JimWorld Gazette Issue #45 03/20/1998

Gazette - Issue #45 - March 20, 1998

-- Web Discussions
-- Search Engine Forums Update
-- Get High Forums
-- You Are The Artist And Graphics Are Your Medium
-- Tips From The Hitman - Part XXVII
-- New Web Graphics Program
-- Opentext Index Disbands
-- I Hate When That Happens
-- Snippets
-- Adam's Toolbox - Part III
-- Book Review - Photoshop In A Nutshell

Link to this issue of the Gazette as http://gazetteworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g45

WEB DISCUSSIONS

About once a month someone with a stunted mental development gets subscribed to the Gazette and instead of just asking to be unsubscribed they feel the need to embellish their messages with profanity. My email filters put these messages directly into the trash where they belong and those people will become even more frustrated until they send a more normal message without the cursing. Those profane messages never even reach my in-box so unless you enjoy trying to communicate with my email filters, try using human language.

We are now in the second week of deleting subscriptions for all addresses attached to autoresponders. About 50 subscriptions have now fallen under this ax. If yours is one that was deleted, just resubscribe using an address not attached to autoresponders.

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You were meant to get this issue on Friday evening, but Murphy made an appearance on the Web and the server hosting our list was not available. After all that hard work by all of the contributors to shift the deadlines back to Thursday night! I've put out a contract on Murphy and expect to finally rid the world of his (come to think of it, Murphy might be a Her) unwelcome presence as soon as the hit team gets their car running again.

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Spring Internet World was fantastic. I was there every day and that still wasn't enough. There were approximately 600 booths to visit along with continuous press briefings in the press meeting rooms. Mecklermedia is to be applauded for a flawlessly planned and executed convention. This is no small task, and they have it down to a science. Most of my business life I have either been attending or exhibiting and speaking at trade shows, so I especially appreciate a well run show like Internet World.

The next USA Internet World is in Chicago on July 13-17, 1998 and I'll be giving you some more information in the near future. You can see their entire worldwide schedule at <http://events.internet.com/>

I've ordered a ton of software for review. I found so much new and updated software that I think you'll want to know about that that we are stepping up our review output. Besides, it's too much fun playing with all of this software. I'm enlisting the help of the rest of the writing staff here to help me increase the review output. Why should I get to have all of the fun! Maybe next we could start reviewing cars and vacations.

Ran into Sinbad at the show. Cool guy. Just as overwhelmed as the rest of us with the amount of activity in cyber space.

Ran into about two dozen Gazeteers. That was nice. Just to keep my feet on the ground, I tried to talk to two of the browser blocking software producers. I was, to put it kindly, not warmly received. Apparently they have no sense of humor. I would have thought a sense of humor would be a real asset in their business. There were a couple of new Site Blockers at the show. We'll be watching them to see if they are as 'different' as they say they are. Someone is going to come along and do this job right and the Web will be better for it. So far they are batting zero or less. Somebody get off your duff and do it right. We're waiting.

If there was an over riding theme to the show, it would have to be e-commerce. Here an e-commerce, there an e-commerce, everywhere an e-commerce. Shopping carts. Merchant account services. Site security. Affiliate programs. 3D product catalogs that'll knock your socks off. (I have a great idea for a virtual, 3D art gallery if one of our on-line art gallery subscribers wants to talk about it) One of the booths I visited was even bragging that their software was so efficient that they could get a product page down to as little as 100K. Wow, that will sell a lot of product. It would be faster to drive to the mall and walk around.

While much of what was on display was glitzy and cool, we have to keep in mind that we still have visitors with browsers not able to handle forms and using 14.4 modems. Don't rush into 'new' until the Information Superhighway has a fast lane.

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I will be (finally) working on the HelpWare site this week. Look for the unveiling. If each of the finalists would send me their banners, I'll get you going and send some traffic your way. Good work by all of you. It was a close race.

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I would like to start a new series of articles for the Gazette. I am looking for a researcher/writer that has skills in business management, marketing, and sales. A real 'business person' that can interview and document the success stories of e-commerce on the Web. Is this person you? If so, can you make the time available to create one success story every 2 weeks? Or once a month, and we'll have two writers. You will get the same high wages that the rest of us get -- lots of satisfaction and some great self-promotion.

We're not going to look at the big-business Amazon.com and Apple types of success stories. We are going to look at companies that have transitioned their non-virtual business onto the Web and individuals that have created a business from scratch on the Web. Businesses that we can all identify with. Any one of them could be us with a lot of hard work, a little luck and a Gazette subscription.

SEARCH ENGINE FORUMS UPDATE

The Forums continue to pick up steam. There have been about 1,300 messages posted by almost 300 people. Thousands 'lurk' each week. Every week, more people switch from lurking to participating. They are getting their questions answered. Are you?

Since we can't go beyond nine forums in the Search Engine Forums until Ted gets the next release ready of the Ultimate Bulletin Board <http://www.prime-web.com> we are going to phase out the OpenText Forum (see below). We are planning to change that Forum to Snap, LookSmart or Planet Search. You decide. Stop into the OpenText Forum and respond to the post from me entitled 'Vote Here For New Forum'. I want you to help figure out which of these three directories has the most potential to generate traffic for our sites (yours and mine) and therefore we benefit by discussing it.

A powerful source of traffic is languishing in the Forums. Lycos is a potent generator of traffic when worked right. I think what we need is a motivated Moderator for that Forum. If you are willing to become the God of Lycos (takes a few minutes each day) let me know. You would be responsible for digging up good Lycos stuff to get the discussions going. Same pay as everyone else around here. But you'll meet a lot of people and probably pick up some business along the way.

Hayden our Hitman has taken on responsibility for the HotBot and Northern Light Forums. Expect to see those discussions heat up as he posts some of his research into those operations. Thanks Hayden. You didn't really want to sleep ever again, did you?

I have gotten some interesting e-mail from people you would recognize commending the Forum participants for holding the line against search engine spamming. Forum participants get more traffic that lasts longer than any spammer ever did. Keep up the good work and great attitude. As usual, Gazeteers are out in front of everyone else. Everyone is now starting to beat the No Search Engine Spam drum. Same drum we started beating two years ago.

The participants in the InfoSeek Forum have now pushed things beyond where I had envisioned. Doesn't surprise me at all. The JimWorld site started as my list of bookmarks and grew as a response to e-mail asking questions. The rest of my webmaster sites have grown in similar ways.

The InfoSeek gang wants to set up a FAQ for InfoSeek so that no information gets lost as the discussion threads get older in the Forum. I think that is great. We'll link to it from within the Forum as well as from the home page.

Any Gazeteer out there that wants to show off their cgi skills? I'd like a script that maintains the questions and answers in a data file and can be read from top to bottom or can be searched. We'll make sure you get some good exposure for your efforts.

The gang of people contributing to the Gazette and to the sites has grown so large that I decided it would helps us all, and be fun, if we had our own Forum to discuss production issues, new site ideas and just generally get to know each other better. It got its own set of graphics and 5 different forums. It's an amazing team of professionals creating the content and I think the Staff Forums will make us all more effective. Sorry, no URL. Staff only.

The Forums have attracted a very high caliber of participants, all of whom are able to communicate without 'attitude'. The Forums have turned out to be a really comfortable place to hang out. We have only had complaints about two members and they have been warned to play nice or lose their privileges. I reserve the right to keep 'attitude' as my personal domain and everybody else has to behave. The most interesting thing is that the complaints are not coming from the Moderators, but rather from many of the other members who don't want badly behaved members spoiling a really beneficial service. Like I keep saying, this is your community to make of what you will.

BTW: If you've been visiting the Forums and not seeing any of the posts on your screen, check to make sure that you have Javascript turned ON in your browser preferences. The Forums make heavy usage of Javascript. The next update to the Forum software will have a non-Javascript script, but it will not have any of the cool ease-of-use options. It will also offer you a cookie to make it easier for you to find posts that have been made since your last visit.

GET HIGH FORUMS

By popular demand, I have established a new set of Forums for you to participate in. They are called the 'Get High Traffic Forums' and have discussion areas for the following subjects:

H-E-L-P ! (Need some help building your community? Ask here.)
Community Building Is The Way To Real Traffic
Building And Publishing A Newsletter Or Discussion List
Contests and Sweepstakes For Real Traffic Growth
Building A Site That Is Friendly To All Browsers
Kewl Traffic Building Ideas
Visitor Friendly Site Design and Graphics
To Spam Or Not To Spam - That Is The Question.
CGI, Perl, Java, Javascript (to build your community)

If you have questions or answers about any of these subjects, stop in and make yourself heard. As usual, I will be finding Moderators for these new Forums from the group of people that seem to have the most to give in each of these areas. I read the threads and someone always stands out. If you want to be a Moderator, participate. That is the only way. Then you can volunteer.

The URL for these new Forums is <http://gethighforums.com/> Enjoy and learn. Remember our motto 'It Works'.

Until now we have overlooked a lot of 'off-topic' activity going on in the Other Search Engines And Directories Forum because we had no other place for this activity. Now that is at an end. I need all of you to help move that activity over to the Get High Forums and let the Search Engine Forums focus entirely on search engines and directories. If you find your posts have been deleted from the Search Engine Forums, it's not personal, but rather the inforcement of the rules.

We all have to stop and think about our posts for a while until we get used to this change. We can keep the Forums growing and offering a steady flow of great information, but only if each of us makes the effort to keep our threads in the right places.

All the usual Jim rules apply:

No discussion of spam techniques. It doesn't work and we don't talk about it.
Play nice with the other kids.
Do your research and give good advice.
Participate. That's how you get answers.
Have fun.

Get High Forums... won't the site blockers love that one!

YOU ARE THE ARTIST AND GRAPHICS ARE YOUR MEDIUM

By: Wendy Boulding

Web designer and artist Eliza Young is a creative genius.

The sites she has designed for clients of her company White Wolf Imaging are the perfect combination between functionality and exquisite beauty. Educated at New York University, Cornell, and the Main College of Art where Young pursued a double major in photography and graphic design.

"A creative website is very much like making a movie and conceiving of it is always done as series of images (for me at least)," said Young.

With that astute perception, who better to ask for wisdom about how to use, and how to not overuse, graphics for your Web site.

IMAGE MAPS

Opinions about the use of image maps vary. Some people adamantly believe image maps are too confusing, take too long to download, and add nothing to your page. Within her designs, Eliza Young defies those opinions and has turned her image maps into functional art pieces that add to the site like candles can set the mood in a bedroom.

"Image maps, like any element in a web site, should be considered for what function they serve and what else they add to a site," said Young.

She also recommends that you consider:

Realize that it is critical to code the image map with alt.tags
Have corresponding text links
Keep your visitor in mind. Make navigating as easy as possible to those who either have images turned off or are confused by your map
Go for simplicity over sophistication

"If used correctly, an image map can allow a site to built with a theme, or
overall metaphor, with all the elements reflecting that theme," she said.

ANIMATED GRAPHICS

"With animation there needs to be much caution. It has become a gimmick with morphing mailboxes and cartoon characters," said Young, voicing how many of us view animated graphics. "I tend to be really hesitant about animation because it is overdone and it adds so much strain on the download time."

Before adding animated graphics consider:

Have the animated image serve a purpose (for navigating, offering information, or to identify who you are).
Never use an animated graphic to simply "jazz" up your page.
Use animated graphics that are small in size. They do slow the downloading of your page.
Remember that animated graphics can be very distracting.

GRAPHICS AND TEXT

When it comes to balancing graphics and text, Young says she has no steadfast rules when it comes to mixing the two.

"For a site that is primarily informational with lots of text then the graphics are used to provide some breathing room and some depth to the page. For a more artistic site, the graphics are more prominent, defining the overall structure of the page. In this type of site, the text is the contrast, the calming element to the visuals."

As Eliza suggests, determine what the theme of your site is and choice what would be most effective.
Keep the graphics small and the text paragraphs short.
Use alt.tags with all the graphics on your page.

USING COLOR VS. GRAPHICS

One way to avoid filling your Web page with graphics but still have it be eye-catching, is to use color.

Said Young. "I consider color to be one of the key elements in web design. One of the first things I do when designing a site is develop the color palette. I restrict myself to the 216 web safe colors and choose the colors that I feel will reflect the company or individual that I'm designing the site for. Colors have such a powerful influence on our emotions and perceptions so the choice of a warm or cool palette, black or white background, definitely affects the viewer."

Eliza offers her sound advice about color:

Use a colored background is a much better way to add color and dimension to a site than a background image. Background images can make the text hard to read and the site confusing overall.
Choose color combinations that resonate, are unique, and yet allow for text that is easy to read and graphics that are easy to differentiate.
Carefully consider your color choices

"Red text on a black background is very strident. It would not be a good choice for a florist site for example. Blue text on a white background is very airy and calm and would not be a good choice for a hard rock band. But that does not mean we should always choose the obvious colors either."

MISTAKES TO AVOID

What you might consider a design "mistake" someone else may think it isn't. Use your better judgement when deciding what will work for your site and what won't. First and foremost, think of your first-time visitor and what they will be subjected to upon arriving at your site.

"I guess I am bothered by a lack of purpose in most sites. There is no sense of planning, continuity or clarity in the majority of sites I see. I want to go to a site and get a sense immediately of what this person or business is about."

"I think a site should reflect the organization it is representing but too often it seems like a hodge podge with every new gimmick thrown in, and no sense of consistency."

Eliza also feels strong about those sites designed for high-speed connections and are overwhelming for someone with a regular dial-up connection.

"I want the web to stay democratic. I think web designers need to consider all audiences when making a site."

YOU ARE AN ARTIST

Eliza offers a peak into what inspires her.

"I have two wolf/dog mixes and they are a very big part of my life. I need their rawness, their animal nature, around me to keep me grounded. They don't let me get lost in the computer, they always remind me of the life around me."

Follow Eliza's example. Design your Web pages to be just as ingenious and distinctive as you are.

ELIZA'S SITE:
<http://www.wolfey.com>

ELIZA'S OTHER CREATIONS
<http://www.shaunmichael.com>
<http://www.tony-o.com>

(You have to check out this site)

LEARN FROM OTHERS:
I don't mean to be malicious, but I found this site and I want you to go to it to see what NOT to do with graphics:

http://www.mindspring.com/~maregaudere/nanenquirer.html

---Warning from Jim: This starting page is 666K to download. Hmmmmm. 666. Is it an omen? At least it's on a fast server.---

MORE INFO
Art and Zen of Web Sites
<http://www.tlc-systems.com/webtips.htm>

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WENDY BOULDING is a freelance journalist who scours the Internet for interesting things and people to write about. She writes for several print and online publications and has her own e-zine. Check out her Web site at: <http://www.mind-magic.com>

TIPS FROM THE HITMAN - PART XXVII

Search Engines have been around for as long as we've had the WWW and in fact there are probably a lot more of them out there than most people realize. There are literally hundreds of them, some of them are public, others are privately held and they are constantly sending out spiders to gather information about the nature of the Internet. For instance, <http://www.webscout.com/search/search.html> is a list of 30 of the more popular search engines.

Most of us think of only a handful of search engines when we hear the term. This is because in the US, and to a certain extent world wide, there are some established leaders in this area that tend to dominate the market. These big engines such as Excite, Hot Bot, Infoseek, Alta Vista, Web Crawler, and Lycos tend to get most of the traffic from people doing searches on the WWW.

This is a very exclusive club, some times called the Big 7 (Yahoo gets included in this club although it is not a search engine at all) or the Big 8 where Northern Light Search is now in the 8th position which was formerly held by the OpenText Index.

It is not an easy club to break into. The membership is the elite of the web, the Big Dogs, and it is often reported that 95% of the daily searches on the Internet take place at one of the Big 7 or Big 8.

Even though the club is tough to join, we still see it happen now and again. A new engine comes along that shows promise and older engines get bought out by a competitor. Excite has recently bought Web Crawler and it bought Magellan last year. This type of situation can be a break for a newer engine to work its way into a position to contend for a coveted Big 8 position. It does happen, the Big Dogs do fade from the top. Do you remember WWWWorm? Newer readers may not even have heard of Magellan.

The Newest contender in this Heavy Weight division in my opinion is Planet Search. Planet Search is owned by Phillips Electronics and is currently doing about 3 million+ pages views a month. They caught my attention when RANK This! added them to their Big 8, making them number 9 at this very popular and useful site that allows you to check on the position of your pages for specific keywords in the top 200 positions at 9 locations now. <http://www.rankthis.com/>

Is Planet Search just another Search Engine? Yes and No. It does operate in the customary fashion. You type your inquiry into the box in much the same way as with any of the engines.

So what makes it stand out as a possible contender? Let's take a look at some of the features. First of all, Planet Search allows you to search by typing in a question. In addition to word searches, the search engine understands questions entered in everyday language. This can make the searching much easier for the average person who hasn't got a clue about Boolean logic. Planet Search also has personalization of the page to suit your preferences. This is not new of course, but what makes their personal page different is that it can be secured with a password access so you can view your personal page from any Internet connection. This type of feature will become more valuable as public access to the Internet starts to show up on kiosks in public places such as transportation hubs like airports, train stations and in major hotel chains in the very near future. Information you need regarding your business trip, including weather at the various stopovers would be very easy to set up for quick access. Even if yo u were working with a laptop, having it all setup in advance makes for quick retrieval of necessary information.

There is one last feature that I have not tried out but looks like it could be very useful. Planet Search has a service they call Search Alert. This service allows you define you search queries, save them and receive updates. Store frequently used search queries and receive regular updates via email! This allows you to keep up with the latest information on a given subject by setting up specific queries one time and you will be emailed when new information shows up for the searches as you defined them. This could be a great feature as the number of sites indexed grows.

I was not able to determine the number of pages in the index, the information is not available a the site. My own use of the engine showed it to return accurate material on the first page for the search string I was using. I did notice poor results on a very current buzz word that has crossed my desk via a couple of clients, Big Planet. This could be because this is a new keyword to the Net and no pages have been indexed for it yet. I don't know how long it takes to get a site listed, but I have seen it reported as 4 weeks.

I have noticed that Planet Search has been added to the lists of submitted sites on the search engine posting programs I use. These programs are used by hundreds of professional promotion firms and this insures a steady stream of new URL's will be indexed and Planet Search will grow in size and importance. If Web Crawler fades from the scene as Magellan did when it was bought by Excite, there could be a nice hole in the Big 8 waiting to be filled.

Hayden Mitchell
<http://www.webthemes.com>

NEW WEB GRAPHICS PROGRAM

And It's Free (for now)

Run, don't walk to get your copy of Fireworks by Macromedia. Yes, even you long-suffering Mac users. I now have it on all of my machines, Mac and PC.

This new graphics system has it all if you need a sophisticated way to create web site graphics.

To create Web graphics today, designers wrestle with a complicated jumble of tools and utilities, none of which are integrated. Macromedia Fireworks brings order to this chaos, letting you create amazing graphics quickly and efficiently with a complete array of Web design tools. Fireworks' suite of text, design, illustration, image editing, URL, JavaScript, and animation tools can create everything for your Web site, without the annoyance of jumping from application to application.

With Fireworks, designers finally have an easy way to optimize and preview final output in every popular format. For example, you can examine GIFs and JPEGs side by side in the same window, comparing size and appearance, without ever leaving Fireworks.

And because they know you need to spend your time being creative rather than struggling to get decent output, we made Fireworks the easiest way to output great-looking yet compact graphics, while still giving you as much control as you want.

You've never experienced a graphics environment like this before. Draw using any number of organic brushes, and go back and edit the strokes at any time! Fireworks brings the best features of a top vector drawing program to the Web arena of image-based bitmap graphics!

I've ordered some evaluation copies from Macromedia so I can give you a more in -depth look at Fireworks and another Macromedia program, Freehand. In the mean time, go get a copy of Fireworks NOW.

The Fireworks Public Beta Version is a pre-release version of Macromedia Fireworks. It contains all of the features that the final product will ship with, but will expire on June 8th, 1998.

<http://www.getfireworks.com/>

OPENTEXT INDEX DISBANDS

The Opentext Index, formerly at <http://index.opentext.net> announced this week that their Internet search service has permanently ceased operating according to their traditional model. Now refreshing directly to <http://pinstripe.opentext.com> the new service, Livelink Pinstripe, aims to provide powerful new ways to search for information, focusing strictly on search returns that are highly focused and pertinent to business users.

'Business people are often frustrated by the overwhelming amount of information they have to sift through when performing searches on the Web,' said Abe Kleinfeld, Open Text's Senior Vice President of Marketing. 'Other search tools generate large amounts of irrelevant information - resulting in wasted time and energy. Livelink Pinstripe solves this problem by only searching through the major business pages available on the Web.'

I HATE WHEN THAT HAPPENS

Be Prepared. It's more than a slogan for the Boy Scouts, It's your guiding light on the Internet.

I received the usual daily summary of press releases from Internet Wire <http://www.internetwire.com> As usual, it contained a couple of items of interest to me. One read as follows:

"Bottled Water Web - <http://www.bottledwaterweb.com/> Includes mineral and trace element analysis of major bottled water companies, overview of the industry, automated forum, and current industry news."

This looked interesting, so I clicked to visit. Uh-Oh! The server was displaying the following message:

"500 Server Error The hard transfer limit for this user has been reached"

If you are going to the trouble and expense to send out press releases or announcements about your site, make sure you have an arrangement with your ISP that allows you to handle the resulting traffic. While it may appear on the surface that no real harm was done and that you could just make a better deal with the ISP and send out the release again, it just ain't so.

Many of the people in the press that saw the original release and tried to visit will remember the site when they see the next release. "Oh yeh, I remember them." and will just move on. Damage done.

Here are a few things you should double check before sending out a press release:

Verify the email addresses that are used in the release and on the web site. Send a test message to each address.
Triple check the URL used in the release.
Talk with your ISP if you are not positive that you can accept all of the traffic you might get.
Make sure that your server is not scheduled for maintenance the day of the release.
Quadruple check the phone number used in the release. If it is not a number that you dial often, like an 800 number, try it. Make sure it is working.
Verify that any employees and associates that are mentioned in the release are planning on being at work that day.
Make sure that everyone in the company knows the information being announced in the release.
Discuss procedures with the employees responsible for answering the phones.
Confirm that you have a response pack of information ready to be sent to anyone inquiring about the contents of your press release. You should have both an electronic version and a printed version.

The above may make you go 'No, duh' but let me tell you that each is a publicity puddle that has been stepped in by many companies and web site operators. Spend 500 bucks to send out a press release the day your ISP is installing a new server. 800 numbers that were changed months ago. Key marketing department employees out of town the day of the release. Receptionists turning away the press because they didn't know that their employer had launched a new product.

Make your life a little less hectic. Check everything BEFORE you publicize.

SNIPPETS

Hi Jim,

Just wanted to thank you for all the tips used from your newsletters. I used a bunch.

In return my Payment is Due and I want to share a promotion trick that I recently used in changing domain names for my web site, 50 States and Capitals. <http://50states.com/> The move process was planned to take almost three months.

First, I built a referral page for the new domain that announced the move and included a large-type notice of the new domain name and a link back to the old domain page. This temporary page, which contained META tags and title from the new index page, was posted for two weeks. It gave me time to review and rebuild my web site, start the submission process to the search engines and send announcement letters to everyone that had signed my guest book, communicated via E-mail or had links to my page. (Note: You can find links by searching for your own URL.)

In the mean time I had a message on the old page announcing the move and asking visitors to add bookmarks and change links on their pages. Traffic gradually started flowing to the new domain.

When my revised web site was completed, the new version was turned on at the new domain and the referral message and link was moved to the old home page.

Both URL's are currently online. My logs show traffic growing at the new domain at about 20% each day with an equal amount of lost traffic on the old page. While the combined traffic has a slight upward trend. When the traffic balance reaches 90-10, I will add a referral page to every file on the old site. Leaving these referral up at least two months.

The point here is I worked very hard promoting the site and did not want to loose any of the momentum already established. The extra time spent while transferring domains, created a lot of good will and actually increased traffic.

Taking time to make this transfer cost an extra quarters fees at the old ISP, but the price was small compared to the time investment already made in promotion. I have to admit that moving to a new domain was equally as stressful as moving to a new house.

Other promotion tricks I use are: Sending a Thank you E-mail to guest book signers, posting reciprocal links on a Friends (friends.htm) page, participating in newsgroups, and quickly replying to E-mail questions.

Hope this helps!

Ray Weber
50 States and Capitals
http://www.50states.com/

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Earlier this week, Network Solutions announced that it will eliminate the Intellectual Infrastructure Fund portion of the fee charged for domain name registrations and renewals in the .com, .net, and .org top level domains. Effective April 1, 1998, registering a new domain name will cost $70 (instead of $100) for two years of registration service and annual renewals will be $35 (instead of $50). The complete press release is available at <http://rs.internic.net/announcements/pr0316.html>

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If you haven't been using the Alta Vista real-time language translation service to let you visit sites around the world, you are missing a lot of fun. You will be amazed at what you will find out there and much of it won't be known by the average person. It is a great source for material for your newsletters.

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The following appeared in the February 10th issue of Successful Schmoozing (To subscribe, send an e-mail to subss@connectionbank.com> with the command SUBSCRIBE in the Subject line) and it says it so well I'll just let it remind you to send PromoteCARDS.

SCHMOOZE TOOL OF THE WEEK!

PromoteCARD
<http://jimworld.com/bin/postcards/postcard.html>

I just found this wonderful schmoozing tool on Jim Wilson's JimWorld site, <http://jimworld.com>. (By the way if you've never been to this site you must go there. It's one of the few Web sites that I bookmarked, and actually go back to on a regular basis!)

PromoteCARD's are these neat virtual postcards especially made for schmoozing. If you want to link with another Web site, you can send the Webmaster a PromoteCARD that says "Let's Link." Thinking about teaming up and forming an alliance? Send the one that says, "We Should Work Together." They're a great way to keep in touch with clients, colleagues, and prospects, rather than plain e-mail.

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I find little gems like the above by visiting the search engines and searching for 'jimworld' and looking through the list trying to catch any new references to the site. It really helps you keep up with your progress towards building a network of traffic sources. Have you done yours lately?

ADAM'S TOOLBOX - PART III

One of the most effective ways of attracting links to your site is to offer something in return. Traditionally, what is returned is simply a reciprocal link, but more and more, sites that sell a product or service are offering commissions on sales to entice webmasters to link to them. In fact, some of the big boys of electronic commerce have been extremely successful with these programs. Sites like Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Cdnow have developed affiliate programs offering cash or merchandise credits. Affiliates receive a percentage of every sale that is made as a result of their link.

To be able to know when a sale is made as the result of a link, these companies have developed custom software to track where each user came from. To be able to successfully run an affiliate program, you must also be able to track the source sites of all your sales. This is easy if each site links directly to your purchasing page and every customer immediately completes the checkout.

You can just use the Referrer CGI environment variable to see what the last page they visited was. But your site's visitors will likely browse around the site before they make a buying decision. By that time you would have no idea where the original link came from. You wouldn't be able to reward your affiliate partner site.

What your site needs is a way to remember things about your visitors. Programmers call this maintaining state, and it is something the protocols that make up the web aren't very good at. Every time someone requests a file from your web server, the server sends the file and then closes the connection. A new connection is opened and closed each time a file is requested. Information about previous connections is not shared with other connections, so your web pages and applications cannot use anything learned on previous pages.

To take care of this problem, Netscape introduced cookies. A cookie is way for the server to ask the web browser to remember things for it. Each time the browser asks for a file, it also sends the server's cookies back. Using cookies, a server can tell the browser, 'You came to this site from a link at xyz.com' and every time a page is requested, the browser tells the server, 'I came to this site from a link at xyz.com.' When the customer completes the order, the server now knows where the customer originally came from and the partner site gets credit.

To make sure that unscrupulous sites don't steal information from cookies that aren't meant for them, a browser will not send the information stored in a cookie to anyone but the site that originally created it.

A cookie is created by sending the command 'Set Cookie' to the browser. Using this command, you give the cookie a name and a value. The complete cookie command looks like 'Set-Cookie: NAME=VALUE; expires=DATE; path=PATH; domain =DOMAIN_NAME; secure.' The name and value are required, but the rest of the settings are optional. You can set 'expires' to either a date or a time relative to the time you set the cookie. If you don't set 'expires' the cookie expires as soon as the user closes their browser. 'Path' and 'domain' are used to tell the browser what web site the cookie belongs to. By default these are set to the domain and path that originally set the cookie, so you probably won't need to set these. Using 'secure' only allows the cookie to be transmitted over a SSL secured connection. Since your whole site probably isn't secure, you shouldn't set this. For this application, I'm only going to set the name and value.

Depending on your needs and programming expertise, you can bake your cookies with JavaScript or a CGI application written in Perl or C. I normally suggest staying away from JavaScript for any mission-critical use because not all browsers can handle it well. In this case, however, just about any browser that can work with cookies can handle JavaScript.

The first thing you need to do is create an id for each of your partners. Instruct the partners to use the id in each of their links to you. If their id is 123, any links to you would use the URL <http://www.yourdomain.com/?source=123>. Our application is going to use this as the value of a cookie named 'source.'

To create a cookie in JavaScript, you can simplify things by using one of the many public domain functions that handle all of the details of cookie manipulation. In this example I'm going to use the code designed by Bill Dortch of Idaho Design.

To get started, place this code in the HEAD of your page. The first few lines of the script place everything after the '?' in the URL in your cookie. The setCookie function is from Dortch's public domain JavaScript functions. One warning: if the URL that your affiliates are using already contains a query string (the part after the '?'), this script will not work.

Now that you have set a cookie, you will need to retrieve this information when the customer submits a form to complete the transaction. To do this, you will need to write that cookie information into a hidden field on your form. So what happens next is we use Dortch's GetCookie function to grab the cookie information and a document.write to create the hidden field.

Place the following code into your HEAD section.







Then place the next few lines into 

the body of your page, right after 

your FORM tag.

Now when a user reaches the page with your form on it, your affiliate's id will be placed into your form in a hidden field called "source." All that is left for you to do is ship the product to your customer and pay your affiliate.

Cookies are an easy, convenient way to remember information about your visitors, but there are some drawbacks. Because of some undeserved bad press, some people fear cookies. They think that when a site uses cookies, it is trying to gather personal information like names and email addresses. As a result, browser manufacturers have allowed users to disable cookie use. If a user disables cookies, partner sites will not get credit for the link.

Over the next few parts of this series, I will demonstrate more ways to track which partner referred a customer to you. In the last part, we will combine the best parts from all the methods we have learned to help you build the best solution for your needs.

----------

Adam Kalsey, Technical Director
the marketing store! <http://tmsonline.com>
Marketing and design solutions for print and the world wide web.

---Jim's .02 --- Adam's article is very timely. At Internet World one of the big topics of conversation was how to keep track of commissions and fees owed to affiliate sites. Most of the solutions were very slick, and VERY expensive. Adam's way is enough for almost all of us and should be a part of any affiliate program you have set up. Don't cheat your affiliates by asking visitors to 'remember' how they got to you. Use technology to keep track of it and you will win in the long run. Keep in mind that you and your affiliates have the same goal in mind - making a few bucks to pay the server bills and buy bigger hard drives. The necessities of life.---

BOOK REVIEW: PHOTOSHOP IN A NUTSHELL

By: Donnie O'Quinn and Matt LeClair
Publisher: O'Reilly and Associates
584 pages, soft cover, $19.95 US

You've all heard me moan about the limited amount of space available immediately around my computer where I can store reference materials. Everyone has this problem. To earn a place in this sacred area, a book must be relevant to something I do a lot of and it must be good enough to cause me to use it on a frequent basis. If I only use it now and then, it can go on the big book shelf. I'll find it when I need it on my way to the coffee pot.

I now use Photoshop In A Nutshell entirely too often to have it out of immediate reach. The material it presents helps me every time I try to do something new with Photoshop, which I use several times each day.

The book is not a tutorial about Photoshop, but rather a reference book covering every tool, feature, technique, nook and cranny of Photoshop. I have yet to ask it for something that it didn't deliver up in an easy to use and quick to learn format.

If you use Photoshop then you should have this book. It will make your life easier and expand your abilities to produce great (or at least better) graphics. Order it at the O'Reilly web site at <http://www.oreilly.com/>

Now, if I could find a safe way to keep the coffee pot next to my computer, I could eliminate almost all movement for most of the 18 hour work day. Imagine, never having to move away from the monitor! Add some good voice control over all programs and I wouldn't even have to put down my coffee cup to move the mouse around.