The question was:

1. Where is the best placement of OPEN and CLOSE loop elements for a repeating table row?
- Inside the TR tags?
- outside TR tags?
2. Where is the best placement of the LOOP controls?
- Whether the controls are placed AUTOMATIC or MANUALLY they display inline at the top of the table, which is confusing to the user.

And the answer was:

ad 1.: Outside the TR tags – the loop should surround the table row

ad 2.: When placing the loop start in a position where now content HTML is allowed (like between the TABLE and TR tags) then you should set the control flag to MANUALLY and insert the little PHP code snippet for the controls (as listed in the Menu Element’s reference) elsewhere – e.g. at the beginning or end of the table cell (right after the TD or before the /TD). You might want to enclose that in a DIV and give that a nowrap via CSS so the buttons are kept in a separate line.

And I added:

Just used this tip and thought posting the code would save someone else time:
<?php $webyep_oCurrentLoop->showEditButtons(); ?>

Original Forum Article is here: LOOP – TABLE; repeat TR, controls placement

My secret?

I love this site! Every morning, I now login to my SpamCop.net account, and I paste in the entire email message (including headers) and his submit. Spamcop.net analyzes the email to figure out who actually sends it, and then you can alert the actual domain owners (or people in charge of fighting the spam).  I opened an account for $2 (you can try it for free too) and am just thrilled to be able to do my little part to get back at the folks who spam me. It takes me less than 10 seconds to report each message.

I use Thunderbird for my email application, and in Thunderbird you can quickly view and copy the full message by clicking on “View” and then selecting “Message Source”. I then select all, and copy, and paste right into SpamCop.net’s field.

If you use Outlook and want help copy/pasting the email with full headers, please leave a comment on this article and I’ll look it up and report it here. Or if you know how to do this with Outlook, leave that in a comment as well.

Give it a try, it makes you feel good, really, it does!

Don’t ignore it, just hit the “Please update now” link and follow the instructions.

WordPress may release updates every month, or every few months, so be sure to log into your blog at least monthly to check for a new version number.

Prevent hacking and viruses – keep your WordPress Blog updated!

“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

If you have a PC (not a Mac):

1. Press the print screen key (PrtScn). This takes a screenshot and saves it.

2. Open a program that uses images (Word, Powerpoint)

3. Edit and Paste. This pastes the saved screenshot.

4. Save the document and email it.

If you have a Mac (not a PC):

1. Open your “Grab” application.

2. Select “Capture” and the method you’d like to use.

3. Save the image to your desktop (it will be a .tiff) and email it.

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.

1. Domain Name Ownership – Make sure that you own your domain name, and the domain name registration is not in the name of the web designer.  You need to make very, very, very sure that you, and no one else, legally owns your domain name. Here’s article you can use to find out who owns your domain name. You’ll want to be 110% sure that the domain name is owned by you, and that your name is listed in the public records. Some domain registrars will hide the names, and display a proxy – but you should contact the domain registrar and make sure that you are the owner of record. If you are not the owner, you should ask your web developer to transfer the ownership to you. If they refuse to transfer it, you might want to hire an attorney.

2. Hosting Plan Ownership – You can use the same method listed above to see who your current hosting company is. It will generally be listed in the DNS (Domain Name Server) area of the WHOIS record. If your web designer is doing your hosting, then you might want to consider moving to a neutral company (like DreamHost). Unless your web developer has sent you recent copies of all your website files, they may only exist on your hosting company’s server and your developer’s computer. This means that if you make your web developer mad enough, they can simply delete them from the server and your website is GONE. Sound unbelievable? It’s actually happened to a client of mine.

Why are these two things important?

If you don’t own your domain name, it means whoever owns it can sell it to another person – even a competitor, at will. There’s no logical or ethical reason why a web developer needs to own another person’s domain name – would you let a graphic designer trademark YOUR logo? Of course not. So make sure you are the domain name owner – and if not, make this your #1 priority.

If you don’t have direct control of your website hosting server, your website files could be at risk if your relationship with your current developer goes bad. It just takes a few minutes to set up your own hosting account with a neutral company – so if you’re planning on leaving your web developer – get an account set up and get your website files moved. Most likely you will need help from your current developer to get this done, unless you have duplicate copies of your website files handy, or have FTP access to your website’s server.

Other Things To Consider

3. Stock Photography Licenses – if your developer has purchased stock photography on your behalf, get documentation to prove this so you can’t be held liable for copyright infringement.

4. Software Licenses – if your developer has purchased software on your behalf, get copies of that documentation so you can prove that you own all  the software used by your website.

5. Databases – If your website uses a database, transferring your website from one hosting server to another can be complicated. Be sure you understand the scope of your current website before attempting to relocate.

6. Server-Side Language – Know what languages are used on your website. For example, if your website is written in PHP, it might need to be hosted on a Linux or Unix server, and if your website is written in ASP, it might be need to be hosted on a Windows server. Know what server-side languages (and corresponding database languages) are used on your website because they may prohibit you from moving your website to certain servers.

7. Email - Generally speaking, email servers are with whoever is hosting your website, and whoever is hosting your website has the ability to read your website-based emails. If you change hosting companies, your email accounts will be lost, and you will need to set up new accounts on your new hosting company’s email system.

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do – But It Shouldn’t Be Dangerous

While deciding to end your relationship with your web developer may be difficult, it should not put your website in jeopardy – if, and only if – you’ve taken steps to make sure that your website registration and hosting are independent from your web developer. If domain registration and hosting are under your direct control, you simply need to change the passwords on any accounts (control panels and FTP) to make sure your developer doesn’t have access, and you’re ready to start a new relationship with someone else.

Prevention Is Worth A Pound of Cure

This means that if you haven’t yet hired a web developer and are in the interviewing process, you can ask them about domain registration and hosting. You can avoid folks who say they’ll do the domain registration on your behalf, as well as folks who insist on hosting the website themselves. There’s no reason why a developer would need to register your domain in their name. While it’s possible that your website is so special and complex it has to be hosted on a developer’s server – find out the details and ask lots of questions, especially if all you need is a simple small business website. Domain registration and website hosting are relatively inexpensive things ($10 a year and $10 a month, respectively) – yet depending on how they are structured, can make breaking up with your web developer a nightmare.

This new bill would ammend 82.32 RCW adding language that would seem to fix the problem that many of us who own online stores have – namely that we’re supposed to be charging tax based on the customer’s address, the “destination”.

Here’s the language:

NEW SECTION. Sec. 2. A new section is added to chapter 82.32 RCW

4 to read as follows:

5 (1) Retail sales of tangible personal property and digital goods

6 shall be sourced to the location where the order is received by the

7 seller if:

8 (a) The order is received in this state by the seller and where

9 receipt of the product by the purchaser or the purchaser’s donee occur

10 in this state. However, when products are sold in conjunction with a

11 retail service, both the product and the service must be sourced as

12 required in RCW 82.32.730;

13 (b) The location where receipt of the product by the purchaser

14 occurs is determined pursuant to RCW 82.32.730(1) (b) through (d); and

15 (c) At the time the order is received, the recordkeeping system of

16 the seller used to calculate the proper amount of tax to be imposed

17 captures the location where the order is received.

18 (2) For purposes of this section, the location where the order is

19 received by or on behalf of the seller means the physical location of

20 a seller or third party such as an established outlet, office location

21 or automated order receipt system operated by or on behalf of the

22 seller where an order is initially received by or on behalf of the

23 seller and not where the order may be subsequently accepted, completed

24 or fulfilled.

If you’re in Washington, contact your legislators to learn more about this bill and if indeed does get rid of the nearly impossible to implement “destination based sales tax”, help get this bill out of committee and up for a full vote. This would be a great improvement and make it much easier for online store owners.

I called this particular company to find out a) what this mysterious “platform” change is and b) how they got websites prepared. Needless to say their answers made absolutely no sense at all. So if you get a cold call from a company who tries to scare you into hiring them to do SEO work, do your homework, ask your web designer to check into them, or make sure you can independently verify all of their claims. Don’t fall for the mumbo jumbo and scare tactics!

zipweb.com is a internet search marketing company like Dex and YellowPages. They have a directory that they’ll list your business in for a price. They make cold calls to small business owners with websites and make a pitch that sounds too good to be true. Here’s what my client says:

“They offered a one-month free trial of their ad service, promising to list me on Google, Yahoo, etc. (85 places total) and I very explicitly said “Do I need to cancel this or will it stop on its own?” They said it would stop on its own and I would get several notices by email first.

My service apparently got billed on November 30th for the month to come, and I called on Dec 1 to cancel, just in case. I hadn’t heard about the bill yet and was surprised on the phone.

Then I told them to cancel and reverse the charge, which, after some hemming and hawing, they did do. Or at least, they said they did.

I gave no credit card info, but they billed me via the phone company!!“

I found this article on ComplaintsBoard.com about another person who had their phone bill charge without their consent. I also found an article called ZipWeb Beware. And yet another one here. And still another one. The stories are all virtually identical. After being told something was a free trial that would NOT self-renew, customers felt safe in saying yes, because they hadn’t given zipweb their credit card numbers. But apparently zipweb is able to bill people via their phone numbers – without their knowledge or consent.

Be careful out there small business website owners. Even free trials aren’t actually free…and while my client got the following from zipweb, we’ll see whether she actually gets her money back:

To Whom It May Concern:
Per our conversation as of 12/01/09, we will no longer provide services for your business nor charge your phone statement for services. Your total satisfaction with our company and the cancellation process is of utmost importance to me. Your refund of $49.95 will appear on your phone statement within 1-2 billing cycles. If your credit does not appear within that time frame please contact us. Please call me directly if you have any questions or concerns about our services, or your cancellation.

Please retain this notice for your records.

In the event that your invoice was in process with your phone company at the time of this cancellation and you receive a statement past this date of cancellation, please contact us at (866) 606-3249 and we will issue a credit for that charge.

If you have any questions concerning our service, this letter or the actions taken on your behalf, please call me. We can be reached by phone during normal business hours Monday-Friday from 6am–8pm PST at (866) 606-3249.

So if you have gotten unauthorized charges from zipweb.com, fight  them and get a refund. This client spent a good deal of time on the phone and had to really stand her ground and insist over and over again that they had made unauthorized charges, but eventually she won. Don’t give up!

Most reputable professional newsletter/email marketing companies have strong anti-spam policies in place. If you receive an email from someone who is using a professional service, go to the company’s website and look for their privacy or spam policy. I usually look in the footer of their home page.

Read MyEmma’s Emma’s privacy and permission policy, and Constant Contact’s Anti-Spam Policy.

My Emma’s policy states:

To send an email to someone using Emma, that recipient must be:

• Someone who is a customer, member or subscriber of your business or organization,
• Someone who has specifically asked to receive your emails by opting in or signing up in some way, or
• Someone who has bought a product or service from you in the past 18 months.

Constant Contact defines spam at “Spam is unsolicited email also known as UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email). By sending email to only to those who have requested to receive it, you are following accepted permission-based email guidelines.”

And both companies, have email addresses (abuse@myemma.com and abuse@constantcontact.com) that you can simply forward the offending spam to, and they’ll take care of it. I do this every time I receive spam from a professional newsletter or marketing company, because rather than just removing my own email address, I want the business owner to remove ALL of the other people that they are spamming as well.

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.

My client is in the dog training business. She has an extensive online training system that includes both dog training products and dog training services, like private lessons and classes. Because of her website content, she gets targeted with email scams that are a little harder to detect, because they mention her products and services.

Here’s the first example:

From: BILL CARSON <poineer.northinc@gmail.com>
Date: November 25, 2009 1:54:25 PM PST
To: mr.carson123@yahoo.com
Subject: Order request

Hello Greetings to you and the company well My name is Bill Carson and i will like to know if you do sell harness  and if you do email me with the Types  that you Have  and include their prices range On them thank you

Best regards
Bill Carson

Now, she does indeed sell harnesses, so this might be a real customer. Let’s look at the email for warning signs that it’s an attempted scam.

1. The email was sent to her BCC (blind carbon copy), see how the “To” field is to mr.carson123@yahoo.com? Big red flag.

2. Subject is very, very generic and designed to get your attention. “Order request”.

3. Poor sentence structure, capitalization in weird places.

4. She has an online store, so logically, there’s no need to send products and pricing, it’s online – that is available to any real customer who wants to get the information. You can’t view a harness on her site without viewing the price, etc.

The purpose of this kind of scam, is to get you engaged with someone in a business transaction, so that they can attempt to pull some kind of Nigerian scam on you.

This next example is a great one, you can see the beginnings of the money exchange attempt. Notice it is also sent BCC to my client, because the “To” field is geoff.collins. Also note it begins with “Greetings” – another apparent red flag:

From: Benjamin Morgan <benjaminmorgan37@yahoo.co.uk>
Date: November 25, 2009 5:19:31 AM PST
To: geoff.collins@paradise.net.nz
Subject: LESSONS/BOOKING

Greetings.
I hope this email meets you in good health and spirits.
I would be coming into the country with five puppies. As part of my Dad’s 50th birthday anniversay, I would love to have the puppies entertain the guests on that special day. Can you organize a 2 MONTH training lessons/classes for them? How many hours of lessons would the puppies need?
DATE: 25TH JANUARY 2010 TO 24TH MARCH 2010

In order to fully secure the booking with you, I would send my credit card details for a deposit. I hope you do accept credit cards via email? Do you have a POS termainal in your office? Kindly get back to me with a confirmatory email so we could proceed with the booking.

Notice how the email is trying to lure my client in with a big promise of lots of work and therefore lots of money? Notice how anxious they are to send credit card details? And they want to send them via email, which is totally unsecure? And they’re asking about a POS (point of sale) terminal? And of course, the whole idea is a bit farfetched, someone is coming from the UK with 5 puppies and he wants them trained for several months to entertain his father at his birthday party?

Let’s review how a scam like this might work. They send a stolen credit card number for a huge amount of money because continuously training 5 puppies for three months is a huge endeavor. Then, maybe they cancel it, and ask for a refund. Now, if you send them a refund before you and your credit card processing company figure out it’s stolen, you’re out of the money. Or perhaps they send the credit card, but it doesn’t work, and they they start asking you for your bank information to wire you the money….see how this works?

So be very, very wary of emails that sound like these two. Remember the warning signs: you are bcc’d on the email, it’s addressed to someone else, they ask for things related to your business – but the requests don’t make sense, the emails start off with a formal greeting, and are badly written.  It’s weird that these both came in on the same day!

Be careful out there!

Virtually all of my website clients aren’t aware of what redirects are and when a web developer should use them. They don’t understand how important it is to tell search engines where to find renamed pages. It’s similar to notifying the post office when you move that you can now be found at a new address. (It’s the best analogy I could come up with).

When search engines “crawl” over your site, they make a record of what pages they found. If you want to see what pages Google has found when crawling your website, read this article. If you follow these instructions, you can actually see what Google has indexed – what pages Google thinks comprise your website. In order for a page to come up in a search engine result, it must have been indexed.

So, imagine you have a page called “widgets.html”. Google comes along and crawls your site and now in the Google index there’s an entry for “widgets.html”. Time passes, and you decide you want/need to change the page name. Your web developer makes a new page called “newwidgets.html”.

The best way to inform Google that the old page is gone and has been permanently changed to the new page, is to create a permanent redirect. Your web developer makes a file (a plain text file) that’s called .htaccess and creates redirect commands/code for each page. The actual code will vary depending on your website hosting server. I use DreamHost, so any examples here work for them, but might not work for you if you have a different hosting company.

The .htaccess file has code that basically says “if you’re looking for a page with the name of “widgets.html”, it’s been permanently moved to this new file named “newwidgets.html” and please update your records”. When search engines encounter this code they will update their index and replace the old page with the new one. Pretty neat!

So why did I write this article on redirects? Because I often find that clients are unaware of what they are and when their web developer should use them, and some web developers don’t always use them when they change page names, change domain names, or redesign a client’s website.

Why? Well, frankly it’s a fairly tedious process if there are many pages to redirect, but it’s very important to make sure your web developer does this if the URL’s of a page are going to change.

So if you are shopping for a web developer to redesign your website, ask them if they are going to redirect the old pages to the new ones and how they will accomplish that. If they don’t say “.htaccess” as part of their answer, you might want to keep shopping.

More Information on 301 Redirects:

Here’s a wonderful article I found on redirects: htaccess 301 redirect tutorial. I learned that you can even redirect page names that have blanks in them (a bad web design practice) by putting quotation marks around the page with the blanks:

redirect 301 “/old page.htm”  http://www.example.com/newpage.htm

And if you have a WordPress blog and you change the URL/Permalinks, you’ll need to create redirects using a redirection plugin like this one.

You wouldn’t move without telling the post office your new address would you? Don’t change a page URL without using a 301 (permanently moved) redirect!

Normally my clients use DreamHost for hosting, and they usually just sign up for a regular old shared hosting plan. So far, I haven’t had anyone who has the need for more bandwidth than their regular hosting plans offer.

However I did switch my own website hosting plan over to PS around a year ago as an experiment. I was having enough downtime to bug me, perhaps getting notifications that my site was down from Web-Stat a few times a month. I also knew that how often my website went down was heavily dependent on which server I was on. I think I asked to be moved, which they did, but for some reason, I still was having downtime that bugged me.

So I switched to PS, which did indeed cut down on my downtime. It’s a bit more expensive, but since my business is web design, having a website that’s up as much as possible is important to me.

However, I also have other clients who pretty much never have downtime and they have a regular hosting plan – so I do think that it depends on who your server neighbors are and what they are doing to impact your server’s performance.

So I told my client that if he was experiencing downtime that bugged him, he could give the PS a whirl, but otherwise to stay where he was. The PS does require users to check their usage and to make adjustments, which for most of my website clients is the last thing on their minds. If you’ve moved from standard DreamHost shared hosting to PS, let me know what you think.

The article is called “Why running the White House Web site on Drupal is a political disaster waiting to happen.” It’s very well written and fairly entertaining – and it lists many of the issues that I have experienced with other complex content management tools like Joomla and Mambo. In fact, I’ve had such bad experiences with Joomla and Mambo, that I simply refuse to work with them, and now, after reading this article on Drupal, I’ll add that to my list of what content management systems to avoid.

The only content management tool that I do use, is called Web-Yep, and it’s a much simpler kind of content management application that keeps clients out of trouble and gives them just enough control over their content without the headaches. Sometimes, simpler is the way to go.

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!

If you’re a DreamHost customer, you can get access to this Live Chat, if you have PS (Private Server) or if you’ve signed up for Premium Support ($9.95 additional per month).

For me, it’s great, because I get to use Live Chat to ask questions and resolve issues on behalf of my website design clients. I still use the Support Ticket system frequently, but it’s nice to be able to use the Live Chat as well for those times when I need an answer quickly.

Here’s the announcement from DreamHost’s October Newsletter (note, their newsletters are written in a style that’s, well, quite funny and a bit sarcastic, so it’s not your typical newsletter, because they’re not a typical hosting company):

Live Chat Support!

Ah, that’s better! I finally feel comfortable and can just continue withthis newsletter, knowing that without even the least bit of effort each section will be clear, concise, and clever! They will practically write themselves from here on out. Soooooo good.

If only our tech support tickets wrote themselves! Like the time we tried that robot-sales-chat thing, oh yeah! That thing worked GREAT! Well, now we’re giving it another go around, except this time our chat responses write themselves _with the help of HUMANS_!

What I’m trying to say is, we’ve now got 24/7/365 Live Chat support available from our web panel (there’s a link at the top of each page near the “Help is on/off” button)!

With one small caveat… you need either a DreamHost PS or our Premium Support add-on! You can add a PS at any time from:

https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=vserver.provision

And you can add Premium Support ($9.95/mo) from:

https://panel.dreamhost.com/?tree=support.msg

(Just act as though you’re going to submit a ticket.. it’s there at the end.)

Sometimes too, generally when we’re super bored, we’ve been opening up the live chat to everybody. So if you happen to see the link at the top of our panel even when you’re not a PS user and haven’t signed up for Premium Support, PLEASE REMAIN CALM.

While most of my clients might never need to actually contact DreamHost, this Live Chat feature has been a fantastic tool for me, and is enabling me to do my job more effectively and efficiently. And perhaps best of all, the folks who are on the other end of Live Chat, are in California, and work directly for DreamHost, so I’m not chatting with folks in India or Russia, or some other country overseas. So when you are a DreamHost customer, you can rest assured that you’re helping the economy of the United States, while supporting a company that offsets it’s carbon emissions. What could be better?

You embed or add a pdf document much the same way you add an image:

1. However instead of clicking on the first “Add An Image” icon, you click on the last one “Add Media”. It looks like a little dot with spikes, like a star.

2. Next, just like adding an image, you click on “Select Files” and navigate to your PDF file.

3. Change the title to something obvious like “Click Here to Download Blah”, so that folks will know what will happen when they click on the link.

4. Be sure to click “File URL” under the “Link URL” section.

5. Then click “Insert Into Post”.

Here’s a screen shot of the “Add Media” window with the important parts circled in red:

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!