Printing a Book with CSS

good article about how to print a web page using CSS
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/boom

apartment neighborhood hunting

good sites for learning more about communities, security, crime rates, schools, and more...

http://www.bestplaces.net/city/compare_Montclair_NJ_to_Lyndhurst_NJ?CRIME


Towns in Bergen County
http://www.co.bergen.nj.us/bcresources/municipalities.html

free directory listing sites

http://www.tipsntutorials.com/Top-Directories/

http://www.isedb.com/

good NYTimes article...

[from http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/nyregion/thecity/27brid.html
This article is not reprinted for any internet use...I posted it here just so that I could easily re-read it at a later time...I'm not trying to republish it.]

November 27, 2005
Urban Tactics
For You, Half Price
By GABRIEL COHEN

THE year is 1899, and a saucy con artist named Peaches O'Day is trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge. She succeeds, too, passing it off to a gullible fellow who pays her $200 and receives a bill of sale reading, "One bridge in good condition." As punishment, she is run out of town, but she returns in triumph, disguised in a black wig as the French entertainer Mademoiselle Fifi, and goes on to be elected mayor of the city.

So it went in the 1937 comedy "Every Day's a Holiday," a Mae West film that made merry with one of the most cherished notions about New York and the gullibility to be found there: that someone would be foolish enough to buy one of the city's iconic landmarks.

Since the bridge was completed in 1883, the idea of illegally selling it has become the ultimate example of the power of persuasion. A good salesman could sell it, a great swindler would sell it, and the perfect sucker would fall for the scam.

But this was not just a rhetorical or a fictional conceit. A turn-of-the-century confidence man named George C. Parker actually sold the Brooklyn Bridge more than once. According to Carl Sifakis, who tells his story in "Hoaxes and Scams: A Compendium of Deceptions, Ruses and Swindles," Parker - who was also adept at selling the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Statue of Liberty and Grant's Tomb - produced impressive forged documents to prove that he was the bridge's owner, then convinced his buyers that they could make a fortune by controlling access to the roadway. "Several times," Mr. Sifakis wrote, "Parker's victims had to be rousted from the bridge by police when they tried to erect toll barriers."

Another seller was William McCloundy, also known as "I.O.U. O'Brien," who sold the bridge in 1901, "for which he was convicted of grand larceny and served two and a half years in Sing Sing," The New York Times wrote some years later.

In writing his book "Hustlers and Con Men: An Anecdotal History of the Confidence Man and His Games," Jay Robert Nash interviewed an elderly swindler named Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil, who said he had known several criminal vendors of the bridge. Mr. Weil, whom Mr. Nash visited in a Chicago nursing home and described as "probably the greatest con man of the 20th century," recalled a swindler named Reed C. Waddell, who worked the bridge swindle in the 1880's and 1890's. Mr. Weil also claimed to know Waddell's successors in that trade, the notorious Charles and Fred Gondorf.

Perpetrators such as Mr. Waddell and the Gondorf brothers were savvy. They timed the path of beat cops working near the bridge, and when they knew the officers would be out of sight, they propped up signs reading "Bridge for Sale," showed the edifice to their targets, and separated them from their money as quickly as possible. "The Gondorfs sold the bridge many times," Mr. Nash said. "They would sell it for two, three hundred dollars, up to one thousand. Once they sold half the bridge for two-fifty because the mark didn't have enough cash."

And there were plenty of marks. "The oddity of the thing today," said Luc Sante, author of the book "Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York," "is not that there might have been con artists ready to sell the bridge, but that there would have been suckers both gullible enough and sufficiently well-heeled to fall for it."

By all accounts, the bulk of the suckers were greenhorns, fresh off the boat. Swindlers used to approach the stewards of international vessels docked at Ellis Island and pay them for information about passengers who might have money and be interested in buying property. "They didn't understand the country," Mr. Nash said of this population. "They didn't understand the law. But they understood that this was supposed to be the land of opportunity."

The Brooklyn Bridge had several attributes that made it particularly well suited for this sort of endeavor. Its proximity to the port made it highly visible to newcomers who might be likely marks, and its size provided opportunities to show it off while avoiding the law. But perhaps most critical was its considerable fame. "In the 19th century," said Kathleen Hulser, the public historian at the New-York Historical Society, "the bridge was one of the two best-known symbols of America," the other being the Statue of Liberty.

Vendors of the bridge not only counted on the gullibility or greed of their targets; they also appealed to their vanity. Buyers could believe, as Mr. Sifakis put it, that "they had become real men of substance, great capitalists."

"All great monuments will have swindles built around them," he added. "The appeal is to own a piece of the rock."

Even as the nature of the immigrant population shifted, the scam endured. "Up to the 1920's people were still trying," Mr. Nash said. "But it was a hard sale. Immigrants had become much more sophisticated and knowledgeable, and by that time the processors at Ellis Island were handing out cards or booklets saying, 'You can't buy public buildings or streets.' " These shifts explain why the Brooklyn Bridge is the span associated with swindles; the city's other bridges were built after the high tide of gullibility had already begun slipping away.

Long after actual sales of the Brooklyn Bridge subsided, the concept still roused the public imagination and remained embedded in popular culture. In the 1947 movie "It Happened in Brooklyn," Frank Sinatra played a young private home from the war who sang plaintively to the woman he loves: "Don't let no one tell you/ I've been tryin' to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge." Even Bugs Bunny got in on the act; in the 1949 cartoon "Bowery Bugs," an old man is so charmed by the rabbit's tale of the famous bridge jumper Steve Brodie (Brodie's feat, alas, was a hoax) that he agrees to buy the bridge from him.

AND because of the Internet, which has provided seemingly endless new opportunities to propagate frauds, there's life in the old con yet. One particularly memorable attempt to sell the bridge is documented on Scamorama.com, a Web site that presents e-mail exchanges between would-be scammers and their not-so-gullible targets.

In one, a swindler using the name Genevieve e-mailed a target calling himself Vidocq (a pseudonym that should have warned off the scammer, it being the name of a famous French criminologist). In broken English, the scammer presented a convoluted story of riches tied up after a coup in Liberia and tried to entice Vidocq into sending money to help gain release of the funds. Vidocq did his best to gain the swindler's trust, then turned the tables by offering shares in the Brooklyn Bridge. The notion piqued the swindler's interest, and an involved exchange of e-mail messages followed before the scammer finally realized just who was being conned.

When it comes to victims and victimizers, perhaps the humorist Will Rogers deserves the last word. "They may call me a 'rube' and a 'hick,' " he said. "But I'd a lot rather be the man who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the man who sold it."

Gabriel Cohen is the author of "Red Hook," a novel.

A simpler way to save: the 60% solution

[from http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Savinganddebt/Learntobudget/P36153.asp
This article is not reprinted for any internet use...I posted it here just so that I could easily re-read it at a later time...I'm not trying to republish it.]

A simpler way to save: the 60% solution
Twenty years of complicated budget calculations have led me to this one simple conclusion: By limiting all essential spending to 60% of total income, savings will soar.

By Richard Jenkins

How many of you have tried budgeting and think it's a waste of time? Come on, let's see those hands.

OK, that's just about everybody.

I've kept a budget of one kind or another, first on paper and then with the help of various software programs, for about 20 years -- despite a strong suspicion that I was wasting my time. The illusion of control, I argued to myself, was better than none at all.

My approach to budgeting was to carefully track my spending during the month and to adjust my budget targets up and down in each category, so that my total expenses never exceeded my income.

Laborious? You bet.

Useful? Sometimes.

Anal-compulsive? Probably.

After two decades of this, though, I started to wonder if there isn't an easier, more effective way to budget. I realized that the hardest part about keeping a budget is getting useful information from it. There's too much detail and not enough bottom line. My answer is "the 60% solution," a faster and easier way to structure your budget without having to account for every penny. (You can use the calculator at right to estimate your own monthly income and expenses.)

What you're trying to do with a budget is to prevent overspending, which ultimately leads to piling up debt. Contrary to the way most people budget, however, it rarely matters what you're overspending on -- dining out, entertainment, clothes. Who cares? It's still debt, right?

Looking at my own spending history, I realized that it wasn't the little luxuries here and there that got me in trouble. It was the large, irregular expenses, like vacations, major repairs and the holidays that did all the damage. To avoid overspending, I had to do a better job of planning for those.

And then there were the really big expenses: buying a car, putting a down payment on a new home or putting a new roof on an old home -- all of which can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. They also can often be postponed, sometimes for years, which theoretically should give me a chance to save for them.

Understand your committed expenses
As I looked back over the past 20 years of budgeting, I saw that there were a few years when my wife and I believed we were fairly on top of things, even with a much lower income than we have today. How did we manage?

The key was a drop in our fixed monthly expenses. It was a period when declining interest rates had lowered our adjustable-rate mortgage payment to about 15% of our household income. That left us with some extra money each month to set aside in a savings account for those irregular expenses.

We later moved to a bigger house with a much bigger mortgage payment, higher maintenance costs and utility bills, and obscene property taxes. The monthly mortgage payment was only 20% of our gross income, far lower than the 33% that most lenders will allow, but, suddenly, we were struggling again.

Even after refinancing our mortgage at a lower rate, we were still often running out of cash before the end of the month. I realized that other fixed expenses had crept upward over the years. As my children, Natalie, now 17, and Jackson, 14, have gotten older, they need things like music lessons and sports equipment that can add several hundred dollars a month to our basic expenses. They're also outgrowing clothes faster than we can buy them.

The slow but steady growth in our monthly spending commitments was putting a squeeze on our budget. I call these "committed" expenses rather than "fixed" or "non-discretionary" expenses, because things like music lessons are neither fixed in amount nor absolute necessities, but rather are commitments my wife and I have made to provide for our children.

The 60% solution emerges
After analyzing our spending patterns over the past couple of years using our Microsoft Money data file, I determined that we needed to keep our committed expenses at or below 60% of our gross income to come out ahead at the end of the month.

Committed expenses:
# Basic food and clothing needs.
# Essential household expenses.
# Insurance premiums.
# Charitable contributions.
# All of our bills -- even such non-essentials as our satellite TV service.
# ALL of our taxes.


I'm not saying that 60% is a magic number. It's a workable goal for my family, and it's a nice round number. But your number might well be a bit higher or lower. At any rate, it's a good place to start.

Then I divided up the remaining 40% into four chunks of 10% each, listed here in order of priority:

Retirement savings: consisting entirely of my 401(k) contribution, which is subtracted automatically from my paycheck.

Long-term savings: also automatically deducted from my pay to buy Microsoft stock at a discount as part of an unusual stock-purchase program. The relative lack of liquidity (i.e. the difficulty of turning these shares into cash) makes it harder to spend this money without some planning and a series of deliberate steps. In a real emergency, though, I could sell and have the cash wired into my bank account within three days, so this is also our emergency fund.

Short-term savings for irregular expenses: which are direct-deposited from my paycheck into a credit union savings account. Money in this account can be easily transferred into our checking account, as needed, via the Web. Over the course of a year, I expect to use all of this money to pay for vacations, repairs, new appliances, holiday gifts and other irregular but more or less predictable expenses.

Fun money: which we can spend on anything we like during the month, so long as the total doesn't exceed 10% of my income.

You may have noticed that only 70% of my paycheck is used for everyday expenses. Since we never see the other 30%, my wife and I generally don't miss it.

We don't really need to track our expenses, because our checking account balance is generally equal to the amount of money we can spend. That's the way a lot of people do it, but they don't first make provision for savings.

The key is keeping a lid on those committed expenses. You can categorize them if you want, but it isn't really necessary. In fact, you could make a budget with just three categories: committed expenses, fun money and irregular expenses, and that's just what I've done with the budget in Money 2005. (I can't really give up my anal-compulsive ways completely, so I've also created a set of subcategories to track the committed expenses, partly because that also allows me to export parts of my spending data to a tax program at the end of the year.)

Now, at this point you may be saying, "Well, la-dee-dah for you, but there's no way I can get my committed expenses down to 60% of my income."

How to get your spending down
For a lot of people, part of the difficulty in reducing committed expenses comes from the need to make big monthly credit card payments. If you're carrying a substantial amount of non-mortgage debt, I'd suggest using the 20% that would otherwise go to retirement and long-term saving to aggressively pay down your debt -- but only after you cut up those cards.

Every dollar in interest that you don't pay is just like getting a guaranteed, risk- and tax-free return on your money equal to the interest rate on the debt. When your debts are paid off -- and it won't take long using 20% of your gross income -- immediately redirect that money into savings.

Now, let's take the really hard case: Even excluding debt payments, reducing your committed expenses to 60% still seems like an impossible goal. If that describes your situation, the odds are good that you're facing one of the following problems:

# You have a more expensive home than you can afford.

# You've committed to car or boat payments that are larger than you can afford.

# Your children are in a private school that you can't really afford.

# There's just a big, ugly gap between your income and your lifestyle.

If it's one of the first three, you can undo the damage by slowly unwinding the commitments you've made and choosing something less appealing but ultimately more appropriate. You might also be able to take other steps that could help to reduce your committed spending, outlined in "7 radical ways to save money."

If the problem is having champagne tastes on a beer budget, you'll need to take a long, hard look at where the money is going and why. Take the "Savvy Spending Quiz" on MSN Money to see if perhaps you're using money and things to fill a void in your life. Often, the steps needed to fill that void have little to do with money.

The real secret to building a budget that really works isn't tracking what you spend, any more than counting calories is the secret to losing weight. The key is creating a sustainable structure for your finances, one that balances spending and income and that leaves enough room to handle the unexpected.

heatlh insurance calculator

Web site that has a calculator to assist with deciding which health insurance package works best for you and your family.
http://planforyourhealth.com/

nice photos

nice photos.. some images for desktop of computer screen

http://knuttz.yi.org/

Google SiteMaps will give webmasters information about their site(s)

[originally from http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2005/11/16/google-sitemaps/]

Google is now offering a new glimpse at exactly how their spider views your Website.

Try this:
1. Login to your Google account (AdWords, Gmail or Analytics)
2. Enter your Website URL at the bottom of this page.
3. Verify your Website by creating a uniquely-named, but empty HTML file and uploading it to your server. Click on the “verify” link to view instructions on how to do this. More info about verifying your site.
4. Click the “View stats” link

So what exactly can you find out?

• The most popular queries that your Website shows up for
• The top queries from which you get clickthroughs
• Crawl statistics: Pages succesfully crawled, pages blocked by robots.txt, pages that generated HTTP errors or were unreachable
• The PageRank distribution within your site
• Various indexing stats (pages indexed, etc.)

This is an awesome troubleshooting tool for all Webmasters, and something that hopefully the other search engines will copy soon.

Powerpoint presentation tips...

[originally from http://particletree.com/notebook/powerpoint-and-presentation-tips/]

• Presentation Zen – Presentation Zen contains a wealth of information on creating professional presentations. Two of their articles which recently caught my eye are Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic and Living large: “Takahashi Method” uses king-sized text as a visual. I would highly recommend subscribing to this blog.

• Powerful Pointers for Presenters – A great list of articles and sites related to improving presentations.

• Beyond Bullets – People Communicating with People – Beyond Bullets talks a lot on how we can use PowerPoint to be more than bland bullet point presentations.

• Really Bad Powerpoint – This pdf by Seth Godin talks about Powerpoint mistakes and how to fix them.

• Garr Reynolds – Garr Reynolds, the man behind Presentation Zen also has a personal website Including tips on organization, presentation, and slide creation. There are also some great sample presentations you might want to check out.

• The “Change Up” in Lectures – Don’t worry, you’re not the only person dying of boredom in those long lectures. This article is a little dated but does a great job of explaining why our attention span is so short and how lecturers can liven up a presentation.

very hard passwords

Generating long, high-quality random passwords is
not simple. So here is some totally random raw
material, generated just for YOU, to start with.

https://www.grc.com/passwords

Ruby on Rails - RoR ... tutorials

http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/article/1816/top-ruby-on-rails-tutorials

Top 12 Ruby on Rails Tutorials

A former student asked me a few days ago how I learned Ruby on Rails. The answer was that I simply read alot of great tutorials. So in the spirit of sharing, here are the 12 tutorials that I found most useful:

1. Rolling with Ruby on Rails - Curtis Hibbs of ONLamp.com offers his first excellent introduction to Ruby on Rails. This is the article that got me really excited about RoR.
2. Rolling with Ruby on Rails, Part 2 - The sequel to Curtis Hibbs excellent series of articles.
3. Four Days on Rails (PDF) - a great tutorial that is broken down into simple tasks that you can do over a four day period. To be quite honest, this tutorial only takes about 2 hours, but nonetheless it is very well organized!
4. Really Getting Started in Rails - Amy Hoy has a great tutorial that not only covers RoR, but also introduces the reader to many of the basic concepts of the very cool Ruby scripting language.
5. Tutorial in Ruby on Rails - is a basic tutorial aimed at newbies.
6. Fast-track your Web apps with Ruby on Rails - IBM jumps into the sandbox with an excellent (as usual) tutorial to get you on your feet fast.
7. Getting Your Feet Wet With Ruby on Rails - Talking about getting on your feet fast, this one from Webmonkey promises to get them wet too!
8. How to make a todo list program with Rails - Another excellent introductory tutorial that actually helps you build something useful!
9. Ajax on Rails - Curtis Hibbs offers part 3 of his look at RoR
10. Many to Many Tutorial for Rails (PDF) - is a nice document that begins to delve into some of the more complex parts of web application programming, but in fine Ruby on Rails manner, it’s really not too complicated!
11. Distributing Rails Applications - A Tutorial - So now you’ve built your RoR application, how to you push it to a production server? This tutorial covers the bases.
12. Installing Ruby on Rails with Lighttpd and MySQL on Fedora Core 4 - and of course this list wouldn’t be complete without a shameless bit of self-promotion, this tutorial promises what it says. Other install tutorials can be found here, here and here!

Happy Rails developing and if you have any other tutorials that you’d like to share, please leave them in the comments!

Web marketing web site

wilsonweb.com

from the site's homepage...

Struggling to market your company on the Web? You've come to the right place!

We offer the Web's largest source of key information about doing business on the Net -- with over 2,200 pages and 15,000 of links to resources on e-commerce and Web marketing. This is such a large site that we offer you a site introduction tailored to your needs.

web site promotion tutorial site

http://apromotionguide.com/

from the site's main page...

We'll begin with the assumption that your site is brand new and that you haven't done any website promotion work yet. However, that doesn't mean that you can't use the tutorial if you have submitted to a few search engines or registered your site with a couple of directories. If you notice that there are some things you have already done, feel free to simply skip over them.

Promoting your site takes a lot of time and may involve waiting several weeks or even months to get into certain directories and search engines. Thus, it might be wise to bookmark this page so that you can return to it later and continue the tutorial from where you left off.

Website promotion, phase one - Directories

You should start your website promotion efforts by listing your site at the most popular Internet directories. Because they can send you substantial amounts of traffic and affect your ranking in various search engines, it is wise to make sure that your site is present in all of the major directories before doing anything else.

Step one - General information

Submitting to directories is easy and doesn't require much effort. It's ensuring that your submission will be accepted that makes this task a hard one.

1. First, read "Boost your traffic with website directories" to get a basic idea on what directories are and how to submit to them.

2. Examine the article about web page design to get some tips on how to improve your site and reduce the chances of it being rejected.

Step two - The Open Directory Project

Start with the Open Directory Project. While your site has to offer good, unique content to be accepted to the ODP, its editors usually review sites quickly and won't reject them without a good reason for doing so. This, along with the fact that submitting to the ODP is free of charge, makes it a perfect starting point. Completing this step successfully will also provide you with experience that will prove to be very valuable later on.

1. Read my thoughts on how Google's ranking algorithm works and notice how an ODP listing seems to affect your ranking at Google. Keep this information in mind when you submit.

2. Take a look at the advice on submitting your website to the ODP.

3. Finally, submit your site to the ODP.

Step three - Yahoo

After securing a listing at ODP, your next task is to get the folks at Yahoo to notice that your site exists and is worth a place in their directory. This might cost you a fair amount of money if you are running a commercial site, but is usually worth it. Non-commercial sites can get in for free, but might require several submissions and a lot of patience before they are accepted.

1. Check out the Yahoo-specific guidelines and hints and the article about how Yahoo's search feature ranks sites.

2. Bite the bullet and submit your site to Yahoo.

Step four - Looksmart

You're done with ODP and Yahoo, so it is time to move on. Looksmart is the third of the big website directories and is also the final target of our submission campaign. A good listing in it can send a lot of visitors your way, but obtaining one sometimes requires you to open your wallet a bit.

1. Read "Looksmart, the pay per click directory". The article explains why Looksmart is important and how to submit to the directory. It also has the details on what the "secret" back door to Looksmart is and how to use it.

2. Try to submit for free, if possible. If not, evaluate whether a Looksmart listing would be worth its price and submit if you see it as a wise move.

Website promotion, phase two - Search engines

Now that your site has been included in ODP, Yahoo and Looksmart, you should already be receiving clearly more traffic than before. The next task is to get to know search engines and use them to bring even more people to your pages. Because you have completed phase one, you have established a good foundation for making your site perform well in the search engines.

Step one - Search engine optimization, basics

Before you even submit to search engines, learn the basics of their algorithms (ranking systems) and adjust your pages to meet their criteria as well as possible. This will take some time and effort, but doing some work now will save you from a lot of trouble in the future.

1. First, try to make the design of your site as search engine friendly as possible. To read more about the subject, take a look at my article about website optimization.

2. Next, you'll need to do some keyword optimization. Sounds frightening, but in plain English it simply means choosing the correct keywords for your pages. Using the wrong words is perhaps the most common reason why people don't get satisfying results from their search engine optimization work.

3. Continue by reading these search engine optimization tips.

4. Read the article about META tags and add them to all of your pages. The META keywords tag isn't absolutely necessary, but the META description tag is very important.

5. Learn what link popularity is and how search engines use it to rank your pages.

6. Unless you have already done so, read about Google's algorithm. Google is among the most popular search services of today, so it is wise to take its requirements into account.

7. Use all of this information to optimize your pages for the search engines.

Step two - Search engine optimization, advanced

Your site is now adequately prepared to be submitted into search engines. But if you want to widen your knowledge about them and increase your chances of success, you still have some work to do. On the other hand, if you're totally exhausted and just want to get this thing over with, you'll be delighted to know that this step isn't absolutely necessary.

1. Study some of the more advanced things related to search engine optimization. Among them are cloaking, css tricks, doorway pages, themes and how to improve your search engine ranking with click popularity.

2. Read about the things you should avoid doing from this article that outlines common web site promotion mistakes.

Step three - Submitting to search engines

Finally, the time has come to start the process of submitting to search engines. Before you begin, you will need to know where to submit, how to submit and what to submit. Registering your pages with all the major search engines is going to take some time, but these days you simply can't sit around and wait for them to find your site on their own.

1. Learn the correct search engine submission techniques. Incorrectly submitted pages may be left out of the database.

2. Read the "Top search engines" article to see which engines are the most popular ones.

3. Submit to them, then move on. Check back next month or so to see whether your pages have been included or not.

4. If you are running a commercial site, you might also want to consider paying for search engine placement. Take a look at how you can use PPC search engine advertising to buy your way to the top.

Website promotion, phase three - More techniques

After being accepted into the largest directories and having pages of your site come up in answer to searches done at the major search engines, the long hours that you've spent on website promotion have begun to pay off and your daily visitor count is starting to look good. But there is still plenty you can do to help your site attract even more traffic.

In phase three, we'll examine different promotion methods that you might want to try. However, in order to prevent you from wasting your time on things that don't work, we'll also go over a few techniques that have proven to be less than spectacular when I experimented with them.

Step one - Keep these in mind

First, let's take a look at the good stuff. The articles introduced in this step are about the website promotion methods that are at least partially effective. Some of them work better than others, but if used correctly, all of them can produce results that will be worth your while. Of course, most of the articles include advice on what you need to do to obtain the best possible results with the method discussed.

1. If you sell something on your site, you might want to try banner ads. Usually banner campaigns are seen as expensive and ineffective, but it is partially because advertisers don't know how to design good banners.

2. Read the article on how to increase traffic with return visitors. Getting people to come back is the secret to why some sites get amazingly many hits per day.

3. Learn what reciprocal links are and how to get them, then put that knowledge into use. In addition to sending you visitors, reciprocal links will also increase your link popularity and help your site rank higher in the search engines.

4. Start using E-mail signatures. They might not produce thousands of visitors, but are a great way to promote your site a bit without having to actually do anything.

5. Evaluate whether your site could benefit from joining a topsite list. These lists have their good and bad sides, but might be at least worth a try.

6. Consider trying to build traffic with Usenet advertising. It can give you a nice traffic boost and help spread the word about your site, but only if done properly. Read the article to learn why Usenet promotion should only be done with great care.

7. Writing newsletter articles often works well and can send you large amounts of targeted traffic in a short period of time, for free.

Step two - Forget these

As said, everything just doesn't always work the way it should in the world of promotion. In step two, our attention is focused on website promotion methods that are more trouble than they are worth. They might not be entirely useless, but your time would be better spent on improving your site or spreading the word about your site in other ways.

1. Click exchange programs are easy, fast, free and will get you a lot of visitors. That's why it might be a surprise to hear that they really aren't good website promotion tools.

2. A lot has been written about FFA pages and for the past few years, most of it has been negative. The only thing they are good for is increasing the flow of spam to your E-mail address.

3. Winning website awards can occasionally be useful, especially if the awards are well-known. However, sometimes the winner of the award is not the real winner.

Final words

Congratulate yourself for being persistent, bright and hard-working. Most get frustrated and quit before this point, which is why most sites never become anything. After all, the secret to having a successful site is working hard in both promoting and creating it. You just might have what it takes.

After going through those three phases, you've read just about everything this site has to offer. While there is more to website promotion than what we have discussed here, you now know quite a lot about the subject. If you still desire more information, don't forget to come back to this site every now and then. This tutorial is always incomplete, because I continuously notice things that I want to write about.

I hope that A Promotion Guide has been able to help you to make your site more popular and thus given you the chance to spread your ideas and thoughts to a larger audience. And remember, if you have achieved good results, it's not because I showed you how to do it - it's because you did it.

open source advertisement program

phpAdsNew is an open-source ad server, with an integrated banner management interface and tracking system for gathering statistics. With phpAdsNew you can easily rotate paid banners and your own in-house advertisements. You can even integrate banners from third party advertising companies.
http://phpadsnew.com/two/

requires:
php
mysql

online selling and advertising article

http://www.strategicmarketingmontreal.ca/selling.htm

CMS open source

http://drupal.org/

Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

A site for entrepreneurs to read and learn ideas from each other.
http://www.kauffman.org/

blog about link building

A good blog about link building strategies
http://www.linkbuildingblog.com/

SEO: link building strategies

Description link building strategies
http://www.14thc.com/get-free-backlinks.html

Directory sites

These are a few online directories (directory sites):

blue.daffodil.uk.com
coolgrandma.com/odp/directory.php
dir.seo7.net
directory.cipinet.com
directory.google.com
http://dir.portprophecy.com/
http://directory.portalit.net/
http://directory.sysice.com
http://directory.xperts.ro/
http://dreamz.mylinea.com/
http://ecommerce-directory.org
http://english.hispanoempresa.com
http://fabaroo.com/
http://fabarooni.com
http://flexengine.com
http://link-ads.com/directory/main/
http://mkdir.anchorbase.com
http://search.711.net/
http://search.stopat.com/StopAt
http://SearchCity.biz/
http://search-o-rama.com/
http://searchsight.com/
http://searchwarp.com
http://sonicquest.com
http://www.dir-submission.com
http://www.dmole.org
http://www.dwff.com
http://www.easy-submit.info/
http://www.exactseek.com/
http://www.ezilon.com
http://www.fabarooni.com
http://www.familyfriendlysites.com
http://www.fastpaths.com/
http://www.gdirectory.info
http://www.geeksonsteroids.com/directory
http://www.geniusfind.com/
http://www.gloose.com/dir.html
http://www.grizzlyweb.com
http://www.guide-directory.info
http://www.hotlaunch.com/
http://www.iconcave.com/partners/
http://www.mavicanet.com/
http://www.maxlinks.org/top/English_Directory/
http://www.megri.com/
http://www.mercury-directory.info/
http://www.moon-directory.info/
http://www.mostpopularsites.net/

Google Analytics

Google has started a free web site stats analysis tool:
https://www.google.com/analytics/

"hot map" for advertisements

Google created a "hot map" for identifying good places to put AdSense advertisements.
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html&gsessionid=kmgrxYquqIc

PHP implementation of security text

If you're looking for a way to prevent brute-force attacks against your login pages, automated sign-ups through your registration forms, or automated spam in your blog commenting system, then look no further! In this article, I'll guide you through the basics of creating and integrating a security image like those found on the sign-up pages of many mainstream sites.

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/toughen-forms-security-image/

Useful SitePoint articles

Do you Need a Virtual Private Server?
A Virtual Private Server (VPS) is a simulation of hardware by a host operating system that allows another operating system to run on it. What that means for Web developers is that a Web hosting company can host multiple "Virtual" servers on one physical, or "host", server.
http://www.sitepoint.com/print/virtual-private-server

Take Command with AJAX
Do you want to build more dynamic, responsive, desktop-like Web applications like Gmail and Google Maps? Then this article is for you. It guides you through the AJAX [1] basics and through the process of building a simple AJAX application. That application is named WebConsole and, in essence, it's a browser interface for executing system commands for which you'd usually need shell access.
http://www.sitepoint.com/print/take-command-ajax

Make Money From Your Content SiteIf you're a Webmaster whose site receives even a modest amount of traffic, you've no doubt dreamed of the untold riches that lie untapped in your traffic stream. The burning question is: "How can I make the most money possible from my Website traffic?" This article will help you answer that question, as we explore several of the most common and profitable methods that are currently being employed to convert page views into dollars...
http://www.sitepoint.com/print/make-money-content-site

Successful Web Development Methodologies
Commercial Web development has been around for more than 10 years. As an industry, this one's still fairly young when you consider others that have been around for centuries. But relative youth as an industry is no excuse for not doing better.
http://www.sitepoint.com/print/successful-development

Build an eCommerce Website with eZ publish
This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions for creating a custom ecommerce site with online credit card processing functionality, using eZ publish.
http://www.sitepoint.com/print/ecommerce-website-ez-publish

The Search Engine Marketing Kit - Chapter 1
Every day, millions of people turn to their computers and look for information on the Web. And, more often than not, they use a search engine to find that information. It's estimated that more than 350 million English language Web searches are conducted every day!
http://www.sitepoint.com/print/search-engine-marketing-kit

Simple CSS Image Switcher

This is a pure CSS image switcher that is lightweight and standards-compliant. It could be used for a gallery or any similar function. Any number of list selection options can be used so long as the width can accommodate them.

The CSS does not utilize any hacks, as this page uses Dean Edwards' IE7 JavaScript.

This css widget functions in Mac/Win Firefox, Mac/Win Opera 8, IE6, Netscape 7 & Safari (and perhaps others). It is easily adaptable for different uses simply by modifying the various widths, heights, and margins. View source for CSS and XHTML. Please feel free to use and adapt to your own needs.

http://www.andyrutledge.com/cssslides.html

Web Site Graphic layouts

As a reference for the web designer, this website provides over 500 layouts to use in planning and designing websites.

As a reference for the client, this website provides a visual menu of layouts for the website that they are envisioning.

http://www.layoutcookbook.com/index.php

Photoshop tutorials

Some interesting Photoshop tutorials
http://www.tutorials1.com/index.php

Find out how far you've run...

This site uses Google's mapping service to determine how far you've run. Great tool!
http://mapmyrun.com/index.php

I dig Digg

Digg is a technology news website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control. With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allow an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

http://digg.com/faq