The new Collections Questions & Answers Board is the first of its kind in the Credit and Collections Industry. Specialists from all fields can use it to share information and get answers to questions.  Typical users will be medical collectors, third party collectors, debt buyers, debt sellers, asset recovery specialists, skip tracers, collection agencies, collections attorneys, collections firms, commercial collectors, collections software agents and the full range of professionals in the Industry.  However, consumers will be able to use the site also to get answers to questions and expert input from the specialist mentioned above.

The debt collections questions and answers site is a great way to let consumers and debtors have direct access to debt collection experts.  People in the collections industry can also get direct feed back from debtors and help explain some of the questions people with outstanding debts sometimes have.

From an Internet Technology perspective, the addition of the debt collections questions and answers is a great way to add value to the site, create good wholesome content, and help people all that the same time. In addition to adding content people can subscribe the the RSS feeds to keep current with new content being added to the website. 

ProCollectionJobs.com has now added several sections to their site including debt industry news, collection industry press releases, and most recently the Questions and Answers Board.  ProCollectionJobs.com is quickly surrounding the Collections, and Accounts Receivable Industry.  They are also planning the launch of a massive marketing campaign that will utilize traditional marketing avenues such as TV, news paper, and high level online advertising.  They average 15% to 20% growth per quarter in the network of companies utilizing there services. ProCollectionJobs.com is the leading online job board for the collections industry boasting over 700 companies that use there career services.

ProCollectionJobs.com is poised to close a transaction this month with a small network of companies. This network includes skip tracing companies, collection agencies and long standing debt buyers.  This venture will launch ProCollectionJobs.com into the debt market.  Within the next 4 months the venture will see over 100 million dollars of debt purchased, skip traced and placed creating hundreds of jobs for specialists in the Industry.  

For more information visit: ProCollectionJobs.com

Dates for your particular site may vary. The times listed above are just relative to our research for the sites we host and develope. Let us know if you have seen other dates that vary signifigantly from the dates posted above.

1) Notify any visitors that the job has been filled or has expired.

2) Let the job description display still for visitors to be able to learn more about that type of work and also for content and SEO reasons.

3) Remove the "Apply Now" button.

Keep in mind that you need access to the source code, for this you must have the full licenced version of smartjobboard. Here is how we accomplished the three items listed above:

You will need to open two files:

1)  /system/user-scripts/classifieds/display_listing.php
2)  /templates/SmartJobBoard/classifieds/display_job.tpl

In /system/user-scripts/classifieds/display_listing.php find the following lines and comment them out as shown below, they should be around line 33 or so…

//commetning the lines below will show the inactive job
//elseif (!$listing->isActive() && $listing->getUserSID() != UserManager::getCurrentUserSID()) {
//    $errors['LISTING_IS_NOT_ACTIVE'] = false;
//}

This should effectively display the job even after it goes inactive….

Next, open /templates/SmartJobBoard/classifieds/display_job.tpl. Search for "$listing.Title". This will most likely be the first row in a HTML table tag "<table …><tr>". Add the following code so that it is the first table row:

   <table width="100%">

            {if !$listing.Active}
              <tr colspan="2">
                <td>
                  <h2>
                  <font color="red">This job has been filled or the job listing has expired! Use the quick search links below to search for other job opportunities in your area.</font><br />
                  </h2>
            <a href="http://www.procollectionjobs.com/find_jobs/">Advanced jobs Search</a> |
            <a href="http://www.procollectionjobs.com/browse_by_category/">Find jobs by Category</a> |
            <a href="http://www.procollectionjobs.com/browse_by_city/">Find jobs by City</a> |
            <a href="http://www.procollectionjobs.com/browse_by_company/">Find jobs by Company</a>
            <br />&nbsp;
                  <hr>
                </td>
              </tr>
            {/if}

Of course, replace the domain name with the domain of your site in the snippet above.  You should find the table tag somewhere around line 165 or so… 

Hope this helps somebody. We encourage your comments, let us know if it does or if you need help to edit the source code above.

Our fire wall and security appliances provide our hosting clients  with secure connectivity for their sites. By implimenting the Check Point firewall, VPN, intrusion prevention, and antivirus technologies in a single solution, VPN-1 UTM Edge ensures sites hosted by DeveloWare LLC stay secure. To simplify security management for large remote site deployments, VPN-1 UTM Edge devices can be centrally managed alongside other security solutions at DeveloWare LLC.

The VPN-1 UTM Edge X16 provides complete remote access and site-to-site connectivity, broadband-level performance and high availability capabilities, and powerful central management.  The X16 features a 4-port LAN switch, 1 WAN port, 1 DMZ/WAN2 port, and 1 serial port. The X16 delivers Firewall/VPN throughput of 80/20 Mbps, allows up to 16 users, and supports up to 10 remote access VPN users, as well as allowing site-to-site VPN tunnels.

Sites hosted at DeveloWare LLC can be assured of the latest cutting edge technology to protect against DoS and DDoS attacks at a rate that is much cheaper than any competitor.

Perhaps, like many start-ups, you have lots of ambition but little money, and are willing to do all the work yourself, if you could just be pointed in the right direction. You want to maximize your investments of time and money and ensure you produce results.

Article marketing is just the key you are looking for, especially if you use an affordable article writing and submission service. According to experts, article marketing is one of the key components of SEO (search engine optimization), meaning that by having articles published on the internet which link back to your site, you will gain many benefits, including higher search engine rankings. This means people will be able to find you when they search for content that is relevant to your site, and they will click on the links in your articles because they will perceive you as an expert.

You may have heard of article marketing, but the thought of writing and submitting the number of articles necessary for your desired results is intimidating. There are scripts you can buy which promise to submit your articles, but they are expensive, you don’t know if they will work or if you’ll understand how to use them, and you still have to write your own articles.

By using an article submission service, especially one which provides free custom articles geared to improve your site’s search engines rankings, you can save both time and money by having the work done for you. Your site will gain valuable permanent back links (very important for traffic and rankings) in the hundreds or thousands, and all article content will be completely relevant to your site’s topic or niche. You choose the keywords you want your site to rank for, and the article service provides you with relevant articles, custom written for your site, and then does all the submission work for you.

A quality article submission service is the perfect solution for any website owner wanting to build traffic, page rank and a great reputation.

Shauna Arthurs is the owner of http://2Catchup.com, a popular article writing and submission service. Visit today for some of the best packages and pricing available online! Affordable and fast link directory submission packages are also available!

"2Catchup.com has been approved by the SEO team at DeveloWare LLC. Shauna provides outstanding writing and a submission service that has yet to be surpassed by any company we have used thus far. (Joseph Mas- CEO DeveloWare LLC)"

Today's Devotional Bible Verse for Kids | Devotional Verse a Day for Kids

Christian Parents

Christian parents subscribe to get a bible verse and a small devotional daily to share with your children. As the bible says in Proverbs 22:6 "Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it." If you have small children this is a great service to have. Daily bible verses will help you be consistent with your children. Give your kids a firm and consistent devotional subject to learn daily.

Christian Children

Subscribe to ChildrensBibleVerse.com to have today's childrens bible verse sent to your email. One daily verse will bring hope and encouragement to your childs life like nothing else can.

Childrens Bible Verses and a small devotional daily

Our mission at ChildrensBibleVerse.com is to serve today's bible verse for kids that is relevant to their lives today, right here, right now. Our purpose is to share inspirational daily verses for kids and devotional bible verses daily. Subscribe to get your Christian verse of the day, watch it touch your childrens lives. There is a new bible verse everyday with a different theme, for example; Caring, Attitude, Angels, and much more!

How do you keep growing your organic traffic?

Here is some advice I gave to an automotive software company which has successfully gained top place in google for all of there keyword sets such as "automotive software" and a few others. It has taken over a year to get them to the top with all of there keyword sets but now that they are there how can we up the page rank and expand the organic traffic coming to there site to increase sales. I love to see real results like these.

Below is a quick summary of what you can do to increase your organic traffic once you get to the top. It is basicly a copy of an email I wrote for them after a marketing consultation with a great company:

I have starred out the domain names and company name for privacy reasons.

——————————————————————-

Recommendation Summary For Phase Two of Web Marketing for *** Software

1. Cross link your sites on the footer, header, of navigation as mentioned in the meeting yesterday.

2. Take all of your demo videos and create a YouTube channel and upload them. Put a link on your site pointing to your new YouTube channel.

3. Use the linkbuilding submission service for SEO and Promotion. To do this you will have to create 2 articles and 2 press releases. Use the **** offer they currently have running. Do it twice, one for each campaign listed below. This is probably the most important of all the items in the list because you need higher ranking on ***.com and you are still in the sandbox for the other site *****.com.

• Do a campaign on ****.com. Because *****.com needs help with ranking I would highly recommend making one of the articles about the service it offers and one of the press releases about a recent update to the software. Use these in the SEO submission service.

• Do a separate campaign for ****.com. For SEO, linkbacks and social book marking I recommend making the second article and press release for the ****.com website linking to a page that is deep in the site. You will have to create a page in the site to link the article and press release to.

• With all the articles use the technique of getting the list of keywords collected from Google Adwords and keywords you know are the most searched on for your industry then create a sentence from each one in a human readable fashion about latest updates and so on. Keep in mind that the primary purpose is for SEO, although it should be written to provide real content people will read and be interested in.

• Create an internal page on each site for the content to be submitted to the SEO campaigns.

4. Turn on or create the RSS feeds for ***.com (main site).

5. Install Wordpress on *****.com and *****.com in a directory (not a sub domain though because sub domains appear as a separate domain to the major search engines).

• Install the rss reader widget to read the updated feeds from your rss feeds on ****.com and if you can find any good rss feeds from other blogs set them up also so there is daily content going onto these subsites. Once this is set up you will not have to worry about content.

• Add a link on each site in either the footer, header or navigation menu pointing to the new blogging software.

• For aesthetics you may want to install the plugin “Theme my login” and other plugins to get the desired look and feel you desire. And don't forget to put in the google analytics code for them for tracking visitors.

6. Create a face book account or log into your existing account if you have one.

• Then create a page for “Automotive Software” and apply your rss feeds to the page using RSS Grafitti. You can find information on how to do this by googling “Facebook DeveloWare”. On that page you will see a link with instructions on how to do add the feeds.

• Next create a group for “Automotive Shop Owners” or something to that affect. On this page you can also apply rss feeds using RSS Graffiti. However, on this page maybe you can find other feeds from external blogs or news about your industry to apply.

• Add a link on your site pointing to this new user group and page with some text like “visit us on Facebook” or something to that effect.

In the next phase we should take a deep look at the content on the ****.com site. We should also take a look at effective ways of reaching out to your current customers on a regular basis. One other item not covered in the list above is mass mailing. I have found mass mailing done correctly is very effective for reaching out to new customers if done correctly. However, mass mailing can severely cripple your business if not done correctly and most of the time there is output of a couple hundred dollars. That is why I did not mention it this time around. I tried to focus on low cost solutions that focused on what you have in place already. The final thing we discussed was a Q&A script to get.

Also, keep in mind that because of the length of time it takes the search engines to update there indexes, most of the results from this campaign will not be seen for up to 2-3 months after completion. However the results will be well worth it.

I just needed a quick fix for a site I was working on. The posts were long so before the fix, if you have 5-10 posts you have to scroll way down the page. We just needed a summary of like the first 5 sentences of each posting.

You can see it in action here:
http://www.procollectionjobs.com/arm-industry-news/category/credit-collections-finance-and-risk/

After searching for a plugin I did find a couple of them but they did not work with the latest release or my theme. Therefore, I whipped this little fix up.

Are you ready? Heres how I did it:

First, open "/wp-includes/post-template.php" and add the following function to the file:

//—————————————————————————-

function the_content_shortened($more_link_text = null, $stripteaser = 0) {

 $num_of_sentences_post_to_display = 5;
 $content = get_the_content($more_link_text, $stripteaser);
 $content = apply_filters('the_content', $content);
 $content = str_replace(']]>', ']]&gt;', $content);

 $contentARR = explode(".",$content);

 $shortened_content = "";
 for($i=0;$i<$num_of_sentences_post_to_display;$i++)
 {
   $shortened_content .= $contentARR[$i].". ";
 }
 $shortened_content = force_balance_tags($shortened_content . " …");
 echo $shortened_content;
 echo '(<a href="' . get_permalink() . "\"#more-$id\" class=\"more-link\">Read full news article</a>)";
}

//—————————————————————

Next, find and open the following file:
What ever your theme is replace "yourtheme" below with your theme.

/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/index.php

Now, in the file replace this line (yours might be slightly different but "the_content" function is what we are replacing, just look for it):

<?php the_content('<span>Read the rest of this entry…</span>'); ?>
with this:
<?php the_content_shortened('<span>Read the rest of this entry…</span>'); ?>

Save your work and WAAAAA…… BAMMM! thats it. All done.

Note: you may want to apply the fix to these other pages also as they usualy show multiple posts like your home page.

Here are the most common files that you would be interested in:
/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/index.php
/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/archive.php
/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/archives.php
/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/search.php
/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/page.php

Let me know if this helps you.
Joe

This technique will drive visitors to your jobs and give you exposure and back links.

What we will be doing is adding an RSS app on facebook then setting it up to read the RSS feed from your job board. After installation jobs will show up on your facebook everyday. Its quite nice and I personally love it.

So are you ready??? Lets do it!

Step #1 Log into FaceBook.
First, create a facebook page or open yours up. If you have a business and you don't have a facebook you are behind the times. Wether you like it or not they are approaching 400 million users, its just good business.

Step #2 Add the RSS App.
Next, after you log into facebook go to the top search box and search for this app: "RSS Graffiti" or you can just follow this link:
http://apps.facebook.com/rssgraffiti/
In the upper left hand corner click "Go to Application" this will take you to a page that will prompt you for access. Go ahead and click "Allow" for each step.  You have to give permissions about 4 times.  Don't worry the RSS app will walk you thruough it.  You must give permission if you want the Jobs to show up on your wall.

Step #3 Configure the RSS App to read MyPrayerToday Feeds
Once you click "Allow" you will be taken to a page to configure the feeds.

• In the "Feed URL" textbox type: http://www.yourdomain.com/yourfeeds/
• In the "Feed Name" textbox type: YourDomain.com
• In the "Source URL" textbox type: http://www.YourDomain.com
• Set the "Style" to: Standard

You will also want to set it so it gets the feeds every 3-6 hours or so.

Replace "YourDomain" with your websited domain name.

…

And…. WA – BAM!!! There you have it, your jobs posted on your facebook. Hope this helps somebody out there. let me know if this has helped you

Joe

What is a DDoS attack?

DoS and DDoS attacks flood a Web server with false requests for information, overwhelming the system and ultimately crashing it. The following graphics explain how such attacks work and how companies can possibly prevent them. In effect the server can not handle all the requests, no matter how big and bad your server is. The nature of the attack is quite simple but has complex results on the machine being affected.

How a "denial of service" attack works

In a typical connection, the user sends a message asking the server to authenticate it. The server returns the authentication approval to the user. The user acknowledges this approval and then is allowed onto the server.

In a denial of service attack, the user sends several authentication requests to the server, filling it up. All requests have false return addresses, so the server can't find the user when it tries to send the authentication approval. The server waits, sometimes more than a minute, before closing the connection. When it does close the connection, the attacker sends a new batch of forged requests, and the process begins again–tying up the service indefinitely.

Typical connection

 
DoS & DDoS attacks

 

How to block a "denial of service" attack

One of the more common methods of blocking a "denial of service" attack is to set up a filter, or "sniffer," on a network upstream. This means before a stream of information even reaches a site's Web servers. The filter can look for attacks by noticing patterns or identifiers contained in the information. It requires hardware for filtering. If a pattern comes in frequently, the filter can be instructed to block messages containing that pattern, protecting the Web servers from having their lines tied up.

DDoS attacks can happen to anybody!

As a webmaster or admin for any site, never ever think you are exempt from being attacked.  It can happen to anybody. Last month alone there was over 50,000 reported attacks. The attacks were directed towards major sites and small ones without regard. Twitter was taken down from such attacks just a couple weeks ago. Then the same malicious group targeted Google and Facebook.  Less than two years ago the department of defense was attacked and completely taken down. If they can take down Google, Twitter, and the US Gov they can most likely take down your site also.

Protect Your Website

To protect your site you must have hardware that can defend your servers. The problem is that it is expensive. If you find your site is being attacked and you host with one of those $5/month accounts at some cheap hosting company you will find that they will just shut down your site in the interest of protecting the other sites on there servers. You will be just flat out of luck. Make sure your hosting has the routers and firewalls in place to handle these vicious attacks.  Ask specifically about DDoS prevention before you purchase hosting if you want protection. Normal firewalls and routers WONT STOP THE ATTACKS.
Take if from me. We had a virtual server completely upgraded and screaming fast with the highest security you can imagine. But the nature of a DDoS attack does not even send up a red flag to most security prevention systems. You will most likely only notice when your site goes down or your hosting provider cuts you off. Not good at all because it is too late then!

The nature of an attack

What makes these kind of attacks almost impossible to handle without the proper hardware is that you can not just start blocking IP addresses. Because of a couple reasons. First, most of the time the IP doing the request is a real IP but most likely an IP that is not malicious. Usually the IP has been spoofed. Therefore, if you add an offending IP to your block list you may be blocking a true source of visitors. Second, the request is not what actually kills your http server. What kills the server is an incomplete "handshake". 

To explain the 3 way server handshake lets elaborate a little…

To establish a connection, TCP uses a three-way handshake. Before a client attempts to connect with a server, the server must first bind to a port to open it up for connections: this is called a passive open. Once the passive open is established, a client may initiate an active open. To establish a connection, the three-way (or 3-step) handshake occurs:

1. The active open is performed by sending a SYN to the server.
2. In response, the server replies with a SYN-ACK.
3. Finally the client sends an ACK (usually called SYN-ACK-ACK) back to the server.

In a DDoS attack its more like a 2 way handshake. This leaves your server hanging and waiting for the third response. What this does is flood your http server with incomplete requests. Most servers have a 30 second time out and a maxim number of connections around 300 or so. Hence, your server is doomed without protection.

DDoS attack symptoms and info

DDoS attacks generally WILL NOT eat up your bandwidth because the handshake never got completed. It just increases server load to the point of being rendered useless. Nothing ever gets sent to the requesting host so there is not usually a bandwidth issue.

DDoS attacks are basically impossible to track unless you have tons of resources. Like on a government level. One of the difficulties in tracking is because the offending IP's are usually spoofed and do not exist or are valid IP's that are non offending.

Blocking IP's wont help with a DDoS attack. You must have the proper hardware to defend against DDoS attacks. If somebody know software to hand attacks please let me and the world know about it.

Who is doing such malicious attacking?

To put it bluntly there are many groups of attackers out there. Some are religious based and some are politically based. But the most notorious ones are simply groups of hackers that get paid to take down sites. They get paid between $100 and $500 per 1000 http requests. There are actually bots for hire out there… SHeeesh! I think they should be hung upside down and have there toe nails pulled out.

Conclusions about DDoS attacks

Get a hosting company that has the hardware to handle these attacks. Firewalls and fast servers just wont help. As a result of the recent attacks on DeveloWare.com and the companies that host through us we have upgraded our equipment to handle this. We can now provide protection against DDoS attacks.