Doing business on the Internet is fraught with peril in a lot of ways, and chargebacks are probably one of the biggest problems that internet companies face. So, what’s a chargeback?

A chargeback is the return of funds to a consumer, forcibly initiated by the consumer’s issuing bank. Specifically, it is the reversal of a prior outbound transfer of funds from a consumer’s bank account, line of credit, or credit card. This is what you do when you, the consumer, have tried to work out a solution with your vendor, and you were unable to do so – if you feel you have a claim against the company, a chargeback can level the playing field and force the company to negotiate with you.

This isn’t a general post with regard to tips about avoiding chargebacks. This is a post about how we avoid chargebacks, and the possible ramifications to your account if you choose to use the chargeback as your first resort as opposed to the last resort its meant to be.

When You Should initiate a Chargeback against DrakNet

Never. You should never, ever initiate a chargeback against DrakNet unless you’re ready to have your account nuked.

Ok, to be honest, obviously we’re not immune from screw ups, but we do work pretty hard to make those right. Obviously, if you submit a ticket outlining issues and we don’t see it your way, by all means, use the tools available to you as a consumer. Realize, though, if you intend to stay here, the chargeback may not be your best course of action and if you’re going to do it make sure that you have your files, and your domain, and be ready to go somewhere else.

In the event of a dispute (in which the a credit card holder disputes a charge against us), the bank that issued the credit card will initiate a chargeback against us – what this means is your bank pulls the funds from that sale from our bank without notifying us and then sends paperwork a few weeks later. That in and of itself, for a small company, does kinda suck. We won’t kid you.

That’s not our top concern, though.

Our top concern is that when you charge back your fee, we get hit with a $40 chargeback charge (which, on a $10 chargeback, is a pretty big problem). It’s also goes into our chargeback ratio, and too many of them and we can get our merchant account yanked. We take that very seriously, and work extremely hard to outline our refund policy, when they’re done, and to keep the lines of communication open if someone can’t wait. Our chargeback ratio is much lower than our industry’s average rate because we work very hard at keeping it there.

We’ve very, very rarely gotten chargebacks because we’re very, very, very careful to leave people with options and choices with regard to how they pay. For those that choose to leave a card on file, its expected that you know who we are and when you get charged. We do everything but beat you over the head with it, up to an including full page billing explanations. If you’re not comfortable with when we charge, take the card off and pay manually.

2010 has greeted us with a couple of chargebacks that should not have been done, so we want to outline these situations so that you understand our view of your responsibilities as a consumer, and a client, and what our policies are with regard to chargebacks due to the consequences we can face when you do them.

Gosh, I just didn’t recognize the charge! Please put my site back up!

We’ve had two of these this year. Both were long term customers who had been here several years, and both folks didn’t actually want to leave – they didn’t want to leave so much that when we informed them of their chargeback and their accounts would be closed, they got extremely aggressive in demanding we re-open their accounts.

The answer will absolutely always be no.

When you do a chargeback for a charge, your bank often has paperwork outlining that you assert that you attempted to work out the problems with the vendor – in both of these instances, we never heard from them. This certainly puts the client/vendor relationship in an adversarial light, as you are claiming to our merchant account that you tried to get your money back from us and we refused.

If you are a client, and you haven’t tried to contact us for a refund, and you process a chargeback without calling the phone number printed on your credit card statement or without Googling who we are on the Internet (if you Google “draknet”, we’re the top return), and you claim that you did, we have a pretty hard time trusting you again. We certainly aren’t going to gamble our reputation with our merchant bank that you won’t report us if who your host is slips your mind again.

In neither of these cases did anyone try and contact us before processing the chargeback. In both of these cases, we let the chargeback go through, and terminated the accounts, blacklisting them from having accounts with us again. In both cases, the people involved were furious and unhappy and demanded their accounts be reopened, and in both cases, they were told no.

What happens when you do it anyway

A chargeback will:

1. Get your account terminated.
2. Get you reported to chargebackprotection.org
3. Get you blacklisted from having an account at DrakNet ever again.

We’ve yet to see a chargeback where it was an actual dispute with our services which is in and of itself pretty impressive and we’re pretty proud of that. Chargebacks are supposed to be for consumer protection so that a consumer will have an ability to redress a grievance that’s not getting addressed, and we’re all for that aspect of it.

Though while we’re all for consumer protection, what it seems like chargebacks have also become is a way for consumers to to completely avoid their merchant, dialoging with the merchant, or trying to understand (or even remember) that they actually have a relationship with their merchant.

The policies that we have in place and the seriousness with which we take chargebacks should get across the fact that if you’re leaving and really want a refund, obviously, you’re going to get one if you ask, so ask if you feel you can justify it. There’s very few instances where we are going to risk the fees and headache and reputation hit on the possibility of a chargeback.

If you’re here and you do a chargeback even though you’re intending to stay here… well, you’re leaving anyway. There’s no debate after that – we take a chargeback as a cancellation, and it signals the end of the business relationship. Since chargeback ratios can lose merchant accounts, if you did it once, we assume you could do it again, and we won’t risk it.

How to properly attempt to get a refund

If you are seeking a refund for something, you should email into the support desk or create a ticket to document your grievance. Don’t call us, email us so there is a record – before doing so, check the terms of service and make sure that the terms of service didn’t allow for the charge – if it did, you’re really going to have to justify to us in as many ways as you can why we should reverse a legitimate charge. If you have a good enough reason, we might do it.

Realize that if it was a legitimate charge, unless you come up with a really compelling story, the likely answer will be “no”. If it wasn’t a legitimate charge, we’ll reverse it without a problem. If you’re not sure if it was a legitimate charge, ask us to explain it and we’ll be happy to.

If you reverse a legitimate charge, realize we’re going to terminate your account the same way you would likely terminate if we just decided for no particular reason to take your site offline for a couple of weeks just because we felt like it.

If you are canceling, fill out the cancelation form – it gives us information on how to properly shut down your account and gives us an overview of what you want to happen to other services on your account that might be portable, like domain names. Charging back the renewal fees will potentially lose you your files and/or your domain name because once you do that, we won’t take a reversible payment from you for anything.

If you do a chargeback and realize its a mistake, some banks will let you take the dispute back and some banks won’t let you take the dispute back. If you can take it back, and you do take it back, we might reinstall your account in some cases.

If your bank does not allow you to undo the mistake, however, we will not allow you to continue hosting here.

So, what is “open source” software? For the average person not “in the industry”, open source software means is its free.

Open Source actually means a lot more than that. From The Open Source Initiative (OSI):

Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.

Ok, and its free.

Designing

While OS content management systems (software that lives on your site so you use your site to manage and create and design the public facing area of your site) have become more and more prominent, some people do still like to design on their computers.

Lucky for you, there are a number of open source software packages that will allow you to do just that, with a snippet of the description taken from the respective web sites.

http://www.kompozer.net/

KompoZer is a complete Web Authoring System that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing capabilities found in Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe DreamWeaver and other high end programs. You can use it on Windows, Mac OS X, and GNU/Linux.

http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

Notepad++ is a free (as in “free speech” and also as in “free beer”) source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

http://selida.camelon.nl/selida.html

Selida features a very effective WYSIWYG editor, Code Completion and a complete HTML 4 reference. Selida was engineered to be complete and capable – all with the decidedly best price on the planet – $0 ! (Windows)

http://www.w3.org/Amaya/

Amaya is a Web editor, i.e. a tool used to create and update documents directly on the Web. Browsing features are seamlessly integrated with the editing and remote access features in a uniform environment. (Windows, Mac, and Linux)

Transferring Files

Even if you have an FTP program built into your software, its a good idea to have one that’s handy. These two are extremely good open source alternatives.

http://filezilla-project.org/

FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. (Windows, Mac, and Linux)

http://www.coreftp.com

Free Windows software that includes features like SFTP (SSH), SSL, TLS, IDN, browser integration, site to site transfers, FTP transfer resume, drag and drop support, file viewing & editing, firewall support, custom commands, FTP URL parsing, command line transfers, filters, and more.

Templates

Believe it or not, there are designers in the open source community, and they’re just as happy to release their work as software developers.

http://csstinderbox.raykonline.com/

Open Source Templates that provide a very basic layout and framework for you to build off of.

http://www.opendesigns.org/

Over 1500 free and open source designs for you to use as is or change to suit your needs.

http://www.oswd.org/

Over 2000 free and open source designs for you to use as is or change to suit your needs.

Downloadable Documents

http://why.openoffice.org/

Open Office is a an office software suite similar to Microsoft Office, only free and open source. If you need to create PDF files for download, you can do it with Open Office.

In February, TechCrunch brought to light a paper that outlined that 1/3rd of Americans don’t have fast Internet (which translated to 80 million adults and 13 million children either still using dial-up or not using the Internet at all at home).

So, what does that mean for your site?

Years ago, compatibility and speed was a major consideration – does it work on all three browsers? On both operating systems? Ugh, where is that darn table close that’s breaking the table? Well, guess what? Even though the major buzz now goes to SEO (or what I like to call trying to fool the Google) and social media, cross-compatibility is still a major factor in a web site, possibly even more so than when site compatibility was all the rage.

Just in my house, I can view my site on: a desktop with Windows XP, a desktop with Linux Mint, on a Wii, on a Playstation 3, on a Blackberry Curve, on a Blackberry Pearl, on a Macbook,  on an LG Vu, on a computer with a large LCD widescreen and one with a non-widescreen monitor (that flips to portrait!) And probably more that I can’t even think of right now.

Designing for more than your set up is still imperative. Some things that are becoming very important to keep in mind:

1. Flash – iPhones can’t see it, iPods can’t see it.

Actually, that’s probably the big one.

Ok, while that was meant to be a bit of a joke, it does illustrate the problems web site owners have in trying to design one site that looks good on all platforms, in all browsers, with various capabilities. Trying to do it becomes exceedingly difficult – but you still have to try.

A Case in Point

I’m a big buffalo eater (sorry, my vegan friends). I really enjoy steak, and I really enjoy cheeseburgers, and I really wish they weren’t so freaking unhealthy for you. A few years ago at the Austin Pow Wow, I had Buffalo Chili on Fry Bread and I was hooked. When I came home and did some research, I found out how much healthier it was than beef, and I set out to find a Buffalo supplier.

After comparing prices, I found Elk USA (which is Grande Meats)– they had a Bargain Barn for meat that had been frozen a bit too long, was still good, and it was a great price. One problem – the web site was designed a heck of a long time ago and it was designed to work exclusively in Internet Explorer. Two or three times, I gritted my teeth and fired it up, and placed an order. They were wonderful folks, the food was wonderful, it was a small business. My only complaint was the site.

Eventually, they lost my business strictly because of their web site. Ordering was an unpleasant experience, it was difficult to navigate, and I was using a browser that made me feel like I was walking through a back alley alone and unarmed on a moonlit night. I switched to High Plains Bison for no other reason than the ordering experience, and that it seriously bugs me when someone forces me to switch a browser just to buy with them.

Tools to help you keep as much of your audience as you can

So, we try to lecture or opine, and then point you to some places that can help you. Some of my favorites include:

http://browsershots.org/

Linux, Windows, Mac, and BSD operating systems are represented, as well as various browsers including IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari – no Chrome yet, though. You can change the resolution, and change the capabilities, and you’ll get a screenshot at the end showing you what your site looks like with the various options you choose.

http://crossbrowsertesting.com/

Free 5 minute test session if you register for the free trial, this rather professional solution’s lowest paid cost is $19.99/m, which is probably awesome for professional designers but a little pricey for someone just handling one or two sites.

http://www.browsrcamp.com/

Mac-specific testing so that you can check out your site through the eyes of a Mac using various browsers and settings. Free and paid versions.

http://www.testiphone.com/

iPhone browser simulator to see your site through the eyes of an iPhone. Free.

http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/emulator.html

The Android Emulator will allow you to download and install an emulator so that you can preview your site on Android. An overview of how to get started with this is located on this great blog post.

http://www.webpageanalyzer.com/

Free web site speed test to improve website performance. Enter a URL to calculate page size, composition, and download time. The script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component. Remember – 1/3rd = dial up, and there is some indication that site speed may soon play a role in Google ranking. This is still really important.

How do you tell what everyone is using?

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Google Analytics (which provided the graphics in this post and are real metrics from visitors to our own site) continues to be our favorite stats program, which is kind of a given since Urchin used to be our favorite stats program until Google bought them and turned them into Analytics. It’s simple to set up, and free, and provides an amazing amount of information.

http://www.woopra.com/

Woopra is growing popular and giving Analytics a bit of a run for its money. It gives you most of the info Analytics does, as well as some other configuration options with alerts and so on. Woopra is free for sites with page views up to 30,000 a month, and starts at $4.95 a month for sites with traffic above that. The costs go up to $179.95 a month for sites with 10,000,000 page views.

None of you are there yet.

Trust us, we’d know.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and internet marketing itself, is often divided into two different camps: white and black hat.

Now, before we get started explaining the two, let me point out that the spammers who constantly post garbage on your blogs, exploit the holes you don’t patch, and who try and squeeze a viagra link anywhere you let them are doing black hat SEO – so keep that in mind before we offer some explanations that get you all excited about rocketing up the Google Page Rank charts.

Whitehat SEO, the more ethical of the two forms of SEO, relies on strictly and accurately following the terms of search engines and website directories, largely by generating links organically. Blackhat SEO, on the other hand, is less ethical, significantly less effective as a long-term business strategy, but often valuable for its speed.

To distinguish between the two different forms of SEO, it is worth going back to their roots.

White and black hat are not divisions that were thought up specifically for SEO (or hacking), but ideas that originated in western movies. Drawing inspiration from the John Wayne styled heroes of the past, ethical SEOs branded themselves as “whitehat” after the type of cowboy hat the western hero often wore. In contrast, the blackhat SEO world embraced the villainous style – dark clothing and a distinct black cowboy hat.

Blackhat SEO is lucrative. There is no doubt about it – if it wasn’t making someone money, people wouldn’t do it. From spamdexing to indirect and somewhat stealthy blog commenting, there are hundreds of ultra-effective ways for blackhat SEOs to boost their websites’ online influence and search engine rankings. Blackhat-powered websites typically grow rapidly, gaining hundreds of indexed links within days, and occasionally hundreds of thousands within just weeks.

This is generally carried out through the use of automated software – you didn’t think all those comments were done manually, did you? From forum spamming applications to blog auto-commenter tools, the blackhat world has developed its own ultra-lucrative software industry. Of course, as the actions are generally automated and carried out in bulk, blackhat SEO tends to have little long-term value as search engines can easily pick up on the traces and linking footprints and de-index the offending website.

Whitehat SEO, while having only a fraction of the rapid growth potential that blackhat SEO boasts, is more valuable to online marketers and businesses that are focused on long-term internet goals. While blackhat-powered pages tend to climb through search engine rankings relatively quickly, they are forever at risk of being permanently removed from the search engine results altogether.

While this is not a concern for hit-and-run style online businesses (which doesn’t apply to any of those of you hosting with us, I’m sure), it most certainly is for businesses that are focused on long-term branding and internet marketing (which should be everyone hosting with us).

If your business values long-term clients, customers, and branding efforts, it is clear that whitehat SEO is the right choice to make. Despite the longer climb up the ladder and slower movement through the ranks, it is the only choice that offers long-term security.

This is the Internet. At some point, there’s downtime. I know, I know… we’re not supposed to talk about it, but there is. When you are at your computer, you go to your site, and it simply isn’t there, most people automatically assume that their server is down.

Often, that’s not the case – but again, we know what everyone assumes.

There are some tools at DrakNet and on the general internet that you can use for free to monitor what’s going on with your site and try and decipher why you’re having a connection problem, and we’ll outline some of them here.

What to check when “down”

First thing most people do is check drak.net, and assume that if DrakNet’s up, there’s something wrong with their particular site. This would be an incorrect assumption, so lets go over what our set up is so you’ll be a bit more familiar with it.

Just because you can hit our site doesn’t mean that your server isn’t down – we have our own server here, and we’re not in the same data center as you are. We do that specifically so that we can stay up and be in communication in the unlikely event of a catastrophic failure at the main data center.

All shared servers are at the Liquid Web Data Center in Michigan, and there are 6 of those currently, along with the few dedicated servers we manage for established clients – if you host with us, that’s where your site lives. Our server and main DNS is at the Wired Tree data center in Illinois, and the backup mail server and backup DNS are at Virtacore Systems data center in Virginia. The set up is geographically redundant, and all systems tie into one another and work together seamlessly.

The first thing you should do if you site is not responding is check our Network Status Page. That’s located at http://networkstatus.drak.net/ – this page will tell you if the server you are on is up, or down. This is why its important to remember which server your site is housed on. If the status column is green next to your server, Apache is responding and web sites are being served. If there is a problem, its in red and says “DOWN”.

This page pulls in the data from an outside service and is not internal monitoring, and the uptime you see is real uptime – we don’t turn off the monitoring for scheduled maintenance, Apache restarts, or anything else. We want those numbers to truly reflect what someone can experience hosting here. The long term averages are real, and not able to be edited by us to reflect a reality other than… well, reality.

While you’re on that page, check the Twitter Widget. Often, we perform something quick that may cause a blip but it doesn’t really call for a full post explaining what we’re doing. If a notice can be gotten across quickly, a note will be there about what’s going on.

So, its green, we didn’t tweet something – what do you do now? Well, check a little more. Occasionally, our monitoring service is a bit slow on the uptake.

http://www.checksite.us/

CheckSite.us will attempt to access the URL provided and report back on whether it was able to access the website or not, and can give you feedback from yet another place, at no cost, to confirm whether the site is up or its down.

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

Is a very simple checker that will tell you whether they find a site up, or down. If its up everywhere but not for you, it could be a local issue, or you could have firewalled yourself. If you firewalled yourself, get your IP address of your computer, and email in a support ticket with your IP in it so we can check.

And folks, when we ask for your IP in a ticket we don’t mean the IP of your web site. We actually know where your web site is at all times – it’s you we’re none too sure about, and that’s why we’re asking.

If you don’t know how to find it out, go to

http://whatismyipaddress.com/

and it will tell you.

How to Monitor Your Own Web Site

You can monitor your own uptime with us. While we feel we have to plug our own uptime service (cough http://monitoring.drak.net/en/ cough), we also want to share with you the free resources that are available to document and monitor your site’s uptime.

http://mon.itor.us/

This service will, free of charge, monitor your web site 24/7, and report to you when its down. It is a distributed website monitoring service, which means it monitors your site from more than one geographical location.

http://pingdom.com/

Pingdom’s been around for a long time, and has a free version of its service that allows you to  sign up for a free account that will track one site or one server and send up to 20 SMS alerts if you’re down.

And while a quick search for the phrase “free web site monitoring” will turn up dozens of places, those are the two that we personally recommend.

When you fill out an order form with DrakNet, we ask your information – your email address, your phone number, your name. All of this information is important, and is used to identify you so that when you contact us, we know who you are.

If the account is an individual account, this is relatively easy – who you are doesn’t change. Your email might change, your phone number, your address may change but who you are remains a pretty good constant that we can count on. (And if your name changed, you can usually fax us the name change and establish the name changed, though that would only need to be done if you locked yourself out of your billing.)

With companies and organizations, this can become a little more complex.

What matters on the order form

When an order form is filled out for an organization or a company there are two pieces of information that are provided to us, the company or organization name and the name of the individual placing the order. When that’s done, the person listed as the individual placing the order is then listed as the representative who is authorized to make all decisions the account. Their information is the information we look to when we confirm that someone has rights to an account.

If that person leaves the organization, that person is still the person authorized to make changes on the account, close the account, or make requests. Someone that is not listed on the account, even if they are internally appointed to manage the account by the company or organization, does not have standing with us to make any changes or have any access because we have no idea who they are. In the interest of protecting the site and account, they will not be allowed to make changes.

So, what happens when the authorized contact is a position that’s kicked around like a soccer ball?

Please note that these are only for sites that are held in accounts that have a company or organizational name. Individual accounts are individual accounts and transfer of ownership cannot be accomplished this way.

Change Contacts The Easy Way

The easiest way to change a contact on an account is for the old contact to give the billing login to the new contact so the new contact can login to the account and change the information in billing (Name, Email Address, Phone Number), as it is this information we look to when we confirm someone’s identity as a person authorized to work with us on behalf of the account.

This is simple, quick, and takes relatively little time.

Change Contacts The Hard Way

The hard way happens when the original authorized contact leaves in a huff, refuses to hand over the site, refuses to allow access to the legal owners, or simply disappears with the keys.

Changes become more complicated if a handover did not occur.

Because we have an authorized contact that cannot or will not contact us or the company or organization’s behalf, we have to have hard documentation that we are handing the site over to the legal owner or the organization or corporation. Essentially, you need to prove to us that you should have the site.

In these cases, DrakNet required a signed, faxed letter on company or organizational letterhead that states:

1. who the previous contact was
2. why the previous contact cannot or will not contact us to make the change
3. who the new contact us, with their name, phone, and email
4. a specific request to drop the old contact
5. a specific request to add the new contact
6. what the role in the organization or company is of the person writing the letter, with a copy of that person’s ID on the latter itself.
7. A dated signature

and the fax must be accompanied by some official documentation showing the person sending us the request is affiliated or associated with the organization or company, and in what capacity. It could be a copy of an official bill, a dba, a contract, the incorporation papers, corporate minutes. Just something official and legal in some capacity.

We will make an attempt after getting the fax to contact the current contact and confirm the information and if we cannot confirm it, the change will be made as long as the information indisputably shows the person who signed the paper has the legal right to make the change.

The Moral of the Story is

We do the absolute best we can to keep the server secure, and the accounts secure – and part of that is knowing who’s on the server and who’s supposed to be talking to us. If the person that calls or chats or emails us isn’t an authorized person on the account, we don’t discuss things with them as a precaution against social engineering.

We assume that if you host here, we know who you are.

If you don’t host here, you don’t need to know what our random ssh port numbers are, and we don’t care if you swear up and down you are on the Board of such and such and its your account – if you hosted here, you would have known our ports were not on 22 and that firewall wouldn’t have happened. If we don’t know who you are, if you have no information with us on file so that we can substantiate who you are, we can’t tell you anything and we certainly can’t unblock you manually.

If you don’t know that, then you have had a failed changeover, and you need some help to become aware of our system, and our policies, and your site. We’re happy to help you with that – after we know for sure who you are.

It is very important for organizations to maintain their information, and for contacts to maintain current information. Have a pass through book, have more than one person as a contact, share the billing login with the Treasurer or President so problems can be dealt with easily.

If that doesn’t happen, we are going to require that you make changes “the hard way” because that’s the only way we can be absolutely sure that the account belongs to you or you have rights to it.

It is for the safety of your site, the safety of your company or organization’s web presence – and its also because we at DrakNet really don’t want to have to try and figure out who’s telling the truth in a dispute, or explain why we handed over a site to a rival faction bent on nefarious deeds to our client, or in court.

2010 may well be the year that “over share” reaches epidemic proportions (if it hasn’t already), especially considering Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s claims that “public” is the new default social norm – though whether he’s driving that for better monetization or just stating something the public naturally gravitated towards is anyone’s guess.

So, almost anyone on the Internet at some point or another toys with the idea of blogging, and the question of how to blog and what service to use will inevitably come up.

Using a Blog Service

Boy, are there blog services. Just a few of them are (in no particular order):

• http://www.typepad.com/
• http://www.wordpress.com/
• http://www.blogger.com/
• http://spaces.live.com/
• http://www.livejournal.com/
• http://www.blog.com/
• http://www.blogster.com/
• http://www.vox.com/

and that’s just to name a few. Typepad, Wordpress.com (which is not the same as Wordpress.org though obviously they are related) and Blogger are without a doubt the three services that dominate the pack.

Blog Services are, obviously, incredibly easy to set up – you don’t need to know about the server, the service is very focused on one thing and one thing only and so they tend to do it well. So, why would you want to bother hosting your own blog if they do it free?

Why are you blogging?

If you are simply blogging about your cat, your car, or your life’s random happenings for the heck of it, a blog service will probably work just fine for you. The choices of presentation and design can be a bit restrictive but, for the most part, if you just feel the need to talk to the Internet and see who pops by, these will do nicely.

If you’re hoping that your blog will monetize (i.e. you want to cash in with advertising or use it to promote your business), you need to look more professional, your subject matter is controversial, or is on a subject that someone else owns the rights to and could feasibly not want you blogging about, a blog service is likely not going to be the best fit.

Just two weeks ago, Google drop-kicked 6 music blogging sites off its service without warning. (For those who have been living under a rock, Google bought Blogger some time back.) It even got a nickname – the musicblogocide of 2010.

Lawyer Kevin O’Keefe blogged about the issue on his blog, and in addition to lots of awesome information on the subject, he stated:

I would like to be in as much control of my blog’s destiny as possible. If a dispute arose, I’d like to be able to communicate with the blog host by email and phone as business person to business person. I’d like to know my blog’s being taken down was imminent. If my blog was taken down, I’d like to receive a copy of my blog’s content, not have all the content deleted.

Which does point to the major benefit you get having a web hosting account vs. hosting with a blog service.

Well, ok… that and the plugins.

Hosting services are designed to be responsive to issues and are by their nature customer service oriented, where many (if not most) Blogging Services really aren’t designed to be customer service oriented at all (especially when you don’t pay them anything, and sometimes even when you do). They’re designed to provide a platform for you. In exchange for monetizing your stuff, they let you do what you want for free – right up until the point they decide not to let you.

They usually have a support forum vs. tickets or telephones, and often there is no way for you to actually speak to the company if they just nuked your blog. What you wind up with is a potential catastrophe of months or years of lost work, and little to no option to discuss the situation, or to get a dialog with or even a response from them if they choose not to speak to you about anything.

Blogger has a support forum, and one of the blog owner’s in question went to it for support – we checked the thread below, and he’s still waiting for an answer.

More information on the Musicblogocide of 2010

• Musicblogocide 2010: How Doing Right Can Come Off So Wrong
• Google’s ‘Musicblogocide’ – blame the DMCA
• The day the music blogs died: behind Google’s musicblogocide
• irockcleveland in Blogger’s Support Forum (no response by Google)

I’m not a very prolific blogger. The DrakNet blog is here primarily for us to tell you of things you need to know, and things that we find that we think you may not know about, and months could go in between blog posts because… well, I host bloggers. I’m not what one would classify as a blogger.

Like all things on the Internet, what’s expected of Net businesses has changed – you’re expected to engage your audience, share your expertise, become public with who you are (always with an eye towards your marketing). And so we did the blog, the Twitter, and the Facebook thing.

The Facebook thing? Well, we’re there. The Twitter thing? We’re supposed to use it to chase down people that are complaining about us and fortunately, no one has yet, so we can’t really use it the way we’re “advised” to use it because you all don’t complain enough. The blog thing? We got that, too, and try and come up with things that we know as second nature but that perhaps you don’t know. That’s not always easy.

You may have noticed an uptick in posts of late – you have Microsoft to thank (or blame) for that.

Bye, Firefox. I’ll miss you.

At the beginning of February, I kicked Mozilla Firefox to the curb for good. The upgrade to 3.6 was, to me, bloated, slow, and I got so tired of the browser crashing repeatedly that my long love affair with Firefox came to a “crashing” halt (pun intended). Internet Explorer is even worse than Mozilla in the bloated arena, and though I had given Google Chrome an install and a test drive, its lack of extensions kept me away.

Google Chrome added extensions, and so I gave it another go after being so disappointed in Mozilla Firefox. I was incredibly impressed with the speed and stability and decided within a day that this was my new primary browser. I then needed to set about replacing the extensions I depended on day to day in Mozilla Firefox – which was not as easy as it sounded, as Mozilla Firefox still kicks the butt of Google Chrome in the extension department.

Replacing Scribefire

I used Scribefire exclusively for blogging, and Scribefire is a program that is exclusively a Mozilla Firefox extension. It doesn’t run on its own, and its not available for any other browser, so my choice was to keep Mozilla Firefox around and fire it up just to blog, or go in search of another tool.

A friend said “Try Windows Live Writer”.

Yeah, right. It’s from Microsoft.

Frankly, despite the fact that even a broken clock can be right twice a day, I don’t expect anything stellar and stable to come out of Microsoft, especially with regards to anything hosted on a Unix server. I had to deal with Microsoft Frontpage extensions as a host. That made me kinda jaded, sorry to say.

You can serve up that crow now, please. A little salt would help.

Windows Live Writer is a seriously impressive piece of free software. Did I mention it was free? Yes, it’s free. Free software from Microsoft – that alone should be an eye opener.

Installation and set up was quick and painless, and connecting it to the various blogs (this one and the Network Status blog) went very, very quick. It imports enough of your template that you can get some idea of how your blog will be formatted while you are actually crafting it off line, and keeps enough junk out that it doesn’t completely mess up your post while you are crafting it. Switching between blogs is a breeze.

The importing of images, formatting choices for those images, gives a much cleaner appearance than Scribefire, and it has all the extensive options you would expect, like categories and tags and future publishing.

Honestly, the photo treatments are pretty damn wicked.

Since this software is free, we highly suggest that you give Windows Live Writer a try if you’re on Windows. (If you’re on a Mac, give Blogo a try as its been said to somewhat rival, and for Linux folks, your best bet is probably still Scribefire).

Windows Live Writer is one of the best pieces of software we’ve ever seen come out of Microsoft, and its made blogging a much easier endeavor for us.

Good luck with this one. Really. I mean it.

The advent of digital information has created a plethora of opportunities to rip off other people’s content because, after all, content is king. You can right click and save a graphic. You can cut and paste a bunch of text, and republish it somewhere else. Stealing information has never, ever been quite so effortless as it is now – if you have an RSS Feed on your blog, you can even automate the stealing of your content for the plagiarist.

There is no real awesome automated way to protect your content. Forget the “no right click” JavaScript as that is, and has been, a bit of a joke since JavaScript can be turned off by plagiarists, and it just frustrates the visitors that want to share a snippet of your content and point to your page in any one of the 100 social media sites – visitors that likely won’t bother turning off their JavaScript just to do it.

Protecting your images? Well, if the browser can see ‘em, they’re already on the users hard drive. That’s how browsers work. You can watermark them but then it ruins the presentation of the image.

Your music? Countless audio programs can record whatever sound players on people’s computer, save it, and turn it into an MP3. Many of them are free. So even if they can’t get to the file, they can make their own.

There are some services you can use to try and keep the thefts to a minimum, and we’ll go over a few of them here.

Protecting Your Words

For writers, bloggers, and businesses, their words are their creditability currency on the internet and in many cases, writers are required to submit only original content to places that pay them for that writing. When it’s your own blog, it is just as important – especially if you are serving ads to pay the hosting bills or using the blog to drive traffic to your own store.

So, your first mission is to find your words on the Internet, and see if they are in any other places that you didn’t put them. The easiest (and free) way is to pick a particular phrase you wrote that’s fairly unique in the article, and just Google it.

If you don’t have the time to set aside once a week and check, you can use Copyscape (http://www.copyscape.com/). Copyscape has several levels of services, the lowest being absolutely free, and the highest being a recurring monthly fee.

If you input your URL in the field (the specific page you want to check – putting your main URL in won’t check your whole site), Copyscape will present you with a list of sites that may have take your content. Once you click and take a look, they will even let you know in the top frame if the info has recently been removed, and will provide you a link to

 http://www.copyscape.com/respond.php

which gives you excellent steps to take regarding responding to a site that may have plagiarized your work.

Copyscape also has a premium service for $.05 a search that allows you to check content before publishing (which is useful of you have others writing for your blog and you want to make sure they didn’t plagiarize), and Copysentry, a service starting at $4.95 a month that automatically monitors the web for copies of your pages, emailing you as soon as they appear.

You should also include a warning in your RSS Feed and in each post that if people are viewing the content on a site not your own, the information has been plagiarized.

Protecting Your Images

This is also tough, though there are some tricks that you can use that won’t totally thwart a thief, but will make it harder for them to grab your image.

One of the main places people snag images nowadays is at http://images.google.com, which is Google’s image search engine. An easy way to keep Google out of your site and your images off their image search engine is with a robots.txt file. Create an ascii file, and if all your images are in the /images, directory, simply add

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /images/

to the file, and then upload it to the same directory as your index file. This will at least make your images more difficult to find.

You can also “shrink-wrap” or “cloak” the image – place a transparent image over your image to that when someone clicks to save it, all they get is a blank image. There’s a write up of it here along with an image and table generator.

And, of course, there’s watermarking. You don’t need any special software to do this if you can manipulate an image. Simply place a semi-transparent line of text in the middle of the image, making it useless for anyone else.

Protecting Your Audio and Video

Almost anything we tell you here can be navigated around and folks grabbing this stuff likely know all the tricks. Google “how to copyright protect music files” and “how to crack copyright protected music files” and you will see what we mean.

Using flash/FLV players instead of directly handing off the downloading of the music or video file is a good bump to make people have to try and get over to steal your stuff.  There are so many, though, and so many various plugins for various sites that it would be folly for us to try and name just one.

Another infringement search service for videos and music is http://www.mimtid.net/. The search is free, and for $49.95, you will be given access to their DMCA Takedown system that allows you to submit Takedown notices with ease.

Alternative Copyright Protection?

There are a number of places, including http://myfreecopyright.com/, that allow you to “register” your copyright, even though its not registered with anyone but them. An attorney that specializes in the needs of photographers said not so fast with the legal claims in a blog post on the service.

While these are little tips and tricks you can use, obviously, if your content is extremely valuable, you’ll want to see an intellectual properties attorney regarding what steps you need to take to protect yourself, or properly register the copyright yourself according to your country’s legal requirements.

Adobe Photoshop is the hands down gold standard for image editing. Adobe Photoshop is also $699 if you are buying it for the first time, putting the graphics editor out of the price range of an awful lot of people.

There are a number of free image editors and services that allow you to manipulated your graphics in different ways, and which won’t cost you a thing.

GIMP

Don’t let the name put you off.

GIMP is the favorite of an awful lot of graphics folks. GIMP (which stands for the GNU Image Manipulation Program) was originally created for UNIX systems, but has since expanded to include Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems as well, which means just about anyone can install and use it.

GIMP has often been cited as a replacement for Adobe Photoshop, however, it does have some limitations that make it less than ideal for print work. It is used for web image manipulation extensively, is very popular, and has a large community of folks that use it who produce excellent tutorials on how to get the most out of it.

And again, its totally free, so that’s always a plus.

You can check out GIMP and download a copy at http://www.gimp.org.

Paint.NET

Paint.NET is another freeware editing program that’s highly reviewed, but this one’s just for the Windows folks and has not been ported to any other operating systems. While you would think you would get Paint.NET at http://www.paint.net you would be wrong.

You actually get Paint.Net at http://www.getpaint.net – though the owners of http://www.paint.net have very kindly provided redirection to the program.

This program was named PC World’s Top 100 Products of 2007, and in comparisons between GIMP and Paint.NET, Paint.NET’s been called a “better” program that’s easier to use, though that’s a pretty subjective assessment so if you’re on Windows and looking for a free option that you want on your computer, downloading both of these and test running them is a great idea.

Again, this one is only available for Windows, but also has a rich community of users that publish tutorials, and it has plugins and effects galore.

Splashup

Splashup is a service that runs in any browser, so it isn’t a program that lives on your computer. The fact that it isn’t tied to a program definitely presents many benefits to bloggers, travelers, and folks that are often on the go when they attempt to add something to their site. With the advent of netbooks, lots of folks don’t want or can’t handle a large graphics program.

Splashup aims to closely emulate Photoshop, though it does run in the browser and so its unlikely that (no matter how much they want to) they will be able to fully emulate the power and options of Photoshop.

Splashup is flash-based, so it should work in any browser, and it integrates with popular photo sharing sites like Flickr and Facebook as well.