Ever think it takes too long to boot up in Windows XP? Mike Wendland aptly notes:

One of the greatest frustrations in personal computing is waiting for the machine to boot up.

Fortunately, Mike also links to an ABC News article with a solution for How to Make Windows XP start faster. [original link to article removed because it was broken] Some good tips there.

Update 5/25/05: In the comments, reader and fellow blogger Jose alerted me that the original ABC news link has been removed. Neither of us could locate the original article. If anybody else can locate then please use the comments or trackback to update me and I’ll change it. Sort of makes the rest of this blog entry pointless without the story

The original link was located here (unlinked because it’s broken): http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/ZDM/story?id=525074

Update 5/26/05: Thanks to Jose’s spelunking, he has located what he believes is the correct article. It’s not the original one I linked to, but it will work. Thank you again, Jose, for unbreaking this post.

Making Windows XP Start Faster:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1768298,00.asp

Kevin Kelly explains, step-by-step how to get your book, CD or DVD listed on Amazon:

In 8 easy steps, here is how to get your book, CD, or DVD listed on the long tail of Amazon:

1. Get an ISBN (for a book), or a UPC (for a CD or DVD). For one book it costs $125, for one CD, $55, for one DVD, $89.
2. Get a bar code based on the ISBN or UPC. Costs $10, or may be included in UPC.
3. Sign up with Amazon, $30 per year.
4. Duplicate your stuff; include the bar code on the outside.
5. Ship two copies to Amazon
6. Send cover scan
7. Track sales
8. Register it (optional)

As for pricing he lays out that Amazon gets 55% of the original listed price that you set, and if they discount it then it comes out of their cut. A useful how-to for self-published authors of content who don’t want to be the shippers.

Shantu left the following comment regarding signing up for an AIM account:

HOW TO MAKE A FREE AOL EMAIL B’COZ I DON’T HAVE SO MUCH INFORMATION TO FILL IN THEIR SIGN-IN FORM?shantanu - 18 February ‘05 - 09:06

First of all, shantanu, usually located next to the A key is the “caps lock” please hit that. It’s considered yelling on the web when you type in ALL CAPS, and most certainly some will interpret this as being antisocial. Second, I’ve prepared a screenshot of the AIM new registration area at the top of this post with red numbers to explain each item required to register a new account:

1. Enter in a unique name between 3 and 16 letters and numbers, and it must begin with a letter (a-z)
2. This is your password, so be sure that it’s a secure one. Anybody who has this can get into your email. It must between 4 and 16 letters and numbers. I would recommend using at least 8 characters and mixing up the CaSe of the password as well
3. Re-type the password you just put in #2, for confirmation purposes
4. An existing email address you can be contacted at. If you have an ISP then you should have an email address that comes with that. If you have a web hosting account then you should have an email address that comes with that.
5. An optional display name that can be displayed when you sign in.
6. Enter the date you were born.
7. A CAPTCHA validation image. You just type whatever is shown in the picture. In this case the code would be “76J8X”, but this code changes with each page refresh. This is done to help insure that human beings and not bots are sent to register accounts.

After filling that info out, just hit submit and you should be ready to go, Shantanu.

While googling for some scripting help, I came across a set of pages that seemed strangely identical to some pages I regularly visit. Upon further examination, the contents were almost an exact duplication, even down to the layout. Only names and URLs were changed on the pages (to disguise the true owner of the content). The pirated authors content even included copyrighted code in his pages! 
 
I contacted the owner of original site, and inquired if he had any knowledge of this page. The owner stated that he had not given permission to anyone to copy the content that he himself had put together over a five year period. Also remarking that his content had been copyrighted. 
 
The owner asked me if I was interested in pursuing the matter. I accepted the task. I knew that copying content is wrong, but had no idea what rights a web author has to defend him/herself. It all began with a WHOIS of the domain. From there we were able to track down the ISP, web host, and contact information for the owner of the pirated pages.
 
The first thing we did was call the pirate (because thats what he is!). We left a voicemail message indicating we knew who he was, and wanted the copied content removed.  He did not call us back. So we emailed him, as well as contacted his ISP. The abuse contact at the ISP requested information from us such as the original page, the pirate page, and contact information for both sides. Because the information submitted to them was not complete, I decided to reasearch exactly what a copyright was, and what information was needed to persue the matter.
 
By reading articles on the web, I discovered that there are two different type of copyrights. Registered and unregistered. A registered copyright is simply a filled out form, and some electronic file version copies of part or all of your pages. Filing this form costs somehwere in the neighborhood of $300 - $350. An unregistered copyright costs nothing. The advantage of having a registered copyright are that you can get attorneys’ fees and statutory damages from the infringers. Either type of  copyright, allows you to pursue damages for lost profit.
 
These legal situations can be quite sticky. So if you place a complaint direct with the offending web host or ISP, they are sure to act quickly. They do this because they don’t want to get stuck in the middle of these battles, or worse, become liable themselves. What is important is the information you give them to persue the case. This is the reporting information required by the DMCA (The Digital Mellenium Copyright Act of 1998):

• A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive copyright that is allegedly infringed.
• Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works at a single online site are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works at that site.
• Identification of the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity and that is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled, and information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to locate the material.
• Information reasonably sufficient to permit the service provider to contact the complaining party, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an electronic mail address at which the complaining party may be contacted.
• A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
• A statement that the information in the notice is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
  (This list of information referenced from here)

If the page is not removed withing 24 hours, you can submit a claim direct with the copyright office, or you can get an attorney to help you. According to the law, you could pursue lost profits.

Less than 24 hours after we provided this information to the ISP, the offending pages were removed.

In discussion with a Script School student this morning we looked at the array_splice function and how useful it was when replacing items with checkboxes. It can remove the need to iterate through an array to replace individual items. See the example code below:

array_splice($file_contents, $key, 1, ” “);

The complete source code of the checkbox array_splice example demoed above. The code above would replace the contents of the $file_contents array at the index of $key with a space.

Linux users for reference:

tar zxvf filename.tar.gz

OR (2 steps):

gunzip filename.tar.gz
tar xvf filename.tar

Today I look forward to listening to the live scriptschool feed.

I have so many projects ongoing, none of them too big. I should probably make a list and prioritize them. I’ve noticed that a lot of projects seem to be related so it makes prioritizing a bit difficult. I guess it’s like the old question: “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” My main target goal is finishing up a bit of php code I have been stumbling on for about 2 weeks now. Let me back up a bit…

I began looking for some web code that I could learn that could improve our company intranet. Found some php code snippets online and figured out how to hack them. After wading through lots of code, I needed to learn this php ’stuff’. I came across Script School. Originally I wanted to learn how to read a directory, list the contents, and add the ability for a user to delete files from the directory using a checkbox type method. That was beyond my scope of coding. I never really coded before other than some basic html pages.

Once I began, I realized the vast capabilities of PHP, and began my tutorial process with the usual ‘hello world’ type stuff. After 11 weeks of studies, I am now able to create my own basic scripts, and I love coding and creating scripts!

I still haven’t received the code for the dynamic checkbox list down just yet, but I know I’m close. Odd thing is that I could not find anything like it on the web that wasn’t attached to a mySQL database. But I know this can be done. So if you are reading this and can code, maybe give it a look and give some pointers? http://www.timslan.com/scriptskewl/week10/checkbox.php  

In the future you are welcome to view, use, or borrow it :-). I guess I certainly have written more than I thought I would for entry number 2. I guess it’s not as difficult as I thought, and kind of mind settling.

Take away their sponsors or if (sigh) they are the sponsor, talk to their hosting company. That’s how to deal with link and ref spammers. Don’t know what ref spammers are? It is when a bunch of referrals from one site or a collection of sites appear in your referrer logs/stats that aren’t actually linking to your site, they are running hit bots which artificially hit your site from theirs to make it appear that you are actually receiving legitimate traffic from them when it was all just the work of a machine.

The humans behind the execution of these ref spam bots hope that by being listed in your ref logs that maybe you’ll either a) visit their site, or b) post your referrals somewhere on a webpage and they’ll get clickthrus or SE juice from that. Currently, this blog gets almost 100 ref spams a day. They typically look something like this:



Upon visiting those pages you’ll find no links anywhere to this blog. To effectively deal with these people then one needs to track them down and contact their sponsors and hosts. If you can get in touch with the webmaster/company first then you might try that, but they probably will just blow off any inquiry made by you directly or ask you to provide additional proof (you’ll need the access logs to provide the IP addresses of the ref spammer to do that).

Bottom line: follow the money trail.

The first source to use to do this is to conduct a WHOIS search on the domain(s) in question. I did that with 36busty.com and what do you know, they are using a protectfly.com, a “whois protection service” to mask their real identity. I wonder why they might want to do that? (not!). It wasn’t difficult, however, for me to determine who the site really belonged to by looking at their webmaster affiliate program. 

However, another valuable piece of information given in the WHOIS record is the name servers. This usually will tell you who the host is, which in this case is Webair.net. You can also (save time) try using the Netcraft toolbar and navigate to the site and get the website host information as shown below.



Web hosts cannot allow their clients to spam or they can get in trouble, so if you send a complaint to abuse @ their host dot com (you need to provide the raw access log information which you can acquire by talking with your host) you’ll be proactive in helping to prevent this activity from happening to another website/webmaster in the future.

The problem is that all of this takes time and most of us, though frustrated by being victimized, don’t want to take the time to hit these people where it really hurts, so the cycle just continues. It’s the same reason there is so much email spam. Companies pay spammers until they find out they are spamming and in some cases, some companies will continue to look the other way until the heat becomes too much to handle. 

The reality, as I’ve always suspected, is that it isn’t just about SEO. The ultimate goal is to get people to click through. For every click, the link spammer gets money. Sometimes as much as 1$ per click. And when he can send out 1-2 million blog comment spams in a night, he needs very little in terms of click-through to make a profit. A very, very large profit.

Of course it’s the click-thru, and unless the profit is removed from this model and the word gets out that they are in the hostile zone with your website, blog, etc then the cycle will continue. Unfortunately online there is no working equivalent of the ‘Do Not Call’ list for spammers. Zombie bots aside, it’s not as hard though, as some might think it is to track down the source of spam and actually do something about it.

New To MakeYouGoHmm.com
Thanks to TDavid, I will be doing some blogging here. I will not say my articles, tutorials or tidbits make everyone happy. I write about what I see while I’m working whether it is something on seo, affiliate systems or whatever. I know not everyone likes what they read, they don’t want to believe it or they don’t want others to know it.

Some may know me from forums. I don’t always use the same nick. But I do use the same picture…well most of the time.

^ me

My Experience
I started like anyone else. I built my first site in 1998 and became an affiliate to generate income off my website. Then over the past 7 years I continued to build websites and promote affiliate programs. In 2001 I began working on an affiliate system. In April of 2002 I launched my first affiliate program. So my overview is based on my experiences as an SEO, Affiliate System and Affiliate.
 
I understand HTML, PHP, Perl, java scripts, flash, and many other types of web related code and graphics. I have administrated several Unix and Windows based servers (MCSE). I work on over 300 websites. I have an Associates Degree in Computer Science from Sawyer College in Merrillville Indiana and a Bachelor in Fine Arts (Visual Communications) American InterContinental University - AIUonline.com

Some Of My Popular Blogs
So now that you know my experience a litte little more. Here are some of my most popular articles:

Experiences with SEO Friendly Affiliate Programs - This is an overview of problems I have run into while promoting SEO Friendly Affiliate Programs.

Domain Specific Affiliate Program Concerns - This explains how affiliates can lose money if they are promoting a Domain Specific affiliate program.

New Articles
For those interested in learning Search Engine Optimization. Some of my new articles are below:
Step 1 - Picking A Domain Name
Step 2 - Research Your Niche or Theme

More To Come and Questions
Hopefully you find some value in what I blog about here. If anyone has any questions, please post them in the comments, I will respond.

Decided to try out the service Bill Me Later recently and I was surprised by how easy it was to use. As of this writing, there’s 33 online retailers who accept Bill Me Later as a form of payment. The name sort of says it all, but instead of paying via credit card or online check, you’ll agree to pay the invoice later. It is a (very short, actually) credit application very similar to a credit card with minimum payments if you want to go that route or you can pay the whole thing off within a short period of time (20-30 days) and not face any finance charges.

To use Bill Me Later you just put in the last 4 of your Social Security Number, your name, and address and Bill Me Later makes a credit decision based on the purchase. The whole process takes a few seconds and a decision is returned. If it’s a yes, then the online retailer is paid and a Bill Me Later account is created. In my case about twenty minutes after the transaction which occured on a weeknight in the evening, I received a call to confirm that I had ordered something from the online retailer and wanted to pay via Bill Me Later (nice security, I like it!). I said yes, and about a week later the item arrived and my account was created and available via Bill Me Later. It appears that there are different “no payment necessary until ___ deals” like the ad below shows:



BTW, don’t get too excited about the computer ad demo from overstock.com above because the monitor is not included. I hate it when they sell computers this way! Show me exactly what I’m buying and nothing extra. This would be a killer deal with a 17″ flat screen monitor.

Anyway, be on the lookout for Bill Me Later, I’d put this as a company to watch in 2005, assuming like any other credit provider that they give credit to the right people and can maintain their solvency. Some people are very concerned about security and giving their credit card number out online and this provides a method to pay later without providing their credit card info. Grade: A