I am going to explore this new software more from now on, maybe experimenting with different skins and extensions.

OK. you may ask why use Firefox if you got IE?

The answers are simple and there are many reasons.

If you want security - it is a better defense against viruses and spywares. I got into trouble with tons of spywares and adwares on my labtop the last time I used IE. All these trouble and worries are gone and bad memories after I switched to Firefox 1 year ago.
If you want faster page loading. — I notice great  improvement in page loading time with Firefox.
If you want a lean and mean browser. — Firefox is small in size.

If you want extensibility. — Firefox functionality can be greatly tailored and enhanced to your personal needs.

It can do tab browsing — meaning that you can download more than one page in a single instance of Firefox. So you can continue reading your current page while a new page is downloading in the background. This is great time saver. You don’t have to waiting for the new page to download doing nothing useful.
And best of all it is open source and it is FREE.

Even Google endorses it. I got a link where you can download it on the left handside. Give it a try you will be pleased.

I welcome anyone who has something to share about Firefox

There many kinds of autoresponder around, monthly paid services or software scripts that you install on your server/pc. Paid services range form $10+ to $20, quite expensive for a newbie in internet marketing. Then the next cheaper option is the software/scripts. The cheap and great ones cost some like $55 and once installed you use it as much as you like, even you have a mailing list of a million subscribers you don’t need to pay anymore. AutoresponderInformation.com has a lot of information on autoresponders and did a review of the FUMP which cost only $55.

The FUMP seems to be one of the most powerful and feature rich software that I have come across. There is even a fully functional free lite edition.

All the functions I could ever want are in this program, plus it has a few that are just plain fun. it’s not bulky and it’s pretty user freindly. It is a good program to use if you want something which isn’t as hard to use as some of the image editing products in the market.

This program has many cool features, including various effects, a simple “wand” to select any area that is entirely the same color, a simple RGB color chooser, and a draw-box select. But above all, it’s as simple-to-use and user-friendly program as I’ve ever seen. Maybe a Photoshop user might not love it so much, but suffocating on Microsoft Paint as I have been, Paint.NET is a breath of fresh air.

Irfanview is one free graphics software, it is only slightly better than paint but not very powerful and it is not going to help produce great looking header graphics easily.

And I found GIMP. This is a god sent. It is free and powerful. The only problem is, I don’t know how to use it. Went to the library, picked up a book and started on it. I should be on my way to designining some cool header graphics. I wonder why people still pay for adobe photoshop with such fantastic free software around.
I will update later the header graphics of this site as an experiment.

I found NOD32 and Kaspersky. And finally decided on NOD32. NOD32 was fast and can detect 100% all those wild viruses. I am very happy with it. I do not have a single virus problem any more with NOD32. The update was prompt and best of all the computer seems to faster. Later I found out that the memory footprint of the NOD32 engine is very small and its scanning algo is extremely fast. And those were the reasons of the apparent improved computer speed. Forget about those heavily advertised stuff like Norton, and those BS reviews by some of the computer magazines. These magazines live by advertizing, who would bad mouth their own pay master.
Currently I am going to setup a new home PC and the search for an antivirus hunt begins again. I am completely satified with NOD32 but I also don’t want to put all my eggs into one basket. I want to use another good antivirus to be sure that I don’t depend only on NOD32. The search ends with Kaspersky Version 6. It has good reviews in the forums, and virus bulletin. The good news is that they also have an option that includes the all important Internet Security like spyware detection, spam filter, personal firewall… all integrated nicely together. Like NOD32, Kaspersky Version 6 is also fast .

Speed is a very important feature to have beside having a good detection rate for viruses. If your PC slows to a crawl after installing an Antivirus you will not be happy. I can tell you this for sure after the bad experience with Norton.

Finally if you are serious about choosing your antivirus you can get a good report about various antivirus software by visiting www.virusbtn.com

I am a slow learner, I had to spend a week playing around with it before I am able to start using it effectively. There is one book which I find very good. It is Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland.

The Missing Manual is well organized, I read the book chapter by chapter doing all the tutorials and gain a good foundation understanding the basics of Dreamweaver. There are so much tips in there that even after you learnt the basics of Dreamweaver you will find The Missing Manual a good reference to have at your side when you work with Dreamweaver.

What is the fuss about 301 Permanent and 302 Temporary redirect? It all has to do with GOOGLE. Somehow Google likes 301 better and while it may downgrade your page’s PR if a 302 is used.

Now here is how to do it. (se2.php)
< ?php
header("HTTP/1.1 301");
header ("Location: http://www.google.com");
exit;
?>

Yeah, it is simple. Just one more line - header(”HTTP/1.1 301″);

Without this line, the default 302 will be used instead.

Please check http://www.aukcweb.com/2006/09/29/how-to-redirect-to-other-link/ for more details.

You can try it http://www.aukcweb.com/goto/se2.php

You would not notice any difference just by viewing with your browser, but it will actually issue a 301 redirect which is Google spider friendly. I used an HTTP header capture software to catch the headers which I had included below.

[From Req: GET http://www.aukcweb.com/goto/se2.php HTTP/1.1]
HTTP/1.1 301
Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 08:30:06 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: http://www.google.com
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html
Connection: Close

Compare this to headers generated by se1.php

[From Req: GET http://www.aukcweb.com/goto/se1.php HTTP/1.1]
HTTP/1.1 302
Date: Mon, 02 Oct 2006 08:24:17 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: http://www.google.com
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html
Connection: Close

< ?php
header ("Location: http://www.newwebsite.com/?13234");
exit;
?>

1. Copy eveything in the above 4 lines from “< ?php" to "?>“. There should be no space between “<" and "?".
2. Don’t use a wordprocessor like MS WORD. Please use a simple text editor, on Windows you can use “notepad”
3. Open an empty file in notepad, then paste the text to it.
4. Must, must make sure that “< ?php" is at the very beginning of this file.
5. Remove the space between “<" and "?". I have added this space to make it possible to show "< ?" here.
6. Rename everything after // with the complete URL of the newsite.
7. Save the text to a filename with a php extension.
8. Upload this file to your server. ( you can use any FTP software to do it).
9. That’s all.

IMPORTANT NOTE: “<"MUST be the FIRST character otherwise it would not work. There must not be any space or anything at all in front.

As an example, let say, I would like to redirect a link on my site to www.google.com then:
se1.php contains:

< ?php
header ("Location: http://www.google.com");
exit;
?>

I had uploaded se1.php to www.aukcweb.com/goto/se1.php, it would redirect you to www.google.com whenever you click on this php file.

Try it. www.aukcweb.com/goto/se1.php

It is true that many web hosting company will only allow you to host one domain name in one hosting plan. You can see that kind of hosting plans at Godaddy.com Even if you buy the cheapest hosting plan at $3.95/month + $6.90/year for a domain name, you must be prepared to pay $54.30/year. This quickly balloon to big amount if you operate 100 or more websites.

The good news is that there are low cost web hosting company, in fact quite a number of them, offering web hosting packages at reasonable cost while allowing you to host multiple website with their own unique domain names on the same web hosting plan. What you need is a hosting plan that allow add-on domains.

What is an add-on domain?

An add-on domain is a new domain that is added on top of your main domain. It creates a sub directory within yourmain web hosting directory but can show a different web site. The add-on domain collects the information from the sub domain directory using the same space and bandwidth as your main account

Add-on domain benefits.

1. Create multiple domains/websites on the same web hosting account.
2. Save money and web space by using one hosting account instead of several hosting accounts.
3. The add-on domain shares all the same resources (disk space, bandwidth…) with your main site.
4. The add-on domain has its own FTP manager, site stats, cgi-bin which is created automatically.
5. Upload all pages, images, scripts, forums etc to your add-on domain directory.
6. Access your add-on domain using several web site addresses. i.e. http://www.SiteB.com, http://www.SiteB.SiteA.com http://www.SiteA.com/SiteB
7. Promote several web sites within one hosting account with their own set of keywords.

Some web hosting company allow you to host 6,10 and there are even those that allow unlimited hosting of domain names. You still need to pay for domain name registration for every unique domain but the hosting cost is free or already paid for. One such company that I use is Hostmonster. Their system is reliable and the C-Panel control panel is extremely easy to use. You can add more domain names, add email accounts, ftp content to the site and so on….all from the icon driven user interface. Even a newbie like me can do the setup in a breeze.

At Hostmonster, now for only $3.95/month you get 50GB of storage and 999 GB of transfer bandwidth. Best of all, you are also given ONE FREE domain name of your choice. In total you just pay $47.40/year for one site.
What does all those numbers mean to you?

50GB of storage - you can create 10 million pages of text ( assume each page contains 1000 words)

999 Gb of transfer - your visitors can have 200 million page views per month.

Isn’t it mind bloggling that you are given so much resources for just a small sum of money.
Now let’s say your average sites have an average of 10,000 visitors/per day and 3 page views/visitor then that is 0.9 million page views/month. If every one of my site have that many visitors I am very happy.

Armed with these resources, you can easily handle the traffic and storage requirements of 200 sites. (each site have a capacity to hold 50 thousand pages). I think that is more than sufficient for many people.

Finally to the interesting $$$ numbers if you are going to have 200 sites.

• Single Domain Web Hosting yearly cost (200 x 54.3 = ) $10,860 .00

• HostMonster Multiple Domain web Hosting yearly cost ((199 x 6.90) + 47.4 =) $ 1420.50

See the significant differences. You are free to create very topic focused sites without the concern of high hosting cost.

Cheers.