For those of you who are using WordPress as your CMS, there’s a new version out: 2.5 It was just released this weekend. I’ve upgraded one of my sites to use WP 2.5, and I’ve been poking around to see how it works. This upgrade includes some major changes, so I’m going to suggest that you not upgrade unless you really know what you’re doing. It’ll take a while before I’m ready or able to offer any tech support for this version, so if you do choose to upgrade right away, you’ll be on your own for a while.

Speaking of WordPress and upgrades… I couple weeks ago I said I’d be doing some upgrading of this site and pulling it all into a WP CMS. Well… I got distracted and spent my time helping clients, so that didn’t get done all the way. Today is a cold rainy day with nothing going on, so I’m going to work on getting that completed today. If you find any problems with the site, please let me know. Also… If you have any suggestions on how to improve the site, please send them my way. One of the suggestions that we’ll be implementing is a page for current customers. This will have links to log into your control panel and billing accounts.

Over the past few years, we’ve gained a couple customers who are infamous for “breaking things” or finding the limitations in our system. This happened again last week. We discovered that the system breaks down if you try to purchase 2 packages on the same account. If you would like to do this, don’t worry. We can accommodate you. We just have to go in and tweak a couple things by hand. Just let us know you want to do this, and we’ll make sure that it’s set up and ready to go for you. And, of course, that goes for any problems or “non-standard” situations you might find yourself in with our service. We’re more than happy to tweak things in order to make it work better.

One big piece of news from behind the scenes: Parallels (the people who make the Plesk control panel we use) have just bought ModernBill (the billing & sign-up software we use), so there’s a good chance that the integration will improve and make things faster and easier for both us and you.

Thanks to all of you who’ve chosen Geek Niche.

–
M Blaze Miskulin
President & Town Crier
Geek Niche, Inc.

No, it’s not a secret government agency, a corporate job title, or the latest muscle car from Ford.

It’s an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. What does that mean? It means “Getting Google to love you”. And Yahoo!, and MSN, and all the rest of the search engines. It’s a catch-phrase for “getting higher on the list”.

Search engines are a way of life on the internet. People rely on search engines to point them in the right direction when looking for information online. Getting to the top of the list is important. The higher you are on the list, the more likely that people will click on the link that brings them to your site.

Importance means money. And money means scammers. There are hundreds of people and companies out there who will tell you that they can “make you #1 on Google”–for a fee, of course. In my personal experience, I’ve seen some rather significant disparity in this fee. I’ve had one company tell me that they could do it for a mere $10,000 plus $300/year. I’ve had a client tell me that another company promised the same for $65/year.

SEO firms will throw a lot of catch-phrases at you. They’ll tell you all about their perfect plan for making you number one. Don’t trust them. There are no magic tricks to make you #1 in the search engine results. The “get rich quick” kinds of tactics are known as “black hat techniques”, and the search engine companies know all about them. Try using them, and you’ll get caught. Then you’ll be banished from their index. That means you won’t show up on any searches.

Honest SEO is based on 2 primary concepts: link-backs and content. The search engine companies are constantly tweak their programs to make them better understand what’s on your website and how real people view it. This is the key: build your site to be interesting to real people, and it will become interesting to the search engines.

Back-links

A “back-link” is when another website includes a link to yours. Sites can link to you for a number of reasons: reviews (”This widget from XYZ, Inc. is really useful.”), referrals (”hey, check out this great article”), forum signatures, web ads, and many other sources. Every time a webpage has a link that points to your site, it makes the search engines pay attention to you. The closer the topic of the the other site is to yours, the more attention the SEs pay to you. If your site is about blue widgets, the best links you can get are from sites that are talking about widgets.

Talk to your supplier or retailers. Offer a link-exchange: you put a link to them on your site, and they put a link to you on theirs. Purchase web-ads on related sites. If you’re active in online forums, put a link to your site in your signature line. Almost anywhere you can get a link pointing to your site is good.

Almost. The exception are “link farms”. These are sites which offer to give you a link in exchange for money. These are different from ads that link to your site; these are sites that do nothing except list links. The SEs know who these sites are, and they know what they’re doing. Those links won’t do you any good.

Content

“Content is king”. That’s a very popular saying among those who create and maintain websites. And they’re right. Content is king. Your website is an extension of your business. It needs to speak to your customers and tell them what they want and need to hear. The more friendly and informative your website is, the more people will like it. And the search engines like what people like.

Don’t write your site to make Google happy. Write your site to make you customers happy. Google isn’t buying your product. You know who your customers are. You know what they want to know. Use your site to give them that information.

And don’t just do it once: keep giving them new information. The more you update your site–the more you add new and timely information–the more your readers will come back. AND… the more that the search engines will pay attention to you.

If you’ve been set up with a site that uses WordPress as the CMS (which many of our customers have), you have a great tool at your disposal: the blog post. You can write a new post every week (or every day!) to let your customers know what’s going on with your business. Keep your readers coming back. Remember: your website isn’t just a big newspaper ad, it’s a powerful and interactive tool that you can use to entice and educate your readers. Don’t just say “all widgets 50% off this week”. Share your knowledge with them. Tell them about the history of widgets. Explain the difference between widgets and do-dads. Educate them on how to tell a good widget from a cheap one. Teach them the “7 qualities of a superior widget”.

In other words, write information that is interesting. That interesting information will not only keep your readers coming back, but it will remain on your site forever, so that other people can find it. Suddenly, you may find that the Widget-Fancier’s Club of America is looking to you for information–and buying from you because you obviously know what you’re talking about. And if those people like your articles, they’ll link to them on their sites. They’ll tell their friends about you. Those friends will link to you on their sites…. and so on.

Content is king. Give people something interesting and informative to read, and they will bring business to your door.

This post is getting long, and I want to save some of my information for another post or two (See what I’m doing? I’m giving you some information, and then giving you a reason to come back later to get more!).

In future articles, I’ll talk about some of the tools you can utilize to help you make your site more search engine friendly (and people friendly). I hope to see you then. And, as always, if you have any questions about your site and how to improve it, just ask. If I don’t know the answer, I can at least try to point you in the right direction. All of us at Geek Niche want you to be incredibly successful with your websites. After all… if you get really popular, you’ll need to upgrade your account, and that means more profits for us! (Hey… at least we’re honest!)

–
M Blaze Miskulin
Old Man on the Mountain
Geek Niche, Inc.

Currently, GeekNiche.com is a series of php & html pages written by yours truly about 3 years ago. The news section (what you’re reading right now) is a WordPress blog. WordPress has come a long way in the last 3 years. I’ve been recommending WP as a great CMS (Content Management System) to for new clients. Well… I’m going to put my money where my mouth is: I’m converting the entire site over to a WP-driven site (well… not the [i]entire[/i] site; there are some areas that need to remain as they are).

Why am I telling you this? Because over the next couple weeks, you may see some strange things (such as duplicate pages), and I just wanted you to know why.

–
M Blaze Miskulin
Chief Tinkerer
Geek Niche, Inc.

We’ve been busy while we’ve been gone. We’ve been adding new clients, helping existing clients expand, and doing the stuff we normally do. We’ve also been expanding. There are two new Geek Niche projects out there. Both are fledgling projects, so there’s not much there, but they are up and running and ready for customers.

The first project is PhotoNiche.org Photo Niche is a specialty site designed for photographers and models. It currently has 2 versions: the Gallery and the Light Table. The Gallery is for showing off photos to everyone. It’s a great way for models and photographers to have an inexpensive site where they can store and display their work. The Light Table is a special storage site that allows photographers to upload images for specific clients only. If you don’t now the name of the file, you can’t see it.

The second new project is VoteNiche.org (are you sensing a theme here?) Vote Niche is a political site dedicated to local and state elections and candidates. Candidates can create a well-crafted and easy to update web presence without needing any knowledge of code. Integrated blogs allow the candidates to present their ideas and platforms, while the public forums allow both candidates and voters to debate the topics at hand.

These projects are just two more ways we’re tying to take over the world provide useful niche products for our customers.

–
M Blaze Miskulin
President
Geek Niche, Inc.

Starting Dec 25th, and running through Jan 6th, we’re offering a little present to new members. $15 off any new account. Just use the coupon code 12geekmas07.

That’s the present for your friends. What about the presents for you?

Well….Nothing says “holiday spirit” like kickbacks! As always, tell a friend about us, and if they sign up, you get 10% of their monthly bill taken off of yours. Get 10 friends to sign up at your level, and you’ll be hosted for free. Just tell your friends to let us know who sent them, and we’ll do the rest.

Have a happy Geekmas!

–
M Blaze Miskulin
Santa’s Little Helper

If you log in to your control panel, you’ll notice something new in the sidebar. It’s called 4psa Integrator. At this point you’re asking “What is this new feature? What does it do? Well… I’m here to tell you! (Convenient, isn’t it?)

4psa Integrator is a replacement for the Application Vault. It’s the new “one click” installation tool. Not only does it have more applications to offer, it has much more recent versions.

The Ap Vault has been always been a bit of a let-down for us. It’s always been far behind the times with version updates. In the world of internet applications, this can be a serious issue. Integrator takes care of that.

If you’re looking to install a new application, use the Integrator. It’s a nice and simple way to set up the best applications on your site.

If you’ve got any questions, let me know.

–
Blaze Miskulin
President
Geek Niche, Inc.

(Did that work? No? Rats!)

I know that it’s been a long time since I’ve written one of these. For September and the first half of October, nothing was going on, and I figured you didn’t want to sit there and read my silly ramblings. Then… things started to change behind the scenes, and I wanted to wait until various details were worked out before talking about them.

Your Account

First off, Paul has been doing some serious work on upgrading and improving the quality of the invoicing section. For those who don’t remember from the original e-mails you received when you signed up, you can look at all your invoicing, pay an invoice, change contact and credit card information, view your account details, and more.

It’s all available on your ModernBill Account Page. The username and password should be the ones you supplied when you first signed up.

Also, as full account holders, you have a lot of control over your account; e-mail addresses, databases, subdomains, web-user accounts, Ap-Vault installations…. the list is rather long. You can access all of this via the Plesk Control Panel. Again, the username and password should be the some ones you supplied when you first signed up.

If you can’t log into either of those sections, please let us know. We can provide a temporary password to get you into these sections. You should then be able to set a new password.

The emergency page has moved.

In the very rare occasion that the Geek Niche servers are all off line (tsunami, nuclear apocalypse, breaking of the 7th Seal, etc.) we’ve set up a Geek Niche emergency page. This page is entirely independent of our servers and even our data center (the place where all our servers are kept). I have generously offered the pathetic excuse for “web hosting” offered by my ISP as our emergency page (it’s not like it’s good for anything else). Well… I’ve changed ISPs recently, which means that my “personal web page” (pardon me while I stifle my giggles) has changed, also. The new Geek Niche Emergency Page is located at: http://webpages.charter.net/geekniche

If you have reason to believe that our servers have been taken over by hostile alien invaders (or something) check the emergency page for information.

A new addition to the family

Geek Niche is always looking for more an better ways to serve the needs of our clients and our potential clients. As part of this, we’ve launched a new site dedicated to photographers and models. It’s called PhotoNiche.org Currently, it offers a couple very simple, but effective, solutions to models and photographers who are looking for a web presence that offers more features, customization, and security than the various free sites out there.

PhotoNiche is still in its infancy, but we expect it to grow into a strong and vital member of the Geek Niche family.

On a more serious note

The biggest news (and the most important reason this newsletter has been delayed for a while) is a change in our roster. Barry Bonds will be replace by Brett Favre as the goalie…. oh… wait… I’m getting all confused. The real change is that Jason has decided to step down from his position as Vice President and owner. His resignation will take effect January 1st, 2008. Jason’s put a lot of hard work into this company, and still believes in it, but has decided that his family comes first (especially since it seems to be growing faster than the company). He’ll continue working with us for a while as a consultant and secondary administrator, however, so things will continue on smoothly during the transition.

And in conclusion….

…I’d like to thank the Academy… oh…. wait…. wrong speech.

So… yeah… Umm… Have a happy holiday season.

–
M Blaze Miskulin
President & Royal Scribe
Geek Niche, Inc.

As usual, the summer months have been fairly quiet. And, as usual, we consider that to be a good thing. Personally, I figure that the less you hear from us, the better things are.

There’s been a couple upgrades and tweaks going on behind the scenes which you might want to be aware of. First of all, Plesk as been upgraded again, and that means that some of the items in the Application Vault have been upgraded as well. It doesn’t look like there are any new applications, however.

In regards to applications and upgrades: An unfortunate aspect of the internet is the evolution of annoyance. There are a lot of people out there who are too smart and too bored for their own good. They spend their days thinking up new ways to attack websites and the servers that host them. And once they find a way, they tell their friends… and pretty soon it’s out in the wild for any punk with a computer to try out. This means that applications which were perfectly secure a year ago are now wide open to serious attacks. Those attacks affect everyone on the server. While we’re continually vigilant about what’s happening, we can’t be everywhere at once. As owner of a website, it’s partly your responsibility to keep your applications up-to-date.

Right now, our biggest dangers are Gallery and phpBB. If you aren’t running the latest version of either of these, I strongly encourage you to upgrade. If we find that one of your applications is presenting a security risk to the server, we may have to delete it. We really don’t want to do that. Just go to the website of the application, download the latest copy, and follow the instructions. Usually, it only involves uploading the new files over the top of the old ones and then clicking a couple buttons.

As part of our recent security upgrades, we’ve setup some new “rules” for the servers to follow. This could possibly affect some of the applications you’re running. If you notice any problems with any of your applications, let us know and we’ll tweak things to make it work.

Other than that, I hope your summer is going well.

See you next month.

—
M Blaze Miskulin
President
Geek Niche, Inc

When we signed up for an ad, we decided to let Randy do whatever he wanted (though Paul insisted on using the Little Blue Thing in the ad), and let him know that we’re not above making fun of ourselves. The result is great!

A big thanks to Randy and the crew at Something Positive.

I hope you’re all keeping cool during this sweltering start to the summer. I live in Wisconsin; we’re built to handle 40-below temperatures and feet of snow. This hot & muggy stuff is brutal.

I actually have some things to talk about this month. Isn’t that a shocker?

We’ve had a few “black hats” sneaking around in the digital alleyway spray-painting the walls and throwing stones at the windows. Paul & Jason have been on top of things, however, and beat off the intruders with virtual baseball bats.

Hacking is a serious problem. Every server out there is constantly being hammered by everything from script-kiddies to serious threats. Last week the Department of Homeland Security revealed that they had 800 successful incursions into their servers over the last 2 years. We’ve had 3. And in each case, it was discovered within hours and shut down with little or no damage. If you look at it mathematically, we’re 266.6 times more secure than the Dept of Homeland Security!

If you ever suspect that your site has been hacked contact us right away. Catching the hack early not only means minimizing any damage, but also finding out how they got in and plugging the hole. The fact that we’ve been able to catch every one of the hacks within hours, and only 1 actually did any damage is a testament to the diligence and skill of the two guys handling the technical side of things.

In happier news: Geek Niche is going public! For the last 2 years, we’ve gotten almost every customer by word of mouth. That we’ve gotten as many as we have is a big boost to our egos. Well, on July 3rd, we’re running our first public advertisement. We’ve bought the sidebar ad on Something Postivive. The fun part is that we have no idea what it’s going to look like!

For those of you that don’t know, Something Positive (S*P) is a webcomic. It’s a cynical, scathing, sometimes rude and always funny webcomic. The author does custom-designed ads using characters from the comic. When I contacted his advertising manager, I gave him information on who we are, what we do, and what our attitude is (”we’re not afraid to make fun of ourselves”), and told him to do whatever he wanted.

Okay… I’m just a little bit scared.

Even though we’re doing the whole “real advertising” thing, word of mouth is still our best advertising. And we’re willing to put our money where our mouth is: we have our kick back rewards program in place. Recommend someone to us for hosting and, after 3 months, you’ll get 10% of their hosting fee credited to your account. They just have to e-mail us and let us know who recommended them to us. If you like what we’re doing for you, send your friends our way–you could end up getting your hosting for free!.

Happy Independence Day to all you Americans. And for those who don’t care to celebrate that, may be one of the other holidays this month will be more your style…

Fireworks Safety Month
Light the Night for Sight Month
Anti Boredom Month
Baked Bean Month
Hot Dog Month
National Ice Cream Month
July Belongs to Berries Month
Purposeful Parenting Month
Recreation and Parks Month
Tennis Month
Adopt a Rescued Rabbit Month

Therapeutic Recreation Week (1-7)
Coral Reef Awareness Week (15-21)

Or any one of the many many holidays celebrated around the world.
(Check out the Earth Calendar for more holidays)
–
M Blaze Miskulin
President
Geek Niche, Inc.