With the ever expanding Internet and the World Wide Web being a favourite playground of many interested individuals and businesses alike, the changing landscape and the sheer endless possibilities and capabilities needed serious regulations by the legislative body. Existing laws were extended to cover the new medium, furthermore new laws had to be derived and invented in order to cover new ground. Since that the Internet law is not defined as a separate law, but rather extends existing laws, very broad knowledge of the law in general as well as the issues specific to the Internet are required, when a case is related to the Net or the Web.
This spawned a whole new generation of attorneys, who dedicated themselves to practicing and litigating mostly Internet related cases. Unfortunately, not all the lawyers advertising to be Internet savvy really know the difference between a FTP and an SMTP protocol. But since that the Internet law is actually derived from the existing laws, is any such technical or rather IT knowledge necessary, to successfully practice Internet law?
Any lawyer can handle a case of Internet Fraud, as long as it stays on common grounds. But when a culprit uses a vulnerability of a browser or portal to defraud users, then knowledge and understanding of what has actually taken place is vital to the defence or to properly accuse the perpetrator.
United States of America, with 50% of all world lawyers accumulated on a relatively tiny part of the world; need this new playground, because the old one was crowded as is. Mostly young lawyers, who grew up with the Internet and the Web present, decide to venture in the new law department. Big law firms, recognizing the need for quality lawyers with IT knowledge, are scouting the law schools for young talented individuals to offer them employment as soon as they graduate.
In the recent years a true boom of internet lawyers invaded the cyberspace offering all kind of advice, help, protection, assistance, whatever they came up with, just to stand out in the crowd. For instance, full internet protection kits are being sold, the web site packages having custom made terms of service, disclaimers, contracts and other legal mumbo jumbo necessary to have a fully legally protected web site. As usual, most of the legalese made the whole business just more complicated, not easier. Introduction of the Internet small print in the contracts and disclaimers opens whole new doors for litigation, making sure that all the thousands of lawyers being spewed out by law schools every year have something to do for years to come.
Bloggers and webmasters who use WordPress’s highly popular platform are allowed the liberty to choose from among thousands of WordPress clean themes that are available in the WordPress theme directory or purchase customized and quality themes from developers who cater to the theme needs of the WordPress community. High quality themes that are free of malicious codes are available for download online. But there is nothing to guarantee their harmlessness.
The advantage that separates WordPress from most of its competitors is that being an open source platform, the community resources that are at its disposal are vast. There are numerous developers who work for no cost just to create clean, safe and high quality themes for WordPress websites. Most of these themes come for free and have almost all those features that are required of any good WordPress theme but are nonetheless inferior to the ones offered by the themes that are available for a price
When WordPress started out, there were only two themes that a user could have. As the theme frenzy caught on, those skeptics who viewed the economic advantages of developing and selling themes to WordPress users were forced to revise their view. The earlier version of WordPress used a single page that could be amended and modified to create other pages and the use of templates was not yet in vogue. The development of the theme domain has made it possible for users to download and install clean WordPress themes either from WordPress directory or for a price from outside vendors.
Having a WordPress clean theme installed on your blog is important to ensure security for your content and website. There might be free themes out there that any user can download and install. But the problem with most of them is that they come with sponsored links hidden within the theme codes. These links either collect information regarding your blog or personal information of blog posters and use it for nefarious purposes. There is also the danger that some hacker might use a theme to gain entry into the WordPress servers and wreak a lot of havoc for the WordPress community. Since the entire platform is linked and every blogger uses the same underlying code, a tiny security vulnerability, if exploited might endanger every single blog at the same time. Only those who host their blogs or webpages on independent hosting servers would be spared. Though you might have to shell out a few bucks it is always advisable to purchase a theme from a reputed vendor than to install freely available themes.
Clean and quality themes like those belonging to the revolution series of themes are highly popular and have sold like hot cakes ever since they hit the market. There is a huge hype surrounding each release of WordPress clean themes belonging to the revolution series with the latest fancy of every blogger being the Revolution Pro Media Theme. These clean WordPress themes not only ensure that you have a safe and secure blogging experience, but also are customizable to a huge extent and offer various functionalities and features that only money can buy. Though the themes that WordPress directory contains are also clean and highly secure they lack the color and professionalism that these premier themes have.
Contact forms are tools that most bloggers and website owners install on their webpage so that those who visit their site or blog can get in touch with them. WordPress being a premier blogging platform, also makes this tool available to those who use its resources for blogging and website hosting. The usual methods that enable blog viewers to contact you are through your blog comments, or through the email address that you have provided or through a WordPress contact form.
A WordPress contact form is probably the safest way for establishing spam free contact between blogger and viewer on WordPress as it hides the email address and provides you more security. They also can be customized to alert you about the emails that come to your blog and also to ask only specific questions which narrows down the range of requests. There are also options for character limits which allow only certain number of characters to be included in each request.
As an example, if you are someone who provides technical support for plug-ins, themes, shareware etc on WordPress for software programs or WordPress itself, then you can include only those questions in your WordPress contact form that are related to only the things that you deal with. This narrows down the amount of content you will have to read through while reading the contact forms. This can be done using closed response accepting tick boxes which work in the form ‘ Do you want this or do you want that’. If the blog has multiple bloggers, then different forms can be set up to contact the specific people.
The WordPress contact form plug-in is already included in the WordPress installation and it is easy to activate it from the control panel of your host server. Once you download the plug-in and have it installed and activated on your host, it is easy to include it to your WordPress web site or blog. It can be added to a post or a page, depending on how you would like it. After writing the content, you can choose the option for the contact form from the post field at the top. After placing the cursor where you want the form to be included, clicking on the contact form button would finish the task. When the page is published it would appear with a contact form.
For those who use the WordPress blog and not a host server, having a contact WordPress contact form appear on their blog is very easy, one has to just type in contact form into any post or page on the blog. A simple contact form would include the name, email, website and a box for typing in the request or information that needs to be passed onto you. The good thing is that your email address in never shown and the sender has no way of finding it out. This avoids your getting spam on your personal email id. Though the form could be used for spamming it won’t be too much. All the messages are usually filtered for spam before they are sent to the blogger.
Most people who don’t know about the economic advantages of having your own web space or blog or website don’t find it sensible to spending money for hosting their website. They think of free blogging services which are aplenty as a better option with WordPress being the last word on blogging and setting up e-commerce friendly websites and webpages. Surely there are advantages to having a free blogging service. But there are even more advantages to be had by hosting your WordPress blog or website on a host server such as godaddy. There are many who do so and can find plenty of online resources on godaddy WordPress help for finding their way through the process of setting up.
Having a hosting account with godaddy helps to cut down your costs to less than 5$ a month or less. There is also no real need to be nerdy and have a knowhow of HTML coding and pay too much money to graphic designers and programmers if you have godaddy WordPress help tutorials to guide you along the way.
Before we actually go into what most godaddy WordPress help tutorials tell you about setting up a WordPress account on go daddy, lets know something more about godaddy itself. Godaddy offers a lot of choices to the user who wants to have hosting space on its servers. There are economy plans for Linux server hosting that provide with the basic hosting service and then there is the deluxe plan which you can opt for it you are looking to host more than one domain. Anyhow it works out to be less than five dollars a month at the max.
Installing WordPress on your godaddy hosting account as made out by godaddy WordPress help giving resources is not so difficult. The first part is obviously getting yourself a godaddy hosting account. This can be done by purchasing their package online from the godaddy site. The recommended package is the deluxe plan. Once the purchase of the account is completed, godaddy sends you emails with directions which inform you about the time it takes to activate the hosting space for your domain name.
The next step in the godaddy WordPress help tutorial is to log into the account on the go daddy home page. Once there, click on the tab “Hosting Account List”. This gives you the option to open the hosting manager screen. Creating a MySQL data base is where WordPress can store its data is what you need to do next. This can be done in a few clicks on the MySQL icon and creating a new database and naming it as WordPress. Then create a database login and submit the info. The status on the screen once you refresh it would change to “setup”.
The last step in the godaddy WordPress tutorial would be to highlight the hostname and copy it this is used for the WordPress configuration wp-config.php. Download WordPress and install on your hosting server using an FTP up loader to upload it onto go daddy. The FTP address would be ftp.yourdomain.com. The WordPress files can be auto installed as go daddy offers this feature to its users. There you go. All set and done. The easy part is over and you can concentrate on building an attractive website or blogging space for you using all the tools and functionalities and plug-ins that WordPress has to offer.
With the increasing popularity of the Internet and the World Wide Web in particular, the online auctions became a matter of common practice, their escalating attractiveness just inviting more Internet traffic their way. Online auction sites, like the eBay, expand daily and many businesses, besides having a store or other presence on the Web, create an eBay store as well. Other Internet portals, like Amazon.com, started with their own Internet auction sites, whereby eBay remains the biggest and the most well known outlet of such online activity.
When the whole Internet craze started and many auction sites begun to appear, the stories of fraudulent sellers increased as well and people started to ask for legislative protection when buying online. Several such solutions, besides the law makers’ inability to harness the beast in time, were presented by the sites themselves.
The already mentioned eBay introduced seller ratings, comments regarding the seller, both posted by the buyer, as well as a secure payment method per PayPal, which belongs to the same company, eBay, Inc. StubHub and Skype are additional businesses owned by this Internet behemoth.
In 2004, the Federal Trade Commission released a guide with the name “Internet Auctions, A Guide for Buyers and Sellers”, with extensive and accurate information and guidelines for auction enthusiasts and professional auctioneers. The instructions outline how to pay online, what to watch for, which fraudulent actions are known and being perpetrated, how to avoid such, where to go and who to contact in case of fraud and other very helpful data.
National Consumers League operates a so called Internet Fraud Watch, which covers current issues regarding Internet fraud and online auctions in particular.
A separate Internet auction law is not available. eBay is practicing business in several countries throughout the world, every single one has laws and bylaws covering and regulating them. For America, the responsible party is the Federal Trade Commission. In Germany the case “ROLEX” created a big impact when it was ruled that the law regarding auctions is not applicable on the online counterpart and that common trade, crime and fraud laws are to be applied.
The European Union has no regulations regarding the auctions per se, more or less every member state is left to regulate the matter on its own, thereby subjecting the law to general regulations and suggestions.
It is not to be expected that a separate Internet law for online auctions is going to be proposed, not unless a general understanding has been reached to regulate the whole Internet as such. Until such an agreement has been reached, the matter will stay as it is.
Joomla and WordPress are two of the major open source web publishing platforms that are in use today. Both have distinct features and advantages that are associated with their use. They are vastly different from other online resources that offer the same services in that they have formed huge communities around themselves that cater to the changing needs and demands and aid in their respective development and advancement. The contributions for the development of Joomla or WordPress from developers and technicians from the world over are loyalty based and not for any monetary benefit.
Joomla is an open source content management systems that is used for web development and website building. It can also help build powerful online applications. Joomla’s main advantage is the ease of use associated with it which makes it ideal for extensibility. The fact that it is an open source solution that is available freely also increases its popularity considerably. WordPress is also an open source platform but is not focused on extensibility but rather user friendliness and has been created to be more of a publisher’s delight rather than a tool for development. Comparing both these robust resources to see which one of the two, Joomla or WordPress is better is a very tricky task.
Joomla or WordPress, whichever you choose, the one thing that can be guaranteed is that it would be a good choice. While WordPress is the most used blogging software that has been ever created and provides excellent interface for content publishing, Joomla is a software that helps develop a website without having to code using HTML or PHP. The Joomla interface is not as easy as the one that WordPress has but it gives more control and allows for the content to be displayed on different parts of the website. WordPress can be used to make a full fledged website with almost all the functionalities that one would expect. Joomla on the other hand is used for business and corporate websites mostly.
The advantage that both features is that once you have Joomla or WordPress installed on your hosting server, all you need to work on is design and functionality. The common factor with both these applications is that their design files work separately from the programming part. WordPress themes are available as customized and can be stored in the theme folder while for customizing Joomla you have to search for template files and then modify them according to your desire.
While answering the question as to which is best, Joomla or WordPress, from a bloggers perspective, it can be said that WordPress comes ahead in the competition with Joomla by a narrow margin. The thing that turned the tide in favor of WordPress for most users was the varied features and the homepage that WordPress incorporates when compared to Joomla. Ultimately it is for the individual to make his choice and there is so much to both these platforms that the choice invariably is a difficult one.
Those who have tried to put a video on WordPress blog of theirs must know that it is not as easy as the help section and forums on WordPress make it out to be. The thing is rather tricky and involved encoding the video, uploading it somewhere and then embedding a player into the WordPress post or page. There is no need to be disheartened however, this whole process can be made rather simple and easy to do even for new and inexperienced people on WordPress. There are many of them out there who would like to add videos to their WordPress sites or blogs. The good thing is instead of doing it all by yourself you can use plug-ins for adding video to WordPress.
Mostly the business of adding videos to blogs has caught on with the booming popularity of YouTube and other FLV video format based streaming video sites. There are two ways to add video to your WordPress blog or page, one is to put video on WordPress that are already uploaded onto your host server to WordPress and the other is to embed videos from other sites such as YouTube.
If you have the software required to create your own FLV videos and prefer not hosting them on a third party site, you can upload them onto your host server and have them displayed on your WordPress page using a plug in called FLV embed. This plug in can put video on WordPress posts or a page with a quick tag. In order to use this plug-ins and enjoy vlogging or showing off home videos and such on your blog page, you need to first download and install this plug in onto your host server and then have it activated on your WordPress blog. The plug-in is available at wordpress.org and can be installed and activated like any other WordPress plug in. The settings are configurable once the player is displayed on your blog after it has been installed and activated.
The plug-in allows you to set color options and have your own logo embedded into the player. There is also a full screen mode to view the video king size. The volume buttons and other features that you see in most embedded video players similar to YouTube are found in this plug in. All in all it is relatively easy and independent solution for those of you who want to put video on WordPress on your own and of your own.
The other way to put a video on WordPress post or blog pages is to use those found on popular sites such as YouTube and googlevideos. The advantage with these sites and many other is that they offer not just the video for viewing but also lets the viewer have access to the embedding code that would allow them to display the video on their own site or blog. The video would still be hosted by the website which provides the embed code and your bandwidth resources would not be compromised even if you add multiple videos to your blog. This can be done by using a plug in that embeds videos in the same form that FLV embed does for independently hosted videos. This plug-in also embeds videos with quick tag and is called Vipers Video Quicktags. The plug in supports the embed code from a number of sites and also allows videos hosted in non FLV format as well. This plug in is also available on wordpress.org for download.
