Deverill

I got mine today - it's legitimate folks - no tricks, they just ask for an email address. Pretty cool thing to do of them!

Glad you're safe, Curtis! For those who have never been "behind" a hurricane, it's going to be very uncomfortable for awhile and with the intensity and size of Katrina it may be a long while. Imagine no power, drinkable tap water, a/c, the fridge is full of melting food, no electric stoves or lights or motor cars, not a single luxury.... no wait, that's on tv. It's worse in real life cuz we don't have coconut radios and bicycle generators. Then there's the bugs and critters running from the waters, smells you never had before, and on and on and on. Curtis, I hope only the best for you and that you will have as easy a time of it as possible. Let us know how you are from time to time as you can.

It's ok to hope for it but don't count on it. Make sure you are prepared and safe, Curtis.

I would say that the single best thing you can do to get a start on SEO is to have your information arranged so one complete topic is together. If you have a topic spread over 50 pages then you can't hope to do well. If it is on 3 concise pages about mostly just that topic then you got a good start. The other thing is to have a lot of content written up before talking to an expert/agency. If you come and say "I want this optimized" and there is no meat to the site then they'll just shake their heads and say "Uh, right." However, if you have a lot of content organized into groups then they have something to work with. That's my 2 cents worth and without seeing your site so don't think I'm implying that you are or are not doing any of these things

Looks good. I just downloaded it onto my Ubuntu Linux and it worked right "out of the box". Finally a WYSIWYG that seems decent and free. Thanks for the link!

Wow, it's closer that I thought it would be. I placed my vote for a fellow mod and was surprised by the closeness, but with so few votes I guess that's to be expected. Come on folks, surely you have an opinion - everyone does - let's hear who you think has done the best job this month! These guys I am pleased to share the title of "Moderator" with all do a great job so let's make it a hotly contested race instead of "Yeah, you got 30 votes - congratulations"

Nah, it's a low-end Toyota offering starting, I think, with the 2000 model. Runs on gas and is an economy model so to speak. It got a bit dicey at one point when the water was over the hood. I should have traveled about 50 feet in the time it took me to move 5 - I think the transmission was slipping but the thing worked great after it had a minute to dry out (while driving). Folks, do not try this at home! I have a partially disabled mom at home I needed to check on or I would have never done this. People have lost their lives in places where the depth is unknown and they get down under the water and drown. In Key West there are no hills or valleys to trap water so it's very obvious how deep things are. Even in Miami last year they had people die because they thought they were turning onto a street and it ended up being a canal. Thanks for the well wishes folks! Let's direct them Steve's way and hope he can avoid a second helping of hurricane Katrina.

You're right in that the others have them and people probably don't use them much. I just see Google trying to be the web version of Microsoft Windows - sold on every PC and along with Office can do anything you ever wanted to do (so they say). I invision Google in another 3-5 years, unless they blow up or something, being the tool everyone uses. Just look at their Desktop product, it incorporates gmail, local mail such as outlook, RSS news feeds, Stock ticker stuff, weather, and the search which in itself is a "hyper application" that does the web, local files, emails, etc. I just see this as the first view of yet another "plugin" to their "Complete Experience" product. As for open source, it makes it really hard to advertise if they do it that way.

I predict Google Talk will get an initial Gee Whiz boost out of the door but will fall off soon after. The thing is that everyone has to get all their buddies to download it and redo the buddy lists and stuff and right now there's little incentive. Skype rules voice at this time and many ppl prefer typing so until Google can answer the question "If I don't want voice, why should I switch?" question they will be struggling. That said, I don't think it will take long to get the bells and whistles going. Looking at Google's past I'd say they are finding ways to incorporate search, desktop, email, weather, and a bazillion other things into the IM client so it's a one-stop shop for the services people are using.

All is pretty much in one piece here. The power is out in about half of the keys but not at my island thankfully. There were many blown-down trees but I've not heard any reports of houses smashed or people killed. The worst problem was the rain. It just fell and fell and fell... I had to go to work (in Key West proper - 17 miles from my house) and the fun started about 8:30 AM and by noon when I decided to try to go home the water was everywhere. By the way, my little car rocks! I have a 5 year old Toyota Echo and at one time I ended up in water that was over the hood for almost 50 feet and the poor little thing brought me through it! There were several times I know the engine was partially covered and it just kept going like a Timex watch. I love my little car! Today there's a nice breeze and clouds so it's cool for those poor folks that have no power. It's a small thing but after the nasty heat/humidity of Hurricane Georges I can assure you it's a big thing when it happens to you. The heat just sucks your soul out when it's like that and there is no relief. Steve, take care of your property but most importantly yourself! Stay safe and don't take anything for granted. The path looks like New Orleans (poor folks) but as we have seen already, it can do crazy things and hit totally careless, er, I mean, unsuspecting people.

A thought just came to mind. Let's say I signed up for xyz@gmail.com before and loaded gtalk today. When I created it I don't recall an option for an alias - it asked for my google account which is my email name. Now, if I say out here in a public forum to contact me at XYZ via Gtalk then have I just given my email to clever spammers? Not a good thing. Oh well, just a thought. Having all our eggs in one basket could be a bit risky.

For those who can't get to it at work, here's a mini-review you may be able to see. www.downloadsquad.com/2005/08/23/googe-talk-review/1

If the old and new sites are identical then there will be no effect on the search engine spiders or rank. The search engine spiders will know they are at whatever your domain name is but they won't know which one they are hitting, whether it is the old location or the new.

Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_farm) has a definition of link farm that may clear it up a bit for you. In essence, you'd have to have far more links to be considered a link farm... yours is more of a "link flower box" No more links than you have and the fact that they are all related somewhat makes it a non-issue for search engines. Just look at a lot of the links pages for other sites... there are normally 10-30 (my best guess) links in a "Other web sites to visit" kind of page. No, you're fine with your page as it is.

... and you are correct, but you can, for a small fee, make PC to landline calls to people who are not signed up with Skype. I could call, for example, the local pizza delivery guys for $0.02/minute (I think) and they don't have to even know what Skype is. Not so, apparently, with the google thing... at least until they get their infrastructure worked out and then it may be an offering they make.

Not the one I read I had read an article before this post and didn't follow Abinidi's link. I just saw another article that says: Hey Mom, I want to talk to you for free so sign up for this great new service from Google so they can make more money from advertising to us as we talk. hmmm. Google certainly is building an empire though. I just realized today that if you put into Google Search "weather key west, fl" the top section has a little 4 day forecast and a summary of current conditions on the left - and that's exactly what the desktop shows in their weather block. These guys do seem to have a good planning team and are implementing it pretty well. It will be interesting to see where it ends up.

My understanding, and it may be incorrect, is that Google is going to do an IM such as MS Instant Messenger, AOL's AIM, Yahoo IM, etc. It's not the same thing as Skype which is voice over IP. They seem to be trying to create all the tools necessary to have everything that Yahoo!, AOL, MSN, etc have only better and then combine that with the popularity of Google so they can be THE place everyone goes for everything. By the way, if you ignore those fearful of the evil side of the desktop tool, it's pretty neat.. it brings in news, email (Outlook and Gmail in my case), weather, stocks, sticky notes, etc. and seems to be designed for additional plug ins. I've not looked at it much but it's pretty cool to have everything in one place. My boss asked me about an old email he sent me months ago and I went to the search box, entered the topic and *POOF* here was a Google search engine-looking results page with all the emails and files from the hard drive relating to that term. If they can address the privacy concerns I think they have a real shot at blowing the other guys out of the water.

I just thought of another alternative and mention it more for folks reading this months down the road as you seem to have a solution you like. Dreamweaver from MacroMedia has a feature where you can take an image of a website (screenshot) and it will fade it out and make a backdrop of the image. Then you can design your site "on-top" of the image. It's like tracing an original drawing - not original in itself and you may have copyright issues but it is an option.

Welcome Jack! I have photo galleries on my sites. I use the free program Coppermine but it's not trivial to install. There are tons of them out there though so you'll find something suitable.

Bob, you are absolutely right in that Joe Scum sitting out in Internet world won't be able to see my desktop computer while I'm on. He could, however, infect me with a backdoor (bridging software) through which he can issue commands or a worm that will pounce on my work system the next time I hook up.

Way to go BillH! Grats! I hope for only the best for Michelle too.

We use VPN at work and I have it here. What happens in our case, and I'm by no means an expert so I don't know if it is in every setup, is that I am hooked to the internet just like any DSL subscriber in my town. At work our entire network is set up on the private IP addresses beginning with 10.10 so they don't map to the outside world. When I want to hook up to a computer at work I start up VPN and it creates a "tunnel" back to our network and does the ip tronslations and everything through, for lack of a better term, a gateway. I can still get garbage from the internet via DSL. I can still transfer virus infested files to my work computer. And when I activate VPN, the scumware on my machine will say "Hey, there's a new computer on the network - 10.10.20.32 - let's go visit it." So in all I'd say your coworkers are not correct just based on observation of how ours works.

Welcome, Fred!

Without prior contractual agreement then it falls under "Caveat emptor" or "let the buyer beware". It is underhanded if she won't give up the domain name in good faith, but there is nothing illegal about it. The onus is on the buyer to make sure that they are indeed buying everything needed/desired. My workplace hired some programming out without consulting my, the IT, department and ended up with a $15,000 piece of software that barely works and when they came to us and we said "Ok, we can fix it, where's the source code?" we heard the crickets chirping. At that point we were like "Step away from the program" - we can't fix it without the sources. They blew the money and unfortunately, Mike's friend may have lost the domain name desired.

Welcome Karim! Kevin's more of a tech support guy so I guess he'd be working "behind the scenes" on the helpdesk and other things more than hanging here in the forums... that is what we mods are for Listey, don't give up. If there's nothing now there will be - TCH is growing so fast that it's mind boggling how many staff have been added since I started here. I guess doing it the right way does pay off in the end! Way to go HeadGuru!