I've been doing my taxes online now for four years, and I wouldn't have it any other way! It's cheap, and it only takes a few minutes (no need to drive to meet with your accountant!). If you want to do your taxes on the web, online income tax preparation and electronic filing services are getting far more robust, and can give you all the benefits and breaks that the best accountants are aware of. (more…)

Well, I've only been trying to make money from this blog for a couple of months now, but I'm already generating a few hundred dollars per month. That's not bad for extra cash, with very little effort! (more…)

When running marketing campaigns, it's great to know where your visitors and customers are coming from, so that you can track conversion based on source, and determine ROI for various advertising link campaigns that you're running.

This code will capture the visitor's referring URL when they first enter your site. This could be a query string from a major search engine, it could be the URL of a website linking to yours, and you could even force it to be something specific. For example, if you want to track how many visitors are clicking on your email signature, you can use the URL www.yourdomain.com?source=email.

Then in any form or conversion point on your site, have a hidden field where you echo the $_SESSION['source'] variable. Then when you get the lead information, you can see where that lead came from.

I've noticed lately some strange behavior with my MacBook. It's normally very silent, and the fan usually only comes during resource intensive processing (ie: games). But now when I view the embedded videos on Digg, from YouTube or Google Video, the fan spins up? What is it about the embedded videos that makes them so much more CPU expensive than just watching the videos on the sites themselves?

If you use localization in your web application, and you need dates & times localized to Arabic, then it's best to have a robust and reliable PHP class to do the conversion for you. (more…)