SLK Services Web Design, Hosting, & Internet Business Tools

Have you received a letter indicating that your Domain Name “search engine” registration is about to expire?  And they’re asking you to pay as much as $119 for 2 yrs?   It’s a scam.

First of all, you should know who your website is hosted with and can verify through them the validity of this letter. If you don’t know where your domain is registered, you can look it up using whois.net, just type in your domain and click Go.

Secondly, there is no such thing as a “Search Engine Registration.” You can submit your website to many different search engines, but once you do so, it never expires.

For more detailed information about this scam, visit ucan.org (Utility Consumers’ Action Network).

Okay, this isn’t new, but since I recently upgraded to Vista and had to reinstall MSOffice, and had to research it again, I thought I would share it.

There’s still a lot of people that either really like the older versions of MS Office or they can’t afford to upgrade.  Well most of you that use Office have noticed that the new file formats have an additional “x” on the file name: document.docx

There’s a simple solution to this, download the fileformatconverters.exe from Microsoft, it installs easily and then you can open the new .docx files with your older MS Office program.

Here’s the link to download direct from Microsoft.

The following Google Shortcuts will significantly improve your search abilities and improve your results with greater efficiency.

Conversions - 1 foot in yards or 50 celsius in fahrenheit
Define - define:optimization
Math - 10+10 or 10-5 or 10*10 or 100/10 or 10% of 100
Find a phone number - phonebook:Google CA
Find business phone numbers - bphonebook:SLK Services El Cajon
Find residential phone numbers - rphonebook:John Doe San Diego CA
Search for showtimes - movie:star trek 92020
Get a stock quote - stocks:goog
Get local weather - weather:92020
Search book text - book: SEO for Dummies
Search within a number/price range - 1967 chevy malibu $500…$1000
Search within specific date range - ddmmyy) - san diego news daterange:200508-200510
Search only one website  - site:www.slkservices.com “seo”
Exclude adult content - safesearch:breast cancer
Find linked pages - link:www.007websolutions.com
Find info about a page - info:www.slkservices.com
Find related pages - related:www.slkservices.com
View cached page - cache:google.com
Restrict search to specific filetype - us constitution  filetype:pdf
Search for keywords in page title - allintitle:”seo” san diego
Restrict search to page URLs - inurl:services
Specific domain search - site:.edu, site:.gov, site:.org, etc.
Restrict search to country - site:.us “new york”
Search for keyword in body text - intext:optimization
Return pages with all words specified in body text - allintext:search engine

Do you know how most spam gets to your inbox?  It is sent using an unsuspecting user’s email account.  Their computer has been taken over by a malware, trojan or virus that gives the spammers full access to their information and computer resources.

You can identify the source of the email by viewing the headers.  The key is to find the true email listed in the “Received from” code.  In the example below of a spam message, it falsely states that it came from “Mr.Alex Martinez.” <marcelolotteriaespanol@aiesec.net>, but the reply goes to mrjesuscarlosdept2610@hotmail.com, and if you look even closer to the headers in the “Received from”  it actually came from “authenticated user name@aiesec.net (I removed the actual name for privacy of the victim).

In this case, I will inform both the victim that their email account is being used for spamming and that their computer may be infected with malware/spyware/virus, as well as sending a copy of these headers to abuse@hotmail.com since the true return address is a hotmail account used for receiving the spam response. Read the rest of this entry »

“I don’t like my job.” “The cube walls are closing in.” “I’m walking out of this job right now.” “I need to get out of here!” You know you’ve thought it at one point or another, and suddenly, the life of a free-spirited, self-made freelancer sounds all the more appealing. Before you rush and type your resignation letter, there are a few things that you will have to consider. Pamela Slim, a former corporate manager turned entrepreneur and author of the book Escape From Cubicle Nation, weighs in with 10 important questions you need to ask yourself before you make the jump.

I wish there were a secret formula to ensure that the freelance business you have been madly working on is going to generate enough income to compensate for your current salary as an employee, if not much more. Unfortunately, there are many, many factors that go into determining business success.

To get some insight into your readiness to say goodbye to your day job, read over this checklist and see how prepared you feel. Read the rest of this entry »

Once PHPList is configured correctly, it is a fantastic tool for email campaigns. Below are some notes from my own experience in setting up a 19,000+ name, email campaign.

Setting the batch size and send rate to prevent server errors.

Most servers have a very low email per hour (or per day) limit.  My server, Hostdime, has a 350/hr max, GoDaddy has a 500/day max (on a shared hosting account).   You should not use the max limit because this will prevent any other emails from being sent during that time-frame.

The default PHPList installation doesn’t limit the batch size or send rate.  You must make these changes prior to sending a message or you will crash your server and have to contact support to stop the process (and you may lose any email ability for that time period).

After you’ve gone through the installation and setup process, you will need to modify the config.php file.  Look for the following and max changes - carefully!

# define the amount of emails you want to send per period. If 0, batch processing
# is disabled and messages are sent out as fast as possible
define(“MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE”,0);

# define the length of one batch processing period, in seconds (3600 is an hour)
define(“MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD”,3600);

I found that sending a smaller batch size more often worked best for not putting lag on the server (it WILL affect your website if it is hosted on the same account).   I set my batch size to 40 and the send rate to 60, thus sending 40 emails every 10 minutes, totalling 240/hr.  This left 110 emails per hour for other purposes (auto responses, sign-up notifications, normal emails, etc.).

Here is a sample of the update I received in my email after I started the message process queue:

[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] Started
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] Sending in batches of 40 emails
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] Sent in last run: 40
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] Skipped in last run: 0
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] Processing has started, 1 message(s)
to process.
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] Please leave this window open. You
have batch processing enabled, so it will reload several times to send the
messages. Reports will be sent by email to yourname@yourdomain.com
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] Processing message 8
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] Looking for users
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] Found them: 12080 to process
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] batch limit reached: 40 (40)
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] Script stage: 5
[Mon 8 Jun 2009 11:10] [75.33.200.235] 40 messages sent in 27.91 seconds
(5159 msgs/hr)

These settings have allowed my server to continue sending emails, uninterrupted, until all emails were sent.

For more information about setting the send speed or other PHPList help, visit this website: http://docs.phplist.com/PhpListConfigSendRate.

Well, I struggled with using my company name as a domain name and it’s just not doing very well since it has nothing to do with my business:  slk services… what the heck is that?  So I came up with a new domain name: 007websolutions.com. Now, it’s time to work on that seo again.

I didn’t want to get cute with the name, but you try to find a “websolutions” domain that isn’t already taken!  So, there it is.  This website will slowly evolve into more of a blog and information website and my new website will be focused on… you guessed it… Web Solutions!

First, I must point out how wonderful my hosting company (Hostdime) is!  They responded to me within a few minutes of submitting my trouble ticket and had the issue resolved!  I regret spending an hour searching the net and trying to fix the issue myself, Hostdime customer service is excellent!

Here’s the fix that worked for my administrator login on a Joomla 1.5 build:

The following value in my configuration.php file was set to ‘1′ forcing SSL:

var $force_ssl = ‘0′;

Since this account does not have a SSL installed *yet* I cannot force it to use SSL as it will fail.

The odd thing is, I was able to use the site during most of the development before the error occurred.

Hope this helps someone out there in Joomla land.

I’m fairly new to the Twitter community, but in a relatively short time, I’ve come to realize the huge potential benefits of such a simple communication tool.

I’ve been sitting in on trainings held by Patti Serrano @iPatti with the eClubUniversity.com. Patti has been involved with Twitter from its inception and has added this tool to her entrepreneurial toolbox, along with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Blogging.

Learning how to use hash tags (#keyword) that can then be used to search for tweets with the same hash tags is just one of the many ways you can utilize this tool. Don’t just try to follow anyone and everyone you can find, make an effort to find people that post relevant information to your business and would be consider a “mover and shaker” in the industry.

If you’re at all curious about Twitter, just sign up at twitter.com and try it.

You can follow me @iSeanKlope