So Free IQ is probably something you want to check out. It’s a bunch of educational and training videos about a variety of business related ideas and products, most are completely free. Hence the ‘Free’ of the IQ part. If you have any interest in online marketing, making money online, or just want to check out a new educational tool, then I’d suggest that you visit Free IQ and sign up today. It’s free to join, free to watch. Some of the programs do cost money and those are mainly on the right hand side of the pages.

Oh yeah, and if you have a good idea for a product, then you can post your product on their yourself and start making money and getting traffic to your site from this business YouTube-like site of his.

Increase your IQ with Free IQ.

Who the hell is Microsoft to tell the general public on my ‘order page’ (not my home page, or my free lesson page, but my ‘order page’ of all places) that this is a suspicious website?? What right do they have to do that?? In the United States, we are innocent until proven guilty. And putting fear into people about an innocent site is CRAZY!!!

Now to put fear into people about a suspicious website (with absolutely no f#@cking reason or proof) on my order page BEFORE they go to pay money – That’s COSTING ME MONEY!!! Microsoft is in all liklihood costing me sales. Because of a filter on their new Internet Explorer 7.0 that checks each website to see if it’s safe according to their rules.

I have NOTHING on my ‘order page’ that is suspicious, or phishes for personal information of any kind. The only thing I have on my order page is a link to Paypal and a Paypal buy now button.

So I checked my other sites, and my clients’ sites that use Paypal. And guess what?? They all came back as suspcious according to Microsoft. On the ‘order’ and ‘checkout’ pages of NUMEROUS websites using the Paypal ‘add to cart’ button, a POP-UP box built into Microsoft Internet Explorer ver 7.0 says that these are suspicious websites and you should not trust them, because we don’t.

SHAME! SHAME on Microsoft. They are causing undue fear and a potential loss of renenue. In fact I have had ZERO U.S. sales since I saw that filter pop up. And God only knows how long it’s been there. I don’t check my order now pages all that often. I could have lost TONS of money because of Microsoft’s wreckless paranoia.

They think they are doing a public service? Give me a break. Personally I don’t need Microsoft to be a police for the internet. It’s a company, not a ruling body. And to tell the general public NOT to trust my site is f#cking INSANE! My site doesn’t have any viruses, any spyware, any phishing bullsh%it, nothing. It’s clean and safe and I want people to know that.

So there is a link on that pop up from Microsoft saying don’t trust this site and if you click on that link you can fill out a form saying that you are the owner and that this is NOT a phishing website. So I did that. I had to fill out a f#cking form giving Microsoft PERSONAL INFORMATION and then had to explain to them why my site is NOT a phishing site. As if it were any of their f#cking business. How unbelievably hypocritical is that. And it gets worse. I called Microsoft customer support, they wanted to charge me $35 to talk to a customer service rep. UNBELIEVABLE.

About an hour later, I get an email from Microsoft telling me that they have changed the status of my website and AGREE IT’S NOT a phishing site. Well no f#cking sh$t. But, to make matters worse, that changes could take up to 24 hours to take effect.

24 HOURS??? That could cost me A LOT OF MONEY!!!! Waiting 24 hours and losing sales because Microsoft is telling each visitor who actually clicks through to my order page that this is a SUSPICIOUS site is, to me, bordering or way past the border of libel. If only I was an attorney. The damage they have caused is wreckless and really pisses me off, in case you couldn’t tell.

Now I have actually always liked and used Microsoft products, but not now. This whole thing is just a HUGE waste of time and my money.

This new bullshit Microsoft Phishing filter gets an ‘F’ in my book. ANd in 24 hours it had better NOT be telling the general public that my site is “SUSPICIOUS”!!!!!!

FOR THE RECORD – January 10, 2007: Microsoft has ammended my site’s rating and is no longer saying that it is suspicious. I am in the clear on that one. Having said that, Microsofts new tool has been upgraded to a D- in my book. Because, another friends site using Paypal is still being called suspicious on their checkout page. NOT good!

If you’re not familiar with what a database is, it’s just a way to save and organize information. SQL stands for Structured Query Language. And it’s a great tool for you to easily store and read data you’ve put into the database.

So what are some of the common applications involving the use of a MySQL database?

There are tons. One common one is a recipe database. If you’ve ever gone to a site and searched for recipes, those recipes are stored in a database. Another example is user registration for membership sites. If you’ve ever belonged to a site that required you to enter your username and password, then more than likely they had a database set up. How else would the compute remember your password for your particular username?

Databases are used to save information for future use. Now there are numerous databases out there. MySQL is the most popular because it’s reliable, high quality and it’s free. Others include Microsoft Access, and Microsoft SQL.

On the web, it’s pretty common to see MySQL paired with PHP (see our last post). MySQL is the database and PHP is the web language used to access the database and provide custom searches and custom results.

A database is made up of tables. Inside the tables are rows and columns containing the data. PHP can be used to access a specific row and / or column of data for a particular request. For example, if you were looking for a chicken recipe with lima beans, then a PHP script can be written to ‘read’ the database and retrieve those specific results.

If you think about it, that’s what search engines really are. Just giant databases. They have all these websites stored in gigantic databases and when type in a keyword, the search engine goes through their database and pulls out what they think you are looking for.

Now it’s important when you sign up for web hosting to look to see how many MySQL databases they give you. The more the merrier. Hopefully at least 1. Also check whether or not you’ll be using PHP with it. This is most common on Linux web servers. For Microsoft servers, the preferred database is either Access or SQL. And the language used to interact with the database is .Asp (Active Server Pages). So keep that in mind.

To learn more about MySQL here’s some helpful resources.

MySQL – This is the home page for MySQL
myPHPAdmin – This is a php program used by many web hosts that allows you an easy way to create and edit your MySQL databases & tables.
MySQL Front – This is a windows based open source way to edit and create tables on your home computer.

Open source is software that has been contributed to the online community. Open source usually means that the source code is available and can be used, changed and edited.

So what does this all mean to you?

The open source community has some great programs available for you to use for FREE.

For example, Nvu and the GIMP are both FREE open source programs. And so anyone who wants to create a website or design some graphics can use these programs for FREE. There is no charge. That’s one of the beauties of open source. And that’s why we support open source with our free tutorials. To help contribue to the community.

Besides, Nvu and the GIMP, there are some other great open source programs. One of the most recent I’ve stumbled across was OpenOffice.org by Sun Microsystems. Open Office is a complete office suite that allows you to create speadsheets, word processing documents, presentations, databases, etc.

And after using it for a few days, I have to say it is awesome. I mean I didn’t own the other popular brand names, mostly because they are expensive, but Open Office is truly compatible with the major office suites brands and it’s free. You can’t beat that.

Need a spreadsheet? Or to create a pdf? Try Open Office. Easy to download, install and use, I am thoroughly impressed with Sun’s contribution to the community. Thank you very much to all those who made that project possible.

So, probably in the not so distant, there might just be some Open Office tutorials coming soon!! Also I want to thank my friend Glenn and his biofeedback site for telling me about Open Office.

Just last night, I was talking to a friend who wanted a web site, but didn’t know what web hosting was and thought it was too complicated to do her self. And she isn’t the only one.

Actually creating your own web site is ridiculously easy to do. And we help by giving you free video tutorials and free software to make your web pages. If you have ever used a word processor or sat at a typewriter, then you can create your own website. I promise.

Ok, so just what is web hosting? Web hosting is simply a place where you can store your web pages. It’s like one of those big storage unit rental places, where you can store all your stuff when you’re moving. You rent a space, which you can lock, and you can store, add, remove or swap out your stuff anytime you want. If you have a BIG website then you’ll need lots of space, if not go with the smallest possible. That’s really all a web host is, a storage facility.

When you sign up for a web host, you pay a small monthly or yearly fee, and they give you a place to store your web pages so that the world can come visit. They’ll ask you to create a username and password and then you enter that information into your web page editor and you can store (also called uploading, or sending) your web pages to that space.

It’s also a good idea when you’re getting web hosting space, to buy a domain name at the same time with the same company. And typically you’d do that first. The domain name tells you and other people where to find your website. It’s your unique address.

For web hosting and domain names, we personally use and recommend…

Optimal Web Hosting

But we suggest and recommend others as well. Check out our web hosting page at www.designyourownweb.com for more detailed information.

Creating your website is not complicated. There are some steps you have to follow, yes, but it’s actually very easy. Anyone can do it.

And anyone can create their own podcast, all you really need is a microphone and some software. In fact, some of the software out there is FREE. So you just need to buy a good microphone and your in business.

There are tons of podcasts now available. And of course, pod casting directories have compiled huge lists of this recent trend. All of these podcasts relay information via a talk format. As I write this post, I am listening to an interview as well.

That ability to multitask to me is one of the major advantages of podcasts versus just reading websites. For me, I can listen to a podcast and work on the computer at the same time. It’s a way I use to multitask. I have yet to develop the skill to read multiple websites at the same time. The other major advantage of podcasts is that you get to hear the creator of the podcast. You can tell alot about listening to someone’s voice. Communication is 45% tone and words. The best option is video, where you get to see the other 55%. By the way there are video casts, those are called vlogs.

So podcasts are usually just mp3 recordings. mp3 is a way to compress the audio into a smaller file size without losing tons of quality. You’ll need special software to compress your recording into a mp3 file format. One free program out there is the open source program audacity. You can use audacity to record and save your recording in an mp3 format.

Once you have a saved recording in mp3 format you can upload that to your site. Now many people also include that mp3 recording in an RSS feed. We talked about RSS a couple posts ago. That way, people can subscribe to your podcast. Whenever you release a new podcast, you can have subscription based audience to podcast to.

For example, after creating your podcast and the relevant RSS information, you can submit this information to various podcasting directories. So you can literally, today, start your own talk show and your own podcast.

Now, you just need something interesting to talk about…

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a way of syndicating (sharing of content among different web sites) information of all sorts. This information can be news feeds (like CNN or CBS News) or can be from a personal blog (like this one). The language used to create RSS Feeds is called XML.

So what? Well, here’s how RSS can help you….

Understanding a little about RSS and XML allows you to subscribe to different news feeds. It allows you to literally design your own daily news choices.

For example, let’s say you just want to get the men’s basketball news. You can go and sign up for a news feed just for Yahoo’s Men’s College Basketball feed. And then you’ll be kept up to date on the college basketball scene automatically.

Now clicking that link won’t do you any good UNLESS you have a news reader.

A news reader is needed to decipher the XML language that the RSS news feed was generated. News Readers are designed to every once in a while (you determine the frequency) check ALL of your news feeds that you signed up for (you can sign up for tons if you wanted).

Once it checks them all, any updated news feeds are then displayed as headlines in the your news reader. You can then choose to read either the entire article or pass based on the headline or your interest or time.

Using news readers is a great way to keep updated and keep in touch with the websites you really enjoyed. Good RSS feeds will continually show you new and interesting things.

Here’s the step by step…

1) Get a news reader. There are many readers, most are FREE. You can get a desktop news reader (like Feed Reader) or you can go with an online reader (like MyYahoo, or Google Reader or Bloglines).

2) Go to a website that has a news feed or an RSS feed. Often times they’ll display some symbols like…

or or the new

3) Clicking on that symbol will only get you gibberish (or XML language). What you’ll need to do is to copy that feed code (http:// code in your address bar if you clicked on it OR just right click on the orange button and copy the link code) and then put it in your news reader. Typically there will be an option to ‘Add a new feed’ in your reader. Just paste that feed code into your news reader. You’ll then begin getting all the news feeds from that site.

4) You can add as many news feeds as you have time for. You can always delete them if you don’t have time or if they aren’t very good feeds.

5) News feeds are helpful in that they don’t get blocked by SPAM filters and you don’t have to give away any personal information (like email address) to sign up for a news feed. It puts you in charge of what you’d like to receive.

It’s been suggested that only about 15% of the population actually have news readers. But, with the release of the new Windows coming out soon, it will supposedly have a built in news reader and the popularity of news feeds will probably increase dramatically.

If you haven’t already, try out a news reader and sign up for some news feeds.

Our news feed is at the bottom of this page (the little RSS link in the blue bar). Design Your Own Web Newsfeed.

Until the next ‘What the heck??‘….see you then!

A blog can actually be many things. It can be a personal journal, it can be a business tool, it can be a diary, it can be a reminder for you about cool website you’ve found, it can be a content management system, and it can really be a wide variety of things. If you have spent any time at all reading blogs, then you know what I am talking about.

The great thing about blogs is that anyone can create their own blog. Using free software you can have your own blog up and running in just minutes. Then you just write about what ever is on your mind. You can create a blog for your friends and family to share information, like pictures for example.

The best way to learn what a blog is by setting up your own. Here’s some tools to do just that:

Blogger – Google’s FREE blogging account tools.
Yahoo 360 – Yahoo’s FREE blogging.
MSN Spaces – MSN’s blogging account tools.

All the above are FREE and are hosted on their servers. If you want to host it on your own server, then try a blog program like WordPress or Moveable Type.

Some notable blogs of interest…

Design Your Own Webs’ Blog – This blog right here.
Ask Dave Taylor
Brad Fallon’s Blog
Massage Therapy Online

That should be enough to get you started. What you do with your own blog is up to you. It’s basically just a blank canvas waiting to be created…