Clarkson Energy Homes

In our last exciting episode, I promised a crude flowchart and I don’t want to let anyone down. You’ll need to click on it to see the whole thing. Feel free to open it in another window and follow along.

As I read my previous posts it occurred to me that you may not see where I am leading with all these files. The idea I have in mind is to allow editing a particular section of the web site in just one file, but more importantly, I want to limit the changes made to that file to affect only that portion of the web site we are making changes to. As long as each section edit maintains well formed markup, that should happen in each instance.

(more…)

In our last exciting episode, I presented a very basic use for SSI. Let's take a closer look. Here's an example include directive which pulls in the contents of a file named content.html located in my www directory.

Now that's pretty powerful if you have never seen it before, but it gets old quick. Let's add a little power using an Apache variable.

(more...)

Oh, I just had the worst meeting and I can only blame myself. More than a year ago, I made a big mistake and I am paying for it now. You see, I own a small mobile home park in Stephenville, TX. I live right in the middle of it. I lease my improved land to mobile home owners. I do not own any home other than my own.

Just about a year ago I was not feeling well and a two homes in the park were purchased while I was shut in my house. When I was notified of the sale, I should have immediately informed the buyers who were the current residents that they had no lease and that they needed to move out of the park immediately. As you can probably guess, I didn't do that.

(more...)

A CMS is great for people who don't know HTML, but what about those of us who do know HTML and CSS and all those other things?

A CMS is a great way to set up a web site for a customer. Weighing in at 15 to 20 Megabytes, they are often cheaper than forcing your customer to pay for every little update. If you have the tie to learn even a small part of their features you can serve your web site design customers well and keep their costs down.

Quite a few years ago I was working with Apache on a web site and we needed quick and dirty method of creating content for each page which used common headers, footer, menus, etc. Perhaps I was too inexperienced to know about Content Management Systems or perhaps there were just none around.

(more...)

Words are important to writers. I think I have written enough to be called a writer. I don't make my living writing, so perhaps I am not a professional writer, but I have been paid for writing in the past and expect to be paid again.

When I run across an inappropriate use of a word, two things come to mind. Is my assumption about the usage correct and should I inform the user of the inappropriate use? Generally, I find I am usually correct and tend to not point out the poor usage.

I often run across instances of people using the word proof when they really mean evidence. After seeing an instance earlier today, I first ran to a dictionary to confirm that they were not synonymous. I then did a Google search to find a comparison of the terms.

Sure enough, I hit this little thread. I'm not going to sum that page up. It's short enough to read and get a great idea of the difference between proof and evidence. It still amazes me how easy it is to do research in the World Wide Web. What an amazing time to be alive.

In real estate investing propaganda I often see terms like "50 cents on the dollar" or "buy property for half off." This is bull shit, folks. Any product sold is worth exactly what the purchaser paid for it. A house which sells for $50,000 is not worth more than $50,000. We know that because it sold for $50,000, not for more than that.

Is is possible for a person to buy a house in the morning and sell it immediately for a profit. With a double closing I could do it in one trip to the closing company. Though it is a rare deal, it might be possible to buy a property for $50,000 and immediately turn around and sell it for $100,000 in one transaction.

(more...)

I keep running across web sites on the Internet which tell all the exciting features of a product except the price. Either the price is missing or I have to fill out some form for a price.

I just want to reach out there and slap the owner upside the head. Holy Crap. What were you thinking? You spent money on advertising and marketing. You did all that research and planning to get me into your store. You told me about the benefits and why I needed your product right now, today.

And then refuse to sell me your product. I can only draw two conclusions. Either your price is to high and I won't be paying it. Or you think your product is one-of-a-kind and no one else is selling something similar or competitive, with an on line price.

Guess what? You might be wrong. And you might be losing sales because of it.

(more...)

I guess this is more a reminder to myself than useful information, but here goes.

Recently, I read up on PHP 5.x header() function. I ran across this tidbit of info.

HTTP/1.1 requires an absolute URI as argument to » Location: including the scheme, hostname and absolute path, but some clients accept relative URIs.

I don't know about you, but I find RFCs incredibly boring, so I'm glad that some insomniac took the time to find this gem.

Following this standard eliminates another problem in a different language. In Perl, many people correctly use CGI.pm to perform redirects. The CGI manual gives the same advice. Use full URLs to redirect.

Here's a mini guide to redirection: (Basically, you just print the redirect out.)

(more...)

I just got off the phone with the former owner of EAAHosting.com. He has one of those cautionary tales that was really tough. It just dawned on me that I completely forgot to ask his name.

According to his story, EAA Hosting started out small and gained a lot of customers fast. Soon, they were able to get better pricing from the larger server wholesalers, but they kept their CRM on one of the smaller server companies.

Some time last year, fatnetworks.com took down the server which housed their CRM and all their customer contact information. While most of their customers were located on other servers form other more stable providers, they went out of business because they lost all their customer information.

Apparently they could not get fatnetworks to get the server back up and couldn't get them to recover their lost data.

So, we can learn something form their mistake. Do not use a Customer Relations Manager program which does not come with some type of off-line or remote backup. Do not rely on CP or H-Sphere to manage all your customers unless you can back up the database they use.

Personally, I would never have thought to take this step.

Barak Obama is touting a tax credit for college tuition. I can only hope that this is just a promise and will not come about. I read recently that a politicians job is to make promises. It's not their job to fulfill their promises, just to make them. Why would I be against a tax credit?

One reason was given in a short interview on my local news station. The speaker said that students could go to bigger schools. In her opinion, the tax credit would allow students to spend more on education, but Obama wanted to help people save money on tuition.

Left only to the market, if the price of education was too high then colleges would have to reduce their prices. The reason we might need a tax credit to help people afford education is if we are already doing something which inhibits this market mechanism.

Instead of offering a tax credit to fix the regulation, why not just repeal that regulation which messes up the market in the first place? Why does "doing something" have to add more laws? Since the market works all by itself, why not make "doing something" mean getting out of the way of the market?