With the impending release of the newest version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser, I figured it would be a good time to influence anyone who is still living under a shell to make the switch.

And while the official release of 3.0 hasn’t dropped yet, (due this Friday I believe), after using it for a few hours it looks like its the best browser yet. So without further adieu, here are 7 more reasons for you to switch from IE, Opera or whatever else you may be using like Lynx or Nutscrape.

1. More Secure

A big part of browsing the web is making sure you stay away from popups and virus’ that can make your surfing experience a living hell. Well now Firefox has allowed you to click on the site favicon to see who owns the site and to see if your connection is protected. Your identity verification is prominently displayed and is now easier to interpret.

2. Vast Performance Improvements

The latest release of Firefox has more than doubled the speed of their last relase, but perhaps the most staggering number is the 9.3 times it is faster than the Microsoft counterpart of Internet Explorer 7. So if you haven’t already made the switch, this fact alone is more than enough of a reason.

3. Smart Location Bar

Firefox 3’s address bar has a smart location bar so when you begin to type in a site or location, it will be able to interpret which site you are going to visit. The bar learns through repetition so the next time you type “Lo” it should take you to this site instead of Andrew Lo’s website.

4. Smart Bookmarks

The smart bookmarks function now allows you to place your bookmarks by how often you visit them. It will analyze your browsing habits and only show the most prevalent bookmarks sorted by “Most Visited”, “Recently Bookmarked” and “Recent Tags”

5. Improved Download Manager

The new download manager is much more streamlined so that you will never wonder where that lost download went. It will resume big downloads after crashes and it will also keep status bar info on your downloads without the need for the “Download Statusbar” plugin.

6. Add-ons Manager Easier to Use

The new and improved Firefox takes another step toward perfection with a vastly revamped Add-ons Manager that allows even greater extensibility with their extensions, which is one the main reasons I love Firefox. You can now search and install extensions/themes right from the manager pop-up box, without any need to visit publishers sites.

7. Overall More Useful & Intuitive Interface

On the first glance at Firefox 3.0 you can see right away that its about a million times better than IE will ever be, even with their oodles of money. The back button only appears if there is a page to actually go back to, and it is no longer on its own, it is now part of the address bar. Firefox 3 also enables you to increase the size of images and text, which can be helpful for those hard to read sites. There is stronger protection for phishing schemes and malware, as well as other tools that may compromise your computers security, and does so by checking against Google’s blacklisting.

All in all a very intuitive browser indeed. Not much else need be said, if you still use IE, well then your just ignorant. Do us all a favor and make the switch.

Well it has been a long time coming, and most of the people I know got out of the game ages ago when the “Myspace Marketing” fad was growing near its saturation point. Today I received an email from Millnic Media which is basically putting the nail in the proverbial Myspace spam coffin. (Although I’m sure there are still other viable affiliate networks for Myspace Marketing)

Hello Lorne,

This is the second very serious email I have written in two weeks. It’s so not like us, but into every CPA Network a little hammer must fall.

All drollery aside, MillNic Media does not tolerate or condone Myspace traffic. Some of our affiliates have been running offers there, so we wanted to remind everyone of the Terms of Service. The Terms of Service is the list of rules and conditions you agree to when you sign up with the network. If you break these conditions, “you will forfeit your entire commission for all programs and your account will be terminated”. Although this warning is redundant, it’s still what happens when you run MillNic Offers on Myspace (for posterity: you don’t get paid, and your account gets shut down now and forever)Great. It’s all very clear now so there wont be any confusion. If you have questions as to the rules and regulations that govern the network please have a chat with your affiliate manager.

Sincerely,

MillNic Media
www.millnicmedia.com www.bestcpanetwork.com

http://millnicmedia.com

So if that doesn’t speak loud and clear, then maybe you deserve to get your affiliate account shut down and never receive any of your “free iphone” or “ringtone” money. Either way if you are still in the Myspace game for whatever reason, it may be time to start looking into new social networks for your marketing purposes. (Facebook Marketing anyone?)

Cloaking Affiliate Links

When you come across an affiliate link for the first time you don’t really know whats on the other end, and that your being sold some sort of product or service. Then as time goes by you start to become more and more aware of affiliate links and if your like me, you avoid them like the plague. The solution you may ask? Cloaking!

If you want to cloak your affiliates links its actually pretty easy. There’s numerous ways to do so, but if you are on a budget like me, then you wont want to spend out of pocket large amount of money. So I am gonna show you a uniquely simplistic way to hide your links, without using and backend coding.

Hide your Affiliate Links

Besides making your landing page a better sell , your surfers are way more susceptible   to click through and convert on affiliate link when they distincly think that its legit and totally unbiased. The trust is broken when the link ends up showing up as an affiliate link.

Which would you click through?
www.google.com/?ref=LorneFade2884 or www.google.com ?

You have no idea where that ref link points to, and the fact that it could be some NSFW content or something malicious is hardly worth your suspicion.

Cloak Them!

<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/targeturl” target=”_top” onmouseover=”window.status=’http://www.displaythisname.com’;return true;” onmouseout=”window.status=’ ‘;return true;”>Your Site</a>
<img src=”http://www.yoursite.com/1.gif” width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″/>

So just take the code above, fill in your affiliate link and then fill in the link you would like to show your users, they wont know the difference. There are other methods including javascript redirects and the like, however for the time it takes I feel that this method is an absolute must for any webmaster who was unaware.

I finally got around to setting up Gallery 2.0 setup and integrated with their wordpress plugin, so hopefully we will be fully integrated by next week. For now I have a lot of tweaking to do, so until I get everything integrated you can go here and check out the gallery as it stands now.