As I said on Saturday, this is the time where I’m not going to post to my blog until further notice (whenever that is). I need some time to be able to take care of some things and implement some changes personally and professionally, and I’ll come back as soon as they’re done. I’m not sure of the timeline exactly, but these are things that need to be done, and I’m going to do them.

I may pop my head up on iHelpYou once every day or two, but that’s going to be about it. I’ll also approve/decline comments as appropriate but won’t respond as such (unless it’s necessary).

Later.

As many of you know, I have a habit of checking my site stats to see what types of sites are organically referring visitors to me and what types of things that they’re saying. A couple of weeks back, I noticed a referrer that had sent me a few visitors called The Boutique Board. I was curious to see what the visitors were saying, so I clicked the link.

The first odd thing that I noticed (besides the combination of brown text on a brown floral pattern background) was that I was required to register before I could view the content. It’s not unheard of for boards to require registration prior to viewing content, but it is somewhat unusual.

No problem, I thought…I went ahead and registered. It was then that things became more unusual. Most forums require the registrant to click an activation link that is sent to their email address before being considered “registered”. I did not receive such a notification. Instead, what I received was the following message on the board itself:

Thank you MrTVTL. Your registration has been successful. The administrator wishes to preview all new registered accounts before posting permissions are granted. The administrator has been notified of your registration.

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Those of you out there with a copy of Out of the Park Baseball 8 may experience difficulty running it on a Windows Vista operating system. This post is especially geared toward those of you out there who, when having installed the game successfully and clicked the desktop icon, experienced an all-white screen and the neverending spinning disc “waiting to load” symbol.

The problem occurs specifically with 64-bit editions of Windows, or so it would appear from the help I’ve given to a few people on the subject. Out of the Park Baseball 8 (OOTP8) is a 32-bit game, which represents a compatibility issue.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that this is very easy to fix, and if you’re in the aforementioned situation will only take about 2 minutes.

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I made two predictions last year about social bookmarking sites within a week of each other, that I’d like to revisit at the present time.

Sphinn: Home of the Most Comprehensive Set of SEO Tools, July 25, 2007. I predicted that spammers would eventually try to manipulate the Sphinn site.

Eventually, spammers and “social bookmark exchangers” will latch on to Sphinn as a place to perform “Sphinn exchanges” and try to manipulate it as a means of promoting their sites.

Why Social Bookmarking Sites Will Die, and Why I Don’t Use Them, July 31, 2007. I predicted that the continued manipulation of these sites will eventually lead to their downfall.

Social media exchanges and their slowly emerging successors, “social media submission services”, decrease the likelihood that sites with legitimate, organic votes on social bookmarking sites will be found. Unfortunately, the process of voting online is extremely easy to manipulate (as the examples above demonstrate), and there are those people who are so obsessed with drawing traffic to their own sites that they forget that social media sites were never intended to be used by webmasters as a submission service; social media sites were intended for users to exchange quality sites with each other in an organic fashion.

If social media sites are ever meant to succeed, they need a means of verifying organic submissions vs. submissions that had to be encouraged or prodded in any way. And that isn’t going to happen any time soon.

I have continued to make predictions of this nature, and will continue to do so, including today’s post. You have the right to be informed if you’re being unethically manipulated, and most of the manipulators won’t bother to tell you.

The reason I chose to revisit these predictions is that both of them, in a manner of speaking, are beginning to come to pass. The first such prediction is coming to pass as I expected; the second has taken a very unusual twist that I have to confess that I didn’t see coming (but will accelerate the process more rapidly than anyone is giving it credit for.)

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I’ve had a difficult time picking out phrases for this week’s Search Query Info. There have just been so many to choose from! But I think I’ve got it down to 5.

This week, we’re going to cover a Republican many people think is an idiot (a few of whom even found this site).
We’re going to explain a relatively common business transaction.
We’ve got information on trial software uninstallation.
We’ve got information on a resort in the Greater Toronto Area (Mississauga, to be precise.)
And we’ve got information on Photoshop (something I’m the last person in the world to be giving information on.)

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I really think
That I can make the grade
There’ll be some changes made round here, tomorrow…
There’ll be some changes made

Chet Atkins (with Mark Knopfler), There’ll Be Some Changes Made

I’m only going to devote Saturday Scribbling to one topic today, since there is only one topic on my mind. If my posts have seemed somewhat shorter, less coherent, or somehow lacking in quality over the past couple of weeks, I do apologize for this; there have been a few major projects that I’ve been working on, including one through a client of mine for a very large company as part of a team. I won’t reveal the company, nor will I reveal the site in question..but rest assured that all of you out there have heard of it. Those of you who have talked to me in the last few days will have a very good idea of what the company is and some of you will have even seen the site in question.
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I have always been a believer that the law is incorrectly written and enforced. I strongly believe that most officers truly don’t understand the law, and that most officers believe in abusing it and manipulating it in any way whatsoever to justify their existence. I also believe that most officers have no real incentive or motivation to stop most of the real crimes in Canada, and probably around the world as well. “The law is an ass” is a phrase that often rings through my head.

To that end, Brian Reeder has gathered up 5 rather excessive examples of “law enforcement” at its finest. The long flabby arm of the law gets in the way in each case and demonstrates just how arrogant and ignorant the police are.

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In the process of my daily work on Sunday, I came across this banner ad for a spammy SEO service (the usual drill…buy links, rank #1, etc.) It was an animated GIF; however, I only captured the first frame since it’s the frame that is relevant to the discussion.

Is this even legal? Can you mention someone like this and use their caricature for advertising purposes without their permission? This is one of those things that at best would fall in a grey area, I would think. If some company used my caricature for marketing purposes without my permission, I’d have a lawyer up that company’s ass so quick they wouldn’t know what hit them.

Mind you, I’m not really familiar with this aspect of the law, and I don’t claim to be an expert; this is just an educated guess. I wonder what lawyers would think about this.

(6 Years in the Making)

When I first started out as a full-time freelance web developer in 2002, I was in a position where I had to research some of the e-commerce providers in Canada. At this time, one of the companies I came across was Internet Secure. Based on what I could gather of their pricing and service levels in comparison to what few other service providers were available at the time, I chose them as my primary payment processing partner.

In 2002, Internet Secure was a couple of short steps above PayPal in terms of flexibility and customization. They hosted the payment pages themselves, although they have since added an option to allow users to host their own payment pages (something I have not yet tried for a number of reasons. So this review will primarily be based on my experiences with Internet Secure’s hosted payment pages.

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In order for everyone to understand my plea, I’ve decided to provide the details of a phone call I just had with Rogers Communications. I just received approval to upload a site I’ve been working on to a client’s web server, and the host in question is Rogers.

Unfortunately, when I did so, I received the following error message:

This domain is not configured for this service. Please contact the webmaster to have it enabled.

Hmmmm…apparently, since I’m the webmaster, I’m supposed to enable the service in question. This becomes rather difficult when it’s a shared server and I don’t have the “Windows Services Enabler” option that Rogers’ WebsiteOS (hosting control panel) says I’m supposed to have. So…it was time to call tech support.

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