Net Sieve

Tired of building models of the structure of DNA? Try a real world example of the passing of genes with GreatFamily freeware.

Graphically design your family tree and generate web pages in a snap. This easy-to-use program approaches family tree making from the user’s point of view. Simply draw your family tree using nothing but the mouse, it’s that easy. Navigate, zoom in and get the complete image of your family tree. Share the tree with your friends and family – generate nice, graphical web pages in a mouse click. Easily create your family chronicle using the MS Word report generator. You can print the tree or any part of the tree exactly like you designed it – as big or as small as you like. GreatFamily is designed to make it fast and easy for anyone to create and edit their family tree. Why spend long hours reading manuals, when you can have fun instead? You do not need any HTML knowledge to use the web features. Simply click once – and the tree will be presented in nice, graphical web pages, including any pictures and additional information you have supplied.

I’ve been using this on my XP Pro for 2+ years now and it’s caught every nasty bugger thrown my way. I really can’t say enough about this program. Only downside I’ve experienced is that it seems to be a bit noisy when it does the system-wide check. Maybe it’s just me.

“AVG Free Edition is the well-known antivirus protection tool. AVG Free is available free of charge to home users for the life of the product. Rapid virus database updates are available for the lifetime of the product, thereby providing the high level of detection capability that millions of users around the world trust to protect their computers. AVG Free is easy to use and will not slow your system down (low system resource requirements). Highlights include automatic update functionality, the AVG Resident Shield, which provides real-time protection as files are opened and programs are run, free Virus Database Updates for the lifetime of the product, and AVG Virus Vault for safe handling of infected files. The new version of the AVG Anti-Virus (7.1) introduces a number of new features and improvements. The new history log, improved scanning speed, further improvements in the update or possibility to modify filename extensions for the Resident Shield – these are just highlights of what made it to the Free Edition, too.”

Lots of places to get it. Just Google AVG Free.

Can anyone tell me what the heck is happening with Overture … I mean I know they were bought by Yahoo, but I thought that meant they had been saved from a fate worse than G**gle. But now they’re down? Dead?

I’m hearing rumors of a return, but the last detailed report I got was that they were reporting numbers from January of this year. Gee, now that’s helpful. Actually it is more helpful than them just being down, but there has to be an update soon. Right?

I want my Overture. I want my keywords fresh.

Are you among the domain addicted? Be honest… how many domain names do you own? Do you know what VRE means? Have you flipped any virtual real estate?

There’s no arguing that creative domain flipping can be lucrative if you can come up with a decent name available at a decent price. If you’re looking for a domain name generator to help you brainstorm, give Nameboy a look.
Nameboy offers domain name creation, domain name lookup and domain registration, but the cool tool is absolutely free.

Enter a few keywords to find, register and back-order related available domain names. NameBoy will generate domain names based on the keywords you enter, and you can register or back-order them right here!

One option that I haven’t seen before in name generators is the rhyming selection. Never thought of that.

I’m no fan of the music industry and its stranglehold on “its” artists and their free expression, but copyright is something I do stand behind. The Web is all about sharing and freedom, peace, love and happiness, but somewhere in there we still need to respect the content creators in the morning.

Fair use. Citation. Quoting. Giving credit where credit is due. It’s not a hard concept and for the most part, if you do screw up and get overzealous with a creator’s work they’ll usually just write a note asking to remove their content before they go reporting you to the authorities. (Your service provider.)

If this happens, respect the request. If you can’t live without this content consider – gasp – offering them compensation. Barring that, ask if there’s a way you can work it out by citing, linking, something. If you’re not going up against the RIAA you’re probably not dealing with blatant flaming arseholes.

And should you find your own pearls of wisdom appropriated on someone’s site, try a civil discussion before you pull out the RPG. Most times, copyright violation is simply a lack of knowledge and not maliciousness. Of course, if the little offender doesn’t respect your request you are free to blast away.

Egregious thieves suck. A great place to learn more is Copyright Website.
(This post is copyright 2006 Net Sieve. Natch.) har.

According to JupiterResearch, online holiday retail sales will equal roughly $32 billion in 2006, with 114 million Web users expected to shop online during the holiday season.

With that much money passing through virtual hands, it’s hard to believe that a large number of people still refuse to use their credit cards online or have no idea how to protect themselves if they do.

To counter this, some Michigan State University professors compiled their smarty pants tips on how to shop – and shop safely – online. Even if you’re an old hand who brought your car on AutoTrader, your house on eBay and your spouse on eHarmony, you might learn something.

Visit Holiday Shopping Tips for the shopping scoop.

No matter how many Web sites I’ve created over the years, I’ve always had this mental block on the robots.txt file. For some reason I never remember to include it, Google bitches at me, and my sites don’t get indexed properly.

Finally, linking myself into a good generator resolved this. I mean really. How hard is this anyway? Take a trip over to Hypergurl’s site and save yourself time with this great generator.

Here’s the blurb:

The robots.txt file is the first file search engine “spiders” look for when indexing a website. The robots.txt file tells search engine spiders (robots) which files and directories they are NOT allowed to index. This helps to prevent incomplete site indexing as well as prevent exposing the files and directories that you don’t want listed. You may disallow, for example, “Google Images” from indexing certain directories and pages on your site, but not block “Google” itself from indexing those same files.

Seomoz has some great tools and this one is particularly cool – to me anyway, I know you guys are much more hip. Anyhoo, this is what it gives you:

• The Relative Importance/Visibility of a Webpage
• The Potential Strength/Ability of a Page to Rank in the Search Engines
• Data on Popularity, Links & Mentions of the Page Across the Web

The tool is designed to satisfy the curiosity of webmasters, surfers and web marketing professionals seeking a better metric to quickly assess a site/page’s relative importance and visibility.

Seomoz’ Page Strength

I just hit on a helpful little site – iTools.com – offering a nice search package in a compact space. iTools gives you “quick access to the best Internet tools” including:

• map tools
• financial tools
• search tools
• language tools
• research tools
• and, yes, even more.

When I hit up the research tools, I found a search for legal definitions, Nolo’s Law Encyclopedia, About.com, newspapers, biographies… and on. I’m spending more time here. Nice work

Having a hard keeping up with computer terminology? Check out:

Webopedia: Online Computer Dictionary for Computer and Internet Terms and Definitions
This site rocks with constantly updated terms, term o’ the day, a newsletter to bring you the latest news in… letters and more. Here are the current Top Fifteen terms your peeps are checking into:

#1 RAID
#2 OEM
#3 SSL
#4 CPU
#5 proxy
#6 proxy server
#7 IP address
#8 ODBC
#9 phishing
#10 router
#11 URL
#12 SOA
#13 VoIP
#14 NAT
#15 TCP/IP

Further proof that you can never know enough.