If you run a blog that’s powered by WordPress, inevitably your website will be hit by a deluge of comment spam. More often than not, it comes from automated software tools designed to build links back to the spammer’s website for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes. If you leave your WordPress blog unprotected, your posts …
WordPress does a lot of things right. It’s easy-to-use, it’s extensible and it has been widely adopted by the website development community. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t do a great job when operating under a heavy load of traffic, especially when residing on a shared hosting server and being combined with a couple of dozen third-party plugins …
If you’re looking to have a contractor or agency build your organization a website, you have more choices than you can possibly consider. There are local design and development agencies, freelance web designers and developers, international developers that can be hired through ODesk and similar services and do-it-yourself services such as Square Space. I estimate …
If you’re a small business owner, you know that your company probably needs a website. So, you ask around to know if anyone knows a good website developer. You find a consultant or an agency, write them a check and have them build you a website that makes use of the latest software and design …
This is a list of books that I read in 2012. Books with asterisks next to them are books that I enjoyed and would recommend: 1 – 1/4/2012 – Archeology and the New Testament by John McRay 2 – 1/7/2012 – A Revolution in Generosity by Wesley Willmer* 3 – 1/14/2012 – Multiple Streams of Income by …
Today marks the two-week anniversary of my transition to full-time self-employment. I would like to say that the last two weeks has been the South Dakota equivalent of sitting on a beach drinking Mai Tai’s (whatever that would be), but that hasn’t been the case. Today also marks the one-week anniversary of bringing my son, …
I announced earlier this month that I plan on quitting my day job as of November 7th, so that I can focus on my business, my seminary degree and my newborn son, Micah. Since then, I’ve gotten a lot of “What exactly do you do?” questions. This post was written to answer that question. My …
I did it. I finally did it. After four years and ten months of working at Factor360 full time and six years of building my business on the side, I’ve finally made the entrepreneurial leap. As of November 7th, 2012, I will have quit my day job to pursue my business on a full time basis. …
2012 was the third year that I had the opportunity to attend the Global Leadership Summit put on by the team at Willow Creek. When I first attended the Summit in 2009, I had the opportunity to hear from a number of great speakers, like Wess Stafford of Compassion International and Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair. In …
I had the opportunity to attend the Global Leadership Summit during the past two days. The Summit takes place in Chicago, but is simulcast to regional broadcast locations around the world. My home church, Central Baptist Church, has the opportunity to serve as a satellite location each year. Last year, we had more than 420 …
John Ortberg’s The Me I Want To Be has a title that’s more deceptive than most. The book challenges the reader to become the best version of him or herself. Do not be deceived though. This book is not a rehash of self-help and prosperity gospel literature. Rather, Ortberg challenges the reader to become the …
“Your only job is to make your players better” – Tony Dungy I had an opportunity to read The Mentor Leader by Tony Dungy as part of my reading for seminary classes this summer. Randy Tweeten, who is the pastor of care ministries at the church I attend, suggested I read the book this spring. …
I had the opportunity to read Jim Collins’ latest book, Great by Choice, as part of my reading for the Leadership Summit class that I’m doing for my seminary work this summer. I’ve read many of Collins’ previous books, including Good to Great, Built to Last and How the Mighty Fall. Collins’ first book attempted …
My company, American Consumer News, LLC, will be launching a new stock research product tomorrow morning. The product, RatingsDB, allows retail investors to get access to Analyst Ratings Network’s entire database of more than 100,000 stock ratings. RatingsDB rests upon a custom-built search engine that tracks more than 200 stock ratings each day. Watch the …
Here’s a list of books that I’ve read so far in 2012.The date next to each book is the date that I completed the book. Books with asteriks next to them are books that I would recommend to others. My goal was to read 50 books in 2012. Apparently I’ve had more time than I …
Karine and I had the opportunity to take a once-in-a-lifetime 10-day trip to Oahu and Maui. Our little one is now 20-weeks along and it’s hard to know when we’ll have the opportunity to take another trip like this again. We had a fantastic time. Here are a few memories from our trip:
I wear many hats. One of those hats is serving as a coordinator for Financial Peace University (FPU) classes at my local church. Yesterday, Dave Ramsey’s team hosted a webinar announcing the 2012 edition of Financial Peace University. The 2012 edition will not be unfamiliar to anyone that has previously taken the class, as Dave’s …
I was running a cross promotional campaign for my company’s daily email newsletter, ARN Daily, this morning. Almost immediately after the campaign email was sent out, DreamHost’s data center had an outage, rendering the campaign almost useless. This is the latest of many issues that I’ve had with DreamHost, unfortunately. I have a couple of …
Several months back, I wrote about my paid email newsletter called ARN Daily in a post called “How I Developed a Paid Email Newsletter to Diversify My Business’s Income.” Since that post last spring, the number of subscribers to both the free and paid newsletters has easily tripled. This business unit now brings my company …
I’ve started my last book for 2011. Here’s a complete list of what I’ve read this year: 01 – 1/1/2011 – Doing More Faster by David Cohen and Brad Feld 02 – 1/5/2011 – Never By Another Stock Again by David Gaffen 03 – 1/16/2011 – Sex Begins in the Kitchen by Kevin Leman 04 …
My company has done pretty well with affiliate advertising over the last couple of years by creating high-quality content about a product or service that has an affiliate program and including appropriate affiliate banners and links in those articles. For example, you can read a review I did of Lending Club’s peer-to-peer lending service on …
Regardless of what type of website that you have, you need to back-up your websites on an ongoing and consistent basis. What would you do if your website got hacked? What would you do if your web-host goes out of business? What would you do if the server that hosts your website crashes hard? If …
Browsing for online business opportunities on Flippa is like prospecting for gold. Most of the time, you’re not going to find anything that looks remotely like gold. On a rare occasion, you’ll find something that looks like gold, but later you found out it’s fool’s gold. On an extremely rare occasion, you can find a …
WordPress has been the single best and single worst piece of software for my company. Almost all of the sites that my company operates are powered by WordPress. On one hand, it’s a fantastic content management system that’s easy to setup and upgrade. If there’s something you want to do on your website, chances are, …
Here are the books that I’ve read in 2011: Doing More Faster, by David Cohen and Brad Feld* Never By Another Stock Again, by David Gaffen Sex Begins in the Kitchen, by Kevin Leman The E-Myth Revisited, by Michael Gerber Becoming an Externally Focused Church, by Rick Rusaw Why We Get Fat, by Gary Taubes* …
When I attended the Leadership Summit in 2009, I had the opportunity to hear from a number of great speakers, like Wess Stafford of Compassion International and Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair. I had a fantastic time attending the summit and enjoyed great fellowship with other attendees. A few weeks after the conference, a …
During the last two days, I’ve had the opportunity to attend the Global Leadership Summit. The actual Summit is taking place in Chicago, but my home church, Central Baptist Church of Sioux Falls, has the opportunity to serve as a satellite location. This year, we’ve had more than 420 leaders come to the Summit from …
Seth Godin has written a number of books, but the one constantly clamored about among entrepreneurs online is the book Tribes. Godin spoke at the 2011 Leadership Summit and I had the opportunity to pick up a copy of the book. Tribes provides a model for leadership in any situation and organization. Godin spends much …
Perhaps one of the greatest mistakes that people of my generation, including myself, make is that we fail to learn from the experiences of those that came before us. We believe that we can tackle just about any situation ourselves without any outside help or wisdom. As a result, we make the mistakes made by …
I’ve always struggled with the command in scripture that we should “be angry and do not sin” (Ephesians 4:26a). The context of that passage is that the Apostle Paul is writing to the church in Ephesus, providing instructions for Christian living. He tells the church to start living a new life of honesty, forgiveness and …
I will be attending the Leadership Summit, a conference for leaders in Christian ministry and in the business world, next Thursday and Friday. I will have the opportunity to receive two academic credits toward the M.A. in Christian Leadership that I am working on at Sioux Falls Seminary. One of the requirements for the credits …
I try to set personal development goals every 60 days for the next 60 days. I’ve tried setting goals over different periods of time, including as long as a year. Some of those goals have been successful and others have failed miserably. I’ve found that 60 days is about right to sprint toward a goal …
In the last couple of years, there’s been a renewed interest in time management, productivity improvement and task management tools. A lot of us are getting far more email than we can handle in any given day and find ourselves faced with an increasingly long and never ending list of tasks to complete. Some people …
I’ve recently started a new website around the niche of peer-to-peer lending, P2PLendingNews.com. The site itself isn’t entirely new, but it’s new to me. It was originally setup in April 2007 by its previous owner during the initial period of excitement around peer to peer lending before the SEC came down on Prosper and Lending …
Starting a business can be a very lonely affair. This is especially the case if you’re a single founder and aren’t working with a team to develop your product or service. When I got into business in 2006, there wasn’t much of an online community for solo-entrepreneurs and lifestyle business owners. During the last half-decade, …
I’ve been running an information marketing company for the last four and a half years, but it wasn’t until three months ago that I started developing an email newsletter for readers of any of my websites. I had always gotten plenty of web traffic from other sources, was doing fine revenue wise and didn’t see …
I’ve had the opportunity to work with Trinity Lutheran Church and West Center Baptist Church, both of Madison, SD, develop new web presences during the last several months.: Trinity Lutheran Church is an ELCA congregation. Their new website launched today. I had originally created them a website while I worked for Logic Lizard, a company …
Thomas Stanley, author of the Millionaire Next Door, tells us that the average millionaire reads one non-fiction book per month. Last year, I had the opportunity to read 22 non-fiction books and the breaks that the month of January offers from my normal routine has allowed me the opportunity to do some additional reading this …
Most of my fellow students at Sioux Falls Seminary are there to get a Masters of Divinity degree so that they have the academic qualifications to become a pastor. There are also a few that are there to get counseling degrees, but not me. Eighteen months ago I was invited to take an informal class …
I recently launched a daily email newsletter on my company’s investing website, American Banking & Market News. The newsletter provides daily updates about ratings changes made by stock analysts. Initially, I planned on using my server’s local SMTP server to send out the messages, but realized that after getting more than 50 sign-ups the first …
Earlier in the year, I realized that I spent far too much time checking my email and clearing out my inboxes each day. At the time, I had four active email accounts that I used and none of them worked terribly well with the devices that I wanted to check email on (other than my …
Many medium and large-sized church congregations (300+ members) have used the mediums of radio and television as a form of outreach ministry during the last half-century. By broadcasting the worship music and message of a Sunday morning service to the outside community, there’s the possibility that God will reach someone that might not ordinarily walk …
Imagine that you and your ten closest friends are put into an industrial kitchen and told to make food item that contains everyone’s favorite ingredients. If you all like exactly the same types of food, you might wind up with something that’s not half-bad. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. You would more likely end …
I’ve recently gone through the process of building out a new website for my home church, Central Baptist Church of Sioux Falls am now in the process of building new websites for my friends at West Center Baptist and Trinity Lutheran Church of Madison, SD. As I go through the design and development process with …
I’m a relatively happy customer of Southeastern Electric Cooperative. They provide me electricity for much cheaper than I could generate myself and I’m part owner of the company (as is everyone else that gets electricity from Southeastern), but after receiving a bill for $150.00 in the mail for my August electricity, I figured it was …
I’m not a terribly huge television watcher, but I do watch/listen to a number of podcasts on a regular basis. I usually try to get into one or two shows every fall season, but quite often the shows get stale rather quickly (I’m looking at you, Flash Forward) or I otherwise lose interest. There are …
As unemployment rates remain elevated in most developed countries, people with specific marketable skill sets, such as website development, graphic design and copy writing, have been applying those talents in the marketplace in the form of freelance work to supplement their income streams. As a person that has done a lot of freelancing work in …
This is it.
Yankton Trail Park: Tut Hill Park:
via youtube.com This is a compilation of videos that I made using my Flip Camera while on a bike-ride around the Sioux Fallss greenway today. I’ve included video of various parts of the Big Sioux River which have flooded and video from Falls Park. I estimate that water levels are somewhere between 5 and 7 …
WordPress is an excellent blogging/news website platform as a whole, but has been criticized for being a bit of a performance dog. One of my websites which is powered by WordPress receives between 100,000 and 200,000 unique visitors a month. I’ve gotten a few nasty emails from the two hosts that I’ve had the site …
If you’ve written any sort of software application of decent size, you’ll know that you need to structure your code, most often using object oriented design techniques, to keep your code-base manageable. Some languages such as Java and C# enable developers to write object-oriented applications relatively well out of the box without much extra work. …
For years, I had been a DreamHost customer. I had their standard shared reseller hosting account that costs peanuts. Every few weeks my sites would crash hard when they had any remote amount of significant traffic. Eventually it got to the point where I was losing out on ad-revenue because of DreamHost’s inability to keep …
A couple of months ago, Facebook announced some ambitious changes to their API. We’re now starting to see some of the first of the newly announced features be released into the wild. A couple of weeks ago, Facebook added the ability for developers to ask prompt to bookmark their application. Previously, users were only able …
I’ve been playing around with the Code Igniter Framework for PHP over the last couple of weeks, primarily because Net Tuts has a series of 6 high-quality screencasts showing off some basic functionality of the framework. Essentially, Code Igniter provides some additional functionality and provides a standardized means of creating pages and methods using the …
For my day job, I’ve been developing a facebook application to coincide with its annual SpayDay event. Developing the application has caused several headaches, but once I realized that the majority of the facebook integration wouldn’t happen from the Facebook Developer Toolkit (an ASP.NET Facebook Development Framework), and instead from JavaScript-based XFBML, life got a …
If you do any sort of web development work on the .NET platform, you are going to find yourself concatenating (connecting) strings together on a very regular basis. There are two ways to do this. The first is with a traditional string concatenation, which would look something like this: string MyString = String.Empty; MyString = …
Over the last few days, I’ve been scouring the web for techniques and strategies to optimize ASP.NET code so that it runs faster and more efficient, resulting in quicker load times. A lot of what I found was pretty standard advice, disable viewstate, use the StringBuilder for concatenation, disable tracing and use AJAX. One piece …
UPDATE 3/23/2010 – Ricky from Twitterizer commented below noting that basic authentication will soon go away via Twitter and OAUTH will be required. Note that the code below will only work for a few months. We will post an updated code-example soon. As I write this article, It’s about 75 degrees and Sunny outside. When …
One of the components of the 360 Web Content Management System (website in progress) that I wanted to develop was an events calendar that allowed you to post events into color-coded categories. You can see a demo of it here. At first, I had it so that users would manually enter in a 6-character HTML …
I was recently doing doing support for a client that had a newsletter system. The previous employee had neglected to do much in the form of format validation for email addresses from both a user-input standpoint and system-integrity standpoint. Since there were several email addresses in the database that didn’t meet the basic conventions of …
One of the more useful features of ASP.NET’s GridView control is that users can sort the information in the table they are seeing by any number of fields. To allow this sorting to happen, ASP.NET sends a post-back to the server and the web server re-renders the page with the GridView re-sorted in the order …
Just about everyone who’s ever made a web-application knows that you generally can’t trust your users to enter data correctly into a form. Some of them will ignore important fields, others will type in data that couldn’t possibly be right. Some will try to choose two character passwords and others will enter in a long …
We recently covered an easy way to hash passwords using SHA-1 in .NET using either Visual Basic or C#. In most cases, SHA-1 encryption is “secure enough”, but there are some mathematical weaknesses. Microsoft’s .NET platform (specifically the System.Security class) allows you to encrypt passwords with a number of differnet algorithms without having to know the …
If you’re working in an academic or large corporate or government setting, changes are you’re going to have a network in place using Active Directory or an open-source equivalent. Every user in the organization will have some sort of an account to use. If you’re building an internal web-application or desktop-application, it doesn’t make a …
If you’re developing a website that allows users to upload any sort of photos or images, you have to expect that they aren’t going to bother doing any sort of basic image manipulation, such as resizing an 8 megapixel image down to something that’s appropriate for the web. Fortunately, there are a number of good …
Earlier this week, I wrote up a tutorial about how to make a testing environment for Joomla on the windows platform. I went through the instructions of setting up WAMP, making the database, and installing and configuring Joomla. It turns out there’s a much easier way to create a testing environment for Joomla, Magento, MySQL, …
While attending Microsoft Mix earlier this spring, I stumbled upon a book called “Making Forms That Work“, which was written by Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney. The book focused on building web-forms that aren’t intimidating and that people will actually fill out. One of the focuses was making sure to use the right controls for …
If you develop a web-application for a client that involves creating and viewing reports, it’s very likely that they’re going to want to be able to export that data to excel very readily. Fortunately, you won’t need any special libraries or hundreds of lines of code to make that happen in ASP.NET. All you need …
WordPress is without a doubt the most popular blogging platform on the web. It’s easy to use, relatively secure, very extensible and best of all free. Unfortunately, it’s not optimized for search engines terribly well out of the box. The URLs that it generates don’t have any keywords in them. There’s no way to customize …
If you’re developing a site that requires users to logon, chances are you’re going to need to be able to generate passwords at some point, whether it be when users initially create their accounts or after they lose their passwords and need to reset their account credentials. Here’s a very customizable function that will generate …
In the next couple of weeks, I’m planning on developing a Joomla 1.5 module so that I can flex my PHP muscles and get some more experience developing for Joomla. As part of this, It will be very helpful to have a local environment where I can test out the component that I’m plan on …
If you’re developing a website that requires your users to create an account, it’s a very good idea to not store their passwords in plain-text in the database. A good chunk of users use the same password for just about everything, so if your database is compromised, there’s the possibility of having some real reprocussions …
When researching various web-based imaging cropping tools, I’ve found that there are a lot of good looking JQuery, MooTools, and other JavaScript based solutions out there, but there’s not a ton of good server-side support. The one ASP.NET control I found that I really did like was “Asp.net 2.0 Web Crop Image Control“. It’s actually …
One of the most frequent criticisms of the ASP.NET stack is that it’s less efficient than some of its open-source counterparts. However, Microsoft has actually built in a lot of neat technology into the framework related to caching that allows for much more scalability than you might think. Not only is there caching support built …
If you plan on doing any sort of file manipulation on a web-server using ASP.NET, you’re going to have to become intimiately familiar with the System.IO library and learn how to properly configure the permissions for the directories you would like to write to on your Windows Server ’03 or ’08 web-server. Fortunately, the process isn’t …
I’m currently working on an file manager that will be integrated with the content management system software that we developed. In doing this, I’ve been looking for a solution that would allow users to upload multiple files at once, does so in a very easy to use way and shows a progress bar. For this …
When working with strings of text, there are certain characters that you can’t represent in a normal string variable because the key required on the keyboard simply doesn’t exist or because of how strings are represented in text. Fortunately, modern programming languages provide “escape sequences,” or ways to represent certain characters that otherwise could not …
For the last week or so, I’ve been looking for a Virtual Private Server (VPS) for use on some of my websites and personal web-development projects. My adventure began by doing a Google Search for “Windows VPS” and found dozens of different providers that had different features at different pricepoints. At first, I found it …
While looking at various tools that might aid in the development of an ASP.NET based file manager, I came across a JQuery based tool called jQuery File Tree. Typically we would think of a file browser for a web-server that would be something that’s almost uniquely server-side, but jQuery File Tree does a nice job …
If you’re making use of C# or Visual Basic for Windows Forms, ASP.NET Web Forms or ASP.NET MVC, you have access to a very powerful file-system access library that’s included with Visual Studio. The library, System.IO, will allow you to create, rename, edit and delete files and folders on your system. If you are using …
LINQ has been out for around a year now, but I never have been able to get away from using traditional SQL queries and data-access classes. Today, I thought I would try to do the “Hello World” equivalent of a LINQ program and share that with you today. So What’s LINQ? LINQ stands for Language …
In the last decade, Google has given us a lot of amazing free services, and web developers haven’t been left out of the party. For a while now, Google has been hosting popular JavaScript libraries on their CDN (content delivery network) and letting any website make use of them for free. On face, you might …
When I was a new developer making websites in .NET, I ended up doing some pretty screwy things to make date’s and time’s look how I wanted to. I would do things like: DateTime thisDate = DateTime.Now; string AMPM = String.Empty; if(thisDate.Hour>=12) {AMPM = “PM”;} else {AMPM = “AM”;} String FormattedDate = (thisDate.Hour%12).ToString() + “:” …
I’ve spent the better part of the last 3 months developing the new version of our company’s content management system that’s called “360 WebCMS”. It’s a product that Factor 360 has and is used to develop all of our client websites. One of the cool features that I built into it was multi-site management. Essentially, …
If you’re looking to do URL rewriting for a content management system or another .NET based website, there are a number of ways to accomplish the task. There’s a very mature free product called URL Rewriter.NET which gets the job done, and Microsoft has made their own URL Routing solution which was originally developed for …
If you use C# or VB.NET through the ASP.NET stack (or just as a desktop application) to connect to a SQL database, you’ll have a few options. There’s the new entity data model from Microsoft, there’s also last year’s notion of LINQ. They both do a reasonably good job, but are sometimes on the over-kill …
If you have a website or blog, one of your motivating factors is that you’d like to promote yourself, your services or your ideas. Typically most bloggers don’t want to be writing anonymously and would like to provider their readership an easy way to contact them. Unfortunately, it’s a really bad idea to let your …
I was recently working on a new website for an adult fellowship group at my church and one of the tasks I had was to create an image rotator that had various bible verses on it that would transition every few seconds. Since the site was Joomla-based, I initially searched for a free plugin that …