COBRA insurance is the standard temporary insurance available to you after you quit or leave your current job. Most people assume it’s the only temporary insurance policy available so they just select it after their companies insurance policy expires (typically at the end of the month you quit).

I’ve used COBRA in the past and never needed to file a claim. Since I recently left my job and need a temporary 3-6 month insurance policy, I’ve began looking for a lower price alternative. COBRA quoted me $384 a month as a low risk single male! That was motivation enough to begin my search. …click here to read more

I’ve recently had to transfer a number of my web sites to new web hosting providers because my traffic continues to go up. It’s a good problem to have but it’s also a pain to deal with. My latest domain move is a real estate blog which currently runs along with 5 other web sites under one account with Bluehost. The time has come to migrate my Real Estate Investing Blog to a new provider and I’ve chosen Host Monster.

So here the steps I had to take to transfer a domain to a brand-new hosting provider. This list serves as they high-level guideline and may vary depending on the current web hosting company and/or blogging, database you are using. …click here to read more

I came across this post on Jottings.com which lists the 100 oldest registered domains on the internet. For those of you who know about SEO, domain age is one of the factors in the quality of content according to Google. Boy do I wish I could purchase a couple of these for personal use. Talk about instant traffic!

Rank

Create date      Domain name
1.      15-Mar-1985    SYMBOLICS.COM
2.      24-Apr-1985    BBN.COM
3.      24-May-1985    THINK.COM
4.      11-Jul-1985    MCC.COM
5.      30-Sep-1985    DEC.COM
6.      07-Nov-1985    NORTHROP.COM
7.      09-Jan-1986    XEROX.COM …click here to read more

For those of you who use WordPress as your blogging platform, you know it’s the best blog platform out there hands down. I personally run several blogs, all of which run on WordPress version 2.0 or greater. And the great thing about WordPress is the availability of additional plug-ins that anybody could potentially write to improve the WordPress blogging platform.

So what’s the one simple technique to double your page views? It’s actually a free plug-in that you can download and easily install into your existing WordPress environment. This plug-in is called “Related Entries” which basically finds other similar posts within your blog and lists them. If you think about it, it’s nothing really special — the trick is all about where you place it on your blog.

As someone’s reading one of your articles or posts on your blog they scroll down and continue reading until the end of the post. At that point there looking for some new content or something else that they could benefit from based on what they just read. Now, most bloggers lose the reader at this point, as they found the information they needed and they move on to another site. The trick here is to add this plug-in at the end of your post, and it literally will double your page views overnight.

Now this might not be the case for everybody so you can’t hold me responsible if you don’t double your page views. I do promise, however, that your page views will increase (assuming you at least have decent content). As soon as I added it to my CRM blog I notice a 63% increase in page views per visitor! How’s that for a free bump in traffic? Not only did my page views go up, but my ad sense revenue also increased as well. Pretty nice huh?

Side note: You won’t notice the related entries plug-in on this blog because I just don’t have enough content (yet) to support related entries. But I urge you to download the Related Entries plugin and give it a try for yourself. If you’d like to see it in action, go to my CRM blog and click on any post. You’ll notice at the bottom of the post underneath some strategically placed ads (feel free to click on those too! :-0).

Good luck with the plug-in and let me know how it ends up working out for you.

I’m a creature of habit and been using Homesite for almost 10 years. I’ve finally decided to break the mold and make my development life easier and install the OpenSource development platform Eclipse.

Most PHP developers find it easiest to work with a running web server of their local machine. This allows you to test your work as you go, without having to upload it to a hosting environment. Therefore, I suggest you also install Apache, PHP, and (if you are using it), MySQL. This step is required if you plan to use the php debugger. Together these tools are often referred to as AMP (or AMPP if you include Perl as well as PHP).

XAMPP is a software bundle which includes everything you need to install Apache/MySQL/PHP/Perl in one go. It’s available for Windows, Linux and Solaris. Particularly on a Windows machine, this is definitely the fastest way to get up and running with these tools, as someone else has done the integration and configuration work for you.

Here are the steps to get your development environment up-and-running.

1. Download and install Eclipse
2. Download and install Java Runtime Environment (JRE)
3. Download and install PHPEclipse (Preferred automated instructions below)
4. Download and install XAMPP

An automated installation of PHPEclipse is available via the Eclipse Update Manager.

1. Click on Help->Software Updates->Find/Install from file menu in Eclipse.
2. Select the radio button labeled, “search for new features to install”.
3. Click on the “New Remote Site” button.
4. Enter a name, and the URL: http://phpeclipse.sourceforge.net/update/releases (stable)
5. Click on “Finish”.
6. A list of features will be presented, open the list and check the one labeled “phpeclipse”.
7. Click on “Next”
8. Follow the onscreen instructions to finish the automatic install.

The best overall instructions I used came from this wiki. I’d recommend walking through in detail and plan on taking 1-2 hours to get this fully installed. Good luck!

I know most everyone has Tivo or some sort of DVR (digital video recorder) but it’s not necessarily easy to access or portable. Miss last weeks episode of Southpark? Forget to Tivo 24 Season 6 Episode 2? Not to worry — just visit Peekvid.com and watch it for free — streaming straight from your computer.

Peekvid.com hosts dozens of movies & tv shows for your free viewing pleasure and with a very clean UI (user interface). As long as you have a high speed internet connection, internet browser, and a current version of the Flash media plug-in (90% of you do) then you’re good to go.

I’m still just wondering how they don’t get busted for copyright infringement but who’s complaining? Of course you can find lots of pirated videos on youtube.com but this site is much easier to find what you want to watch. Get bored at your parents house and there’s nothing on tv? Head to the computer and watch what you want. (No offense mom & dad!)

There will probably be more and more of these sites out there and I’m not sure how it will be regulated. It’s like how the music industry first had a problem with mp3’s getting passed around the internet and then iTunes monetized the idea. Video is already heading that way and fast. Long live open source & free media.

So when you get a chance, check out http://www.peekvid.com and catch up on the latest episodes of the Amazing Race, Entourage, or Grey’s Anatomy (or whatever floats your boat).

Search engine optimization (SEO) is no longer a secret weapon of cutting-edge, Web-savvy marketers. Even traditional companies have to make sure that search engines like Google and Yahoo find them consistently—because search engines are the primary way that prospects and influencers learn about products and services.

Too often, companies ignore search optimization or shelve requests for it simply because senior management does not understand it well enough to provide the necessary leadership and support. And if top management does not view it as priority, marketing and sales people are disinclined to pursue it. They will apply traditional, “accepted” tactics, shying away from one of the most efficient, measurable ways to get in front of prospects.

Too often, executives focus on the technical aspects of SEO and lose sight of the more important strategic aspects. Meta tags, spiders, pageviews, and visits don’t mean much to company stakeholders and shareholders. Results—in terms of better leads and more of them—do. …click here to read more

When people refer to “organic SEO” (search engine optimization), they almost always use it as a blanket term to describe the unpaid, algorithm-driven results of any particular engine. However, a sophisticated search engine optimization company will often take the meaning of “organic” one step further. To such companies, the “organic SEO” is not limited to what shows up in the “natural” search engine results—it includes the methodologies used to achieve such rankings.There’s more than one way to skin a cat (although I must admit that I don’t know the one way that everyone else presumably knows), and the same is true for achieving natural search engine results.

A search engine optimization company usually falls into one of two camps. A “White Hat” search engine optimization company will use a largely content-based approach and will not violate the terms of service of the major search engines. A “Black Hat” search engine optimization company will use a largely technology driven approach and often ignore the terms of service. …click here to read more

I’ve talked about it for a while but I finally signed up for Nihonjin gakuen (Japanese school). I’ve taken Spanish and French in the past but never a difficult language like Japanese. I’ve been spending a lot of time in Tokyo off and on over the last year for work so taking a structured class will help. The school I chose is located on Octavia and Pine called “Soko Gakuen”. The location is great, the schedule is great, and the price is right. It’s a 12-week intensive class where I’ll officially learn how to read & write Hiragana characters.Course Description
The development of survival listening and speaking skills, and basic vocabulary. Upon completion of this basic information–name, phone number, occupation; negate a sentence; make purchases; ask and answer course, the student should be able to: use daily expressions (greetings & salutations); provide and ask the price for things; ask and tell time, count objects; describe what one does and will do (going & coming, travel by taxi, etc.); describe locations; ask for information (What…? Where…? Who?… etc.).

Classes are Wednesday nights from 6pm - 9pm so a full weeks worth of material is covered in three hours. I just finished my first lesson tonight and felt pretty comfortable. The sensei loaded us up with homework and it’s finally homework I’m excited and willing to do. Makes a big difference when you actually enjoy the class!

So here’s a link to the Japanese School but being an SEO-guy, I’ve of course analyze their site. A pagerank of 5/10 is not bad for a poorly chosen url hanging off the aol.com site. I almost just want to suggest a change to a new prominent domain like www.sokogakuen.com or something. Not only will it improve their brand but also make it easy for their students to remember. Ok….enough with the SEO stuff.
Sayonara for now!

Alert! Additional card cage fan needed for PCI Express card over 75 watts. — That’s probably the message many of you have seen and hopefully I can help remedy it for you. The main reason I am blogging this is to help save others the frustration I went through to troubleshoot, research, order, and install this darn card cage fan.

So I purchased my Dell Dimension 8400 a while ago and decided to upgrade the video card to a GeForce 6800. After doing so, I started getting that message everytime I booted up. I’d have to hit F1 to continue which was annoying. So after some trolling through Dell’s support site, I finally discovered my problem wasn’t unique. In order to satisfy my machine, I needed to purchase an auxilary blower fan.

Ok….so to the right is a picture of the fan which obviously doesn’t have much to it. You’ll need to call Dell Spare Parts (800-372-3355) and purchase this part number:
H3840 Auxilary Blower Fan for an 8400 PCIe video card. I actually picked one up from eBay for under $9.00 + shipping so I’d recommend that route. I think Dell charges $20 or something. …click here to read more