By Sharon Housley

 Creating Content

New websites are being launched daily. In order to compete, webmasters need to find alternative ways of producing themed websites. Highly focused articles are often sought by wembasters. Why? Because content on the web is still king! In order to attract search engines and site visitors, webmasters rely heavily on providing new, innovative and fresh content. If the web site content is rich, visitors will come. If the website content is updated regularly, visitors will return. When evaluating a website's traffic it is easy to see that the low cost of syndicated content can increase a website's value. Sites that contain multiple pages related to a specific topic increase the likelihood of being 'found' when a variety of search phrases are used for that topic.

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By Daniel Lamaute

 As a sole proprietor, it's wise to familiarize yourself with the some key deductions that may reduce your tax bill for 2004. Small-business consultants generally recommend that you hire an accountant to prepare your tax returns, payroll and financial statements. But you should also meet with your accountant well before the year-end rush to discuss such matters as tax planning, and record keeping for tax deductions.

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By Richard Grady

 A discussion in my forum has prompted this newsletter as I think it is important for any online entrepreneur to understand how Alexa ratings work in order that they can understand why they may not be that important to the success of their online business. Too many people make the mistake of concentrating entirely on improving their Alexa ratings but at the end of the day, these rankings are just numbers - they won't put money in the bank.

Alexa is a company owned by the Amazon group and it aims to rank every single website on the Internet in terms of how much traffic it is receiving.

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 Free content. It's what all of us webmasters want, right? Not only do we want it for free, but we want it to be original.  Content just for our site. Oh, we'll take reprints of articles or reviews if we can't get original free content, but what we really want is people to write content for us and only us.

And why not?  Good original content does well in the search engines and draws traffic which we can convert to sales or to clicks (for those who want to earn an income from Google Adsense type programs).

The question is how to get people to write content for us.

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 Let me tell you about my trial and error path trying to make some money with Google AdSense™. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of websites on this subject already. Many of them tell you how you can make a 6 figure income with only a couple of hours work a week. They will even tell you exactly how to achieve this. Just buy their e-book and you’ll have all the tips and tricks from the pros.

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By Paul Kimmel

LINQ to XML for Objects (a.k.a. LINQ to XSD) is an extension to LINQ that uses an XML schema to code-generate strongly typed objects, permitting you to objectify XML data. Paul Kimmel shows how it works.
Introduction
People are what matter; everything else is window dressing.

—Jackson Wayfare

Language Integrated Query (LINQ) is an integrated query language. LINQ basically permits you to write SQL-like queries against objects, data, and more. Instead of learning XPath or XQuery for XML, SQL for SQL Server databases, LDAP for Active Directory, and writing raw C# or Visual Basic .NET code for objects, you can learn LINQ and use LINQ to query your data—no matter where the data originates.

LINQ provides the interface IQueryProvider. By implementing IQueryProvider, you can write code that converts LINQ queries to the query language your source needs, such as LINQ to SQL. Because of its built-in extensibility, LINQ will continue to be extended into new places, such as Active Directory LDAP. In fact, this built-in extensibility is behind the subject of this article, LINQ to XML for Objects (generally referred to as LINQ to XSD).

LINQ to XSD uses the CodeDOM and LINQ technologies to generate strongly typed wrapper classes based on an XML schema (.XSD) file. The result is that you can treat XML data like in-memory objects, querying them easily with LINQ. The LINQ to XSD bits are still in prerelease mode, so you'll need to download them for the demo discussed here.

By Jeff Forcier, Paul Bissex, Wesley Chun

How fast can you produce a simple blog using Django? Pretty darn fast.
Django bills itself as “the Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines.” So let’s put ourselves on deadline and see how fast we can produce a simple blog using Django. (We’ll address your perfectionist side later.)

All the work in this chapter is done on the command line in your shell of choice (bash, tcsh, zsh, Cygwin, or what have you). So open your terminal and cd to a directory that is on your PYTHONPATHenvironment variable. On a Unix-based system such as Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and so on, you can issue an echo $PYTHONPATH command to see its contents; from a Win32 Command window, type echo %PYTHONPATH%. You can read more about paths in both the installation and Python chapters.

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By Leo Wrobel and Sharon Wrobel

Would you know what to do if you strolled past the computer room after hours and saw water coming under the door? Leo A. Wrobel believes that every organization needs a disaster plan that includes designated instructions for a first responder and the emergency team that gets the first phone call.
Every organization should have some type of business resumption plan in place, designed to respond to disaster. The term disaster, as defined in this article, breaks down into four categories:

Natural damage
Intentional harm
Human error
Acts of God

Any of these events that eliminate or severely impair a mission-critical function of an organization are assumed to be a disaster. Therefore, the definition of a disaster varies by organization. Various entities have different "pain thresholds" that define when an incident becomes a disaster. A bank, for example, will have different criteria than a poison-control hotline. With this fact in mind, any organization should begin the process of implementing "first alert" and response teams after it has completed a business impact analysis (BIA), preferably with the help of a reputable consultant. Your BIA should establish your organization's essential criteria for recovery timeframes, how quickly the organization should respond, and therefore how the first alert procedures should be structured.

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By Lee S. Barney

Create an iBlog hybrid application! This chapter shows you how to interact with web services and servers in order to retrieve data.

This chapter is from the Rough Cut version of the book.
Sometimes your application may need to access data in a remote database. Or there may be one or more web services from which it needs data. You may even want to synchronize the data on the phone with data stored remotely.

Hybrid iPhone applications make this easy. As hybrid applications they have full access to the XMLHttpRequest object from within JavaScript. This chapter will show you how to download, display, and store XML data designed for consumption by an RSS feed reader. This example allows you to see how it can be easily extended to retrieve other types of data such as HTML or JSON.

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By Randy Nash

The latest battle cry in the security community is for full-disk encryption (FDE). This has been largely due to concerns over lost and stolen information that could lead to identity theft. Disk encryption for mobile devices has become mandatory for the federal government, but it’s a good idea for anyone who wants to protect personal information either at work or at home. With that in mind, security expert Randy Nash describes how he deployed a FDE solution on his personal laptop using the free, cross-platform, and open-source solution from TrueCrypt.
TrueCrypt is an excellent open-source, cross-platform solution for file and disk encryption. It is under constant development, with regular updates being posted to its site. Another attractive feature for me is the availability of AES encryption. The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) specifies aFIPS-approved cryptographic algorithm (Rijndael, designed by Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, published in 1998) that may be used by U.S. federal departments and agencies to cryptographically protect sensitive information. If it’s good enough for the federal government, it’s good enough for me. TrueCrypt can currently encrypt the following operating systems:

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Making Money From Affiliate Programs

by Elena Fawkner

Affiliate programs are a great way to generate income if you don't have a product of your own to promote yet. You know that already. But it's NOT, despite what you've heard, just a simple matter of signing up for this or that affiliate program and placing free and paid classified ads all over the place to generate traffic to the Website they give you or to get people to click on your autoresponder link. There's more to it than that. Much more.

When I started out in this business in May 1999, I signed up for Cookie Cutter. Like many of you I thought that I could simply absorb the information provided and then resell it to others. I followed all the advice about advertising in other people's ezines and all of that. I looked forward to some very round numbers. Well, I got one alright. A big fat ZERO. And that's how it stayed until I realized the truth. That if I was going to make any money in this business I had to start from scratch. In saying that, I don't want to take anything away from Cookie Cutter. It was and is a marvelous product in terms of what it can teach you in a very short period of time if you're starting from ground zero. (Debate rages about its merits in terms of a business opportunity but that's another story.)

In this article, I tell you what worked for me. It's nothing earth- shattering or particularly profound. It's simply reality and common sense. Here's what you need to do to make any significant income from promoting other people's products.

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Evaluating Affiliate Programs

by Sarah Coles

Affiliate programs, also called partner or associate programs, have become one of the most popular ways to earn money with a website. Participants earn money by receiving commission for clicks, leads, and/or sales generated through a website. But, some affiliate programs are more rewarding than others. Knowing what to look for is the first step in choosing which affiliate programs will be most effective.

Commission and Earnings per Click (EPC)
The commission an affiliate program pays can help you choose between similar affiliate programs, but it is not always the most effective measure of how the affiliate program will perform.

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When Is The Right Time To Start A Discussion Forum?

By Andres Munoz  By now I'm certain that a great number of you have participated in online forums and exchange ideas on just about everything (business, search engine optimization, marketing or doll making). Online communities or discussion forums come in all different flavors and styles. There are some forums that receive tremendous traffic and it seems that everyone is post questions and receiving free advice.

I've been asked several times by newbies when is it appropriate to start an online forum. It's difficult to answer that question but all forums must have 2 basic requirements already stamped out:

1. Focus on a particular niche subject
2. Very high traffic ­ at least 3,000 unique visitors per day

Forum Subject

In order for a forum to succeed you must give visitors a reason to join.

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What the Heck is a Blog?

By Andy Wibbels Everybody is talking about blogs. They are everywhere: on the TV, in the newspapers, and all over the internet. With the number of blogs doubling every five months, there is no stopping the power of blogs.

But what the heck is a blog? For the elegant simplicity and beauty that blogs create, they certainly have an ugly, ungainly name. Blawg sounds like some kind of gurgling sound your cat makes before coughing up a hairball.

A blog, short for weblog, is often described as an online diary. The most recent entries (called posts) - appear on the homepage of the blog with links to archives of older posts. Archives are organized by date and often categorized by topic.

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Understanding Web Logs and Why it Matters

By Sharon Housley  General web statistics give pertinent information about website visitors. Webmasters analyzing these statistics have a better understanding of who their website visitors are and how they perceive the website. A lot can be learned by evaluating navigation patterns, most-viewed pages and exit pages. Deciphering web logs could easily become a full-time job. The information that can be gleaned from close log scrutiny is extremely valuable.

When a visitor comes to a website, the site has just a few seconds to grab the visitor's interest. Slow-loading pages or broken graphics will send visitors and potential customers looking elsewhere. In order to make sense of web statistics, consider using a log analysis program. These programs tend to format the information in an easy-to-understand way, often providing graphs or visual representations that make understanding and seeing patterns that much easier.

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