Deverill

Bruce, What is the filter-activation score you have set for Spam Assassin? Did you leave it the default 5? I bumped mine to 4 and set it to add **SPAM** to the title just in case. I don't recall any false positives... every **SPAM** that gets into K9 is really spam.

Upgrade to XP? Seriously, when I had ME there were tons of problems and they are only going to get worse for you. I don't know any workaround for it thought. Edit: Duh, "though" it should have said!

I'm not sure it's the best route, but if you don't get a good answer here then try going to the Help Desk under Billing and ask there. There may be something they can work out and this place is definitely the best host I've ever seen so it's worth the effort. Would you feel safe using PayPal since the credit card info never gets this far - it stops at the PayPal system? It's not total anonymity but it may be enough to make you (your clients?) feel safe.

Gee, that's nice Robert, but it doesn't help Eric much now does it? (to all visitors, this is know as intra-family ribbing and it's done in jest.) Eric, I have used FP2002 and earlier, Netscape communicator, some off the wall ones you can download and Dreamweaver. If you are looking to do more than a simple 2-page hobby site (not that there is anything wrong with them!) and can dig up the cash, my money's on Macromedia's MX 2004 (or whatever's out after that when you buy). It's integrated with a lot of different tools including flash, a graphics program, dreamweaver which is really nice. The MX2004 has really handy CSS tools too which appeal to me. I've not used other products like GoLive so I can't compare them, but for me it my pick.

Check out a product named SpamBayes - it uses Bayesian filtering and snaps right in to Outlook. I use it at work but I don't get much spam there so I can't say how good it is. It is easy to use though. Hope it helps! Oh yeah, if you do end up with a proxy program, K9 is the best I've found.

I'm no email guru so I'm just throwing out what comes to mind, but I believe the email caches your password so if you come from the same IP with the same email account within so many seconds it knows it's you. Did you just check email with a client that had a password in place?

Check hotscripts.com for a javascript snippet. Javascript runs on the visitor's pc so it can do up-to-the-second updates. As Bruce said, PHP is interpreted by the server so you don't have the same flexibility.

There are many possible reasons for this. As Rob said, backlinks are a big deal for Google right now. Also important is the link of the text itself. If you have "Reiki Seichm" as the text of the link back to your site it will rate much higher than "visit www.whatever.com" would. Besides this, Google and Yahoo use different ranking methods so they won't be the same. Yahoo doesn't place as much emphasis on backlinks as Google does for instance. What's more is that the other guys may be using cloaking to show one page to Google with tons of ugly keywords and a different page to the normal visitor. Finally, Google has been acting strangely lately and one of it's problems is just what you mention. It could very well be just that Google's broken for awhile - they may have tried to wipe out one kind of spam but made another rank higher. With the complex algorithms they use it's bound to be easy to mess it up from time to time... we just hope the times are small.

Something I do that may be of interest to someone is this: 1. Set up filters for web, webmaster, postmaster to go to the trashcan. I don't use those addresses for anything and they are spam magnets anyway. 2. Set up the default email to go to my non-TCH email address. 3. When I go to a site that I have to give it an email address for ordering something or signing up, I'll use a descriptive name. For instance, if I go to sign up on the Miami Herald website I'll set my email to miamiherald@**** (substituting the real domain of course). Then, when I get junk mail about enlarging my mortgage or keeping my job from receeding I'll see that "Hey! They got my name from the Herald --- those evil ..." Then I have the option to just filter/block miamiherald and I'll never hear from anyone they sold my address to again. It is working great for me - I use Spam Assassin here, on my off-TCH email site and I use K9 on my home pc so my spam is almost nothing and I haven't seen a false hit yet - I'm about ready to delete instead of tag and segregate the emails it's working so well. Hope it helps someane!

You could try asking them to remove it but they probably won't. As Rob said, they can't hurt you in the Search Engines and, as a matter of fact, may inadvertently help you slightly. Google uses page rank. If the page the link is on has a high page rank it will transfer, in part, to your site because of the "vote of confidence." Since the sites are so different it may not be a huge bump but it may be a slight one. I understand how you would want them to stop but there really is no way to do it other than if they agree to a request from you to remove it unless you want to go into the realm of high priced lawyers and defamation of character stuff.

The techs here keep watch on everything happening and Head Guru is here about 20 hours a day - no exaggeration. They have a pretty fancy system of notification of problems too. For instance, if a SQl service goes down, or email or apache ..., their pager goes off alerting them to the problem as soon as it happens. The thing about power versus clients on a site is that TCH makes sure the load is kept low on the servers. This is basically how busy the system is and if it starts getting too busy they either move customers off or find out why and stop the problem. If it is a rogue script running wild they will suspend the client that has the problem and contact them to fix it. They do the same thing with spam - if someone is reported for spam they investigate and resolve the problem so the other clients on the same server never get blacklisted by the likes of AOL. I also am a forum moderator, not paid staff, and I've been here almost a year and have not had a second's problem. As mentioned, check out the server section of the forums and see the problems and fast resolutions that have cropped up but don't be surprised if some servers have no entries in the forums... they just don't go down that often. Moving is a harrowing experience, but you'll love it here!

Hey Scott! I hadn't heard that one yet and it is pretty bad because a lot of folks use DW templates. The meta description tag is at least important in that many engines/directories use that as the description of your site. Put your best face forward with it. I suspect it also plays in the keyword/relevance issues as well, but that's my guess. Thanks for the tip - timely as always! See ya around!

I think we are going to see more of Bill's posts starting off as closed Sarah, I'm sure it would be working from wherever you wish to work from. Bill doesn't have a cubicle farm (that I know of) and anything that can be done remotely here is done remotely. Get with him on IM... you never know what will happen!

Anytime TCH is hiring I'm interested, but for this job I'm way outclassed. I'm a great programmer and do pretty good web designs but I'm not a graphics type of person - too scientifically minded I guess.

It has more to do with bandwidth than number of domains. 50 domains like the one for my church are not high but 1 like Yahoo would be super-duper-ultra-high. It just depends on how popular they are.

I ran across this quote and remembered this thread and thought I'd throw it out there. It's from Jill Whelan whom some consider an SEO Expert. All I know is that she makes big bucks doing this stuff whether she knows her stuff or not. The program that was asked about was censored from the article out of a sense of fair-play. Again, it's just another opinion and there are a billion of them out there. Take it for what it's worth.

Nice site, Snipe! You're using phrases which is good. The title, for SEO purposes, could be more keyword heavy at the front. It's up to you if you want to go with aesthetics or squeeze every little bit of search engine rank you can out of it. Either works in the right situation. The white-on-white is risky. If the search engines detect that they may penalize you for spamming. You're much better off turning it into info that a visitor would be interested in and making it visible. Granted, using CSS may be safe for awhile but eventually the SE's will catch on or a competitor will report you - besides, let the folks in on some more great info and work in those words into the added content. If you bold them or make them header tags it may be worth more than just the plain text anyway. Best wishes on the sites! Animals are great but the people that help them are even greaterer.

Hi Ray, Nice site! For better page rank you may consider a few things. First, you have a lot of keywords. Thin it down to 2-3 keyword phrases that people will search on and it will help. You have a highly competitive field so try to narrow it down if you can. One way to do this is if you focus on local businesses to emphasise your city/state. Google's starting to put more tools out there for folks to find local businesses. Another thing you can do is to get links from other sites. This is a must to get a high rank on Google and some other sites. Read What Is The Importance Of Inbound Links? for some idea about this. Back links are very powerful and so far you don't seem to have any... I'm sure that will change

Hi Brent! For the best Search Engine effect, you should find a couple of keyword phrases that you thinks folks looking for your site would use and optimize for that. Although the title being your site name is correct, it won't help you in the search engines unless someone is looking for you by name and then they can just type your URL. In looking at your "keyword" meta tag I see that you have a bunch of terms. You would do much better to take the 2 or 3 phrases you think are best and use them. Maybe something like "German war caps" (I'm not up on your particular product so I don't know what people will be looking for.) You should also use those key phrases in strategic places such as <H1> (header) tags and throughout your text on your page. Also, read through the Website Promotion Tutorials.

Here's some stuff from Google's site about the submission thing... I trust this falls under fair use: "Google is a fully automated search engine, which employs robots known as 'spiders' to crawl the web on a monthly basis and find sites for inclusion in the Google index. Since this process does not involve human editors, it is NOT necessary to submit your site to Google in order to be included in our index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed are not manually submitted for inclusion." "The best way to ensure Google finds your site is for your page to be linked from lots of pages on other sites" "Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our terms of service." "We do not require submission nor do we penalize sites for 'over-submission'. You are free to submit as often as you wish. However, given the nature of our inclusion process, your time is better spent improving the content and links of your site. " As for automated submissions on Google - they don't currently delete you if you do this, but they are pretty explicit about hammering their servers with automated searches and I speculate, which I didn't make clear in my first post, that they may one day (soon?) decide to slam those who would try to spam via submission tools. At the very best it does nothing, why risk it? Those "terms subject to change without notice" provisions scare me sometimes.

Red Wings hockey team - it's a Meeshigan thing.

Keep in mind, though, that "poor design" is often in the eyes of the beholder. Nielson's useit.com might be great for a screen reader for the visually impaired but for me trying to find a specific category or piece of info it stinks. I certainly would not go there on a regular basis to find things, but that's my point of view and I know others disagree. There is the accessibility issue but also usability and that differs based on your audience, web site purpose, etc. A site about the latest graphics techniques for high end video games probably doesn't have to do a lot to accomodate the visually impaired because it just doesn't work that way. It's like Columbia House adding a section of their web page for the deaf - they sell CDs so the audience is very likely to be hearing people. CSS-P (Positional) is not as mature as I'd like it to be. I am using the built in CSS layout that Dreamweaver MX 2004 has to play with it but on the sites I do completely myself, until I get the hang of it, I'll probably use CSS for fonts, etc and tables for layout.

As Rob hinted, you are better off with links to your site from other sites that are already listed on many of the search engines. They send out programs called spiders that follow links and it is much more reliable and quicker than the submit button. I would not resubmit for at least 6 months and spend time building incoming links instead. Some places see it as spam, others drop you to the bottom of the list if you resubmit making it take longer than if you didn't. Personally, I would not resubmit for a year... in fact, I didn't when I set up all my pages. If you are hosted here make sure you sign up for the Add Me To The Family topic under this forum and have TCH list your site on their pages. They have good ranking and will get the search engines to you quicker than a submit would. In addition to that, many many experts will advise against automated search engine submission - in fact, the search engines themselves often tell you that. If Google knows you are being auto-submitted they will possibly even ban your site. Do it by hand and exercise every bit of patience you have - it takes awhile.

Kaula, I thought that too at first, but what Jack's asking for is the emails of a thread to be together but date-sorted within each thread. Clicking the date (on mine at least) breaks the threads and puts messages by date/time regardless of which thread they are a part of. Jack, I did look for answers to your questions when you posted originally but never found anything useful.

Sounds like you are in for some fun! You have a very powerful package there in MX 2004 but as you realize it comes with a lot of learning. Don't let that stop you though - the stuff you need does not need to come all at once. First, learn some basic level of HTML. You could do without it but you will do much better with it. You don't need to get awesome with it but it does help to be somewhat familiar when you start tweaking what DW produces. Fireworks has a lot of features. I use only very few of them on a regular basis. Focus on the features you will use for the web sites and learn the rest later as time or demand requires. PHP gives you a lot of ability but at first just learn about PHP includes (because they are powerful) and check out a few scripts for anything you may want to implement and go from there. Definitely learn it but don't put web design on hold because it's a nice added tool, not the base skill. I would stay away from frames because of search engine reasons. CSS is definitely the way things are going and anyone with a fairly modern browser can see it well. The really old browsers don't handle CSS well but how many folks have Netscape 4 and does it bother you if they don't see your site like you intended? If it's not a business and there's only 3% then who cares... if it is a business then maybe 1% of the "left behinds" might affect your decision. If you are doing more than 3 pages you should probably have a great idea of how you are going to organize your pages. If you can do that in your head then great (you're better than I am at that if you can) but if you need to write it down then do that. Don't start designing until you have an idea of what the page will look like and how it fits into the others. Then you won't have a crazy navigation system. Best wishes!