I was talking to Jason Isaksen on the phone today, and he made a really great suggestion.  His suggestion was, the free Affiliate File Cabinet application that we released a week or so ago should automatically open your web browser and go to the URLs stored in the app.

I thought this was a truly time saving addition, so I just put a new version on www.affiliatefilecabinet.com with the new feature implemented.

If you've already downloaded AFC, and entered your data in it, you can just install the new version over the old.  It won't affect your data at all.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008 2:14:22 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  web businesses

Well I joined Twitter today.  I'm reading quite a few blog entries recommending using social media in our internet marketing efforts. I'm not sure if it's valuable or not at this point. Your welcome to check out my Twitter account. I hope to find out what the fuss is all about. More to come.

Sunday, January 27, 2008 5:44:55 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  internet news

Domains are eligible for a refund for 5 days after their purchase.  Domain tasting is the practice of placing Google Adsense on the newly registered sites.

Google announced yesterday that it will begin blocking Adsense ads from the domains that are repeatedly refunded and repurchased.

Apparently the practice is endemic.  According to Wikipedia, "In April 2006, out of 35 million registrations, only a little more than 2 million were permanent or actually purchased. By February 2007, the CEO of Go Daddy reported that of 55.1 million domain names registered, 51.5 million were canceled and refunded just before the 5 day grace period expired and only 3.6 million domain names were actually kept."

We have to welcome cleaning up some of the spammy practices on the web.

Saturday, January 26, 2008 12:24:49 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  internet news

I received a Hallmark ecard today.  It was html & had links back to the hallmark site.  Everything looked real, except the link to get the card was an IP to card.exe. An obvious virus. One would think that large companies like this would track these people down.  It has to be destroying the online card business.

I know I very seldom click on these unless I absolutely know the sender, but many people must, or they wouldn't bother sending these things.

I'll take my greeting cars in the mail thank you.

Friday, January 25, 2008 1:42:13 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  internet news

We are releasing the beta of The Affiliate File Cabinet.  It's software to store the information you collect as an affiliate marketer.

You can store...

• Affiliate merchant information
• Website information
• Domain names
• Web hosting company information
• Domain registrar information

All the information will be in one place. Easy to find and use. It uses simple copy & paste to enter data. Best of all it will only take a few minutes to learn how to use The Affiliate File Cabinet.

Download it for free at: http://www.affiliatefilecabinet.com

Wednesday, January 23, 2008 8:27:27 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  internet news | web businesses

I ran across an article on web browser shortcuts this morning.  It contained some information that I found valuable.  It was at Coding Horror. It describes some shortcuts to use in your web browser.  Since this is the application most of us use more than any other, I thought I'd pass it on. It's not for the techies, they probably already know about them.

There are 5 shortcuts you may find useful.

1. The middle mouse button, aka the wheel, will open new tabs and close them when clicked.
2. You can navigate to the address bar with alt-d.
3. Navigate to the browser search box with ctrl-e.
4. Use alt-enter to open links in a new tab.

Along with these, I'd like to pass along some really handy windows shortcuts. I've run across a large number of folks who don't know about these. They are extremely useful.

1. Ctrl-x will cut selected text.
2. Ctrl-c will copy selected text.
3. Ctrl-v will paste text from a copy or cut, that is data in the windows clipboard, to a text box or document at the place your mouse cursor is.
 
RC

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 12:13:49 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  tips

Six months ago or so, I learned about Foxit from my son Dustin. I'm passing this along because I've found this program has lowered my frustration levels so much. We have all used the Adobe Reader to read pdf files. It loads slowly, prints poorly, and crashes often.

Check out Foxit! They have a free download at http://www.foxitsoftware.com.

Saturday, January 12, 2008 9:58:52 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  

Network Solutions has developed another way to ripoff internet users.  It's called "front running". It's the practice of registering a domain name when somebody does a search to see if it's available. It turns them into the exclusive holder of the domain so they can charge more for it.

They have changed the policy. Now they only front run the domain if the search is done on their home page. What a seedy company.

Thursday, January 10, 2008 1:25:16 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)      Comments [0]  internet news