John Dilbeck Musings

In late December 2007, I created a new social networking site for Murphy NC 28906 on Ning.com.

If you live in, visit, or want to know more about Murphy, NC, come join us at the Murphy NC 28906 social networking site.

You can customize your profile, write a blog, discuss topics related to Murphy, NC in our forum, meet and get to know fellow residents, upload photos, and much more — all for free!

Anyone living in, visiting, or wanting to know more about Murphy, NC is welcome. Come join us today.

I love posters and I’ve built an artstore on JohnDilbeck.com that links to items I love, including castles, dragons, wizards, and many other subjects.

Here’s a list of other topics for which I’ve built my own store pages:

Artists

• Leonardo da Vinci Art
• Michelangelo Buonarroti Art

Musicians and Actors

• Johnny Depp Art
• Mel Gibson Art
• Elvis Presley Art

Movies and TV

• Disney Art
• Harry Potter Art
• Lord of the Rings Art
• Monsters, Inc. Art
• Spiderman Art
• Star Trek Art
• Star Wars Art
• Warriors Art
• X-Files Art
• X-Men Art

Places

• Ireland Art

Nature & Outdoors

• Animal Art
• Bears Art
• Birds Art
• Butterflies Art
• Cats Art
• Deer Art
• Dinosaur Art
• Dogs Art
• Dolphins Art
• Doves Art
• Eagles Art
• Floral Art
• Frogs Art
• Horses Art
• Landscape Art
• Manatees Art
• Pelicans Art
• Rainbow Art
• River Sports Art
• Reptiles Art
• Roses Art
• Seagulls Art
• Sunset Art
• Wildlife Art
• Wolf Art

Other

• Angels Art
• Aviation Art
• Believe Art
• Castles Art
• Cowboy Art
• Dragons Art
• Fairies & Pixies Art
• Fantasy Art
• Inspirational Art
• Kings Art
• Lighthouse Art
• Mermaids Art
• Motivational Art
• Princes Art
• Princesses Art
• Queens Art
• Space Art
• Unicorns Art
• Warriors Art
• Waterfalls Art
• Wizards Art

If you aren’t particularly interested in the same topics I am, you can select from over 300,000 items, some of which are sure to be of interest.

Here are some of the topics you may choose to browse directly at the Art.com site:

Art.com offers over 300,000 items from which to choose.

It’s easy to find what you’re looking for at Art.com. You can click on my selections in the menu to your left, go to their site and browse their main categories, or use the handy search box, below.

Top 100

Top 100 at Art.com

What’s New?

What’s New at Art.com

LIFE Picture Collection

The LIFE Picture Collection at Art.com

Other Popular Art

To make it convenient, I’ve put together some samples from a variety of interest areas. Just click one of the following links to see a sample of the art that is available in that category. A new window will open with items that you will, hopefully, find to be of interest.

• Abstract posters and prints
• Animals posters and prints
• Architecture posters and prints
• Astronomy & Space posters and prints
• Book Illustration posters and prints
• Botanical posters and prints
• Comics posters and prints
• Cuisine posters and prints
• Education posters and prints
• Fantasy posters and prints
• Holidays posters and prints
• Home & Hearth posters and prints
• Humor posters and prints
• Inspirational posters and prints
• Maps posters and prints
• Motivational posters and prints

Popular Movies

Movies posters and prints

Popular Music

• Music posters and prints
• People posters and prints
• Places posters and prints
• Religion & Philosophy posters and prints
• Scenic posters and prints
• Sports posters and prints
• Still Life posters and prints
• Television posters and prints
• Transportation posters and prints
• Vintage posters and prints
• World Culture posters and prints
• Youth posters and prints

In addition to art prints, photos, and posters, Art.com offers a framing service so you can do all your gift buying and framing at the same time.

The selection is huge and the prices are right. Order today to avoid the holiday rush and to be sure to get the items you want.

Randy Burnett, non-partisan candidate for the Cherokee County NC School Board, has opened a new website that contains information about his platform, a survey, blog, photos, and other items of interest about the candidate and his campaign.

It is nice to see a candidate not only presenting information, but also inviting feedback.

Hopefully, other local candidates will create an online presence, as well.

If you know of any other 2006 election campaign websites for candidates in Cherokee County, NC, please leave a comment and I’ll point to them, too.

I got side-tracked in May. For several months, I’ve been fighting one or more hackers who have been breaking into my brother’s site at GeorgiaDragRacing.com and installing software that attacked other computers and ran an Internet Relay Chat — both of which are not allowed by our hosting company who have been working with us to put a stop to this.

On May 5, 2004, I received a notice from our SysAdmin that the hackers had installed software once again and he had detected and deleted it. He told me that he’d been patient for a long time, but this was the final notice. One more break-in and our account would be cancelled and we’d have to find another company to host the site. There are over 2,500 pages on that site!

Since I didn’t know how they were breaking in and I’d done everthing I knew, it was time for drastic action. After a long talk with David, my brother, we decided to completely rebuild the site and remove all the scripts that we were using to power the photo album, bookstore, forum, and news updating. It was going to be a big job, but it would be less work than moving everything — including thousands of photos — to another site.

So, I looked for alternate ways to do what we’d been doing with PERL and PHP scripts. We decided to create a blog at blogger.com for the news updates, which can now be found at gdrn.blogspot.com. The photos will be hosted at ImageStation.com until we find another site that is easier to use. The bookstore was completely rebuilt using javascript and direct links to Amazon.com and the forum was deleted in favor of the mailing list hosted by Yahoo groups.

So, I had to completely redesign everything and rebuild all the pages of the site. It took about three weeks of working around the clock to get it finished, but now we’re moving on using the new tools. Most of the functionality was saved, but it was a huge job and it pulled me away from the other tasks I had scheduled for this month.

There are probably quite a few broken links on the site and I’ll have to find and squash those bugs as they come up.

So, why am I telling you about this?

When building a business on the Internet, you may not always have total control over what happens. We had to make a decision and I had to do a lot of work to do our best to keep the site open. Now, we’re running no custom scripts and nobody but me knows the password to the site. Hopefully, that will foil the hackers.

In this case, the bad guys won the battle, but I still intend to win the war.

For reasons associated with hacking activity on our account, I’ve been forced to completely rebuild GeorgiaDragRacing.com. All 2,000+ pages have been rebuilt and uploaded to the site, and that’s what has kept me very busy for the last couple of weeks or so.

Fortunately, all of my large sites are built using Radio Userland’s database and scripting abilities. It takes some of the work out of managing them, and even rebuilding them when necessary. Nevertheless, it was a lot of work and I still have many broken links to find and fix because we no longer use any scripts on that site.

Of course, this means that thousands of links on the Internet, especially those pointing to the photos in the photo album are now broken, but there’s nothing I can do about that from my end.

All because somebody decided to invade the site and cause problems.

Sigh.

It’s a real shame that it isn’t easier to be creative and helpful than destructive.

Moving on….

Art.com is changing their affiliate program, again.

When I first joined, a couple of years ago, they had a very good in-house affiliate program with excellent tools. Then, they discontinued it in favor of going with LinkShare, and the tools that were available for marketing their art products were not as good, at least in my opinion.

I recently learned that they were transitioning back to an in-house program. So, I joined the new program and I’ve spent the last week or so reorganizing and updating my Art Store at JohnDilbeck.com.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be adding posters and photos to the appropriate pages in my bookstore, too.

If you are interested in affiliate program marketing, I encourage you to learn more about Art.com’s affiliate program and join it if it fits your needs and interests.

Oh, yeah, check out my Art Store and purchase posters, photos, and fine art prints. Over 100,000 products are available in thousands of categories. If you don’t find what you want on my site, every page in the art store has a search box. Enter the name of a movie, musician, topic or keyword and you’ll be presented with great artwork for your consideration.