Posts Tagged ‘code’
What is SSL (the little padlock)?
SSL (“Secured Socket Layer”) is a protocol used to encrypt the communication between the user’s browser and the web server. When SSL is active, a “little padlock” appears on the user’s browser, usually in the status line at the bottom (at the top for Mac/Safari users.)
This assures the user that sensitive data (such as credit card numbers) can’t be viewed by anyone “sniffing” the network connection (which is an increasing risk as more people use wireless networking).
Common web site owner questions about SSL:
How do I get the little padlock on my site?
To get the little padlock, your site must have an SSL Certificate from a Certificate Authority. Once an SSL Certificate has been purchased and installed, it provides three things:
Once obtained, the certificate must be installed on the web server by your web host. Since your web host also has to generate an initial cypher key to obtain the certificate, very often they will offer to handle the process of obtaining the certificate for you.
My web host has a “shared certificate” that I can use. Should I?
It’s still fairly common for small sites to use a shared certificate from the host. In this circumstance, when a page needs to be shown in secured mode, the user is actually sent to a domain owned by the web host, and then back to the originating domain afterwards.
A few years ago, when SSL Certificates were quite expensive (around $400 per year), this was real attractive for new sites just getting their feet wet in e-commerce. Today, with a number of perfectly functional SSL certificates available for under $100 (exclusive of installation, etc.), it is a lot less attractive. Since your user can look a the address line of his or her web browser and see that the site asking for the credit card number is not the site he or she thought they were on, the cost savings is probably not worth the risk of scaring off a sale.
What’s the difference between the expensive SSL Certificates and the inexpensive ones?
Usually, mostly price. Some expensive certificates have specific functions, like securing a number of different subdomains simultaneously (a “wildcard” certificate), but the effective differences between basic single site certificates are very slight, despite the wide range of prices:
The encryption mechanism used by all of them is the same, and most use the same key length (which is an indicator of the strength of the encryption) common to most browsers (128 bit).
Some of them (“chained root” certificates) are slightly more of a pain for your web host to install than others (“single root” certificates), but this is pretty much invisible to the site owner.
The amount of actual checking on the ownership of the domain varies wildly between vendors, with some (usually the more expensive) wanting significant documentation (like a D&B number), and others handling it with an automated phone call (“press #123 if you’ve just ordered a certificate”).
Some of them offer massive monetary guarantees as to their security (we’ll pay you oodles of dollars if someone cracks this code), but since it’s all the same encryption mechanism, if someone comes up with a crack, all e-commerce sites will be scrambling, and the odds of that vendor actually having enough cash to pay all of its customers their oodle is probably slim.
The fact is that you are buying the certificate to insure the safety of the user’s data, and to make the user confident that his or her data is secure. For the vast majority of users, simply having the little padlock show up is all they are looking for. There are exceptions (I have a client in the bank software business, and they feel that their customers (bank officers) are looking for a specific premier name on the SSL certificate, so are happy to continue using the expensive one), but most e-commerce customers do not pick their sellers based on who issued their SSL Certificates.
My advice is to buy the cheaper one.
I have an SSL certificate — why shouldn’t I serve all my pages in “Secured” mode?
Because SSL has an overhead — more data is sent with a page that is encrypted than a page that isn’t. This translates to your site appearing to run slower, particularly for users who are on dial-up or other slow connections. Since this also increases the total amount of data transfered by your site, if your web host charges by transfer volume (or has an overage fee, as most do), this can increase the size of your monthly hosting bill.
The server should go into secure mode when asking a user for financial or other sensitive data (which may well be “name, address and phone number”, with today’s risk of identity theft), and operate in normal mode otherwise.
Updates to this article, and many other great articles and tutorials for small business web site owners can be found at Insanely Great Sites!
Deck Building Basics
In my previous article, “planning for a new deck,” I outlined the steps for planning for a new deck. This article takes the process one step further. We’ll look at how to get started actually building your deck. By this time, I will assume that you have your building permit in hand, a good set of plans, and a materials list. If you don’t have a material list, simply take your plan to your nearest home center or building supply store and have them create one for you. Most lumber yards can actually arrange for delivery of all your materials at one time including all the nails and screws are you will need. This can be quite handy on large projects or if you don’t own a truck or a trailer. The lumber yard will bring all the parts and pieces you will need to build your new deck.
The first place to start, is to set some posts for your deck to rest on. Were I live in the Northeast, we have to deal with the frost and free cycle of winter. When I received my building permit, the code officer made sure to point out that all posts must be secured in country at least 36 inches below the surface of the ground. This will ensure that when the ground freezes the posts of the deck will not heave. Check with your local zoning office to find out what your specifications are for setting posts.
Renting a post hole digger makes setting the posts much easier, especially if you live in an area with a lot of playing or a lot of stone in your soil. I was able to dig a half a dozen holes in less than an hour. Digging the same number of holes my hand would’ve taken me at least half a day so the few dollars I spent on the post hole digger rental was well worth it.
Next, a port some stoning concrete makes into the holes and set the posts. My plan called for 4×4 posts. Your plans may be different. After the posts were in and let the concrete cure according to the directions on the package. I then nailed 2 x 2 joists to the side of the House and around the perimeter of the deck. I used metal choice hangers to hang all the internal joists. You can also tell nailed them but metal choice hangers are stronger and easier to use than trying to toenail large lumber.
There are lots of different types of taking you can use on top of your deck. I choose simple pressure treated lumber. To attach the deck boards to the joists you can use either nails or screws. If you use nails, make sure you use special spiral nails. These help prevent nails from popping. Deck screws are preferable as they are stronger but they are much more expensive than nails when laying out the decking, it is easier to let the deck boards run long and trim them down later once the entire deck surface is finished. When all the deck boards or laid, simply take a circular saw, and cut all the ends off the deck.
For a finished look, attach a skirt board to the exposed edges of the decking and over the rim joists. The last thing to do, if needed, would be to add railing, and or steps. However, these basics should get you started.
Dean Novosat is an avid do-it-yourselfer and remodeler. He writes for http://www.newsletterjournal.com, http://www.newsletterjournal.com, and http://www.newsletterjournal.com.
You MUST Sweat the Small Stuff
It’s The Little Things That Make or Break a Small Business
If you make a poor impression in small things, why should customers trust you with larger ones like buying your product regularly or giving you a big order? In the last two days, I’ve seen this simple fact proved three times.
I ordered software from Company A. It came with a 30-day trial period, after which I was to be charged for the purchase if I hadn’t returned the package. It’s now 44 days later and I’m still waiting to be charged for my purchase and receive the code to convert to the full version. I’m having to chase them to take my money.
Company B took an order from me in person, then failed to deliver the goods. When I called them, they remembered the order, but said they had “mislaid” my credit card details, so hadn’t shipped my order. No call to me to explain or get my credit card details. Just silence. Until I called to complain.
Now it may be only me, but in both cases I made a mental note not to do business with those companies again. Since they couldn’t handle basic administration, I have little confidence in their ability to do anything else well.
The Hallmark of Success
It’s nothing fancy. In fact, it’s just the opposite.
Successful businesses consistently do all the boring, fundamental, basic, necessary and unexciting little things unsuccessful people put off, ignore or do only when they have to.
It’s attention to details. Making sure regular customers are remembered and called by name. Keeping up to date with vital paperwork. Calling people to stay in touch, not just to push a new product. Giving helpful advice and not trying to turn every conversation into a sales pitch.
All the small things that turn a customer into a regular who will choose your business, even if you charge a little extra than the “big box” store down the road.
If you don’t sweat these every day, you might as well give up.
Are You Serious?
Small businesses don’t have a stranglehold on their market. You never have to buy from them because there’s no one else. Typically, they’re trying to make their way against flat-out competition from every angle, and you, the consumer, have all the choice in the world. If they screw up the basics, you have many other people to deal with.
Why buy from a small business?
Because they offer things the big stores find really hard: a tight focus on a single product area, with people who truly know their business inside out, not a green college kid trying to make a few bucks.
Because they aren’t always trying to sell you whatever the management in Idaho or Vancouver or Hong Kong has decided is the thing to push this month.
Because they remember your name and treat you like a human being, not just a “customer:” a walking credit card to be relieved of as much cash as possible in the shortest possible time.
Sure they don’t have a massive stock. Or the lowest prices. Or wall-to-wall TV advertising. But people buy from people, not faceless bureaucracies.
So What’s The Problem?
Why do many small businesses fall down on the vital small stuff?
I guess entrepreneurs aren’t much drawn to admin. They’re originally salespeople or inventors or marketers or dreamers. The admin is an unpleasant chore they do only when they must. But it matters. Lord, how it matters!
They say every disgruntled customer tells around 15 other people about their bad experience. Can your business handle that much negative publicity? If you really hate admin, or you’re more disorganized and memory-challenged than your Uncle Chaz who’s been hospitalized for twenty years, hire someone efficient to do it for you. Until you do, you’re wasting your hard work selling by losing customers as fast as you get them.
Here’s how it should be done. I called a small nature tour company recently with a query about one of their upcoming tours. Next morning I got an e-mail from their president. He explained he’s presently leading a tour to one of the remoter parts of Mexico, answered my query and apologized for not being able to call me in person.
That’s sweating the small stuff!
Guess who I’ll be doing business with in future
Your brand isn’t just your logo and color scheme. Nor your carefully crafted marketing message. It’s what everything you do says to potential customers about who you are and what it will be like to do business with you. And it’s usually the small things that speak loudest. Most people get the big things right, because they’re paying attention to them. Then they trip themselves up in some small area, giving an impression that’s quite different from their public face.
Which do people believe? Okay, you answer that one. I know which I think better shows the real person.
Adrian W. Savage writes for people who want help with the daily dilemmas they face at work. He has contributed more than 25 articles to leading British and American publications and has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and The Chicago Tribune.
You can find his blog on small business life at http://www.adriansavage.com.
Using QuickSub To Make It Easier For Your Visitors To Subscribe To Your Feed
You can make it easier for your visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed. With a free and easy to install javascript function you can add the http://www.methodize.org/quicksub/ (QuickSub) feed button to your webpage in just a few minutes. Let me show you just how easy it is.
QuickSub is a javascript mouseover function that produces a list of RSS feed readers that you can use to subscribe to your RSS news feed with one click. You can see it in action on my RSS resource site, just move the mouse over the subscribe link. You should see a list of RSS feed readers. If you click on one of the news reader links it will open up that RSS reader and add this feed to it. You will need the particular news reader installed on your computer for this to work. So for example if your visitor uses SharpReader as their RSS reader then they would click on the Sharpreader link and this would add your feed to your visitors RSS reader.
To use QuickSub on your site you will first need to download the javascript and CSS files from QuickSubs site. The file is compressed so you will need to unzip the file which will leave you with quicksub.css and quicksub.js as well as a sample html file.
Upload the CSS as javascript file to your server. Now you will need to add some code into your web pages. You will need to do this for all of the pages that you wish to use QuickSub on.
Please note that in these examples I have used square brackets instead of angled brackets.
First you need to copy some code to call the CSS file. Add this line with your head tags.
[style type="text/css"] @import “quicksub.css”; [/style]
Then copy this code into the body of your page.
[div id="quickSub" style="position:absolute; visibility:hidden; z-index:1000;" onMouseOut="return timeqs();" onMouseMove="return delayqs();"][/div] [script language="JavaScript" src="quicksub.js"][!-- quickSub (c) Jason Brome --][/script]
Then where you want to use QuickSub place this code in the body of your page.
[a href="http://www.sitename.com/rssfeed.xml" onmouseout="return timeqs();" onmouseover="return quicksub(this, 'http://www.sitename.com/rssfeed.xml');"]Your link text here[/a]
You just need to replace the path with the path to you RSS feed and enter you own link text. All is left now is to upload your modified page to your web server and the new QuickSub javascript will be active.
Allan is the webmaster at NewsNiche an RSS resource for webmasters. Learn how to use RSS to attract and retain visitors to your site.
Affiliate + Blogs = Money
I’ve been an affiliate for a long time, trying different ways and many different sites to make money. When I first started there were many things I didn’t know and it seemed like I was banging my head against the wall just to make a few dollars… and sometimes just a few cents… but over time I learned a few tips and tricks.
1. One website isn’t enough. When I first became an affiliate, I had one website; a site for women that featured recipes, articles, a shopping section, and more. I put affiliate ads on every page, but the shopping section was exclusively affiliate advertising. I spent more than a year submitting this site EVERYWHERE, constantly. I never made more than 20 dollars a month. To profit from affiliate advertising, you need many websites. Do you think having multiple sites is too much to maintain? Once you get them set up and get the hang of it, you will only spend a few hours a day on them, especially if you use BLOGS instead of the standard html sites, as mentioned below in the next tip.
2. BLOG! There are some advantages to having blogs and using them for your affilate advertising. You don’t have to know html. Blogging has been made so easy that you just click here, copy and paste there, and you’re done. Blogging can be FREE. Many sites such as blogger.com offer you a free blog. Blog articles get picked up VERY quickly at Google and other search engines, especially if you allow people to comment to your posts. If you get a blog, add to it every day, and put your affiliate advertising right into your article. The more blogs you have the better. I have a blog for coupons and savings, one for personal articles, one for news articles, one for just jewelry, one for coupons, one with a punk theme, one for poker, and one for internet chat logs, and I’m always trying to think of new blog ideas. They all link to each other and they all have affiliate advertising on them. In fact, my friends and I are working on building a blog empire!
3. One affiliate company isn’t enough. In the beginning I was only signed up at linkshare.com. Sure, I was an affiliate at 100s of online stores through LinkShare, but I didn’t realize how much I was limiting myself. You need to also sign up at Commission Junction (cj.com) and ShareaSale.com, and maybe one or two more. Many merchants only use one affiliate site. For instance, if you want to be a Macy’s affiliate you’ll need to be a member of Linkshare, but if you want commissions from Liz Clayborne, it’s Commision Junction you’ll need. Don’t limit yourself!
4. Coupons and Sales. Many merchants offer coupon and promotional codes to their affiliates. Look for them and take advantage of them. Advertise the sales, too! People love saving money! Have you ever shopped online and then at the checkout you saw a box for coupon or promo code? Did you then open another browser and go try to find a coupon code for that site? I’ve done that a few times, as many people have. If you have a blog article entitled “Perfume.com coupon code” and then list the code as an affiliate link in the article with “click here to redeem”, someone shopping at perfume.com WILL find it. When they see the box at the checkout for coupon code, many people will go to Google, type in “perfume.com coupon code,” and find your article listed near the top. Like I said earlier, blog articles get into the search engines very quickly. Of course, my coupon blog, percentsavings.com, is filled with nothing but coupon codes and sales from 100s of online stores, and it’s all affilate advertising.
5. Don’t just add a link. Tell a little about the store/company and what they offer. If they were proudly founded in 1930, say so! If your link goes to their apparel section but they also offer bedding and kitchenware and dog collars, say so in your post! When you become an affiliate, you become a salesman. If you want commissions, make the merchant sound great!
6. Submitting isn’t just for search engines. In addition to the search engines, submit your blog to forums sites that list blogs. Every incoming link helps, no matter where it is! For the sites that list blogs (bloggerinity.com, technorati.com, bloglines.com, etc.) you’ll be required to link back to them, but that’s a good thing! You should spend at least an hour a day just finding new places to submit to.
7. Consider Pay-Per-Click. Not to your site, but to the merchant’s site, with your affiliate link as the URL. For instance, I use Google AdWords to advertise single sites I’m affiliated with, or even single products. Because of the Terms of Service I agreed to, I can’t use the word “ZALES” as one of my keywords. But when I was notified by the affiliate company that ZALES was having a sale on children’s jewelry, and I was given an affiliate link that landed on the sale page, I started a Google pay-per-click ad for it. I used the URL they gave me as the landing page so that it would have my affiliate tracking link in it, but I used “Zales.com” as the URL that shows up in the results, so that when it’s clicked on in Google it goes to Zales but I still get a commission if they purchase. My search terms were Children’s Jewelry, and Children’s Jewelry Sale. I set it to 5 cents per click, and my entire Adwords campaign stops each day after I’ve spent $1. I kept this ad running for the duration of the sale. With the small number of clicks the ad got, I only spent about $6, but one purchase of an expensive item of jewelry gave me a commission of $34. Keep in mind, I’m using affiliate advertising, in this case, without ever having the link on any of my websites or blogs.
8. RSS. RSS feeds are becoming more and more popular. I subscribe to several blogs’ RSS feeds, myself. It’s just so much easier to get new articles to all my favorite blogs all in one place (I use Mozilla Thunderbird), and I know people who subscribe to RSS feeds appreciate seeing an RSS button on my site. It’s very easy to implement, too. Just add a link on your blog to “http://yourdomain.com/?feed=rss2″ and then anyone with an aggregator can subscribe to it. If you want to give them the option to subscribe to your blog’s comments as well, the url is “http://yourdomain.com/?feed=comments-rss2.” If you have a blog similar to my coupon site, RSS can really help you by sending your new items directly to a subscriber’s aggregator, without you having to do anything at all!
9. Email signatures. For your email signature, use links to all your sites that have affiliate advertising on them. Family, friends, clients… anyone can be enticed to click on your ads!
10. Don’t give up, and POST POST POST! It can become frustrating but NEVER give up! It takes time! Just keep working at it and you WILL start seeing some commissions eventually. My first blog was online for a few months and being added to daily before I started seeing commissions. Just be sure to post articles to your blogs constantly! Never miss a day!
Melody Ralls
http://percentsavings.com
