Why Wait Webs

Today, many people are simply reserved to the idea of receiving anywhere from 20 to 1000 spam email messages every day. Some deal with it by filtering their email to stop spam, but in my experience they will also lose at least some of their actual email as a result of this, even with the best filters. Others have simply given in, and spend a half hour or more every single day just hitting that delete button to get rid of their spam emails.

While it is very difficult, if not impossible, to get your email address off of these spam lists once you are on them, you can stop email spam for the most part by being careful with your email address from the beginning. If you have a new email address or an address that receives very little Spam, following these guidelines will help you keep it that way:

• Don’t make purchases from companies you do not trust. - Many companies build their lists by purchasing emails from other companies who have sold something to that individual.
• Stay far away from websites that offer free iPads or other up-scale electronics in exchange for your email address, recruitment, or signing up for offers. They are not always scams (although that often is the case), but they do make their money by selling your email address. This is the single fastest way to get signed up to literally hundreds of spam lists. If you absolutely must participate in one of these, I highly advise using a secondary or “throw-away” email address.
• Avoid signing up for free email newsletters, unless you are genuinely interested in the content. Some will tempt you with a free offer, and there is nothing wrong with that if you are interested, but sometimes they can be difficult to get back off.
• Do not list your email on any website. Ideally, use a web form, so that no one can find your email address from the site. But if you feel it is necessary to include an actual email address, you should use one separate from your normal work and use an image instead of text so that spam robots will not pick it up as quickly. I speak more on the details of this in How to Publish Your Email Address.

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Why Wait Webs indexed on first page of Google thanks to having search-engine friendly content.

We have all seen websites, books, and seminars dedicated to one of today’s hottest topics: search-engine optimization. There is a lot of information out there, a lot of it helpful, and a lot of it completely bogus or largely fluff. If you are new to the subject of SEO, the plethora of information available about writing content for search engines can be quite daunting.

Fortunately when it comes right down to it, one of the most consistent, tried and true methods of search engine optimization is simply writing search-engine friendly content, which is something anyone can do if they follow a couple very simple techniques. By the end of this short article, you should be able to write search-engine friendly content that will allow your website to get indexed by Google and the other search engines much more effectively.

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WordPress 2.7 recently came out. For those of you who don’t know, WordPress is the most popular blogging platform in the world, and deservedly so. It is highly customizable and extremely themeable. It’s coded with standard, valid XHTML and CSS. My only real complaint with WordPress is that they, like much of the web, chose to use XHTML instead of HTML when there’s no real reason for it. But that’s a topic for another day. As it stands, WordPress is still the best CMS I’ve ever used by far, and that’s why I use it on my own site and recommend it to all of my clients.

I am going to be upgrading this blog and, if all goes well, my clients’ blogs shortly thereafter. Normally I wouldn’t go to the trouble of updating, but this is a big one. Instead of the usual one or two obscure bug fixes, the WP team has completely redesigned the back-end, and from what I’ve seen they’ve done a really good job of turning a great blogging platform into a truly rich CMS (content management system).

Continue reading to find out what some of these great new features are, and for a video showcasing them!

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Apple, developer of Mac OS X

Ok, it’s true. I am a big fan of Apple products. I do most of my work on a 24 inch iMac, and I find myself using my iPhone constantly throughout the day. I like these products because I’ve tried the alternatives, and I have found that for me, these are by far the best solutions. However, even though I’m a fan of Macs, I would never condone a website that doesn’t support PCs. I believe that right now, there is no reason why EVERYTHING computers can do shouldn’t be done cross-platform. That means OS X, and even Linux.

You see, applications and websites that are built from the ground up with these smaller platforms in mind don’t take any extra effort. Supporting an extra 12% or so of the market is easy to do, but yet so few developers do it. I came across an excellent article today about why game developers should support Mac OS X and Linux. But the concept extends beyond just game developers. Software developers of any kind, including website developers, should take heed to this information. Continue reading to see why.

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A lot of people put their email address on their website, either as plain text, or as a link to their email address which will open the user’s default email client with the “To:” field automatically filled out. And why shouldn’t they? That’s what email addresses are for, right? To give to people who want to contact you. While this worked great several years ago, one thing has made this a very bad idea on the web today:

Spam.

Spam ruins everything, doesn’t it? These days, many spammers employ robots that crawl the web, going from site to site looking for email addresses to put on their list. These spambots are so prevalent now that putting your email address on the web for all to see is like sending an email to all the spammers that says “please send me all your offers!” But what are we supposed to do? Here are a few solutions that will allow people to email you with a greatly decreased risk of being placed on everyone and their brother’s spam list.

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