Archive for the ‘Web’ Category
I have a couple of dear friends who have talked me into signing up for a bloggers service called Pay Per Post. How was I to know that you can actually get paid to blog. What an exciting concept. I am thrilled that they have accepted me into Pay Per Post. I think the idea is great as long as it does not denigrate the integrity of my blog. The idea of making money with my blog sounds really great as long as you, my readers know that occasionally it is a paid post and also know that I will never rant and rave about a product or service unless I feel they are worthwhile.
I have became rather excited and passionate about my blog and am thrilled that I am getting even more readers. I also have started to make new friends in the blogging world and have several blogs that I must read every day. I try to always tell the truth the way I see it. I am excited also about the opportunity to write and be paid for it as well. I believe I can balance wanting to make money – it will help with bills such as web hosting – while maintaining my line of balance with my blog. Hopefully this will help out financially. I sure could use it, being disabled and not able to work doesn’t leave much money left at the end of the month. Any how if you are a blogger and are interested in blog advertising you should check into Pay Per Post. There is a link on my sidebar to the right in the widgets you can follow to sign up yourself. But believe me I will not subjugate you to a steady diet of ads with no real meat to the postings.
Jimmy Wales, the founder of online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has announced the launch of a new open-source search engine, Wikia Search. The new search engine is Wikia Search. It went live two days ago on the seventh. The search engine will allow the community to help rank search results, in a model close to Wikipedia. However the company is a for-profit organization. This new search is supposed to challenge Google and Yahoo by offering a search service that is more transparent to end users, meaning they can see how search results are arrived at. It launched the day before yesterday and is available to use now. The search tool will take time to evolve, and the initial service won’t match the capabilities of the leading search engines. Contributors will have to develop the search platform over time the same way that Wikipedia was built up. If this goes as planned then the search results will be better targeted towards the information we seek rather than wading through tons of junk pages. Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Basically, if you consider one of the tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ?this page is good, this page sucks.? Computers are very good at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way – But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that.
Last week there was an interesting article in the L.A. Times about the cloak-and-daggerism of fighting online scams in Romania, summing it up like this: “The country is the top source of auction site scams. One company is trying to do something about it, with increasing collaboration from local law enforcement over recent years. Ebay has sent over equipment and a team to help the authorities combat this form of cyber crime, which is run with all the organization of an industrial-scale business.”
Danger lurks for Albena Spasova when she arrives in the small industrial center of Ramnicu Valcea, Romania. She is escorted by U.S. Secret Service agents on her trips to the town of Ramnicu Valcea. Her safety is at risk making the agents necessary. They always book her room and always make sure it is next to their room. She has spent weeks sometimes months going over case files with the local police.
If you didn’t know it Ramnicu Valcea would not seem to be the capital of anything. but this obscure town located in the Carpathian Mountains is the global center of an Internet and credit card fraud ring. And Albena Spasova is an accomplished online fraud buster. She has helped take down gangs of fraudsters all across Romania. She isn’t a law enforcement agent for any government but instead works directly for ebay the giant online auction house. Ebay won’t disclose any dollar figures but does admit that Romania is the number one source of professional fraud. Last year there was an Internet fraud ring busted in Chicago that had its roots in Pitesti, Romania. On a November 2006 visit to the Romanian capital, Bucharest, FBI Director Robert Mueller said the vast majority of Internet fraud committed on “one prominent U.S. online auction website is connected to Romania or Romanians.”
Fraud is a big problem for ebay as it has built its reputation on the feedback system to determine if a seller or bidder is reputable or not. The whole system depends upon buyers and sellers trusting one another. If this becomes broke the whole system will be broken. Ebay users are deluged by phishing emails almost daily. Any one of which if mistaken for a real ebay message can give the thiefs all the knowledge they need to hack your account and list things in your good name. You must be ever vigilant and never ever under any circumstances click on a link in an email that claims to be from ebay or paypal either one. These schemes don’t cost ebay anything but could potentially cost you a bundle. They tend to gravitate towards high ticket items like laptops and cars. But not always. Be careful. I have read about an auction winner being told to send the money to Romania via Western Union, A practice that should put up a huge red flag for you. If the auction states they take paypal and then want only Western Union Funds contact ebay immediately. If they want the funds sent to somewhere other than where the users location says you should also be very wary and contact ebay. It is a good idea to have a good password that is very hard to guess. A mixture of letters and numbers is great. Changing it regularly is also a very good idea.
As Publilius Syrus said, “He is most free from danger, who, even when safe, is on his guard”.
There is a new search engine on the block and it?s name is Spock. This search engine is for looking up people. Be it a famous person like an actor or major league ball player or something simple like your high school buddy or sweetheart.
Spock makes use tags for searching. They make up the way you search and how members can add to searches. Tags are simply bits of information about a person. If you wanted to add yourself to Spock then you could add your profession, your blog name, any awards you have, home town, etc. These identifying words are tags.
Another popular way of searching is to search by category. This could be helpful to bloggers looking for work. Try searching for on line advertising. You could also do searches for politicians. Either local or national politicians can be searched for and perhaps turn up things in their past or ways they have voted that will turn you against or for a certain candidate With the price of a vote being so terribly cheap you may want to keep a check on all your local representatives using Spock.
Spock is not a social engineering site like My Space etc they do have some capabilities like messaging. I was astonished to find me come up as the number one entry when I typed my name in the search box. Pretty eerie actually. But pretty cool at the same time. I also tried it out searching for Jessica Simpson and got the results. you see below.
This search engine can be used for many reasons. Yes you can find friends and catch up on the latest news about celebrities and politicians. You can also help yourself by joining, adding yourself and then add your blog, website, anything you may be doing on the internet be it selling, looking for work, etc.
Creating tables is relatively easy to do. But can become confusing especially when you want a background image in them. The proper way to create a table with a background is written like this:
<table
style=”background-image: url(http://www.your-site/your-image.jpg); width: 100%;”
border=”2″ cellpadding=”2″
cellspacing=”2″>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style=”text-align: center; vertical-align: middle;”></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Notice the way the backround image is written. this way will validate according to the W3 ( The World Wide Web Consortium). Now you can use the “background=http://www.yoursite.com/image.jpg” but this will not validate and is actually incorrect. Notice the width is set to 100%. This can also be set to a value determined by pixels, such as 700 pixels which would fit most screens. I prefer to use percentages as they will adjust to fit different size screens. You can also set the border, cell padding and cell spacing to any value you wish. These values are all in pixels.
Notice also that the td style is set to text align center and verticle align to middle. default if you are using Nvu would be “<td align=”undefined” valign=”undefined”>” which again will not validate. to be correct you need to set these values. This is where your table cell content will go, between the td tags:
<td style=”text-align: center; vertical-align: middle;”>This is where your text, images or another table (nested) will go.</td>
I hope this has helped you. If you are not sure of this or need more explanations let me know in the comments box and I will be glad to add more to this or another post to elaborate further.
There is a new search engine on the block and it’s name is Spock. This search engine is for looking up people. Be it a famous person like an actor or major league ball player or something simple like your high school buddy or sweetheart.
Spock makes use tags for searching. They make up the way you search and how members can add to searches. Tags are simply bits of information about a person. If you wanted to add yourself to Spock then you could add your profession, your blog name, any awards you have, home town, etc. These identifying words are tags.
Another popular way of searching is to search by category. This could be helpful to bloggers looking for work. Try searching for on line advertising. You could also do searches for politicians. Either local or national politicians can be searched for and perhaps turn up things in their past or ways they have voted that will turn you against or for a certain candidate With the price of a vote being so terribly cheap you may want to keep a check on all your local representatives using Spock.
Spock is not a social engineering site like My Space etc they do have some capabilities like messaging. I was astonished to find me come up as the number one entry when I typed my name in the search box. Pretty eerie actually. But pretty cool at the same time. You can add tags to the items in the search to help narrow down searches. You can become a member and that allows you to add and vote on tags, message other members and have your favorite searches come up when you sign in.
