SEO and google news

Here is an interesting article about getting on google news... they claim "In order to have your articles crawled by Google News, their URLs must contain a number consisting of at least three digits." It also it suggests emailing google directly at source-suggestions@google.com

Another article in the new york times discusses the fact that people are losing the clever headlines and using a boring headlines with keywords people will search for using services like google news.

How To Start A Business in Alabama

Choose legal structure:

sole proprietarship
no liability protection
must pay fedral self-employment tax (currently 15.3%)

LLP - limited liability partnership
provides little liability protection

LLC - limited liability corporation
provides liability protection
pass through tax entity (avoids corporate taxation)
earnings require payment of fedral self-employment tax (currently 15.3%)
must be dissolved
operational and accounting ease and flexibility compared to S-Corp.

S corp
provides liability protection
pass through tax entity (avoids corporate taxation)
earnings don't require payment of fedral self-employment tax
subject to more stringent accounting guidelines than LLC.
Limited to 35 maximum shareholders, and no foreign capitol

C corp - (most large corporations)
provides liability protection
earnings are taxed at corporate and personal levels
stringent account reqirements
required annual reports, and board of director meetings



How to create an LLC:

1) Draft and file articles of incorporation.
-lawyer is needed for complex articles
-file with county courthouse
-you can use online service.
-also might want to create operating agreement.
2) Pay Alabama business priviledge tax. (Forms PSA)
-currently you have 30 days after forming corporation
-this is paid yearly. (from dec1 to march 15 for that year)
3) File ss4 with irs to get ein (employer identification number, aka tax id)
-choose closing month for accounting.
4) Get local business license.
5) Set up business bank account.
-this allows you to easily separate business and personal finances.
-normally banks require you to have EIN and local business license.
6) Get business insurance.
-Insurance can further protect your personal assets.

**** Yearly Taxes
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=295077

The LLC must file a form 1065 with irs.
The first year it must file a Form 8832 to be taxed as partnership.
The LLC sends members K-1 forms.
File earnings on 1040, schedule C.

Email Tracker

This site uses techniques that spammers use to allow you to track your email and know when it was opened, forwarded, etc.

CSS Page layout

This is a simple layout for the typical header, right/left nav, and centered content using css. Next time I do a page from scratch, I am going to ditch the tables and use this.

Google Maps blogs

Here are 2 blogs that just cover cool google maps hacks.

http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/
http://coolgooglemaps.blogspot.com/

these are both examples of of a blog done right. No cost, set up blog w/ blogspot, and adsense for revenue. cool google maps got a link on digg for publicity.

digg

digg is knocking slashdot off the totem pole. It's similar to slashdot except that there are no editors, the stories are choosen democratically by the users.

Process Explorer

Process Explorer is a freeware that is task manager on steroids..

First Impressions of Ruby on Rails

Lately I have heard a lot of buzz about ruby on rails. It is used by basecamp, the project management system that I like, and I have heard it mentioned by Martin Fowler and on slashdot.

First there is the ruby language. According to the Ruby Users Guide, it is "an interpreted scripting language for quick and easy object-oriented programming." "Rails" is the web framework portion.

After watching this intro video I can see that scaffolding is a piece that genreates quite a lot of web code for you. It appears that it breaks things into the MVC pattern.

google maps

Here are links to several cool google map hacks

Project management

I recently was turned onto a cool online project management program called basecamp. My only reservation is that the data is hosted by another company and you have no control over it(I don't see an easy way to export your data either), but it's very well written and works far better than excel.