I wrote a blog article last year about online allegations that were being made against Yelp. Recently I read an article in the Huff Post that reported that:

“Two law firms, Beck & Lee from Miami and The Weston Firm in San Diego, have filed a class action lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court alleging unfair business practices by local business review and rating website operator Yelp.”

Read the full article from TechCrunch.com

Sometimes clients see things in a certain way in their browsers that I’m unable to see. Often the fastest way to clear up the confusion, is for them to send me a screenshot. Send a screenshot of something on the web is easy to do once you know the steps.

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I often have people contact me who are in various stages of breaking up with their current web designers. Sometimes the termination is friendly, sometimes it’s not. Here’s what you should know BEFORE you attempt to fire, or otherwise end your working relationship with your web designer.

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Many of my readers may be familiar with a very popular article I wrote in May of 2008 about the then new Washington State Destination Based Sales Tax. Today I received news from one of my readers that alerted me to a new development: SB5113.

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A client of mine just received a cold call from a Washington SEO company, who offered a free website review to see if his website “would be negatively impacted by an upcoming Google Platform Change”. Scary huh?

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I learned of a new feature in PayPal today by complete accident. I normally login and move money from my PayPal business account to my business checking account. A few days ago, I forgot I logged in, and this morning noticed funds had moved out. When I called PayPal, they confirmed that indeed it was me (embarrassing), but they told me that PayPal has an auto-sweep feature that would do this. They enabled it on my account so it shows up under the Financial section of my Profile. I never knew PayPal had this ability, and wanted to share my belated discovery!

Whenever one of my clients has a good or bad experience with a website marketing company, I make sure to post these experience here in my blog. A client notified me of problems with a company I had never heard of before, “zipweb.com”.

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All of us hate spam, those unsolicited emails we get from individuals or businesses who want something from us. But if you get spam from someone who is using a professional service, like MyEmma or Constant Contact, there’s something you can do about it.

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I was contacted recently by WebHostingSearch.com and asked if I would be interviewed about my hosting company. Loving DreamHost.com like I do, I said “of course!” and you can go here to read my interview  on DreamHost, my favorite hosting company.

If you’ve gotten an email with the subject “Compensation Notification (Read Attachment)” – do NOT open the attachment – this is a known scam and you should immediately delete the email.

The email looks like this:

Subject: Compensation Notification (Read Attachment)
From: OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT cmofng4631@sbcglobal.net
Reply-to: compensation@diamondplcng.com
Cc: recipient list not shown

It has a .txt attachment.

Again, don’t open the attachment – just delete the email.

One of my clients recently received several email scam messages that she wanted me to pass along. These email scam messages were a little different from the ones that I usually receive, in that they specifically mentioned products and services that she offered. In other words, they were a little harder to recognize as scams than other generic email spam.

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Recently my life has been full of redirects. I have a client who had another web developer change her website pages from one naming convention to another, like “?p=123″ to “how to file dog fingernails”. I had another client that I did the redesign for, but her old page names had blank spaces in them, like “old page.html”. Both of these situations required creation of special files called “.htaccess” that map the old pages to the new ones. I wanted to give folks an overview of why creating redirects every single time they change a page name/page URL is so important to SEO (search engine optimization).

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It seems like all my blog article ideas lately come from my clients, so here’s another one. A client got an invitation to try out DreamHost PS (Private Servers) and wanted to know whether he should sign up.

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A client sent me a link to this article on Slate.com that gave a fairly scathing review of one of the common open source content management applications called Drupal. While I’ve never used Drupal, after reading this article, I don’t think I ever will.

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For the past month or so, I’ve been able to use live chat to communicate with the folks at DreamHost.com, my web hosting company. While their support ticket system has been excellent, they’ve now improved their support system by adding a live chat feature for some of their customers. I’ve used it several times, and didn’t want to write about it until they officially announced it – and today, they did!

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One of my clients asked me how she could embed a PDF document into her WordPress blog today. After some searching, I found the answer and wanted to document it here so that my other clients and blog readers can learn how to do this.

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I ran across a really impressive article today while I was working on a client’s WordPress blog. She had hired a company to perform SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on her  blog and was unhappy and looking for guidance. While I knew some of the basics, I went in search of some expert advice.  I wanted to post a link to this comprehensive article called “WordPress SEO: The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog” written by Yoast that I found, because although it’s quite lengthy and time consuming, it’s a wonderful checklist for those of you who have time and patience and  want to increase the rankings of your blog.

He starts out with the most important things to focus on:

• Permalinks (I always do this)
• Titles (yup, this too)
• Descriptions (um, don’t really do this at all for my posts)
• More text (who new you could change this!)
• Image Optimization (those pesky alt tags!)

Enjoy!

Usually Akismet protects my blog from spammers. It’s captured and prevented nearly 50,000 (yes, fifty thousand) spam comments from annoying me. But today, all of a sudden, I got a dozen spam comments one right after the other. I looked at the IP addresses, and they were from all over, Israel to the Netherlands. So I looked inside the Akismet Configuration and saw this scary message: “Unable to reach any Akismet servers.”

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An iframe, is an HTML element that gives you a window through which you can view another website. But sometimes, you want to show just a particular piece of that other website. I thought this was  impossible to do, until today, when I found an article that told me how to do it.

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This blog article is a personal one, and since I don’t have a personal blog, I’m writing it here, in the hopes that some of my readers are in Washington state and don’t know about Ref 71 that’s on this November’s ballot. For those of you outside Washington state who enjoy reading my blog, I’d appreciate you considering making a donation to help this referendum pass, as it directly impacts my family.

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