| LED Digest 2223: AOL's Blunder, also Tracing Email |
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AOL blundered this week with their release of 20 million searches. Now, search data is being used to discover the individual searchers...
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========== NEW ===================================The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ............................................. August 11, 2006 Issue no. 2223 ............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== <Moderator Comment> ~ AOL's Blunder "...how closely linked searches are with searchers..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Shopping Carts ==-- ~ Cayley Vos "The problem with Paypal not sending data to your shopping cart is a common one..." --== Best Use of 'Trashed' Domains? ==-- ~ John "Zeke" Brumage "Owning an empty domain is like owning empty land..." --== Membership Perks ==-- ~ Nathan Holley "I'm just curious how things have changed online over the last 3 years..." --== Usability Factors ==-- ~ Tom Aman "Follow the link near the bottom of Nielsen's site..." --== Site Re-design from Scratch ==-- ~ Kathryn Martyn Smith "You don't appear to have a domain name..." ~ James Miller "...make sure all the page names of the old site do something on the new." --== Font Sizing ==-- ~ Mary Lee "My hubby blows text up so big it is in your face..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== How to Find a Spam Source? ==-- ~ George Forder <Moderator Comment> Greetings LEDer, I'm sure you saw this week how AOL made a mistake by releasing search data for some 20 million searches. Then, the NY Times ran an article about how closely linked searches are with searchers, showing by example one AOL user's identity. Pretty interesting stuff. AOL has pulled their mistake off-line, but you can still find all the data on these mirrors: http://www.gregsadetsky.com/aol-data/. Crunch away. Have a great weekend, Adam ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Cayley Vos Subject: Shopping Carts (and Re-design) > While Miva has almost all the features you want I have > been having problems with my customers that use Paypal. - R. Neilson, LED 2220 The problem with Paypal not sending data to your shopping cart is a common one, and I have had to fix this in oscommerce.com in the past. I actually spoke with a Paypal rep about this and he acknowledged it was a common problem. http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-35436.html I have tried Miva and many other shopping carts and I like http://www.digishop.com (if you try it please tell them I sent you) -- this is a low cost ($300) program that separates the design templates from code. Tech support is good and they will answer many questions by email. On the topic of a CMS I have created a drop dead simple program, aimed at small websites. It is available to any server running PHP. http://www.netpaths.net/cms/admin/ Sincerely Cayley Vos, Principal SEO website development http://www.netpaths.net -------- new post - new topic -------- From: John "Zeke" Brumage Subject: Trashed domains > Is there anything whitehat I can do with these > domains that would benefit from the constant > robot visits or is it best to just let them bite the dust? - Jim White, LED 2221 I have a website where you can give your old domains a proper burial. It's not a cemetary, it's a compost heap. An entertaining, non-competetive place to point the DNS for new sites as well. Beats the heck out of the awful domain parking sites, and I am considering giving a small "Pixels By Zeke" icon ad in the permanent window for each incoming domain. Or maybe some kind of pixel credits as an incentive for pointing to the site. But I think the main user of the site will be the "domain collector" who does not want to have visitors to a lapsed domain going to a porn or gambling site when some big operation grabs the name, especially if the site had traffic and a community. The site is http://anyhoo.com and all that is required is to point the DNS of your orphan domain name to 66.98.170.138. I have about 85 domains, pared down from 200. Owning an empty domain is like owning empty land, there is no revenue, but the taxes must be paid or the land is purchased by someone else. It was a VERY tough decision, and the first time i saw one of my lapsed domains appear as a SCRAPER SITE... Talk about your bad neighborhoods. I was very upset. If you have domains with ego-involvment, and you can afford the annual price of the domains, you should consider the money well spent. And if that magic day comes along that you invent the perfect content for that domain, it will be yours, ready to start serving up your dreams. If some kind of trade for a link to one of your other sites seems reasonable let's discuss it here, with Adam's permission. Because you can specify the ALT text for each little icon, links on this page should be very helpful. These are not PURCHASED LINKS, they are PAID ADVERTISMENTS, which hopefully the search engines will not penalize. We know that pixel-ads, made famious by the www.milliondollarhomepage.com promotion DO generate click throughs. Pixel People point to icon ads and read the tool tips. To the website visitor, it is faster than navigating to a new page, or even a, *shudder*, popup. John Brumage Disco Legend Zeke <Moderator Comment> Please discuss any trades, barters, deals, etc. off-list. Thanks :-) -adam -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Nathan Holley Subject: Memberships Re: Memberships for Off-line Organizations... I, personally, am more interested in how Internet sites "sweeten up" memberships. Subscription sites have become ubiquitous -- are they generally working out as a business model? They must be... but how / what / when / where are these sites doing it? I see that now Slashdot, Searchenginewatch, etc etc all have membership options. This post probably sounds totally naive. I'm just curious how things have changed online over the last 3 years -- it was * that * recently that subscription sites were being panned and just plain didn't work online. Nathan Holley -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Tom Aman Subject: Usability > But that's what Nielsen's site lacks - a good colour > scheme and interesting photos. It lacks a "look and > feel" which is what makes it dull in my view. - Steve Pronger, LED 2222 Follow the link near the bottom of Nielsen's site (useit.com) to go to a page where he explains why his site has almost no graphics (there are some where they are most appropriate). Aside from anything else, it makes it a pleasure to print out any of his articles since I am not using up printer ink for pretty pictures that add nothing to the information. Nielsen points out: -------------------- "One benefit of the small number of graphics on this site is that I can serve a quarter million unique users per month with a relatively cheap Web hosting account (about 50 GB/month data transfer) that covers both sites." -------------------- As an aside, I note that useit.com, as well as another associated site, nngroup.com and some others, are hosted by Pair Networks (LED's sponsor). Tom Aman -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Kathryn Martyn Subject: Re-design > ... if I provide my "wish list" could you come > up with some recommendations? - Nancy Schettler, LED 2219 You don't appear to have a domain name at all, which is why Homestead.com has you in a sub directory. If you had a domain name, it should simply point to their sub directory, but you'd use favoritefabrics.com or whatever your domain name is. > I could move the domain name registratio... but the > websites might be inoperable for up to two weeks... Why on earth would it be two weeks downtime? It takes maybe 24 hours, sometimes a wee bit more for a DNS change to propogate over the net. Two weeks is ridiculous. If Homestead.com won't give you a proper site address, then yes, you'd be far better off moving your site. Maybe they have another level or service you could move to? I use several domain registrars, http://www.joker.com, http://www.gandi.net and even http://www.viaverio.com which is where my sites reside. Verio doesn't care where I bought my domain, I don't see why Homestead.com would. You just point your domain's DNS to the correct IP address and voila! I have no idea why homestead would be different in this regard, so either you aren't really uing your personal web address, or they are just pretending you can't have it your way. > I'm pretty sure that there are HTML editors / web > design software packages that could make maintenance > lots more automated than what I have now. Probably, but it could be you'd be talking an entire redesign, and that's not necessarily easier. Are you always needing to change the existing pages, add more pages, or what? Maybe an CMS solution like Joomla would work? I'm just starting to play with that myself. > Even something that would identify all the bad links would be > a big help! Plus the site is not quite portable the way it is. There are free programs for link checking. I use Xenu Link Sleuth (TM) to check my site's links. Here's the page to get that: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html I use Dreamweaver for an editor program; mostly because I've been using it forever. Perhaps you could use some type of database solution, but not knowing much about that, I'd probably head over to http://www.rentacoder.com and post my specifications to get bids on the job. > It sometimes happens that two people are > working on the website at the same time. Dreamweaver can handle that too. You have so many separate issues in this post, you may just want to hire the work done and get busy doing what you do best. You're not likely going to be spending your time most wisely by trying a do-it-yourself approach unless you can devote the necessary time to trying software packages, learning them, and tinking until the cows come home. Believe me, I've tried. I'll bet you'll get lots more ideas here though, so let's all see what ideas start to flow ... Warmly, Kathryn Martyn Smith, M.NLP Ending Emotional Eating, One Bite at a Time http://www.onemorebite-weightloss.com -------- new post - same topic -------- From: James Miller Subject: Re-design The first thing you should do is change your registrant to someone that passes the name through. I use LowCostNames and this does that. One of my sites, MakeMostInternet.com, is registered in this way and points to a sub directory on my JamesMiller.com site. This would mean you still have the advantage of separate domain name and hosting, so you can choose a hosting company with all the features you want. One other major point about a redesign is make sure all the page names of the old site do something on the new. For instance if your main product page is products.html, it should also be that on the new site. If not, it should be set to automatically redirect. James Miller Daisy Analysis http://www.daisy.co.uk -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Mary Lee Subject: Font sizing > ... one thing you do on your site is force me to read it using > *your* choice of font size. While my browser lets me set the > text size to my preference, your site takes that option away... - Tom Aman, LED 2217 I have actually viewed my site on several computers -- 3 macs and 2 PCs -- and am able to re-size the font as desired. My hubby blows text up so big it is in your face, and my site text blows up just fine. If you had looked at my site you would know that CSS is not taking that away. In fact if you do not resize my font is wider spaced and a little larger for easier reading, but that does not mean you cannot re-size it. Mary Lee Dinner and a Murder http://www.dinnerandamurder.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: George Forder Subject: How do you find a Spam source? Hi Adam I know this is an old topic, but perhaps there is an easy way to deal with this unwanted SPAM I am getting. Also perhaps you can put my message in a form that will make sense to people who know what they are doing :-) I get tons of these. It seems pointless blacklisting because they seem to come from masked ? addresses. Which part of the message is the server or source that they come from? How do I tell whether it's a list server or find out the true source so I can block it without shutting out some poor innocent? I include the message details below. --------------------- Return-path: < This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it > Envelope-to: This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it Delivery-date: Thu, 10 Aug 2006 11:21:30 +0200 Received: from [213.133.104.99] (helo=www99.your-server.de) by www11a.your-server.co.za with esmtp (Exim 4.51) id 1GB6jE-0004eV-A6 for This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it ; Thu, 10 Aug 2006 11:21:30 +0200 Received: from [202.141.145.66] (helo=COM7.ra6v.com) by www99.your-server.de with esmtp (Exim 4.51) id 1GB6jB-00057f-Qt for This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it ; Thu, 10 Aug 2006 11:21:22 +0200 Message-ID: <26270628509351.FEB9B4A713@3H9QH> From: "consider" < This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it > To: < This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it > Subject: enormous delilah Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2006 14:49:15 +0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Microsoft Office Outlook, Build 11.0.5510 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1106 Thread-Index: 1UaSZONC4IxaLxrhfpNwSjrSjkz7om3vOvvO Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Delivered-To: sdrift- This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it --------------------- George Forder
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