email advertising long after you thought you had left the program.. Sucks doesn’t it??

So how did you get on this list to begin with?? I don’t recall ever seeing any mention of agreeing to be on their list when signing up for the forum.. You know why?? It’s not there.. It’s hidden.. The last pararaph of the confirmation email says “oh by the way - we are going to spam the crap out of you”.. No really, it does.. I don’t know about you, but I don’t read the signup emails when I sign up for a forum.. Like 99% of the world, I look for that link and click so I can join the forum and start posting.. Guess what, the team at iEntry knows this and takes advantage of you by doing it this way..

There are other ways to get on the list as well.. Sign up over at jayde.com to get a link and you are on the list.. It doesn’t say so when you sign up, but it is in the very small TOS.. Hidden well away so that you don’t opt out to begin with or not sign up at all..

So how do you get off?? Apparently there are 2 unsubscribe links in each email.. The first link opts out of that advertiser only, not the entire iEntry spam program.. But there is a second unsubscribe link further down the page that gets you out of the whole thing.. Again, placed where it is intentionally to decieve people into thinking that iEntry is doing a great job of managing their list, not playing fast and loose with the code of ethics most of us would like to observe when it comes to spam.. When you want off a list you hit unsubscribe.. You don’t hit every one on the page, and you most likely don’t read the small print, you click the first unsubscribe you come to.. Too bad it doesn’t do much good..

Is what ieNtry is doing Spam?? Legally, probably not.. But in my mind it is an incredibly deceitful way of doing things for that allmighty ad dollar.. I would have expected better from the team over there seeing how they are positioned in the industry.. Apparently I was mistaken, they appear to be just another batch of mercenary spammers with a jones for your email address and the money that brings them..

~Fey