PC Doctor+ Guide 2 FirewallsWritten by Steve Latimer
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Firewalls have in built libraries of dodgy IP addresses and can be 'trained' to recognise friendly and unfriendly computers. Some firewalls, such as 'Zone Alarm' will alert you when another computer is trying to access yours and allow you to decide whether or not to let access go ahead. Programs such as Internet Explorer and Outlook obviously require Internet access in order to complete their tasks and so you would say YES to appropriate alerts. Your replies can be remembered by Zone Alarm and list of friendly and unfriendly programs and computers consequently grow. Windows XP comes with it's own Firewall which you can access by right-clicking on appropriate connection icon and selecting PROPERTIES. It is active by default. For those using other versions of Windows ARRIVAL recommends using Zone Alarm. There are both free and Pro versions of Zone Alarm. You can download free version of Zone Alarm from Arrival Web Site at www.arrival-computers.co.uk. Installation is straight forward if you accept all of defaults suggested by program. A re-boot will be necessary to make program fully active. We would strongly urge you to take time to work through in-built tutorial in order to get most out of software.Leave ALERTS setting turned on for a couple of day as it's both interesting and alarming to see number of instances when an outside computer will try to access your own. Normally user is oblivious to such instances. You can turn off alerts once they begin to become distracting.
Steve Latimer is Systems Manager at Arrival Computers. ( http://www.arrival-computers.co.uk )The PC Doctor+ Guides are aimed at users relatively new to computing. There are no objections to readers using the guides as content on their own web sites although a link back to the Arrival Site is always appreciated.
| | PC Doctor+ Guide 20 Making Money From Your Web Site (Part 1)Written by Steve Latimer
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4. Search Engine Submission The best way to submit your site to search engines is to visit appropriate search engine web site and to do it manually. Make a list of all search engines you consider important and go to their submission pages. Manual submissions have draw back that it can take several weeks for your site to be added to list of sites to be crawled. The one I would single out as exception is Exactseek.com which will crawl your site within 7 days even if submitted manually. There are other ways to submit your site: Free Web Submission Programs Paid Submission a) Freeweb Web Submission Programs These will by and large, submit your site to a number of web sites in a single process. I say 'by and large' because some are hybrids that will submit a site automatically to some search engines but in other cases they will simply redirect you to a search engine's own submission page. On face of it, any program that will do much of submission work for you sounds like a good option. The reason I am less than enthusiastic is that invariably these programs will ask for your e-mail address as part of process and this leads to an increase in - you guessed it - SPAM!. b). Paid Submission There are different levels of paid submission service. i ) In first instance you pay a fee for your web site to be put through crawling process immediately. Search engines are for most part commercial ventures and there is a certian amount of administration involved so there is no reason, in my view, that they should not charge to hurry process along a bit. ii ) The second type of paid inclusion essentially involves not only paying for an immediate crawl but also 'buying'a keyword. So for instance, I purchase word 'headache' and whenever a user types word 'headache' into that particular search engine my site is given priority. I have problems with this. Taken to its inevitable conclusion this means that ability to pay takes precedent over optimisation. If optimisation was only factor, then even if a large company paid someone to optimise their site and improve their sites ranking that way an individual user would still be in with a chance if he had taken time to learn craft of optimisation. Money changes all that. How does an individual compete with large organisations and companies who can afford to pay? It becomes easy to see a time when any search will produce pages and pages of commercial web sites before a user gets anywhere near smaller, often much more interesting web sites. You'll have to make your own mind up about keyword purchasing - just to say I believe it goes against spirit of Internet and consequently it's not for me.Continued in Part 2
Steve Latimer is Systems Manager with Arrival Computers (http://www.arrival-computers.co.uk). PC Doctor+ Guides may be reproduced or used as addiyional web content provided a link back to the Arrival Web Site is added
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