1. Elance.com.  Ebay-style marketplace for workers.  You can hire accountants, lawyers, programmers, web designers, graphic designers, copywriters, personal assistants, and just about any other online work based projects you can think of.  I actually have spent $2,875 on there myself for my own projects.
2. Prosper.com.  Offers peer-to-peer lending services.  Do you need a personal or business loan? People will bid to lend you the money at the lowest rate.  Need a place to invest? You can find people with good ideas to loan money to and get a good interest rate.
3. Chess.com.  I’ve mentioned this site on here before, but it really is a great place to play and offers an awesome set of features and options for chess enthusiasts.  Challenge me (Joelx) to a game!
4. pwnedoncamera.com.  Funny new site put out by the guys who made Failblog, Lolcatz and other super popular sites.  I spent about 30 minutes my first time browsing!
5. prayer-helpers.com.  Ok, so maybe this one won’t be a mega-hit website but maybe a couple people will visit it lol.

Has anyone else spotted websites they really loved lately that other people haven’t heard much about yet?

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Google Chrome Review below.  You can download Google Chrome by visiting this site: http://tools.google.com/chrome/

Google Chrome has a bunch of new features that are pretty cool.  One of the primary features you will notice right away is that instead of having one box for typing in addresses and another for doing a Google or Live search, you use the same intelligent box for both.  Google Chrome uses Google search to help you search and it recognizes if you are trying to go to a web address instead.

Google Chrome is the newest internet browser.

The single coolest feature offered by Google Chrome over Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer is the ability to drag tabs out to create a new window or drag tabs between various open windows.  I typically do a lot of my web browsing with many tabs open at a time and I have wished for this feature for a long time.

Google Chrome also is much better at handling crashes because each tab is its own seperate process.  This means that when one tab crashes, you don’t lose your entire session of all windows you had open.   Pretty amazing.

Another interesting feature is the ability to run web applications without opening a browser.  I am not sure how this works yet, but I’ll be digging into it soon.

For you married men who look at porn and don’t want your wife & kids finding out, Google Chrome also has an incognito mode which does not save the pages you are looking at to your web history.

Google Chrome also has a variety of other features that I’m not going to get into in this review, including protection from phishing & spam sites, instant bookmarking and unobtrusive download management.

Why did Google decide to launch a browser to compete with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox?  I think that Google is not targetting Firefox in this effort nearly so much as Microsoft.  Google is concerned that Microsoft could make some tweaks to Internet Explorer that would discourage users from visiting the core product in Google’s portfolio- it’s search engine google.com.  Google Chrome is intended to give Google a foot in the door of the browser market so that it can better protect it’s business interests.  

Big portions of computing have started to move to be web based and this trend is going to continue to accelerate as time goes on.  Most people don’t have the technical know-how to maintain computing machines, so it makes more sense to have elite tech workers maintain servers that do most of the computing work.  People also want to be able to access their desktop and applications from anywhere, not just their home computer.  I think that Google Chrome is a part of Google’s grand business plan to continue to hold market leadership in the web applications arena.   

What do you guys think about Google Chrome?  Anyone else have Google Chrome reviews?

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I run a website selling truck and car gauges that operates using zen-cart ecommerce software and uses authorize.net (as well as PayPal and Google Checkout) for payments. After I heard about what happened to my friend who got scammed by the credit card slammers, I decided to take proactive action. I use the most up-to-date version of zen-cart and am operating authorize.net with extra security measures. After doing some research I found additional methods for protecting your website from credit card slamming scams:

• Block all IP traffic from outside of your primary sales regions. You don’t really want to be shipping goods to South America or Africa anyways do you? This method is helpful at protecting yourself from criminals, but there are still ways for them to get around those blocks.
• Another method for protecting your zen-cart website from credit card slamming is to use this helpful piece of code from Damon Parker:

“The code snippet below can be used in modules/checkout_process.php to automatically log a user out after a set number (6 in the below snippet) of payment attempts.

Place in between this code near the top of the file:

I found six attempts to work well on the sites I implemented on. You do not want to adversely impact normal users but you do want to make it harder on abusers so that they just go away.”

Credit card slamming appears to be a pretty annoying new scam. I would like to hear if anyone else in the zen-cart or authorize.net communities has found a solution for credit card slamming… any ideas?

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I chose not to link to any of these prominent search engine web designers because they have too many different pages on the internet to choose just one. If you would like to learn more about them, hit up one of the search engines and you will find hundreds of pages (and more flattering pictures )!

Matt Cutts – Matt Cutts is very well known in the webmaster community since he is Google’s primary intermediary between the search engine and the web design community. The SEO community is very familiar with him and his blog about web design, search engine optimization and other issues. Matt Cutts is a graduate of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and worked on a doctorate in computer graphics and movement tracking. He got his start in search during his time there and eventually moved into the field of information retrieval after learning about it by taking classes in the university’s library science department. Matt Cutts did not complete his Ph.D before being hired by Google, but he did attain an M.S. degree.

Bruce Clay – Bruce Clay is the president of Bruce Clay, Inc. Bruce has been an executive at various high tech companies and has had a long and virtuous career as a technical executive at major Silicon Valley firms and has worked in the Internet Business Consulting area since 1996. Bruce Clay has been a speaker at many major search engine conferences including SES, WebmasterWorld, Search Marketing Expo and others. He has had articles published in many publications and has been quoted in prestigious publications such as Wired Magazine, Wall Street Journal, PC Week, etc. With his BS in math and computer science, along with an MBA from Pepperdine, Bruce Clay has himself written several search engine optimization tools that are available on his website.

Rand Fishkin – Rand Fishkin is one of the first people who’s advice I read when getting started in web design for search engines and their users. According to his seomoz profile, Rand Fishkin got started on the internet in 1993 and learned to build websites via Microsoft Frontpage through the late 1990’s. Rand Fishkin became a leader in the SEO community when he started posting his troubles, experiences and advice for other to follow on the original SEO forums. By 2004, he began posting his materials and writing to “a subfolder that eventually became SEOmoz.” Rand Fishkin is 28 years old and is from the same place as I am- Seattle, Washington. Fishkin actually has the exact same degree as I do from the same University, though he graduated the year before I began my freshman year (University of Washington with a finance degree from the school of business).

Aaron Wall – Author of one of the major resources in the search engine web design field, “SEO Book”, Aaron Wall has been an influence on most web designers currently on the internet. He first authored the “SEO Book” in 2003 and it became a huge hit and he has done tons of revisions. Aaron Wall is also very active in the search engine web design community and speaks at many conferences and writes a storm of blogs, comments and websites. Aaron Wall has led an interesting life including working as a nuclear reactor operator on a special operation fast attack submarine. His website discusses how he wasn’t such a big fan because of the artificial environment and eventually left the military with an OTH discharge because of his “bad attitude, lack of conformity and distaste for hypocrisy”. Aaron Wall actually got started in web design because of these issues (making a website criticizing navy nuclear power). Aaron Wall continued to dig into the web after that and has made a name for himself as one of the leaders in the search engine web design space.

Michael Martinez – Michael Martinez has been a major force in the search engine web design world since his first website on Xena: Warrior Princess went live over a decade ago. He has published several books on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and is a respected scholar in these arenas. Michael Martinez has been intimately familiar with computer industry since the late 70’s and has worked on many different types of computer software since then. Michael Martinez has been a big player in search engine optimization forums and also writes a popular blog on search engine theory. He may not be the prettiest web designer, but he certainly is effective at designing marketing strategies to ensure people find his content.

Todd Friesen “Oilman” – Todd Friesen has also been working on search engine web design for a decade. Until recently, Todd Friesen was the Director of Search Engine Optimization for Range Online Media and recently moved to a new company as their Vice-President of Search Strategies. Todd Friesen has been deeply involved with search engine optimizers and was an admin at Webmasterworld and a moderator for Search Engine Watch, as well as speaking at many industry conferences. Todd Friesen has worked for an impressive list of clients including Nike, Neiman Marcus and Sharper Image.

Bill Slawski “SEO By The Sea” – William Slawski is the founder and president of SEO by the Sea, Inc. He began working on the internet back in 1996 when he helped some of his friends build a website for their online business. Bill Slawski has some in-depth knowledge of search engine algorithms, duplicate content issues and universal/blended search. He has spoken at SES and Webmaster World’s conferences and is very well known to those familiar with the industry. Bill Slawski is currently located in Newark, Delaware.

Eric Ward – Eric Ward aka “Link Moses” primarily discusses link building and techniques for using links to acquire better search engine rankings and Google PageRank. The search engine’s are opposed to people who try to develop links in an “unnatural” way, so Eric Ward can occasionally get into hot water. However, he still has some interesting viewpoints and does discuss many search engine marketing strategies as well. Eric Ward has been building content & links online since waaaay back in 1994 and has been a conference speaker since ‘95.

Lee Odden – Chief Executive Officer of TopRank Online Marketing, Lee Odden is an industry influencer. His company is based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota and integrates natural search engine optimization strategies with social media marketing and public relations to help his clients with sales, reputation management and brand visibility. Search engine web design is a difficult field at time to be involved in, but Lee Odden has managed to forge a strong brand.

Joel Gross aka “JoelX” - Okay, so maybe I’m not actually one of the most prominent web designers for search engines yet , but I’m working on learning best practices, search engine optimization techniques, online marketing and reputation management for the internet. I have been working the field for the last two years in Seattle, WA for Visible Technologies as a Business Analyst. All of the other web designers for search engines listed above focus their blogs and websites on the search engine optimization industry, but my blog posts and websites are all over the place. I write about things as disparate as chess and Britney Spears or football and Islam… basically whatever strikes my fancy. I do enjoy observing the major players blogs and trying to learn what I can from each one and match it up according to what my own research and testing show.

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How to make a favicon:

1. Create a roughly square image containing the visual elements you want to appear in your Favicon. To design a good favicon, I recommend using simple elements that are easily recognizable such as a letter or two with a unique color. You can also take someone else’s favicon (criminal! ) by simply typing in their url and adding /favicon to the end of it (steal mine by typing in joelx.com/favicon) and then right clicking the image and saving it.

2. Go to this site and upload your image and convert it to the .ico favicon format. Next download it to your computer. You now have a favicon!

Below I have listed 5 simple steps to putting a favicon on your Wordpress blog:

1. Create or download a favicon.ico file.
2. Upload your favicon file to your blog using an FTP client. Place it inside the initial public_html folder, not inside one of the blog subdirectories like /wp-includes.
3. Check to make sure you placed your favicon in the correct directory by typing in your-url.com/favicon.ico. If you see your favicon image you did it correctly.
4. Go into your Wordpress admin panel and click Presentation, then Theme Editor and on the right hand side click on header.php to open your editing window. Add the following code <link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico"> anywhere between the <head> and </head> tags.
5. View your blog in the browser and hit Ctrl +F5 to hard refresh your browser. Congrats, you now have a favicon!

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