Online Fun and Business

Las Vegas is almost a synonym for gambling in the real world, having also been called the gambling capital. When one moves to gamble online, one has to wonder where the Las Vegas of the online world of gambling is.

Because of the vastness of the world wide web, the freedom to log on from anywhere in the world and the healthy amount of competition online, there is no real capital of web based gambling. However, there are some web sites that should be noticed, ones that draw the players with a wide range of services and a promise of great riches.

The hubs of online poker are perhaps the best knows gambling portals of the net. With the surging popularity of Texas Hold ‘em and some other poker variants, online poker has an increasingly large share in the online gambling industry.

The poker portals of note are sites such as Party Poker, which has one of the largest groups of players, and Poker Stars, which is considered by many to be the most reliable and respected poker room. Nevertheless, hundreds, if not thousands of poker rooms exist today. The massive growth of Internet poker is a great example of how the net changes gambling.

All in all, there is no Las Vegas in the online world of gambling. Despite the emergence of popular hubs, there is just no single web site that could rise above others in a niche. The market is also highly unstable, with new sites springing up every week and old ones closing almost as often.

Whereas in the offline world your choice of locale for gambling activities is often a given, the online world presents you with a multitude of choices no single player can hope to thoroughly analyze. The most popular way is to try around until you find a site to your liking. There is surely a favorite for everyone among the many alternatives.

One way to quickly find out about poker web sites is to read poker room reviews That way you get to know the pros and cons of many poker rooms without having to go through the trouble of finding about them for yourself.

This article reviews the basic steps of:

1. domain name setup
2. login to a control panel to manage the hosting account
3. set up of new email accounts
4. upload of a website to a hosting plan.

These are the first things a new web hosting customer needs to accomplish, and in a lot of cases they will not need to adjust their account again, except to view website traffic statistics. This article covers these four steps, as well as a couple of other important tasks needed to get a website up and running with your hosting plan.

Let us start by defining what a hosting plan consists of:
A hosting plan is memory space on the hard drive of a server, it is internet bandwidth, and it is a control panel of features to manage your site.

Step 1: Domain Name Setup

The first step in getting your website up and running is to purchase a domain name. Current prices range between $8 to $20 per year. This will be the actual name of your website. No one else will be able to use your name once it is registered. Examples of common domain names you have heard of may include ebay.com, mapquest.com, etc. Once you have chosen a domain name, it needs to be pointed to the server that holds your hosting account, so when someone types www.yourdomainname.com into a browser, it will find the website files you will upload to your hosting plan.

Every domain name has at least 2 DNS settings that map the domain to an actual computer. The Domain Name Server (DNS) is a server that has a look up table of domain names and the IP address they belong to. The IP address is the internet address of a computer connected to the internet. There are thousands of DNS’ throughout the internet, which help with its flexibility. When you order a new hosting account with a web hosting company, they will send you 2 DNS settings. There are at least 2 DNS settings for each domain. This allows for a backup in case the primary DNS setting is unavailable. This is one of the beauties of the internet. Each DNS contains only a handful of domain names, and each domain name has a backup. This makes it virtually impossible for a hacker to bring down all websites, or the entire internet for that matter.

You will need to login where you registered your domain name and change the DNS settings to the ones that the web hosting company has given you. Note that you will have a control panel to manage your domain name, as well as a control panel to manage your hosting plan. New customers to hosting are often confused about the difference between registering their domain name and hosting the website for that domain name. Once you make these DNS changes, it will take 24-72 hours (1 to 3 days) for your domain name to propagate, at which time your domain name will start pointing to our servers and to your new hosting account. The time delay is caused by the distributed nature of the internet. A hosting company cannot tell you exactly how long it will take for your domain name to propagate across the whole world. It is dependent on all of the Internet providers in the world picking up the new results.

Step 2: Logging in to your Control Panel

You’ll want to login to your control panel to do such things as view web traffic statistics, set up email addresses, set up databases, do backups, etc. Every web hosting company offers a control panel to manage your account (cPanel, Plesk, Helm, and Hsphere are the most popular control panels offered by web hosting companies, but some have even built there own to customize it to their services). They all offer basically the same features. In the control panel you can read your email, or set it up to be read through an email program like Outlook. You will also manage databases here, view your website’s performance, backup your website, install pre-built scripts, etc. You can use the control panel to upload your website’s files, but a lot of programmers prefer to do this through a separate FTP program. There will be more on this later. You should have a way to login before your domain propagates. This will allow you to get started on your control panel while propagation is occurring.

Step 3: Setting up Email accounts

Once you are logged in to your control panel, you’ll want to setup at least one email address. Even if you do not want one, it is good to at least define one as a catch all to make sure you do not miss any emails sent to your domain.

Email Forwarding-

If you want to simply “forward” all email to an outside email address (like your ISP email address), then simply set your Default Address (a tool in the Mail Management section of your Control Panel) to your ISP email address…. or to any email address where you want the emails to automatically be forwarded to. That way, any email sent to ‘anything’@yourdomain.com will be automatically (and immediately) sent to you.
If you want to forward some emails to one address, and others to other addresses, you can do this with the Email Forwarders tool in your control panel.

Email Accounts (POP3 Accounts)-

If you want to create a new email address with its own account (or email box; this is called a POP3 email account), then use the Add / Del Email Accounts tool in your control panel. From there you can add POP3 email accounts, assigning each one it’s own unique password. You will then want to go to your own email program (like Outlook, Outlook Express, etc.) and configure it to receive the emails sent to the new account you created.

For example: let’s say your new hosting account is yourcompany.com and you created an email address in your control panel called you@yourcompany.com and assigned it a password called yourpass. The details you’ll need to setup your email account(s) are as follows:

Account name: you@yourcompany.com

Password: yourpass

Incoming POP3: mail.yourcompany.com

Outgoing SMTP: mail.yourcompany.com

Here is a video tutorial that shows setting up an email account in Outlook, http://www.roundberry.com/tutorials/email/email_outlook2002.htm.

Step 4: Uploading your Website/Files

Once your domain name has propagated, you can upload your website and files to your account using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program like WS_FTP. If you do not have an FTP program, you can download a free version of WS_FTP… it is one of the most popular FTP programs in use today. FTP is the most common way to move files around on the internet. If you are going to build and publish websites you will become very familiar with FTP. It is a simple protocol and there are a number of good FTP clients available for free. With FTP you connect to another computer and drag and drop files between them. In this case the “other computer” is the server where your hosting plan is located.

Microsoft FrontPage-

If you are using FrontPage to build your website, then you do not need an FTP program. Instead, use FrontPage’s “Publish” feature to publish your website to your hosting account, using the username and password for your account (provided in your welcome email).

Prior to Domain Propagation-

Another way to upload your files to your hosting account is by using the File Manager tool in your control panel. In fact, you can do this prior to your Domain Name propagating, so that your website will be functional prior to your domain name working. All of the common control panels have a File Manager tool or at least an FTP client.

Viewing your Website/Files Prior to Domain Name Propagation-
You may want to view your website prior to your domain name working, to make sure that it looks and works the way it should. You can immediately view your website prior to your domain name propagating by using the following link:

http://IPaddress/~username

Where IPaddress is the primary nameserver IP address given to you by your hosting company, and username is the username for your new account which is also given to you by your web hosts. So for example, if you are assigned the IP address of 12.123.12.123, and a username of “youracct”, then you would simply browse to:

http://12.123.12.123/~youracct

If you want to view a specific page in your website, say contactus.html, then you would browse to:

http://12.123.12.123/~youracct/contactus.html

Of course, you will first have to upload your website to be able to view the pages…. and you can do that from within your Control Panel.

Congratulations! After completing the above steps, you will have setup your domain name, created email accounts, and uploaded your website to your web hosting account. You are now in business!

About the Author: Rachel Ringler is Vice President of Advantage1 Web Services, Inc., which owns a network of Web Hosting Informational Websites including HostChart.com, ResellerConnection.com, and FoundHost.com Rachel has over 10 years industry experience in internet marketing.

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I couldn’t believe my ears when so many of my friends tried this at my request and came back with all positive results. I know believe so much in this program that not only am I excited to try it out myself, but I am also willing to give away specials readers offers for baby material when you look deeper into how to choose gender of baby for yourself! This is Amazing!

Cigars have long been associated with the rich and powerful, with relaxation and rich flavor. Cigar aficionados have created a culture around the art of smoking, assembling various theories and accessories to debate and facilitate smoking. Much like wine tasting, cigar smoking has been seen as a diversion of the upper echelons of society.

It is believed that cigars were probably first produced in Spain, and then quickly caught on in other European countries. Although many different countries manufacture cigars, Cuban cigars have long been highly regarded as one of the most flavorful and rich of all cigars. This is due to regional microclimates that are said to produce the highest quality tobacco, as well as the skill of the country’s cigar makers. Other countries that produce significant amounts of tobacco and cigars include Brazil, Mexico, Honduras, Ecuador, Cameroon, Dominican Republic, Indonesia, and the United States. Why have cigars long caught the attention of so many? Many speculate that the cigar’s main attraction is in the way it is manufactured. High quality cigars are always wrapped by hand. Unlike cigarettes, cigars undergo a lengthy process of fermentation and aging (much like wine), resulting in subtle flavors and textures. They are highly individual and the best cigars will provide no smoky aftertaste at all.

The taste of cigars is much more complex than cigarettes. The majority of all cigars are created by wrapping three different layers of tobacco leaves together. High quality cigars usually contain long leaves of nicotine as the filler, although they may also contain a combination of scraps. This results in subtle variations, different textures, and complex flavors. Cigarettes, on the other hand, are mass-produced and generally only contain one type of tobacco. Cigars also come in an incredible variety of flavors. The dedicated cigar aficionado can find chocolate, vanilla, apple, and even coffee-flavored cigars!

I Love Cigars

Some men may not know or do not have the slightest idea if
a woman is ready to be kissed. These men may be sitting
beside their dates talking too much they suddenly realize
how the lips of their dates are so kissable.

Their imagination will then take control, but this would
also mean disaster if done wrong. This may often leave
these men without a second chance for another date with the
woman.

If a guy finds himself talking to a girl and wondering if
she’s ready to be kissed, he may softly touch her hair and
give a compliment about it.

If the girl shows a favorable reaction, this may be a sign
of getting closer to a kiss. Get closer and try reaching
for her hair again.

Touch the hair tips and simply gaze on her lips and eyes.
The fact that she does not mind about you getting closer to
her is a sign that she is comfortable. This is a sign for a
guy to go and kiss the girl.

Some guys try to go out on an adventurous date in order to
make the kissing move more suave and natural. One
particular example is a guy who usually takes a girl to a
small boat ride on a river.

Upon sailing along the river, he happens to direct the boat
to a place covered with trees and fireflies - truly a
romantic place to kiss.

A guy can also take her date to some ancient ruins in a
local spot and manage to spend time walking until dark.
These ruins usually light up at night.

The guy can take his date to the top of the ruins where
they can see the city all beautifully lit up. This is when
the guy should make a move and kiss his date.

Find more tips at LayAid.com

So you bought a new PC for yourself or a relative during the holidays. There was the initial excitement about its speed and the nice screen – and then it came time to actually get it running. Which meant embarking on some real work -– downloading a browser, a couple of multimedia players, a PDF reader, a toolbar, and maybe something for voice and instant messaging. Don’t forget the anti-spyware and anti-virus apps – you’ve got to have those. Hours, maybe even days, go by. How many wizards have you clicked through, not to mention license agreements and preference pickers? And then you have to ask: did I get everything? And how am I going to keep all of this up to date?

This has been my experience too many times. I wanted to simplify the project. This led me to Google and Google Pack– a one-stop software package that helps you discover, install, and maintain a wide range of essential PC programs. It is easier for everyone. And it’s free.

It downloads in minutes and installs in just a few clicks. There’s only one license agreement – and no wizards. And there’s a tool called the Google Updater that keeps all the software in the Google Pack current. Even if you already have some of the software in the Pack, you can use the Google Updater to update and manage it.

And now the question for you is: what will you do with all that time you’ve saved?

KeltickDragon is the webmaster for BuyComputersDirect.com & TheBulkyGirl.com

Lacetti - what you think of that name. The wonders of Daewoo considered it to be the ultimate in car saloon names. Personally I think its a bit wanna italian. Like lucioage or bertollena or similar - but the Daewoo Lacetti is a car, and a cheap one at that. Usually when I buy cheap cars my family moan at me, parts fall off in your hand and know one is happy. But with this new daewoo lacetti All I have heard have been good things - positive remarks, all round genuine appreciation for the good value for money incurred by this little daewoo. I even got it fixed and the parts for my used daewoo lacetti were a lot lot lot cheaper than they used to be for my jag, pretty cool considering the actual car was so damn cheap in the first place - how do they make cars this cheap?

Once you’ve written a web page, you can upload it to an HTML
validator. This site, run by the web’s standards body, will
check that your site is valid (’correct’) HTML, and give you
some idea of how to fix it if it isn’t. This is an essential
step in the development of any website - as vital as running
your text through the spell checker - but whenever I recommend
it there’s always someone who wonders why it’s so important.
Well, here’s why.

You Know Your Code is Correct

If your code validates, then it’s correct, and therefore very
likely to work as intended on every web browser out there. If
you don’t validate your pages, then you might find that people
who visit your site with less forgiving browsers see nothing at
all. Correct code is more likely to display correctly on many
different browsers, because it puts them into their ’standards’
mode. If code is even slightly incorrect, many browsers will use
a different way of displaying it, known as quirks mode, which is
designed to handle old and bad HTML, takes a long time and may
make your page end up with errors you didn’t expect.

Without web standards, you end up going back to the bad old days
of having to develop entirely separate web pages for different
browsers. Validating by the standards ensures that all working
browsers can view your content - if they can’t, the fault’s with
them, not with you.

Search Engines Like Valid Pages

When it comes time for a search engine to add your page to its
results, it’s going to have a much easier time understanding the
page if it’s been validated. This will often get you a higher
ranking in the results, which means free visitors for you. If
your page isn’t valid, search engines will often miss keywords
in your pages or not understand your navigation, and may list
nonsensical parts of your code under your site’s name in the
search results - not exactly helpful to potential visitors who
want to know what your site is about.

Mobile Devices

More and more people are accessing the web using mobile devices
like mobile phones and PDAs, and these devices have a lot of
trouble with code that isn’t valid. Because they have limited
processing power, it would take them a very long time to try to
untangle invalid code - they will simply strip out the
formatting and do the best they can with it. Writing valid HTML
lets users with mobile devices see your pages as you intended.

Disabled People

When you write valid code, it becomes much easier to view with
things that aren’t web browsers, such as screen readers.
Technology for disabled people doesn’t tend to be as forgiving
as web browsers, so having valid code is important when it comes
to working with these programs.

Future-Proofing

Before your code will validate, you need to explicitly say which
version of HTML you had in mind when you created it. This
future-proofs your code, as each version of the standard doesn’t
change once it’s been decided on: a valid XHMTL 1.1 page will
always be a valid XHTML 1.1 page, even if everyone else has
moved on to XHTML 5. Once you’ve validated your site once, you
can put it on the web and be confident that people are going to
be able to read it for a long time to come.

Finding Errors

If there’s a mistake in your website’s code, validation gives
you an easy way to track it down and fix it. Before validation,
people had to test their site after each change and look
carefully to make sure that nothing had gone wrong. Writing
valid code lets you use programs that will examine what you’ve
written and point at the exact place where the code doesn’t
validate.

A List of Validators

Here are a few validators that you can try. Most HTML validators
are online, but there are a few that you can download and use on
your own computer.

The W3C validator: validator.w3c.org

The WDG validator: www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator

CSE validator: www.htmlvalidator.com (downloadable)

WebTechs validator: www.webtechs.com/html-val-src

Doctor HTML: www.doctor-html.com (downloadable)

You might also be interested in visiting the W3C’s main site at
w3c.org, as well as the Web Standards Project at
www.webstandards.org.

Q: I recently launched a website for my sporting goods business.
Do I need to do anything special to attract customers to my
website? I know nothing about search engines and marketing as
such. Please tell me where to begin.

A: That is a question that has been asked by every business
person who has ever launched a website. If I build it, will they
come? Of course they will — if you’ve built a website that
appeals to dead baseball players.

For those of you who didn’t get the “Field of Dreams” reference,
let me put it this way: No, Sean, if you build it they will not
come, at least not without some effort on your part.

Assuming that a website will automatically attract customers is
the single biggest mistake that many business owners make. It is
this mistake that eventually leads them to dismiss their website
as a failure and abandon their online sales efforts.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a client say, “Well,
I threw up a website, but nobody ever came to it and I didn’t
sell a single thing from it! Dang thing was a waste of time, if
you ask me …”

Forgive me, but “threw up” is the operative term there. These
short-sighted entrepreneurs (God love them) mistakenly think
that all they have to do is throw up a website and that their
business will automatically double overnight. And when nothing
happens they blame it on the infallibility of the Internet, on
El Nino, on the Bosa Nova, on their customers… everything but
their own lack of marketing efforts.

If you build it, will they come? That, Sean, depends totally on
you.

When it comes to attracting customers, opening an online
business (or an online branch of an existing business) is no
different from opening a traditional brick and mortar shop.
Without a little fanfare and a well-devised marketing plan,
chances are your website will become just another spot of
roadkill on the Information Superhighway.

The first step in devising your marketing plan is to ask
yourself this question: Who is my customer? Who is it that I
want to attract to my website? Believe it or not, this is a
question many entrepreneurs fail to ask. The identity of your
customer is incredibly important because if you don’t know who
your customer is, how can you expect to market to them?

The next question concerns the locality of your customer. Do you
want to attract a local or global clientele to your website? If
the answer is local, then you will gear your marketing efforts
toward customers in your own backyard, which means incorporating
your website launch with your offline marketing efforts.

If the website is the online branch of a brick and mortar
business, include the website URL in all your print materials
and advertising campaigns. Consider running ads in the local
paper, on radio or TV announcing the launch of your site. Use
direct mail or in-store posters to announce the site launch to
your existing customer base.

In short, keep doing what you’re doing to attract customers to
your physical store, just add your website address to the mix.

Just remember, it’s important to consider your website a branch
of your brick and mortar business because that’s exactly what it
is. A good business website will help you sell more products,
widen your range of clientele, and increase your revenue without
adding overhead. Don’t sell your website short. Make it work for
you.

If you are seeking a global audience, your marketing efforts
will be quite different. Attracting customers from around the
world is a more difficult task than attracting customers from
around the block. Fortunately, the task is not impossible. The
Internet has leveled the playing field in many ways. Now every
business, no matter how large or small, has the ability to do
business internationally.

In the most basic sense, an online marketing campaign to attract
global customers should include the following efforts.

Register With Search Engines There’s not enough room in this
newspaper for a thorough discussion of search engines and their
effectiveness (or lack thereof) in driving traffic to a website.
Suffice it to say that 95% of search engine traffic comes from
Google and Yahoo, so start there. It’s also important to realize
that just registering with search engines does not guarantee you
traffic, but it certainly can’t hurt.

Unfortunately, the free search engine lunch ran out a couple of
years ago when search engines figured out that people would
actually pay for listings and higher placement. Since that time
the only way to guarantee a high (or at least higher than
others) ranking is to pay for it. The two most popular
pay-for-placement programs are Yahoo’s “Yahoo Express” and
Google’s “Adwords.” Visit their respective websites for details
on these programs. Be prepared to spend several hundred dollars
at a minimum to get your site listed.

Exchange Links With Similar Sites One free - and potentially
effective - way to drive customers to your website is through
link exchanges with sites of similar interest. Locate sites that
make a good match to your own and contact the owner to ask if
they will link to your site in exchange for you linking to
theirs. If you sell golf balls on your website, set up a link
exchange with another website that sells golf clubs. You post a
link to them and they post a link to you. It’s called digital
back scratching, and if done properly, can work well to drive
traffic your way.

Go To Where The Customers Are If the mountain won’t come to
Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the mountain. One little
known way to attract customers to your website is to market your
products on a mega-site like eBay. There are thousands and
thousands of people on eBay at any given time and each one is
potentially your customer, so it’s a great place to drum up
business.

Your goal is not to make a living selling on eBay, but to use
eBay as a marketing tool to drive traffic back to your website.
Go to where the customers are, then bring them back home with
you.

Let’s use our golf ball example. Post a few auctions on eBay
selling your golf balls at a ridiculously low price so your
auction attracts plenty of attention. When customers make a
purchase, add them to your client list and send them an email
inviting them to visit your website for more great products.
eBay also lets you create your own “About Me” page that you can
use to advertise your business.

We have just scratched the surface, but hopefully this is enough
to get you started. I wish I could tell you that attracting
customers to your website is easy, but the truth is, it’s
anything but. It takes hard work, creativity and above all,
perseverance.

Here’s to your success!