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Brotherman WebProfessor made a NIFTY little script that allows you to check out the bid prices for a list of keywords on Yahoo.

It works very well, and is fast. It shows the minimum bid, the max bid and the standard deviation. And, I was just looking for a tool like this.

You can find more here: Quickie Yahoo Bid Statistic Tool

It took me forever to figure out this issue. No matter what I did, I kept getting a 404 error on all of the “Pages” I made in Wordtracker. The pages were in the database, and were even showing up in my left hand navigation under the category of “Pages”, but when I clicked to see the page, I got a 404.

I went round and round checking everything. The database, the rights on every file, everything. It wasn’t until I messed with the .htaccess file that I found the issue. (And yes, that was the *last* thing I tried. Wouldn’t you know…)

The solution, is rather simple. The culprit was my .htaccess file. Each “page” that is made has it’s own entry in the .htaccess file, and since my .htaccess wasn’t directly writable by wordpress, I’d get an error after I made each page. Unless I uploaded a new .htaccess file from the Options > Permalinks admin page.

So, in order for this *not* to happen in the future, you can either make your .htaccess file writable by changing your file options to 666 in your FTP program or via a terminal window, or you can reload a new .htaccess file after you get all your static pages made.

Now ya know.

Teresa Knezek is your woman. She is known as ‘Mivox’ to many and does graphic design. She is very detail oriented and very good. She is also not cheap, but her rates are worth paying when you get the results.

Ok, you might think I am biased because many of you know she is a good friend of mine. A great friend of mine. She gently pulled me aside and told me that my former wordpress template screamed hideous. (Ok, her exact word was ‘cringeworthy’…but I got the idea.)

So. I told her that I love love love the color green, that I needed something professional and it had to have great usability. She went in and edited the colors and lines since I am color clueless. She even futzed with the fonts.

And I love it. Totally love it.

She also did some work for my father a few years back when he needed his logo turned into a web graphic. I basically sent her a hat with the logo on it and a head of wheat so she’d know what wheat looked like and she did the rest. She also included all the colors definitions in a file so if we needed to do print work or whatever, we could.

If you need work done or a quote, you can email her at teresa at mivox dot com.

In the past month, I’ve had my head down making sites, training my dog Sebastian, and learning a whole lot about SEO and human behavior.

I have learned over the last week that is it important to know your friends and know your tools. A friend is someone who will tell you how it is, straight up, and will give back to you. A tool is a person or thing to be used for what you need. A friend will give back to you. A tool may or may not. If a tool does not give back to you, it is time to drop it and move on.

Now, I know this sounds cold and cruel, but in fact, it is business. This methodology has always been in effect, but few people are actually willing to say it out loud. It is vital in business to know the difference between your tools and your friends. In fact, I didn’t really get this rule until recently.

I have to say, I learn from Jenstar every day. Most of the time what I learn has nothing to do with Adsense. Jenstar knew early on that forums and the people who run them are tools to use to help her build her empire. She uses them brilliantly and if those forums and people stop giving back to her, she drops them and moves on. Why didn’t I think of that?

I’ve also learned that in business, always do for yourself first. Sort of like if the airplane goes down, you put the mask on yourself first THEN help someone else. It seems so simple to most people, but for some reason, I had to learn that the hard way.

The thing is, I’ve been a tool for other people most of my business life. I give a whole lot more than I’ll get back in return. But I’ve learned. I now look at business completely differently than I did before. The coolest thing about it is it has made my life simple.