Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Unexpected bonus
For the most part, life got in the way of much progress today. Today was my day in the MasterVisions office, so I knew I'd have only the evening to work at home today (funny how, more and more, I'm thinking only of what work I do at home as my work).

I expected that work to be on organizing my business records for taxes, but that never happened. Family matters took the forefront. So I ended up with a day off (if you can count seven hours of work in the office as a day off—sheesh, how mixed up is my thinking getting?).

I did find one unexpected bonus as I went through my e-mail, though. A daily newsletter I receive had an article about a site that enabled you to do a search for information on the obscure computer processes that run in the background on your computer.

So many of the processes are unnecessary, or even harmful, but you need a reliable resource to tell which is which.

I had lost track of the resource site I had used in the past—I had come to rely on just doing a search on Google for any process that I wanted to find out about. But finding those resource sites through the search engines has become next to impossible now, thanks to all the people who lazily post their whole process list on forums and then ask other forum users to research the 100 or so processes on their list and tell them which ones they can get rid of.

But the article listed an excellent resource site and the site had a free script I installed on my site to allow visitors to search that site's database of processes right from my page. I love win-win-win situations like this! My visitors get access to a useful tool, I have a useful tool that encourages visitors to return to my site, and the site that offered the free tool gets exposure from the visitors who use the search tool on my site.

I quickly wrote an article describing the value of checking your processes to determine which ones are needed and which aren't and put the tool on the page. I still need to smooth out the rough edges of the article and incorporate it into my linking structure, but if you're interested in checking it out, it's on the following page:

www.onestopwebsupport.com/maint/processes.htm

I get the feeling that maintenance articles like these may find their way into a more prominent position on my site. My target audience is people who are trying to start a business on the Web. I've found that a number of them are relatively inexperienced with technical matters concerning their computers. Web tutorials may be a useful feature to offer them.

But it's getting a little late for serious strategizing right now and Sunday morning's "springing forward" and yesterday's mano a taxo combat with my business records has left me ready for a good night's sleep.
Jeff