Not all companies have programs or licences for content filtering on their networks. It is arguably worth the $10-$60 per employee/year to licence a content filtering package in terms of increased productivity. What is difficult is selling the idea of spending a large chunk of money to management, especially in this economy. I would imagine a large number of companies can pinpoint their bandwidth and productivity problems to 10 or fewer websites. Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, etc…

Below is a logon script for Windows that will analyze the user’s hosts file and modify it accordingly to block Facebook or any other website you wish. It simply redirects to 127.0.0.1 (home).

Another alternative is to block the IP address of the website using rules on your gateway firewall (Windows or router). The problem with this method is many of the larger sites have multiple IP addresses and adding block lines for each is tedious work. You can block entire ranges of IP addresses. Example: Adding 69.63.0.0/16 would block 69.63.0.0 – 69.63.255.255 (65,536 total addresses – 16bit block). Be careful though, some “good” websites may be in the ranges you block, but in a pinch, it does the job.

Finally, Untangle is an open source gateway that can be run on Windows or on its own dedicated server. It includes content filtering in addition to a multitude of other features. Try it out.

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Some might say the greatest requirement of being a consultant is knowledge. While that may be true, there are many other factors that determine a successful consultant from one that is not. Not all consultants choose this line of work for the same reason – some desire more money, some want flexible hours and some need the flexibility of working from home.

I’ve put together a list of questions for myself as well as for others looking to transition to a full-time consulting practice. Answering ‘yes’ to these questions will make the transition from full-time work to consulting easier. You definitely do not need to answer yes to all of them. Reflect on each question and ask yourself whether or not it will truly impact your job satisfaction.

1. Do I have a decent credit rating? You’ll need credit to start up and complete some tasks depending on the field you choose. If you are merely an intelligence consultant, start-up capital will be minimal – cell phone, internet connection, computer – most of which you should have already.

2. Am I self-confident? You will need to sell your services and yourself to potential clients. You must come across being confident in your own abilities in order to land work.

3. Am I organized? In the early stages you’ll find organization will not come easy. You’ll need a good way of organizing your business, contacts, and appointments as well as storing and searching documents.

4. Am I in good health or financial standing? When starting your consulting practice, you’ll have little to no health benefits and possibly several months without a significant source of income.

5. Will my Family support my decision? This is very important. If your family is unsupportive of your choice of work and your ability to produce income in boom/bust cycles, you may find yourself in a poor situation.

6. Do I have the Skills and Knowledge companies will pay for? This is very important. If you are selling your services make sure it is worth it for your clients. Provide value. If they can use Google or their nephew and receive the same or better level of service, you may not be in business long.

7. Am I a self-starter? Can you get out of bed in the morning and start work without any motivation or supervision?

8. Can I work long and/or unconventional hours? Much consulting work results in long days or projects that command a large chunk of your time. Your family may have to adjust to your erratic schedule.

9. Can I deal with all types of people? You may deal with people you do not like or get along with. They may be your clients for months at a time, and if you want referrals and repeat business, you may not have a choice but to take any clients you can get.

10. Can I estimate and manage my time effectively? One of the most difficult parts of consulting will be to estimate job costs and the time-frame. If you estimate too high on costs, you can lose the client. If you estimate too low, it may not be worth your time. If you estimate your time-frame high, you may end up with free time after a job and nothing to fill it with. If you estimate the time-frame too short, you may run into the scheduled start of another client’s work.

(average: 4.00 out of 5)

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I’ve been around the Internet since long before the “Dot-Com Bubble,” when we had to get our MP3s from IRC and use Blade’s Encoder for the command line. Slashdot was just starting up, ICQ was the only instant messenger around, and Winamp really did whip the Llama’s ass. Those were the days…or were they?

Some colleagues and I were contemplating what exactly “ruined” the Internet for each of us. Depending on the era we each signed on to the Internet, we had different ideas of what ruined it. Here are 2 of my own.

1. Inexpensive Domain Name Registrations and the introduction of ICANN

History
Prior to 1999, the only .com registrar was Network Solutions. It was $100 US for a domain. Fast forward to today and there are thousands of ICANN approved registrars (although mostly resellers) selling domains for $5-$10 on average. GoDaddy seems to hover between $6.95 and $9.95.

Why this ruined the Internet
With the arrival of inexpensive domains, it allowed spammers and phishers to setup numerous and ever-changing websites quickly and cheaply. ICANN enforces a 5-day refund policy for domain holders and registrars. What this means is that many people register domain names, use them for phishing, and dump them after 5 days with a refund. Below are two graphs showing the total domains and hostnames registered as of Sept. 2008. According to Verisign – 22% of the registered domains are “parked domains” and roughly 10% are inactive.

2. Pay-Per-Click

History
Advertising agencies in the 90s like Doubleclick, Flycast and Burst paid website owners one of two ways – cost per thousand impressions or pay-per-click. To get approved by almost any agency you needed to prove your impressions and have them audited. Rates were high compared to today’s rates, upwards of $5 per 1000, or $0.10-$0.15 per click. Adwords was started in 2000 and Adsense was purchased shortly thereafter.

Why this ruined the Internet
Adsense is the gold rush of the Internet. If you write a blog, you’ll make money. The promise of almost guaranteed inclusion into the Adsense network by anyone who can cash a check has launched millions of useless websites and parked domains. Because of Adsense’s low payouts, site owners have become increasingly creative in how they manipulate ad space. Duplicate content, misleading ad placement, pop-ups, and pay-per-post blogging (fake reviews) have all contributed to the decline of the Internet and search relevancy. Hundreds of millions of made-for-adsense pages litter search engine results.

Some of the ideas my colleagues came up with were: Flash, RSS, “Cheap” Servers, Frontpage, Marquee/Blink, and anyone with a Slashdot ID over 1,000,000 (ouch!).

References:

http://www.verisign.com/Resources/Naming_Services_Resources/Domain_Name_Industry_Brief/page_002689.html
http://www.verisign.com/static/040767.pdf
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html

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When marking comments as “spam” in Wordpress, it doesn’t actually remove them from the database.

From my own experience, most Wordpress installations have thousands of spam comments in their databases, taking up valuable space.

In the wp_comments table the comment_approved column will show a value of “spam” on any comment marked as spam – and a value of “1″ for any approved comment.

To quickly delete ALL spam comments, execute the following query on your MySQL database:

You can expand the SQL command to delete from multiple databases and multiple tables, quickly and effectively.

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Wordpress has long had a feature that dynamically replaces standard characters with their more visually appealing (and perhaps more accurate) symbols. In some cases the formatting may not be desirable.

Last year I wrote a few articles on Exchange Server errors. The errors typically follow the form of 0xNumber, ex. 0x8000000F. What wordpress was doing was replacing the “x” in the error with a “times” or multiplication symbol. So 0x0 would show up as 0×0.

Dynamic Replace Active

Dynamic Replace Inactive

My concern was that search engines DO distinguish between “x” and the symbol for multiplication. So when people were searching for 0x8004011D my posts did not show up, but when searching for 0×8004011D or 8004011D they did. If you do a google search with the “times” symbol instead of an “x” for exchange errors, you will find many posts otherwise hidden from the world.

The last string of the regular expression below represents a case for when there is a character followed by an x and by another character without spaces. The x will be replaced with the special character for “times” or &# 215 ;

The characters in the image below are the symbols for replacement. Generally the quotes are not misleading to search engines.

The following dynamic string variable is found in the \wp-includes\formatting.php file. If you wish to remove all dynamic characters, simply delete both lines and your wordpress posts will render correctly.

$dynamic_characters = array
('/\'(\d\d(?:’|\')?s)/', '/(\s|\A|")\'/',
'/(\d+)"/', '/(\d+)\'/', '/(\S)\'([^\'\s])/', '/(\s|\A)"(?!\s)/',
'/"(\s|\S|\Z)/', '/\'([\s.]|\Z)/', '/(\d+)x(\d+)/');

 $dynamic_replacements = array
('’$1','$1‘', '$1″',
'$1′', '$1’$2', '$1“$2',
'”$1', '’$1', '$1×$2');

If you only want to remove the “x” replacement symbol ( × ) use the following lines in formatting.php in place of the originals.

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