Working at Home on the Internet

What Every Business Should Work Towards… A Satisfied Customer

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This is Coolest, Bestest, Most Greatest thing Any Business (Home Based or otherwise) can get from a Client!

An Unsolicited and Very Thoughtful Thank You from a Satisfied Client…

Joe, I want to thank you for such a terrific an professional way that you handled my web site problems. You are a pleasure to work with and I will certainly use your expertise again. Deb Bixler/www.DebBixler.com

Would You Like to Add Your Testimonial About MCBS?

Talk about a very pleasant surprise in my e-mail yesterday morning. This is Why I Do What I Do. Help people with their problems and work with them until they are satisfied that their Blog/Website/Computer is working the way they want and need it to perform. And now this… Ever hear the proverb “Have your Cake and Eat it Too“.

That’s about how I feel at this point. Happy that I did a job I was satisfied with and well enough for a Client like Deb to take the time and effort and go out of her way to do something like this for me and my business on her own.

TOO COOL!

April 19th, 2008 at 06:40am | Posted by Joe | Attitude, Promotion, Reviews, Work at Home | reader remarks | Print This Post

A Short Story on Professionalism

A Short Story

I tried a new plugin, Better Comments Manager by Keith Dsouza and I couldn’t get it to work. At ALL… on either this Blog or on My Computer Back in Service.

So, I checked to make sure that the file was downloaded properly and unzipped correctly. I created a new folder on the server and Re-Uploaded all the files that were included in the original download.

It still wouldn’t work for me. It seems to work for most others, if comments on his post are any indication. There were some exceptions of course, but only a couple.

I’m not sure why, maybe it was intuition, but I logged into one of the Blogs using FireFox and tried it again. It worked with no problems. So, I tried it on this Blog using FireFox and it worked perfectly. But it still wouldn’t work when I used Internet Explorer.

I have written before about how things work differently on various Browsers and the importance of CrossChecking. It seems that Plugins are no different in dealing with different browsers.

The Solution

I sent an eMail off to Keith to let him know about the problems I was having using IE7 and explained politely that there are a lot of IE users out there and that they may not be able to use his plugin as well. Therefore, he was probably not reaching a big portion of his intended end users.

Within 2 days I got a return eMail from Keith with a link to a new download that contained all the necessary fixes. I am quite sure he didn’t write the fix just for me, but it does show how professional he is when it comes to his work. He made sure that something he wrote, that has his name on it, performs at or above the expectations of the end user.

Epilogue

Better Comments Manager works as promised.

Responding to comments individually or en mass is simplified through the Admin Page of your WordPress Blog (In IE And FF).

I would highly recommend it to anyone who has any comments to answer, especially if you have numerous comments on a particular post. There is a feature included that will show you ALL the comments on a post so you can respond accordingly.

Keith is just starting to write some plugins for WordPress after changing over from the Joomla platform. (He wrote quite a few add-ons for them too).

If he shows as much dedication to his projects in the future as he has for BCM, then you can be assured that his plugins, or anything else he shares, will work as promised.

August 29th, 2007 at 06:10am | Posted by Joe | Plug-ins, Reviews | 2 reader remarks | Print This Post

Review of Xenu, a Broken Link Finding Tool

No, that’s not a picture of my Space Alien, that is a picture of Xenu. He’ll crawl around your Website or Blog to find all the Bad Ole Broken links.

I was reading a review on Smiley Cat of Inspyder, InSite which is a paid (around $49) program to catch broken links and misspellings on individual websites. He seems to like the program quite a bit and recommends it pretty highly.

Towards the end of the post he mentions a Free program with similar but more limited features. I have been looking for an easier way to check for broken links, doing it manually takes way too much time. So, me being me I had to check it out. I downloaded Xenu’s Link Sleuth unzipped the file and opened the program.

This is a no frills program that functions quite well for it’s intended purpose, Finding Broken Links. The first thing it does when started is to list ALL of your links, internal and external showing the status (Ok, Forbidden, precondition etc) and whether it is text/html or image/jpeg to make it easier to find the location of the broken link.

Once the list is complete you can generate a report on everything found. This is a list of the Table of Contents.

Each table is broken down to show you the broken link, the error code and each post/page on which it appears. From there you simply click the page, find the link and deal with it (make sure you are already signed into your Blog/Webpage account).

I haven’t gotten any further in the table than dealing with broken links yet, with 6000 links that could take some time. So, I will do another Full Review once I have finished clearing out the broken links.

One thing to remember for those to whom you are linking… If they change their URL format, it will show as a broken link. ie. site/date/p=111 to site/date/post title will not work, it will be a broken link.

FYI… This is NOT a paid review.

I almost forgot, this is only for Microsoft Windows users. The author has no plans to adapt for MAC, Linux or any other OS. Sorry.

July 5th, 2007 at 01:09pm | Posted by Joe | Blogging, Reviews, Websites | reader remarks | Print This Post