:Clear Skin Blog

Hehe…actually there are a bunch of site updates that you should be seeing over the next week or two, ringing in the new year at Acne Vitamins. I managed to find out what was causing our tables to shift a few pixels to the left and correct it, so I’ll be adding a subtle graphic effect that will make all of our main pages appeal to a have a bit of a shadow above the background. It’s a small touch, but I feel it makes the page feel a little more professional.

We’ve also got some new acne testimony that I will be adding to the testimony page, including at least one new set of before-and-after pictures. It sounds like Clear5 is working well for most of the users that have gotten in touch with us, which is great to hear.

The new year will also mean the end of the holiday sale. Prices will go up a bit in January, although it will not happen until after the 2nd, so you still have a few more days to save some money. I’m going to keep the price for our standard 2-bottle supply of Clear5 under $30, and actually a bit cheaper than before. Shipping will hopefully stay the same as it is currently, although postal rates will be going up next month (for everybody, as the price of stamps rises). The bundled selections will also stay, so you will still be able to save with the 6-bottle order.

January will also be the start of our print ads, and the start of a lot of work remaking all the graphic templates I lost when one of my hard drives crashed (yay!), so it will be a busy time here. I’ve got some ideas of how to improve our product even more, so you’ll find out about that soon as well. In the mean time, I hope you all continue to see (or start seeing ^_^) great results with Clear5 vitamin B5 acne treatment in the new year! Have a happy New Year’s Eve and a great 2006!

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I know I already have an acne shaving guide up on the site, but the fact is I sometimes fail to follow my own advice. As I would guess is typical for a guy who makes his living off the internet, I can occasionally get a little lazy in my shaving habits, and since I have fairly sensitive skin, I end up paying for it with razor bumps.

All the information in the guide is good, but I have to stress that the first point about consistency is really one of the most important and least talked about pieces of advice. Shaving with the grain is crucial, but if you frequently let your beard grow out (as I have been doing over the holidays…), you’re still going to get more pull from your razor, and the likely possibility of ingrown hairs.

In my case, I’m addicted to my electric razor. I like things quick and easy, and the simple convenience of an electric razor just beats out the multiple steps involved in wet shaving (just like vitamin B5 acne treatment is more convenient than having to wash with a system of cleansers…hmmmm…). The downside to this is that when you’re dry shaving, the pull on your hair is even worse than when you’re wet shaving. When wet shaving with a normal razor, the shaving cream softens up your hair and prepares it to easily be cut (if you let it set in long enough, which many people don’t). Since you’re not using shaving cream with an electric, you really need to keep a your shaving habits consistent and shave before your beard gets too long. This way your shaves will be closer and your hair will have less friction pulling against those spinning blades. The fact is, consistency is simply more important for us dry-shavers.

Now if only B5 would take care of that razor bump on my chin…

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Well, I think I’ve finally put an end to the individual who has been spamming the Acne-Vitamins comments form. A helpful thread at webmasterworld contained some good advice that I’ve put to use, so now my formmail script is hard coded to prevent all but the most desperate spammers. It seems that an oversight in the script that I was using before could still have been exploited to send spam mail, but now the only person who should possibly be able to receive such mail is me, so hopefully this will be a decent deterrent to hackers, since configuring a spam sender for only one email address is obviously a waste of time. So far so good, results wise. The contact form still works fine for normal visitors, although the email field is required now.

In other news, it seems the postal service is still playing catch-up after Christmas. We’ve been notified by Acne Vitamins customers of a few late orders, and hopefully the USPS will get back up to speed shortly. At times like this it would be nice if Priority Mail included standard tracking numbers the way that UPS does, but alas, their only tracking service for normal (under $20) mailing options is delivery confirmation. DC is nice for knowing that a package has arrived, but it does nothing to ensure the package arrives, nor does it tell you where the package is if it hasn’t arrived yet, and so I find it’s more or less a useless option unless you’re sending something such as a check that you want to know arrived on time. In any case, I apologize for any orders that are taking longer to arrive than they should. You can be sure that all orders are being filled and sent promptly on our end.

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Well, business resumes as normal at Acne Vitamins today, and boy is there a lot of extra work to be done. We received more orders than expected over the holiday weekend, so there’s a big backlog to take care of, and then there’s a few deadlines to meet with our new marketing arrangements as well. We may start doing some print ads next year, although you probably will not see them unless you live in Florida (at least for the first part of the year). Online marketing can get expensive, but at least you get guaranteed returns, while offline advertising always involves a bit of a gamble.

Also, while experimenting with adding a watermarked background to Acne-Vitamins, I noticed a weird glitch in our html. It seems that the central table of our site shifts a few pixels to the left whenever you load a new page. I would never have noticed this if not for the background experiment, as it is very subtle. If you hit reload the page becomes centered again. Also, it only happens with Internet Explorer, not FireFox. The background was only a simple gradient and isn’t that important, but now I’m interested as to why exactly the pages shift like this, as I’ve never heard of such a thing happening before. If you visit the health links page and then reload you should see the change occur around the edges of the page (although sometimes you need to follow a link and then press back to see it).

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A late-night Merry Christmas from me!

It’s been a wonderful day of fun, food, and games with the family. Hope everyone out there is doing well, especially our troops overseas!

Our family has been playing a lot of the party game “Apples to Apples” today, and it really is a great game - very addictive and easy to pick up. My parents received it as a gift, and I’d highly recommend it for get togethers, even if you don’t normally like board games. I’ve also been dominating in Connect-4, if any of you dare to challenge me…

Business at Acne Vitamins will resume as normal after Boxing Day (our hours are tied to those of the postal service), so all of our weekend orders will ship out first thing Tuesday.

PS: Whoever was hacking my formmail seems pretty determined, so it’s time to set up that IP trapper…

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The current holiday sale at Acne Vitamins is actually the second sale that we’ve experimented with, the first being our back-to-school sale a few months back. Sale prices are nice for our customers, but they’re also a chance for us sellers to experiment with a little bit of market research.

The big change in our pricing structure with this sale was offering new quantity options such as a single bottle or 6-bottle supply, and it has been a little surprising to see the results (previously all sales were 2-bottle supplies). I had expected that the single bottle would attract a lot of new customers due to the lower price hurdle, but the fact is most new customers still go with the 2-bottle supply. Obviously, this is a good thing since your chances of seeing more dramatic clear skin improvement are a lot higher after the first month, and we recommend starting with the 2-bottle supply for this reason. Still it’s interesting to see that there are actually only a few more buyers that choose the single bottle over the 6-bottle bundle. Six bottle orders have gone up a lot, and most users that probably just bought 4 bottles in the past now buy 6 instead. There’s a good chance the current prices may rise a bit after the sale ends, but we’ll be sticking with the bundled-quantity selections regardless.

Winter is usually not the best time to sell acne products, especially those designed specifically to combat skin oil. When the air gets cold and dry during the winter, many people are less concerned about oily skin and more concerned about dry skin. Also, as it gets closer to Christmas people simply have more important purchases on their mind than acne products, and sometimes a bit less cash in their pockets. Our search engine data shows that a lot less people are actually searching for acne related terms this month, so it’s nice that the sale has helped us to weather this dry spell despite the site being a little less busy.

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Well, my new clear skin article has been published on all the major article sites now, it’s entitled “Treating Back and Body Acne” if you want to check it out. I’m sure Google will help you find it (Google likes article sites, unlike my site… -_- ) .

Anyways, after writing new articles I always like to look around at the other skin care articles that have recently been written. Most of the time, the majority of articles are either too common-sense or to out-there for my tastes (some of these alternative acne treatments can get pretty crazy), but one article caught my attention for it’s anti-vitamin B5 comments. Perhaps this person had a bad experience with B5 somehow, but the article didn’t really go into the reasoning behind its claims. Instead, the author just basically stated “B5 doesn’t work at all” and then moved on. OK, there’s always skeptics and it’s not like I haven’t heard such claims before, but most of the time they have the sense to add “for me” at the end, especially with so much evidence pointing in the opposite direction. I’m not even sure this particular author has ever tried B5.

However, what really blew his credibility was later in the article when he mentions that excess sebum being a cause of acne is merely an “acne myth”. That one almost made me laugh. If sebum is not a major cause of acne, why is it that the highest-strength prescription acne treatments directly target sebum production? Why are the most effective acne supplements, both those produced as regulated drugs and those which are natural supplements (such as b5 and zinc, both of which have medical evidence backing them), all agents that effect the regulation of your oil glands? The author of this article may have thought he was taking a shot at B5 sellers, but he’s also flying in the face of the medical community at the same time.

Now there are certainly specific cases when acne can be brought on by causes other than sebum, such as allergic reactions or bad habits that cause skin irritation. However, these cases are the exception, not the rule. The cause of most people’s acne is directly related to excess sebum, and getting your glands under control despite hormonal shifts is the key to taking back control of your skin. This is what makes both prescription treatments and vitamin B5 so effective for so many people.

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What better way to celebrate the holidays than with email spam!

Yes, despite a few precautions I had already put in place, some kind soul still managed to hack my formmail.cgi script to send myself and who knows who else a ton of spam emails. It seems to have just happened yesterday, so I luckily caught it and fixed the problem pretty quick. I’m not sure if it’s even possible for spam emails to be forwarded to others with the script settings I have at Acne-Vitamins, but this is actually what many hackers do when they exploit formmail — use it to spam a ton of other people and make it look like the site that is hosting the script is to blame, when actually the webmaster of the site may not even know that they’ve been hacked. It’s a nifty little trick that nearly impossible to trace unless you have ip trackers set up ahead of time.

Forms are great way to make customer contact both user-friendly and secure, so here’s the big secret of how to avoid/stop these attacks if you’re hosting a site that uses formmail: Just rename the file!

I had already renamed my formmail script at Acne Vitamins to something else, but I still had the word “mail” included in the file name. Automated hacking programs are getting smarter, so I would avoid using words like “form” or “mail” altogether when setting up your file. As soon as I changed the name, the spam came to complete stop.

Of course, if someone really wants to hack your mailing script, there are going to find a way to identify and exploit your files. In this case, make sure to setup some tracking software, consider changing your file directories and properties, and if it comes down to it, there are also sites which will host formmail services for you on their own secure servers and integrate these forms right into your page.

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Just wrote another skin care article. This one is about back and body acne - the causes, how it differs from facial acne, and how to treat it effectively. For those of you who have already visited our guide to getting rid of back and body acne on the site (under the clear skin guides link on the front page), there will not be that much new information, but it’s all nicely packed in there for people that have never strolled by here, and maybe a few of them will pay a visit after they read it.

One of the great benefits of vitamin B5 acne treatment is simply that it treats acne all over your body at once. Even if you do manage to find a topical acne product that works for your skin, hardly anyone can go through the trouble of treating an area such as their back with a cleanser, toner, and lotion (multiple times a day!). And even if they could, the thicker skin on your back and shoulders is going to be much more resistant to these treatments. They have acne body sprays and washes now, but I’ve yet to see anything that offers a real benefit above your average, normal body wash - and the most effective topical treatment, benzoyl peroxide, is simply not a viable alternative since it would bleach all your clothes!

Without a doubt, internal treatments are the way to go for treating and preventing back and body acne. Just make sure that you’re exfoliating properly to get rid of your current spots as fast as possible, because pimples can stay in the thick skin of your back for quite a long time if you don’t do anything about it; and as effective as B5 is, it helps more with prevention than with killing off current blemishes, so get yourself a good back scrubber if you need one.

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Well, the USPS is really slammed with business around this time of the year, and it seems that some orders are taking a little longer than they should to arrive. Sorry if anyone has had a package arrive a few days later than usual, but there’s not much we can do to get around the holiday crunch. Our local post office that we do drop-offs with had a line out the door today. I thought I was lucky since I only needed some stamps that I could get through the automated teller machine, but of course the machine had to break down halfway through my order! Honestly, most of our orders will probably still arrive on time without any problems, but if your package takes a few days longer than usual, you know why.

I’m actually still waiting for a one of the gifts I ordered to arrive as well, but I sure wouldn’t want to be sending out presents today and hoping everything will get there before Christmas. Business wise, despite the sale prices, Acne Vitamins purchases are starting to slow down around now, as people are probably spending all their cash on last minute presents and don’t have the spare time or spare change to worry about acne products. Oily skin also tends to be less of a problem for many people during the winter, but then, spring break is right around the corner ^_^.

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