If you’re thinking about starting a business — or even keeping one afloat in this economy — don’t be discouraged by the climate. If anything, find inspiration in the fact that — no matter what happens — things will turn around eventually. Of course, eventually could be a long time, so you should prepare for an extended winter — especially considering the reckless irresponsibility with which our leaders are handling our currency and our banking industry. But once it’s over, the new generation of industrialists will come from small-business thinkers who knew how to stay lean and efficient when times were tough.

Times have changed. Believe it or not, the Internet is still in its infancy, and I promise you it’s not going away. If you don’t own a computer, or if you don’t know how to navigate the World Wide Web, it goes with out saying that you’re already at a serious disadvantage. Of course, if you’re reading this, that probably means you have at least a modicum of computer skills. Still, computing and networking have defined the last fifteen years of business, and yet, what we’ve seen so far will be nothing compared to the next 20 years.

I’ve prepared a list of useful tips any entrepreneurial spirit should keep in the forefront of his brain as he weathers this economic crisis.

1. If you don’t know web design and web development, you better find someone who does. Do you know the difference between (X)HTML and CSS? Would you be able to interface with a database using PHP? Can you create an image, logo, or animated presentation using Adobe CS4? If not, you need to partner with someone who can.

   I don’t need to tell you this, but the internet is the place people go first to find what they need, and it has been that way for some time. If you aren’t presenting yourself in the cleanest, easiest-to-read, friendliest, and eye-grabbing way, then you’re going to lose. Period. It’s the new frontier, and you need to be at its cusp.




2. SEO, SEO, SEO. It stands for “search engine optimization,” and that’s exactly what it is — an entire industry whose purpose is to make sure that you, your name, your business, your product, your service, and your reputation are available to as many eyes as possible on the internet. It’s not an exact science, but it’s not wizardry either. And above everything else, it’s not easy.

   
   

   SEO specialists spend years trying to understand the intricate complexities of search engine do’s and don’t’s, and if you truly optimize your presence on the internet, you can drive traffic like nothing you can possibly imagine. But it takes patience, dedication, and consistency. If you think you know enough to do your own SEO, you’re probably just about 180 degrees wrong. Look into it, and once you understand just exactly how much you don’t understand, then find someone who does. It’s critical.




3. Social networking, social networking, social networking. If you think Twitter is a dirty word, and you think Facebook is something a woman carries her makeup in, you are in a lot of trouble. Social networking is the way people connect with each other now. It used to be that if you wanted to find someone, you did a Google search and crossed your fingers. Today, that’s no longer true. You want to find someone? Go to Facebook. With all the updating, connecting, chatting, and gossiping going on in social networking venues, you better understand that you need to be in the fray, promoting yourself. There’s no way around it. You’ll also need to familiarize yourself with LinkedIn and several other social/business networking sites.




4. Blog, blog, blog, blog… BLOG! Are you talented? Do you consider yourself an expert? Do people come to you to solve their problems? Of course they do! And for all these reasons, you are in business! Now go write about it.

   
   

   Do you know how much it costs to create a blog? Zero. That’s how much. You can use blogger, Drupal, Joomla, or my favorite — WordPress. Or, you can use any of the innumerable alternatives out there. Be creative, and tell the world how much you know about your specialty. And keep telling them… over, and over, and over again. Eventually, search engines will recognize your expertise too (especially if you correctly employ SEO), and they will help you find business.

   Remember, an article stays on the Internet forever (at least theoretically). So if you’re writing about yoga techniques today that will still be germane ten years from now, well, then your article could be performing the passive task of marketing for you indefinitely. What could be better than that? And as your reputation grows, so will your audience — and that’s when things go viral. So crack those knuckles, get in front of your keyboard, and write. And don’t stop until you’re rich.




5. TIE IT TOGETHER! As you get older, you’re going to accumulate more knowledge. You’ll learn different skills that transcend the original scope of your business, and you need to tie these skills together.

   
   

   I’m going to use myself as an example: when I began my career, I was a financial analyst. I’m great with numbers and math. But after I started my hedge fund, I found myself developing deep technological skills — including web development, SEO, web design, spreadsheet expertise, networking, database management, and programming of every imaginable sort. The next thing I knew, I was as good in these fields as I ever was as a financial analyst, and yet for years, I didn’t market those skills at all! Likewise, I became expert at marketing, writing, and presentation, and yet I did nothing about it.

   Eventually, however, I wrote a book and used my skills in all of these areas to find as much success as I possibly could — on all fronts. Today, I’ve brought it all together through blogs, web sites, marketing campaigns, and SEO. I know technology, so I write a technology blog at MyTechTool.com, and this helps my web-development, design, and SEO business (DesignOriginate.com). Likewise, I have leveraged my financial and economic knowledge into the content-driven site at BottomViolation.com.

   Finally, I have combined my book’s site — DisciplineNovel.com with my personal site — PacoAhlgren.com. And, of course, there’s Facebook and Twitter, which get updates every single day, no matter where the content comes from. The end result? It’s hard to visit one of my sites without having access to all the rest of them.

   One caveat: from an SEO perspective, it’s okay to create loose links between your various enterprises, but make sure those enterprises stand alone. Use tools like “nofollow” tags to ensure that search engines see each entity as unique and stand-alone.




6. Understand business. Okay, okay… this doesn’t have much to do with emerging technology, but it may be more important than anything else.

   
   

   So you’re a great chef! Isn’t that fabulous! You can prepare the meanest steak tartare east of Boise. Man, we are all just so impressed! But what do you know about A/R, A/P, credit terms, cost of carry, and inventory management? Nothing? Wonderful! Your business is statistically nearly guaranteed to fail!

   It doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do; the overwhelming majority of small business in this country fail because proprietors focus too exclusively on their talents, and not enough on the business of their business – much to the detriment of their cash flow. Enroll in some community college courses. Learn the basics of business and accounting. Believe me, you’ll thank me later.




7. Speaking of education. Do you know what the biggest search engine on earth is? Of course you do. It’s Google. But do you know what the second-biggest search engine is? It’s YouTube.

    

   Are you surprised? I was too, until I realized that YouTube is the ultimate online learning resource. Ever.

   I know — I just told you to enroll at a community college, and you are certainly welcome to do that. But why on earth would you spend $150 on a textbook — along with whatever tuition costs — when you can find anything and everything you could ever possibly want to know about accounting, cash flow management, taxes, employment costs, insurance, software, (or anything else) on YouTube? For free! Try it. You’ll be absolutely blown away at how much you can learn in such a short time.

   And the best part? There’s not some stupid sorority girl in the back row saying, “Do we have to know this for the test?”

Paco Ahlgren solves business problems. He is a financial analyst, economist, author, web-developer, designer, and SEO specialist in Austin, Texas. If that’s not enough, he’s also a single father (that’s the job he likes best).

If you’d like to contact him about how he can help you make your business run better, you can contact him at paco@designoriginate.com. Or you can visit his design | development site at www.DesignOriginate.com. Find out more about his book Discipline at www.DisciplineBook.com.

The simplest way to insert spaces between groups of icons is to use a Terminal Command. Each time you enter the command, it inserts a blank “space” into the Dock, which you can treat like any other icon in the Dock. So if you want four spaces, enter the command four times.

Start by opening Terminal — found in Application/Utilities — and then enter this line:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add ‘{tile-data={}; tile-type=”spacer-tile”;}’

In order to see the changes, you have to restart the Dock by entering the following command in the Terminal:

Killall Dock

The spaces appear at the end of the icons that are in the Dock. Treat them like any other icon — grab and drag them around to wherever you want. If you added too many spaces and want to delete one, simply drag it off the Dock or right click on the empty space and select ‘Remove from Dock.’

Easy, right?

Morgan Merritt

www.MyTechTool.com

Chances are, if you’re using WordPress, you will download a free WordPress theme (at one point or another), with which you will design your blog or site. One of the best things about WordPress is the sheer magnitude of themes available — offering you a seemingly infinite number of theme choices and combinations. One column, two columns, or three columns? Black background, white background, or something in between? You decide — and it’s this flexibility that helps WordPress stand head and shoulders above its competition.

Unfortunately, if you choose to use a free WordPress theme, you will likely encounter one in which the author encrypts code in the theme itself, linking away from your site to another page — from which he or she can generate revenue. Theme writers have to make a living too, so it’s somewhat understandable — but there’s no law that says you have to keep the links. And, in reality, these encrypted are undesirable for any number of reasons:

1. The links will only distract visitors attention from the content on your site.

2. they drive traffic away from your site.

3. From an Internet marketing stance, you always want more links coming into your site than going out of it, and you always want the links to and from your site to link to “strong” pages. This improves your page rank and gives you more credibility, resulting in more traffic. When hidden code creates links away from your site, it deprives you of valuable page rank “juice.” This becomes even more troubling when these links lead to advertising sites of questionable repute.

Your first inclination may be simply to delete the encrypted code from your footer — and that might even work. But most of the time it won’t, and erasing the code will cause your pages to act in strange and unpredictable ways. Fortunately, there’s a way to “unencrypt” these hidden lines of code, and it’s not nearly as hard as you might think.

What is going on here is pretty simple: these developers created the encrypted code in order to keep you from being able to read it. Unfortunately, when the code is executed to bring up your web page, it is unencrypted, and it’s only a matter of finding that unencrypted version of the code, and then replacing it in your theme’s footer. And that’s what I’m going to tell you how to do.

WordPress “calls” different components (like your header, your sidebar(s), and your footer) in your website using “php” commands. So, for instance, if you see your footer and your sidebars when you go to your index (or home) page, it means that those components have been “called,” and that’s why they appear. For this article, I’m going to use the index.php file as our target, because it is almost always the home page of any particular theme, and it almost always calls the footer.

1. Open your index.php in any web browser that allows you to view the source code (almost all — if not all — of them have this feature).

2. Next click “view source.” The screen will change and will show all the code for your index.php file. Scroll down the screen until you find the footer area of the source code. If you aren’t sure what part of the screen is the footer code, you’ll need to open up your footer in any text or html editor (like DreamWeaver, Text Mate, Coda, or the web-based WordPress theme editor in your administration control panel when you login to WordPress). What you can then do is create a commented sentence (it doesn’t matter what it says) just just before and just after the encrypted code (“commented” text is text that has “comment” tags before and after it. This makes the text visible in the middle of the code, but it isn’t executed by the code, so you can read it, but it doesn’t affect any of the commands written in a php or html file. Comments are useful for putting instructions in the middle of application code. To learn more about “commenting,” do a Google search for “comment tags for php.”). After that, you should be able to repeat the “view source” steps above, and you can just look for the commented sentence you added just before and just after the encrypted code.

3. Once you’ve located the footer section of your index.php file, you’ll notice that the part that is encrypted in your footer.php file is not encrypted when you view source. The reason is — as I said above — the code is revealed when it’s executed, and so it appears in the “view source” page of any web browser.

4. If it isn’t already open in a text or html editor, open your footer.php file. Simply copy the “footer” part of your “view source” results in your web browser, and paste them over the encrypted code in your footer.php file. This doesn’t change the file at all. The only difference is that the encrypted version of the code is replaced by the unencrypted version. They are exactly the same things, only one is totally illegible and unreadable to humans, whereas, the code from your “source” page is very easy to decipher.

5. Now all you have to do is identify the URL pointing at the troublesome external site, and delete it.

And that’s all there is to it!

Paco Ahlgren

www.MyTechTool.com

Anytime you create a new category in your WordPress theme, an RSS feed is generated for it. For example, I have started submitting chapters of my book Discipline on its website — in the form of a podcast. I set up a category called “DISCIPLINE Audio Book,” and whenever I record a new chapter, I post it under that category only.

Next, I went to feedburner and burned the feed generated by that category. The feed is: http://www.disciplinebook.come/category/discipline-audio-book/feed. I want to note here that every time you create a new category, you are also prompted to create a slug. That’s the part of the URL that says discipline-audio-book, and that’s what you would use to burn your feed — along with the rest of the URL elements.

Feedburner will then generate an RSS feed that you can track and customize. The feed it generated for my audio book podcast is http://feeds.feedburner.com/DisciplineAudioBook, and that’s the link I give to people who want to subscribe. Of course, if you prefer, you can simply use the feed generated by your site (for instance, http://www.disciplinebook.come/category/discipline-audio-book/feed), but you sacrifice the ability to track the feed and customize, and/or monetize it.

And that’s all there is to it! A relatively simple process that seems incredibly daunting and intimidating. Now you know!

Paco Ahlgren

www.MyTechTool.com

On a PC

This is actually pretty easy. When your PC finds flash on a website, it downloads a copy into a cache folder on your computer. All you have to do is find that folder, identify the video, rename it, and move it to whichever folder you like. This is also possible on a Mac, but it’s much harder to do, and for the sake of brevity, I’m going to leave it out of this article. If anyone wants to contribute to this article by detailing how to find a cached video on a Mac, that would be great. But there is another way to capture video (or anything else) on a Mac…

On a Mac

There is an application called SnapZ which does a wonderful job of capturing anything on your screen — whether still or moving. It’s as simple as this:

1. Identify the video you’d like to capture.

2. Open and configure the SnapZ app.

3. Select the video on your screen.

4. Hit record in SnapZ.

5. Play the video. SnapZ will record it.

A few tips:

- SnapZ records all movement on the screen — including your mouse cursor. Fortunately, it has a feature for hiding the cursor so it won’t appear in the captured video. Avail yourself of this option right away, if you intend to use the video in another context.

- You need to leave the video you’re recording on the screen for its duration — in other words, you can’t work on anything else. Remember, SnapZ records everything that happens on your screen.

As with any content on the web, copyright infringement is a very serious issue. Never “borrow” anyone’s content without explicit permission.

Paco Ahlgren

www.MyTechTool.com

Today was a very good day…

If you get a chance try out a plugin called Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu. It takes your WordPress admin control panel sidebar and turns it into an extremely user-friendly horizontal drop-down menu. Here’s here’s what it looks like at MyTechTool:

Yeah, it let me add the custom color, as well — which is very helpful, considering I manage five blogs. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve created a post and nearly published to the wrong site! The ability to have different colors on each admin control panel helps me remember exactly where I am all the time.

I spend a lot of time moving in and out of my blogs. It’s just a second or two here and there… but those seconds can really add up.

Paco  

www.MyTechTool.com

by Robert McMillan
18 comments | 19I like it!
March 2, 2010, 02:41 PM — IDG News Service —

The company recently used the U.S. court system to shut down the Waledac botnet

How will we ever get a leg up on hackers who are infecting computers worldwide? Microsoft’s security chief laid out several suggestions Tuesday, including a possible Internet usage tax to pay for the inspection and quarantine of machines.

Today most hacked PCs run Microsoft’s Windows operating system, and the company has invested millions in trying to fight the problem.

Microsoft recently used the U.S. court system to shut down the Waledac botnet, introducing a new tactic in the battle against hackers. Speaking at the RSA security conference in San Francisco, Microsoft Corporate Vice President for Trustworthy Computing Scott Charney said that the technology industry needs to think about more “social solutions.”

That means fighting the bad guys at several levels, he said. “Just like we do defense in depth in IT, we have to do defense in depth in [hacking] response.”

“I actually think the health care model … might be an interesting way to think about the problem,” Charney said. With medical diseases, there are education programs, but there are also social programs to inspect people and quarantine the sick.

This model could work to fight computer viruses too, he said. When a computer user allows malware to run on his computer, “you’re not just accepting it for yourself, you’re contaminating everyone around you,” he said.

The idea that Internet service providers might somehow step up in the fight against malware is not new. The problem, however, is cost.

Customer calls already eat into service provider profits. Adding quarantine and malware-fixing costs to that would be prohibitive, said Danny McPherson, chief research officer with Arbor Networks, via instant message. “They have no incentive to do anything today.”

So who would foot the bill? “Maybe markets will make it work,” Charney said. But an Internet usage tax might be the way to go. “You could say it’s a public safety issue and do it with general taxation,” he said.

According to Microsoft, there are 3.8 million infected botnet computers worldwide, 1 million of which are in the U.S. They are used to steal sensitive information and send spam, and were a launching point for 190,000 distributed denial-of-service attacks in 2008.

www.MyTechTool.com

<?php

/*

Template Name: Page

*/

?>

Oh, wait. Not quite done and done. If that still doesn’t fix it, activate the default WordPress theme, check to see if the drop down is there, and then reactive your new theme.

–

3/1/10 update:

In order for this to work, you’ll almost certainly have to install the default theme, check the page post edit page to see if the dropdown has appeared, and then reinstall your new theme. I have no idea why, but this is what works.

UPDATE 3/9/10 — So far, it’s doing its job…

Paco

www.MyTechTool.com