A blogger in Oregon did her own “investigation” on an attorney and was sued for defamation and lost. She claimed she didn’t have to prove her allegations and was protected because she was a journalist, part of the media. Reuters states:

“Media organizations and others are often protected by the “actual malice” legal standard established in a 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision, which holds that under the First Amendment, journalists to be liable for defamation must know or have warning signs their inflammatory statements against a public figure are false.”

The blogger was not deemed a “journalist” or part of the “media” by the judge, and therefore her writings were not protected.

I found this part of the Reuters article astounding:

“Attorneys for Padrick presented as evidence a Jan. 19 email from Cox, sent days after she was sued for defamation by Padrick and Obsidian, in which she offered the firm her services “to protect online reputations and promote businesses” for $2,500 a month. Cox denied she was trying to extort money.”

Wow. Let me say it again. Wow. I was curious, so I checked out the blogger’s blog, and indeed, she has “reputation manager” as one of her service offerings. Wow.

Regardless of her motivation, this blogging defamation lawsuit will have a chilling effect on bloggers – it’s what Reuters thinks, and frankly I agree with that. Note the blogger is in Montana and the person defamed was in Oregon. In the Reuters article, it says that Cox (the blogger) plans to appeal the decision.

Is blogging journalism? There are surely journalists who write blogs, but all bloggers aren’t journalists.

Here’s another take on the lawsuit by Forbes: “Why An Investment Firm Was Awarded $2.5 Million After Being Defamed By Blogger“. It offers another perspective stating:

“The facts in the case are far more complicated, and after hearing them, most journalists will not want to include Cox in their camp.”

I read this Forbes article, and granted, I can’t imagine a journalist taking out a domain like “thisparticularcompanynamesucks.com” – maybe it’s defamation, maybe it’s whistleblowing, I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like journalism. But certainly there are many blog articles that should be considered journalism – I don’t know what the legal definition of journalism is.

Here’s another thought provoking article on this lawsuit: Debate about Crystal Cox blogging case misses a key legal point. Angelotti says that it doesn’t matter whether she was found to be a “journalist” or not, because even if she was, the “shield law” might have not allowed her to make claims without proof:

“My advice to bloggers operating in the state of Oregon is lobby to get your shield law improved so bloggers are covered,” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told the AP. “But do not expect the shield law to provide you a defense in a libel case where you want to rely on an anonymous source for that information.”

And if you’re a blogger in Washington State, like me, here’s another article by the Seattle Weekly: Crystal Cox, Oregon Blogger, Isn’t a Journalist, Concludes U.S. Court–Imposes $2.5 Million Judgement on Her. This articles has links to other related articles for bloggers in Washington State: Unlike Oregon, Bloggers Are Journalists in Washington State, Do Qualify for Legal Protections.

The Seattle Weekly concludes:

“But it’s also important to note that even if Cox had been awarded shield-law protections in the lawsuit, she still most likely would have lost her case, because she was never able to prove her accusations against Padrick were true, with or without her secret source.

So while Cox’s fate has and should send ripples of concern throughout the blogging and journalism community, the flip side of that coin is that if bloggers are able to post defamatory articles all over the Internet where they will permanently remain, it can have an ill effect on the entire medium of Internet journalism.”

1. Find a website traffic tracking tool that is able to capture “labels” that you are going to add to the destination URL of your online ad. As I’ve mentioned, I use Web-Stat. They have a free 30 day trial. You install a small paragraph of code onto every page of your website. Visit your own website and watch the Live Streaming Traffic view to see yourself. Now that you have the traffic tracking tool set up, you’re ready for the next step.

2. Find out how to “label” the destination URL – the correct syntax is extremely important. For Web-Stat, it’s adding ?source=whateveryouwanttowrite at the end of the URL that people will be taken to when they click on the ad.

3. When you submit the ad, be sure to give the ad company the full destination URL with the “label”. Let’s use this example:    http://AldebaranWebDesign.com?source=HelloThereAd

4. Once your ad is running, click on it to test it out. You should be directed to whatever URL you submitted. Then check inside your Web-Stat account, and you should see the visit with the “Referrer” displayed as whatever you put after ?source=   Here’s a screenshot of my own test to show you what this should look like inside Web-Stat. Two visitors are showing. One came from Google, the other came from clicking on the link of my “ad”:

http://AldebaranWebDesign.com?source=HelloThereAd

5. After a period of time, say a month, you can now look at all this traffic as a distinct group under “Referrers”. This allows you to compare the results of various advertisements. (Again, this is a screenshot from my own Web-Stat account as a demo – the HelloThereAd is way down at the bottom because I only clicked once). Note that the bounce rate is calculated for different referrers. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave after only visiting one page, meaning they came into your website and bounced right back off it, not finding what they were looking for. For an ad that you’re paying for, your bounce rate should be relatively low compared with random Google searches. If your paying for an ad that has a high bounce rate (over 50%) something might be wrong with the ad itself.

UPDATE: The number came back, magically, by itself. No idea why.

Web-Stat has many nifty reports that are easy to view, and one of them is daily downtime over any length of time. I ran this report to see my own website’s downtime from 2011-1-1 to today (2001-12-3) and here’s what I found:

Average Downtime : 0.21%

You can see that on some days, my downtime was 7.2%, which equals 1.73 hours.

(Calculation:   (7.2/100)*24 = 1.73)

Yes, on those days, if the downtime happened during my working hours, I was certainly concerned and emailing DreamHost. But they always got things working again. On average, my downtime is 0.21% per day, which equates to 0.0504 hours per day, which is 3 minutes per day.

So that’s my average downtime per day: 3 minutes per day. For me and my business, that’s completely tolerable given the low cost of website hosting that DreamHost charges.

You may see other hosting companies who talk about downtime in terms of uptime, meaning the percentage of the time that the website is up. In these terms, you could conclude that my uptime per day would equal 100%-0.21% = 99.79%

So if you see a  website hosting company advertising 99% uptime, you’ll have an average of 14 minutes of downtime each day.

If a hosting company advertistes 99.9% uptime, you’ll have an average of 1.4 minutes of downtime each day.

Again, this data is easy to get if you’re using Web-Stat as your website traffic tool – which I highly recommend – especially because it alerts you to when your site is down so you can notify your hosting company if they aren’t already working on the problem. The sooner you notify them, the faster they can fix things, and the lower your overall downtime will be. Web-Stat offers a 30 day free trial, and is super simple to add to a website.

Leave me a comment and let me know what your average downtime is.

You can easily use Google Trends to see when it might be a good time for you to take a holiday. Let’s say you’re a therapist. You go to Google Trends and enter the word therapist click the button “search trends”. This is what you’ll see:

Let’s zoom in a bit:

Notice how in the last quarter of every year, there is this large dip in searches for the word “therapist” and then how it rebounds in January? If you look over the years, this is a fairly repeatable trend.

So if a therapist is wondering when a good time to take a vacation or holiday is, they can use Google Trends to take a look at seasonal search patterns. And if you’re a therapist and you’re wondering why your traffic has dropped of in December…well, I don’t know why, but we can say by looking at the data that it’s pretty darn consistent. So take that holiday and don’t worry.

Give it a try for your business. Use Google Trends to look for seasonality in searches and it just might be what you need to give yourself permission to go ahead and take that holiday.

Happy Holidays everyone!

So what’s a favicon you ask? You know when you go to a website and sometimes in your browser’s field where the URL (the website’s address) is, you see a teeny tiny image? This is a favicon.

For my own website, you can see this and it should look like a graphic representation of a bull’s head, front view (because my business name is Aldebaran which is in the constellation Taurus…but I digress). See the two blue horns and yellow head? You have to look real closely because favicons are small.

Most of my clients don’t ask for this, but today one did, and I wanted to share this really easy Favicon Generator tool from a site that I use frequently, Dynamic Drive because it has really robust scripts.

“You should always, always, always have a website. I know some authors who use Facebook as their websites. Big mistake. I know other authors who get a website that doesn’t belong to them, meaning they are part of a community of free sites they don’t own. If the community decides to stop doing websites and goes away, guess what happens? So does your content.”

It’s a really superb article for small business owners, so please do give it a read, it’s long, but contains what I think is great advice on how to use social media to promote your website, and not just promote social media sites themselves.

Normally I use the PHP mail function on my contact forms. Very simple function, works like a charm, very reliable, simple to implement. Normally the recipient is an email address based on my client’s domain that we’ve set up. Every once in a while, it’s a gmail address. And just recently, it’s two AOL addresses.

Today, both AOL clients contacted me to say their contact forms, which we had tested and found to be working, had stopped working – they got no emails. They checked their spam folders, and nothing. The emails from their contact forms were simply nowhere, gone, vanished.

I’ve submitted a support ticket to DreamHost about this, as both clients are on the same email server – thinking, maybe it’s been blocked by AOL. But because of AOL (and Comcast’s) aggressive and hidden spam prevention, DreamHost doesn’t forward email AOL since 2006 or Comcast since 2006 as a policy. Now I’m wondering if using the PHP mail function, which sends out from a DreamHost mail server IP – should have the same rule.

But in general, you can find lots of people on the web who tell everyone who will listen not to use free (gmail, yahoo, hotmail) or ISP (AOL, Comcast, Verizon) as your business email.

Here’s one that has excellent reasons for not using AOL in particular:
Why Real Businesses should not use AOL as their Email Address

All the same reasons apply (except perhaps appearing a decade out of step) for not using a free email account or your internet service provider as your business email address.

Hopefully I’ll hear back from DreamHost soon (and I’ll update this post) – but I remain convinced the best way to have reliable and professional email from a small business website is to use a domain-based email address – even though it requires more effort on the part of the business owner to figure out how to receive that email. There are plenty of solutions like Outlook and Thunderbird (my personal choice).

Here are instructions on how to read your DreamHost email.

UPDATE: Both clients eventually received their emails, but days later – which for business email is totally unacceptable. Now both are switching to domain based email. DreamHost responded and said that yes, it’s possible that AOL was blocking or delaying these because it could detect them originating from DreamHost, and recommended this PHPMailer solution – thinking that if I used SMTP authentication it would be less likely to be blocked. However since I really believe small business website clients should not be using free email (like AOL, gmail, Comcast) for email, we are opting for the more professional and reliable approach of using domain based email.

Study Suggests Internet Explorer Users Are, Um, Kind Of Slow

“The comparison clearly suggests that more people on the higher side of IQ scale have moved away from Internet Explorer in the last 5 years,” AptiQuant concludes.

Whew, I use Firefox

1. Login to your DreamHost Control Panel – you should know the email address you signed up with and the password you picked. DreamHost usually sends this info to you in an email if you’ve forgotten it.

2. On the left hand side, click on Domains and Manage Domains. It looks like this:

3. Next to the domain that you’ve registered, if it doesn’t have a hosting account, you will see this green “Add Hosting” button:

4. On the next page, select Upgrade to Full Hosting by clicking on the “upgrading to our Happy Hosting billing plan”. Yes, I know it’s a dumb name and confuses all of my clients, but it’s the right thing to click on. The image is shown below:

5. Next, look down on the page and under Hosting Plans, click Add A Plan:

6. After this, you will get a screen that asks you how long you want to purchase a hosting plan for. Most of my clients pick 1 or 2 years. Don’t worry about naming your plan. Click “Add Plan Now”.

7. Now the plan should have been added if DreamHost has your credit card information. Go back to Domains and Manage Domains…and if that green Add Hosting is still  there, click it again. This time you’ll see a big long bunch of choices. Don’t panic. Ignore them all except: check “add WWW” and  uncheck Google Apps, and click on the Fully Host This Domain button at the bottom of the first section. You may be prompted to enter a “username” this is for FTP, so just make something up and then click on Fully Host This Domain button.  And then, finally, finally, you’ll be done. And DreamHost will send you a bunch of emails.

Sorry this is so difficult for so many clients. DreamHost needs to make this so much easier. It’s gotten more complicated over time.

1. First off, check that the domain’s email is yours. Use a service like http://whois.domaintools.com/ to make sure that the email listed is yours. Or conversely, login to your current domain registrar and double check that the email associated with the domain is yours. This is important, because later in the process an approval email will be sent – and you need to be able to receive it.

2. In your current domain registrar, you need to do two things. First you need to UNLOCK the domain so that it can be transferred. The second things you need is the AUTHORIZATION CODE. Depending on the domain registrar, this may be tricky to locate – if you have trouble, call them.

3. Now login to your new domain registrar and submit a request to transfer the domain. It will ask you for the authorization code you got in the previous step. (At DreamHost, this is under Domains-> Reg. Transfer)

4. Next, your current domain registrar will send an email to you (that you verified you’d receive in step 1). You will probably need to click something in this email to accept the transfer away.

5. You may also get an email from your new domain registrar asking for approval.

6. Wait. Sometimes it takes two weeks for this process to happen. I often ask the new registrar about the transfer status, because sometimes they fail for different reasons and you need to do things over again. But eventually, if all goes well, the new domain will show up in your new domain registrar’s account.

So it was with great interest that I read this article in Techland: Facebook is not your friend. The article makes some good points, in that Facebook is a business, and exists to make money, and therefore, there may be times when your privacy will be sacrificed. The article is really a call to be smarter about what you post online, which in general, I think is good advice both for people who are on Facebook and blogging in general. Enjoy.

Aldebaran Web Design now offers phone consultation services for folks who don’t have a website, or have a website designed by another developer.

These consultations can be used for general web design questions, WordPress blogging lessons, ECT (ECommerce Templates Online Store) help, or questions about Search Engine Optimization. And you don’t have to have your website designed by Aldebaran Web Design to use this new service – it’s available to everyone.

Cheers!

Solution was found here:

If Pages Return A 404 After WordPress 3.1 Upgrade

Here’s what we did:

1. disable all plugins

2. remove .htaccess file from blog folder on server

3. switch permalinks to default and then back to her setting, and then verified this recreated a brand new .htaccess file on her blog folder on server

4. verified this fixed issue (yeah!)

5. one by one, enabled plugins, and discovered that a category related plugin (that renamed a category to something else) was also causing problem so we deleted it.

6. so with all plugins enabled again, retested and it worked. Many thanks to Dre Armeda for this solution.

Using Microsoft Outlook 2003 with Your Email

Using Microsoft Outlook 2007 with Your Email

Using Outlook 2010 with Your Email

Using Microsoft Outlook Express with Your Email

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