Small Business Resources

I spend the better part of my time advising Small Business on the ins and outs of Online Marketing. Pop over to eBiz4Results.com for the full story.

Current Project

At the end of 2008, I launched BestMacTools.com where you will find reviews, and commentary mostly related to Productivity Tools for Mac OS X.

For Bloggers

It is now just about axiomatic... the most effective online marketing tool for any business is a Blog. That's why I publish Blog4Results.com.

When Firefox web browser checks a security certificate, it also checks with the issuing authority if the certificate is valid. It appears that, near a certificate’s expiration date, the issuing authority may release a new certificate. The two certificates have conflicting expiration dates.

For reasons unknown, this caused Firefox to report a sec_error_revoked_certificate error and refuse to allow you to connect to the site!

To resolve this, presumably at the same time reducing the security of your browsing, complete the following:

For PC Users:


  1. Open Firefox.
  2. Go to Tools the top menu and select Options.
  3. Click the Advance tab.
  4. Click the following button:
    Encryption, then
    Certificates, then
    Validation
  5. Check “Do not use OCSP for certificate validation.”
  6. Click OK and restart Firefox.


For Mac Users:


  1. Open Firefox.
  2. Go to Firefox in the top menu and select Preferences.
  3. Click the Advance button.
  4. Click the following buttons:
    Encryption, then
    Validation
  5. Un-check “Use the OCSP to confirm the validity of certificates.”
  6. Click OK and restart Firefox.

Categories : Software, Web Sites
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Dec
31

SMH brings us the future

By Nigel Ball · Comments (0)

Early Edition

It’s about 7pm on New Year’s Eve so we have just 5 hours or so of 2009 left.

But, Dylan Welch at the Sydney Morning Herald isn’t letting a small fact like that stop him from reporting that the Victorian Police will be making an arrest tomorrow. That does, of course, presume that the fugitive in question doesn’t read the “Early Edition” and change his plans.

Categories : Humour, Trivia
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The following started as a short Facebook update after I satisfied myself that most tweets about Mary MacKillop were negative. But, it kept on growing so it’s ended up here…

is pleased to report that a totally informal check of today’s tweets on MacKillop’s sainthood shows close to 100% comment on the irrelevancy and pure stupidity of an institution that would have us believe that they have proof that an unidentified woman was cured of lung cancer as a result of her prayers to a dead nun.

Frankly, it is embarrassing to just repeat their claim … one can only assume that everyone involved in this crap, from the Pope down, are required to check-in their brains when they pick up their robes.

Importantly, the scorn and derision is aimed at the institution, not the person. I suspect that Mary MacKillop would be as embarrassed by the todo and the sycophantic “reporting” as the authors of todays tweets.

And another thing… Should it concern us that the one man whose decisions will affect us more than any other actually aligns himself with the morons who accepted this “proof”. To make matters worse, Rudd is perfectly comfortable with taking advantage of the “saint’s” profile for his crass personal gain.

I’m pleased to report that a totally informal check of today’s tweets on MacKillop’s sainthood shows close to 100% comment on the irrelevancy and pure stupidity of an institution that would have us believe that they have proof that an unidentified woman was cured of lung cancer as a result of her prayers to a dead nun.


Frankly, it is embarrassing to just repeat their claim … one can only assume that everyone involved in this crap, from the Pope down, are required to check-in their brains when they pick up their robes.


Importantly, the scorn and derision on Twitter is aimed at the institution, not the person. I suspect that Mary MacKillop would be as embarrassed by the todo and the related sycophantic “reporting” as the authors of todays tweets.


And another thing… Should it concern us that the one man whose decisions will affect us more than any other actually aligns himself with the morons who accepted this “proof”. And, to make matters worse, Kevin Rudd is perfectly comfortable with taking advantage of the “saint’s” profile for his crass personal gain.

Categories : Grumpy, Humour, Soapbox, Trivia
Comments (0)
Dec
16

Beware of bidpax.com

By Nigel Ball · Comments (0)

AcornWorkflow-2009.12.16 22.17.08A few weeks ago Facebook carried an advertising campaign for a business called BidPax, a so-called penny auction site. Briefly, you pay BidPax for bids to be placed on their auctions. Each bid costs about $.70. When an auction starts, bidders use their pre-purchased bids. Each bid placed increases the price of the item being sold by one cent and adds 10 seconds to the duration of the auction.

Obviously, anyone who wins such an auction appears to get the item at a huge discount — provided they are prepared to forget that each one cent bid cost $.72. However, even allowing for this, the history of auctions on BidPax suggests that the winning bidder is indeed saving huge sums when compared with the recommended retail price of the items won.

Read More→

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I was about to buy an eBook about iPhone application development for $USD7.99

Safari2Luckily enough I happened to notice that the currency conversion to AUD was not only wrong, but out by a factor of 100! I was just a whisker away form sending the lucky seller over $1,000 AUD

It seems to be an issue with Paypal, rather than the specific site, although I cannot prove this assertion. If you’re buying on Paypal from Australia I strongly suggest that you check the amount you are about to send before clicking on “Pay Now”

Anyone else seen this?

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May
01

Joomla Markdown Extension

By Nigel Ball · Comments (2)

As a result of a request from a reader of this blog, I have prepared a new Joomla extension which I have christened “jMarkdown” to partner with jTextile. Why would I do this? Well I remain absolutely convinced that even the best of the WYSIWYG editors for blogs and CMS are basically useless when it comes to editing text or restyling content. Wherever possible I use Textile markup for content intended for publication via the HTML. This is a matter of personal preference, many others use Markdown. Elsewhere in this blog you’ll find jTextile, a Joomla 1.5 extension which supports the textile syntax

Anyway, jMarkdown allows you to prepare articles for Joomla 1.0 using the Markdown syntax. jMarkdown, when activated, will convert the text into html for display purposes.

You can download jMarkdown here. This is a prerelease version and does not include any documentation. Just install the extension and activate the plugin in your Joomla 1.5 site.

As usual feel free to comment or ask questions here.

Categories : Coding, Software
Comments (2)

Just a quick post here to say that I have released a VirtueMart shipping module for Joomla 1.5.

Suffice to say that it provides a flexible mechanism for calculating shipping with separate scales for “Domestic” and “International” orders.

The idea for this module, plus core source code, was derived from an existing module “flex” by Micah Shawn which is contained in the current VirtueMart distribution.

You can download the module from HERE. Installation instructions are in the included README file.

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One of the masters of photography has to be Ansel Adams, and I have always been inspired by his work. If you are a photographer and don’t know of his work check it out at http://anseladams.com

Recently I came across this short video which explains his approach to a photograph taken to share a visualization…


The Key to a Photograph from Ansel Adams from SilberStudios.Tv on Vimeo

Categories : Photography
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