Archive for the 'Geek Stuff' Category
SEOChat.com Great site with a ton of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools.
Check out your sites keyword density, page rank, generate meta tags, check your search engine positioning, and tons of articles and tips on optimizing your site.
I have been looking for an open source accounting software alternative to Quickbooks for ChopperStickers.com and I think I may have found one - TurboCASH.
The shopping cart I am using, x-cart, will export order data to Quickbooks and it looks like it can be imported into TurboCASH.
If anyone out there has any other suggestions on an open source accounting application please leave a comment. I am going to download and install TurboCASH tonight and mess around with it. From the features page it looks like it will do what I need as far as tracking income, expenses, and inventory.
I am not against paying for commercial software and if I cannot find anything else then Quickbooks will probably be what I use, but I try to use as much open source software as possible (It’s a geek thing).
I did run across several solutions that are SQL and web-based. This is not really what I am looking for. I am looking for a stand-a-lone application that runs on Windows XP.
By the way, ChopperStickers.com launched last week and things have really taken off. I am extremely happy with the results so far. Stop by and have a look.
For the last few weeks I have been working nearly none stop at my first Internet retail business. Setting up the shopping cart, getting all the inventory together, testing and retesting - this was the easy part. I have been working at some kind of business on Internet since around 1996 most of what I have been into are affiliate/associate programs, selling other peoples products and earning a commission. With ChopperStickers.com I am actually going to be running a retail site - this means sales tax, business licenses, and the like. It has taken a couple of weeks to get all that together. My wife and I formed and LLC to run the business under, then I had to get a Federal EIN number, and a state sales tax account.
Well that is all done now and ChopperStickers.com is ready to open. The store is already up and running and I will be making an announcement on the ChopperStickers.com Blog tommorrow to officially kick things off.
Have a look at it, buy a sticker or 2, and let me know what you think.
Spam is a constant problem. I run spamassassin on my personal mail server and on the mail servers at work. It does a pretty good job of filtering out most of the junk, but on occassion a few spam messages get through. Now when I say it does a pretty good job at filtering I am serious. At work we receive from 5,000 to 10,000 messages a day (depending on the day of the week) and about 80% of these messages are JUNK. Spamassassin does a fine job with hardly any false positives and only a handful of actually spam getting through.
In order to help spamassassin determine that these messages that are getting through are spam you have to train the Bayesian filter and doing this is very simple using sa-learn.
I wanted to run KNOPPIX, which is a Linux distro that runs from CD.
Normally I run Windows XP on my laptop but I wanted to be able to boot into Linux, without partitioning up my harddrive, for an extra layer of security when connecting to a public wireless network. At home I have an older Linksys wireless router and I am running WAP encryption. The wireless card in my laptop is a Dell 1370 WLAN card, under XP no problem, I set up my passphrase and SSID and it connects and off I go.
With KNOPPIX I had to do a little work.
Continue Reading »
Knoppix Wireless Setup on Dell Inspiron 6000
I am planning to post at least one review, write up, or whatever of some my favorite software and/or utilities each week. This weeks pick is HTML Kit.
Most of the website design and editing I do, I do by hand using a text editor such as vim or notepad even but occassionally, especially if I am trying to lay out tables, CSS, or image maps (I hardly ever mess with image maps but sometimes) HTML Kit is an excellent tool to help with these tasks.
HTML Kit Screenshot.
HTML Kit allows you to preview the output of your code as you edit. It is also very useful in planning site layout. There are a ton of plugins available for HTML Kit to automate just about any coding tasks.
The built in validation tools are also nice. (Probably should use them more often).
From the authors site:
HTML-Kit is a full-featured editor designed to help HTML, XHTML and XML authors to edit, format, lookup help, validate, preview and publish web pages. Despite its name and the light download size, HTML-Kit is a multi-purpose tool that has support for several scripting and programming languages.
Again if you are looking for a great FREE web development tool download HTML Kit and give it a try: http://www.chami.com/html-kit/
