WebProNews

Motivating Employees

I've been to many, many seminars on management and supervision. I've read hundreds of books and talked with more people than I care to admit. For many years, I searched for the answer to the question: "What motivates employees?"

Baffling the Spambot Harvesters

All right, it's a pretty sure bet that if you put your email address on your website, the spammers will eventually grab it right off your pages. That being true, then how the heck do you allow your visitors and customers to get into contact with you, without opening yourself up to a deluge of spam?

Google And Duplicate Content

I've been following the discussion about Google and mirrored information for some time. It is "common knowledge" that Google penalizes page rank when it determines that content is duplicated somewhere else. In fact, I've read many experts stating that there should be no duplicate domain names and no duplicate content anywhere. On the face of it the arguments appear to be sound. Google obviously has several billion pages in it's database and could, it appears, easily determine if content is duplicated. It also seems, again on the face of it, that it's reasonable to check for duplicate content, as this is the "mark of a spammer" and not necessary on the web with hyperlinking available. At least, this is the common wisdom.

Copyright Law and How it Works

Important: This article contains opinions and information about copyright law. Keep in mind that I am not a lawyer and have not been a lawyer in any past life that I am aware of. If you have specific questions about copyright law you should contact the appropriate legal resources. Everything original that you write (or draw or paint or whatever), regardless of whether it is an email, a painting, an image, a thesis, a web page, a paragraph on a forum, or anything else is automatically copyright protected by you. It does, of course, have to be recognizable as an original work. Thus, the word "the" in a forum would hardly qualify. The exceptions generally must be spelled out in a contract that is agreed upon. For example, Webmasterworld's Terms Of Service (TOS) modifies the copyright to both webmasterworld and the original author.

Self Sending Spam

When a spammer sends a message, he has several goals. First, the message must make it through one or more spam filters. These filters may scan the message for "spammy keywords" at an ISP, a web host and at the user's own system (and potentially other places as well). An especially annoying type of spam is called a "self sending spam". This is a spam message which you receive and the "From:" address is your own email address, or some variation of it. For example, davesmith@example.com might receive an email with a from of "davesmith@anotherexample.com. Sometimes the email has your exact same email address in the "From:" field, making it appear you've sent the message to yourself. Why do the spammers bother to do this?

Time Management

Wondering where the day has gone? Still not finished with work even though it's nine at night and you were supposed to go home at six? Here are some tips to help you manage your time better. Take brief walks - I know it sounds counter-intuitive, but one of the big secrets to effective time management is simply talking walks. You see, little emergencies and crisis's can suck up your attention, focusing you on unimportant (yet seemingly real and significant) details. By talking a brief, five to ten minute, walk now and then, you can give yourself time to clear your thinking, drive out the cobwebs, and refocus your attention on what is important.

Sins of The Internet: Pagejacking

One of the most frustrating events you can experience as a webmaster or writer is finding your work has been copied without your permission. I'm sure that just about every writer and every webmaster has been horrified to find his own work somewhere else under a different person's name. The thankfully few times it has happened to me I felt a mixture of blind fury and complete hate. Sometimes thieves don't stop there. They don't steal a web page or two and claim it as their own (this is merely a copyright violation and a completely unethical thing to do). No, what they do is steal a web page and claim it is YOURS, but with modifications. In other words, they create a web page which is exactly like yours, with some changes to do something undesirable.

Why Use Multiple Domain Names?

It's quite common for a site to be referenced by more than one domain name. In fact, most sites are referenced by at least two: a www version and a non-www version. These are usually set up to reference the index page on a site and produce the same results for a searcher. It could, however, be argued that these are the same domain names. So the question remains: why would someone want to have more than one unique domain name for a single site? Search engines - First, let's take a brief look at search engines. In the past, it was a very common spamming technique to purchase dozens, hundreds or in some gross cases, thousands of domain names, all referencing exactly the same site. These were all submitted to the search engines, and many of them were indexed and blindly added to the results. This is how many questionable sites used to get top search results very quickly and inexpensively.

Internet Privacy: P3P

If you downloaded Internet Explorer 6 recently (or it came pre-installed on your machine) you may have noticed something a little different. Take a under the "Internet Options" selection of the "Tools" menu. You will see a new tab titled "Privacy". Click on the tab and you will be able to specify settings which control the way cookies are handled.

Introduction to Web Technologies

There are literally hundreds of difficult technologies available to the webmaster. Making proper use of these technologies allows the creation of maintainable, efficient and useful web sites. For example, using SSI (server side includes) or CSS (cascading style sheets) a webmaster can change every page on his web site by editing one file. A few of the more common technologies are listed below.