Deverill

Do a search for "clear css footer" for sites like http://www.alistapart.com/articles/holygrail (section named #footer) that show how it works. I think that's all you're looking for.

Not The Bat! too! Is nothing sacred? Thanks for the head's up, Rob.

That is exactly what they are doing. If you did, they would get a boost in search engine rankings, however small, and someone may be tempted to go there. I can't believe enough people have this kind of script to make it worthwhile though.

HTML, the basic "language" of web pages, is a markup language. Since it is not a precisely descriptive language such as a desktop publishing program would use, you will get different pages on different browsers, computers, screen resolutions, etc. HTML can tell a browser to make something bold or to center it, but it does not choose the exact placement on the page. This is why different browsers are free to make things look slightly different. You will probably not see a day any time soon where the page looks exactly the same in different browsers unless it has a ton of work put into it and is fairly basic. Even graphics have different brightness on Mac versus PCs.

Yes, they are "mostly ignored" for search engine ranking, but several engines do use the description for the blurb a searcher sees, as JimE said. Also, as Rob said, even a little help is worth a few minutes to add them in. I wouldn't mess with any but the title, description and keywords ones though - the rest are fluff now. Edit: title is not a meta tag... duh.

It already has, they just didn't tell you.

There are, but you gotta pay. One they have been advertising on the radio a lot is enveloc.com

As Tim said, quite well, it's just another form of spam that doesn't really affect most of us and you're not really linked from them - they are tricking the logs. As for links to your site... there's really nothing you can do about it. There is no legal or technological way to stop someone from putting a link to your site on theirs if they chose to do so. Fortunately, the search engines know this and won't penalize you for it. If your friends see a link at another unsavory site just ask them why they were looking at I AM A SPAMMER.

My opinon: NAV is evil. Most AV's are evil for an experienced user though. (Disclaimer, I like AVG and use it. The big-names usually have posts in various forums about the problems they cause.) If virii are a possibility (for you or anyone else) I have had great success with stinger (google Stinger.exe). It looks for a lot of viruses but is small, fast, and often works when nothing else will for me anyway. Hope the lead you are onto pans out!

First, what Google reports to us as Page Rank may or may not be true info. It should only be used as a guideline at best and probably not then. PR comes from sites that link to you and their value. As Google changes their algorithms, everyone's numbers changes. As that happens, considering there are millions of pages out there the "recalculation" ebbs and flows and the site that gave you a PR3 may pick up or drop off when the pages that point to it are recalculated. Usually the fluxuations settle down when "every" site is recalculated, but it takes time and they may have a new algorithm by then.

Seriously, I installed Ubuntu, then Kubuntu, as a dual-boot on my main computer at home and the interface they have is just as easy to use as Windows is... it's just that you need to be a bit of a wiz if something needs something weird like special permissions or an ini file tweaked... then it's a bit hairy for a "user". It may be worth a look. Command line interfaces are a depreciated feature for the most part nowdays.

Welcome back evil twin brother! (or am I the evil one? I keep forgetting.) Good to have you back on the team!

Is the outgoing SMTP server where your account is at TCH? Are you sending immediately after checking incoming email? Sometimes if you check email and then send something it "remembers" your authentication.

As long as we continue to become "I want it all free... I deserve to have great programs and not pay for it" computing community you may be right. I use a lot of free programs, don't get me wrong, but if it's worth it then I'll pay for something I use. Too many others won't, sadly for the programmers who have less motivation to create excellence.

My $0.01 worth. I have never owned a mac but my department does support our marketing folks who use them (2 people). Take this as a balancing voice of reason, if you will. I'm not fanatical about them and haven't used them enough for it to be fair to slam them... Yes, they do crash occasionally. Usually it's very rare and has to do with a version X program trying to run on the just released version X+1 or it's a hardware problem like bad memory from a power spike. In our experience at work, the crashes are not often pretty but AppleCare is excellent to get it working again. Make sure you buy that support until you get the chance to learn it inside-out. They are fairly "resistant" to viruses and spyware. Being based on Unix is a good start. Not having everything including the kitchen sink tied to the OS is another, but I'm hearing that they are moving that way. The problem with MS is that everything is so integrated that when the music program is told to play an executable it passes it off to the OS which does us "a favor" by running it. Also, the browser is integrated into the OS so any bad websites could cause file deletions, etc. That is what I think is the main cause of most of our problems with MS systems. Mac's are more expensive for the same power. They do not have the vast array of software to choose from so consider that. I suspect the open-source community is smaller because the market share is but I'm not sure. I'm no expert, as I said, but I'm sure that for the average non-power home user either system will be fine. The biggest thing I see is whether your favorite recipe program or ammo reloading program will run and will you miss it if not. My last piece of advice - don't listen to anyone frothing at the mouth either for or against Macs... anyone that emotional about the mac vs pc issue is probably not going to be rational. Good luck with the search for info and the decision to buy. I'm sure others will comment here too. Edit: One more thing. The reason I didn't go Mac on my laptop when I bought it may be something for you to consider... Things I put on one computer will probably not be compatible on the other. That way-cool utility I downloaded or the program I have a license for that allows multiple installs - worthless for the other one.

Try the string "the bat" email which produces 1.9 million hits. Even narrowing it down from email about Batman by adding the string ritlabs (the creator) gives us 105K hits. You must have caught Google at a bad time or something. Take this for what it's worth, consider the source, your mileage may vary, etc. which is sufficiently vague as to have only limited value. I own the program and have been considering upgrading it even though I do everything on Gmail right now. It has some very nice features, especially (IMO) for multiple email accounts. The thing I like the most is that I can do a template so that if I am replying to email that was sent to my XYZ address, the reply can automatically have "Thank you for contacting XYZ" and the sig can be customized "Jim Sewell - XYZ Guru" and be something totally different when I'm replying to an email that came to another of my addresses. Cool stuff.

Thanks for the tip Robmonster! Every tool we can add to our arsenal against spam is a good one!

TotalChoice Hosting, as most of you know, has in the past put into place a policy to prevent automatic email forwarding to AOL because of the way they handle spam complaints. TCH is not the only company instituting such a policy to protect their customers. (University of Florida bans it as we do, Florida State University has issues with it, and a ton of other web hosts I'll not name here have blocked forwarding to AOL) Unfortunately, when someone at a place like TCH forwards emails to AOL and the AOL customer says "Report Spam", AOL assumes that the most recent sender, in this case TCH, is the spammer and adds one to a counter. When that counter gets to a magic number they block the server. It has been suggested by myself and other family members in the forums here that one way around this is to use a Gmail account as an intermediate step. Forward from here to Gmail then to AOL. Yesterday I was working on my Gmail filters and saw that the one set up to forward to AOL was marked as "this address had a problem" and was not working. This was done without notification and I had to open my filters to see any indication that my client wasn't getting his emails. Since he is running a business this scared me quite a bit. Fortunately it was only 2 messages that he didn't get and I forwarded them by hand. This does not directly affect anything here at TCH but since we had discussed using Gmail in the past I thought I'd mention it in case anyone else was using a third party to forward to AOL. I believe that this can, and eventually will, apply to ANY forwards to AOL no matter where they come from. If you're forwarding from any service to AOL check it out - you may not really be after all.

Definitely. The reason is stated in this question: "Can you afford to permanently lose X% of your potential customers?" The percentage varies depending on whom you ask, but it is growing.

Is the sun hot? Yes. I'm not convinced. I'm probably just not getting what is on your mind, but it is a fact that without your password or a faulty script no one can send email from your SMTP. As was said, it is easy to fake an email header sent from some other email server to appear to be from you@yourTCHdomain.com, but the headers will betray the forgery. Maybe if you just tell us what you are seeing as the issue we can help explain why it is. Edit: Forgot to say ... Welcome to the forums!

It's just a lesson to us to always do backups, be careful and always remember that there are bad people out there that want to hurt us for whatever reason. Other than that the Internet's a swell place

Remember if you give them backups of your databases then they may be able to read your Word Press passwords. I'm not sure if they are stored plain or encrypted but I use Coppermine for photos and they store passwords in the clear. Just something else to consider.

Thanks for the nice review, Steve. I think we all have had bad hosts before we came here - some worse than others. Now you're home and as family we are here to help in any way possible!

Congrats, Marie. It's like Forrest Gump meets Norman Bates

There is no doubt that you are correct, Bob. I would never advise anyone to use GDS unless they had a "computer literacy" level somewhat on par with my own. The average user should just step away from the download