My name is John Conde and I am a Web Developer/Office Manager for a medium-sized credit card processing company based in South New Jersey. I've worked there for almost three years and as you can guess I am an expert in credit card processing. I've established merchant accounts for over 1,000 businesses covering almost every product/service and style. There are few in the industry who's knowledge parallels mine as I am knowledgeable in everything from sales to programing to equipment/software to Interchange, etc. so if you have a merchant account question definitely feel free to ask. I'll be happy to help as often as I can. You can read an article I wrote recently called The Chargeback Challenge to get an idea of my merchant account knowledge. I plan on publishing my next article about choosing a gateway shortly. When I'm not knee deep in merchant accounts at work I run JNA Web Services. I started this business casually about five years ago. I've since added a partner and we take things a bit more seriously now. We do web design, web hosting (who doesn't nowadays?), web marketing, and merchant services. We're currently focusing on expanding our merchant services offerings and will be launching JNA Merchant Services in the next few weeks. I'm also an expert in Search Engine Optimization. Every site I have optimized has ranked well. This includes my now defunct site Johnny's Jokes which ranked number 2 for the term 'jokes' (one of the most competitive and popular terms you can optimize for) and number one for virtually every other major jokes-related search term. The site got over 10k vistors daily and had a mailing list of over 20,000 members before I took it down. The story is long but I basically never charged for anything or even put ad banners on the site. It was a free as a site can get. Needless to say a site that popular needs to make money or else there will be problems. I'm no newbie to forums, either. I'm a regular at SitePoint (I also go under the name of stymiee). I am a Mentor there in their Grow and Manage Team which covers the SEO and eCommerce forums. I'm a very active poster there and may become one here as well. When I code I prefer to use PHP and MySQL running Apache on Linux (LAMP). I also know Perl, xHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I write my xHTML to be valid and test my designs in Gecko-based browsers, IE 5.5 & 6, Opera 7+, and when I can get my hands on them, Mac IE 5.2 and Safari. I am an avid FireFox user and evangelist. I use 27 extensions at last count. I'm an expert spyware remover thanks to my newb family and firnds and I am also (almost) a certified ethical hacker. Just gotta pass the test at this point. For fun I like to play roller hockey. I'm usually a goalie although I don't have any problems putting the biscut n the basket. I'm an Islanders fan and am pretty peeved at the NHL right now.
Well I must say John that was the most thorough intro post I have read in a long time so therefore I will be giving you my most thorough welcome that I have ever given. The demise of Johnny’s Jokes made me sad. So I post these lyrics in remembrance. We are young, heartache to heartache we stand No promises, no demands Love is a battlefield We are strong, no one can tell us we’re wrong Searchin’ our hearts for so long, both of us knowing Love is a battlefield And finally since you like hockey I leave you with this one little bit of advice. If you guard your heart like you do the net, no one will be able to shot a puck to your heart. Oh yeah, least I forget, welcome to DP and all the razzamatazz.
Thanks for the welcome everyone. I never realized how popular these forums are. I had known about them for a little over ayear but only really investigated them yesterday. Hopefully I have enough time to be able to dedicate here as it seems like a fun community.
I'm not surprised - last time we were together there with friends, some other people seemed to take an awful dislike to me.