I started using Magento, an e-commerce opensource software about two years ago. I’ve watched it grow over the past few years. Now they have had over 1.5 million downloads and it’s the most widely used open-source e-commerce platform.

http://www.magentocommerce.com

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Today, I received a forwarded email. After scrolling down quite a ways, passing all the forwards in the header, I was able to read the original email. It was about a missing child in Kansas. His mother was pleading for help. This email had been forwarded countless times before being forwarded to me. In the top of the email was hundreds of people’s names and emails from the forward headers, potentially exposing these people to spam.

Should I forward this email? That’s a question you may ask yourself when you get an email like this that gets at your emotions. Before you go forwarding ANY email, you need to do your home work.

The first thing I did when I received this email was copy the child’s name and did a search on bing.com. Google works too, or even Yahoo. When you get an email like this, one of the best ways to see if it is real, is to do a search. If it is, you will find creditable sources. For example, if this email would have been real, I would have found news stories on creditable news sites (cnn, fox, msnbc, etc).

In this case, one of the first results was a link to snopes.com. Snopes.com is a very creditable source to finding out whether or not a story is true or false.

I followed the link and read the article. It was marked as false – the email was a fake. I replied to the person who had sent it to me and let them know (nicely) that it was a hoax and to be careful. I then explained to them how to check to see if it was true or false

Now, if the email turned out to be real, and I still wanted to forward it, the first thing I would do would be to remove all the forwarding messages from the top of the email. It’s the polite thing to do, not only for the people listed, but for your next reader who will not have to scroll endlessly to read the email.

Another email I received (a number of times) was saying that Starbucks made a statement saying they do not support our troops and that they would never send them coffee. Checking this out, it turns out that this was also in fact FALSE. The truth – Starbucks gives coffee to their employees which they are allowed to give to causes and are encouraged to send it to soldiers.

Don’t be embarrassed, check things out before you email. Great damage has been done because of witless forwarding.

A recent news story on cnn http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/20/internet.records.bill/index.html – our senators are trying to pass a bill to track us up to 2 years. While it sounds like a good idea as did the patriot act at first, it’s a huge LEAP in the wrong direction of making the Internet a place that is not a place of free speech.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of having info on perverts, but when “justice” becomes where it can takes the rights of the good citizens away, we have to be so careful.

With this bill, they could read our email. Think about it. Would we want a law that said the police could read your mail. Imagine the police reading your mail from your mailbox. It’s a privacy violation. It’s a bad idea.

A question I frequently get is, about having a one-page website and it’s effectiveness. If it is a temporary site that you plan to leave up for a week or two while developing your site, that is one thing. However, having a simple one-page website in many cases is harmful to your business.

When someone comes to your website, they expect to find information. Disappointing them is not a good move, especially when they can browse over to your competitors site and get the information they need.

Also, having a one-page site actually will harm you in search engines. Your site will be seen as spam or not relevant at best to search engines.

Many places that offer these special deals on one-page website are scams. They give you a “great deal” and then once they have you drain you for every penny possible.

It’s always good to look at what you want to accomplish in the future, not just what you have now. Setting down with a professional and mapping out a plan for your business and the internet is a good idea for any company or organization.

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