Last weekend the hard drive hosting 7dollarsecrets.com decided to start giving problems, so a backup drive and a replacement drive were scheduled to be installed.

I didn't find out in time to let you know that the work was being done yesterday and the site would be down for a couple hours. And I figured that by the time I got back to the office and sent you a message the site would be up anyway.

Oh, this was fun! My best friend, Eric, played bass trombone with DMHO tonight at a concert they gave in Loma Linda. That's him on the far left; Denver's on the far right (I got to meet him!). Kenn Hughes, third from the left, called Eric and invited him to play when he realized the band would be in the area.

It was a bit nerve-wracking when I found 7dollarsecrets.com displaying a blank page today, particularly when I could FTP in and also get in to my control panel. What could be wrong?

Well, it turned out that the hard drive containing the site at the hosting provider was beginning to fail and the drive locked itself into read-only mode as a failsafe. Since the script couldn't write data, it was timing out and displaying a blank page.

Remeniscent of their previous tactics, Network Solutions has been engaging in a practice known as "front-running" domain names. When someone uses their whois service to look up a domain name (to see if it's available), Network Solutions immediately registers that domain name, making it inaccessible to those using a competing registrar to obtain the domain name.

In case you didn't know, there's an anniversary coming up: the 1 year anniversary of $7 Secrets!

To celebrate, I'm initiating a contest for the people that have made $7 Secrets so successful, the affiliates who have promoted the report over the last year.

The only thing you need to do is continue doing what you've been doing, and that's promoting $7 Secrets through your affiliate link. On January 31, the anniversary of $7 Secrets, I'll announce the winner -- the affiliate who has sold the most copies of the report during the month of January 2008.

I used to listen to country music back in the '70s, until I switched to Top 40 in the '80s. So I guess it's not that unusual that I'd be drawn in by not one, but two songs of that genre I heard on Cold Case tonight.

Hey, folks! Version 2.8 of the $7 Secrets scripts (7DSS) is now in beta. You can download 2.8b2 (2.8b1 was a limited, private beta) from the usual place (see page 27 in the report).

While this version has been in use on 7dollarsecrets.com for the past several weeks with no problems, it has not had wide testing and it is a beta. There may be bugs and there will certainly be changes before the final release. I don't recommend using it on a production site. All that being said, I don't anticipate any problems and would appreciate your help in testing.

Christmas is coming up quickly and I always find myself busy at this time of year. For the last week I've been in rehearsals for and performances of my church's annual Christmas production, so my time spent on Internet marketing has been rather limited.

With so little time to invest, it's interesting that quite a bit of that time was spent on investigating membership site software. Not only have I got a project that I'm working on in that area, but I received not one, but four requests this week for a recommendation for membership site software.

Whether we're writing copy for a sales letter or answering support messages, Internet marketers need to be understood. Without direct human intereraction, it's very easy to write in such a way that confuses, distracts, misleads, or downright offends.

I've posted a new article by Dr. Loren Ekroth on the subject of e-mail conversation problems. Besides helping me vent about the support messages I get, it prompts me to remember how to write when I'm conversing by e-mail.

Email sometimes replaces other modes of communication like phoning or face-to-face conversation as the method of choice. It's quick, it's easy, it's a-synchronous. One click of the send button, and out goes your message. Mission accomplished!

But is your mission really accomplished? As it turns out (and as has been discovered by recent research) email conversations can have some significant downsides.