Libertarian Presidential Candidate
Topic: Politics
Barr is forming an exploratory committee to run for president... not sure if he actually believes he can win or not, but interesting news nonetheless.

Important Search Engine Notes
Topic: Technology

geo-targeting: Ads delivered to a particular the geographical location of the searcher. Geo-targeting allows the advertiser to specify where ads will or won't be shown based on the searcher's location, enabling more localized and personalized results.

These are just a few terms to know about the search engine optimization of websites. 

inbound link: An inbound link is an hyperlink to a particular Web page from an outside site, bringing traffic to that Web page. Inbound links are an important element that most search engine algorithms use to measure the popularity of a Web page.

Gaining relevant traffic through search can also be accomplished through search engine marketing efforts on the Internet. 

keyword: A word or phrase entered into a search engine in an effort to get the search engine to return matching and relevant results. Many Web sites offer advertising targeted by keywords, so an ad will only show when a specific keyword is entered.

Website Design Tips

Graphic and Photo Effects

You might have notices some cool sites and wondered "how did they do that?". Most "wow" sites use various graphic and photo effects. What you need to become an expert at is, how to use these effects in the correct amount and not over do it. Read our immensely popular Graphic Design Ideas article to learn how to use these effects, and more.

Site Interactivity

Macromedia Flash is very useful to add interactivity to your site. 95% of the world's browsers have the Flash Player plug-in, so you don't have to think about compatibility as long as your movie can be played by lower versions of the Flash Player. Try having a HTML and Flash Sections "Entry (Splash) Page" if you have a heavy movie to accommodate users on slow connections.

Interactive Applications: To make your web site more sticky you can add a few simple interactive applications like site polls, surveys, a guest book, an event calendar, newsletter sign-up, etc. There are many applications on the net but you need to choose them carefully if you do a lot of online business. You can check out our some of our Flash and ASP/PHP products, that will bring your site to life:

Website Server Back-ups
Topic: Technology

A good rule of thumb to follow while you are configuring your back-up is to figure in how often you plan to update your site, or if you plan on having customers or visitors enter their information into an area of your site. You can then use this figure to decide how often your back-ups should be performed.

Once you have configured your back-ups, you will not need to worry about them. They will automatically run at the specified time each day, or each week. The output of the file will normally be saved in the home directory of your site.

Now, let’s say that you installed a new application on your website and it completely destroyed all of your site’s data. This is a little extreme, but it has happened in the past to thousands of webmasters. Don’t panic! You can easily restore your back-up from your dedicated server’s control panel.

Assuming you have followed the instructions above, you should have at least the past week’s data saved in the home directory of your server. This file will normally be zipped or compressed in some way. You can now log-in to your dedicated server’s control panel, and begin the restoral process.

Configuring and Restoring Hosting Back-ups - Part 1
Topic: Technology

When you begin to operate your dedicated server, you will most likely have the option to configure how often back-ups are performed on your server. It is very important to have a back-up of your site, especially if you are running a site that collects customer data or a site that has a forum or community application.

For busy sites, a daily back-up is essential. This back-up will contain all of the data that was processed or inputted to your site for a 24 hour period. If you have a problem on your site, but you use a daily back-up, the chances of you losing your data are very small. You may lose a portion, but it is a lot better than losing absolutely everything on your site.

Resellers should provide daily back-ups for all of their customers, to ensure that their customers will not lose any of their data. Even if it is the customer’s fault that their site’s data was corrupted, it is good customer service to have a back-up ready for them. You can also instruct your clients to perform their own back-ups of their sites if they are worried about data loss.

Small sites that don’t receive much traffic can still benefit from using a back-up system. In this case, a weekly back-up should be sufficient, but even a daily back-up cannot hurt if you update your site frequently.