The credit crunch has started to hit buy-to-let landlords, with mortgages for investors looking to rent out properties beginning to "dry up", research has shown.

The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics) said it was becoming increasingly difficult for would-be landlords to enter the market.

As part of its monthly survey of letting agents, Rics asks agents whether they are seeing more or fewer landlords entering the market and renting out their properties.

For the first time since it started its survey in 1998, more surveyors reported a fall in new landlord instructions than a rise. Experts said this was the most worrying sign yet that the buy-to-let boom is coming to an end.

Read the full story at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/03/06/nbtol106.xml

People put up their own websites for different reasons. Others just want to be heard. Some love sharing their work, ideas, talents, and resources with other people. There are several who put up websites to earn out of it. And there are people who want to do all of these, so they end up making a website cut out of their own personal preferences.

But how despite the many reasons a person may have for building a website, only one thing holds true – he or she have to make their websites popular enough so that its purpose can be served. Your views can't be heard if nobody can find their way to your site. You can't share anything with a site that has virtually no traffic. And you will never earn from it at all if no one would come and inspect your web pages to check out your wares. Web page popularity is what gives you visitors and makes your site saleable to others.

There are different ways of gauging the popularity of a website. More often than not, big search engines have a say as to how popular a particular website is, at least as far as their search network is concerned. For instance, Google has a different way of assessing web page popularity from Yahoo, MSN, or Alexa. But given these different search engines, they are credible enough and produce congruent results.

So, what are the advantages of owning a popular website? Well, you'll get at the top of search results, first and foremost. Imagine your site coming up on the first page when a certain keyword is typed on the search engine box. When this happens, there are high chances that internet surfers would click your site to check out what you've got in there. But if your web page popularity is low, don't expect that you'll get to the first page. You might get on the fourth or fifth, maybe. And if your site is that deep down in the ranks, visitors might not get to your page anymore. Chances are, they have the information they are looking for on the first two pages of the search engine results. So, why should they travel until the fifth page?

Webmasters should strive to increase their page ranking and popularity right after they have made their sites. Or more importantly, they could create their sites so that they become search engine friendly. Search engine friendly sites are sites that are optimized for search engine popularity. The more popular your site is, the more visitors and the more income you can generate from it.

Making your web page popular is quite a task. First, you have to select a specified key word on your site and sprinkle on your site's content. You can also write for article directories using the same keywords and lead them back to your site with the use of back links. You can also send those back links to different web directories so that they become popular as your web page.

But why does people acquire religions and abide by its rules still? Why are there a lot of people who think that religion is necessary in their lives despite the fact that they can never sense the presence of that supreme being their regard so highly about? The answer is simple – people need to hold on to something so that they could provide some answers to life's most daunting questions.

What do you do if someone who is close to you suddenly die? You would definitely feel misery, longing, and confusion. It is very hard to rationalize why he has to go when he did. The easier answer to all of this is the fact that God simply willed it all to happen.

Despite the many types of religions these days, only one thing is common to all of them. They all give a person a glimmer of hope that the suffering they are experiencing right at that time is something temporary. And that life is will get better with the grace of God.

Whether those statements have strong basis or not, it really doesn't matter. Science has long ceased to give explanations to life's mysteries, including religion. What science did was just to create boundaries of what they can explain and what religion supposedly covers.

People are free to think and believe on something or someone. While it is not evident in all places of the earth, people should be given the chance to choose his or her religion, depending upon what he or she believes. Religion is neither inherited nor thought. It is more felt and experienced. You close encounter to your God cannot be determined by another person attesting to it using his own accounts. You can only make yourself a believer if you really accept everything presented to you as true.

Atheists are the people who don't believe in gods. They are much entitled to their beliefs, as much as the religious is. It all just boils down to creating harmony and accord to all people of the world, whether he is a believer or not.

The same goes for people with different religions. Muslims believe in Allah. Catholics believe in Jesus. These two concepts are different from each other. And yet, there is a point of congruency somewhere. While it is very hard to convert a true believer from one religion to another, letting others be is already a big accomplishment.

At the end of the day, it is not the question of what religion is right and which one will take you to heaven. It is still how you live your life today. It would all boil down to how much you added color to other's people life. It is still how much of a person you have become to make this world a better place to live in.

E-commerce means electronic commerce. It is composed of two components, the EDI and the EFT facilities. EDI corresponds to electronic data exchange. It is the part that checks the orders and all the pertinent data that is related to the order. EFT means electronic funds transfer. It is what manages the sending of funds from a credit card or a bank account. This is the more delicate half as failure to ensure a secured connection could lead to identity thefts and similar grave problems.

The Internet is a big marketplace. A lot of retail companies had made it big in the Internet because they are able to tap into e-commerce plain and easy. But how their e-commerce site looks like on the outside is not the only thing they are concerned of. They also have to ensure total customer satisfaction, privacy, and security at all times.

Popular payment gateway providers today are PayPal, Google Checkout, and World-Pay. To integrate their services in your site, you just have to apply to their merchant account services so your checkout page redirects to their secure site when delicate information like credit card number is being processed.

Besides, the whole transaction doesn't end with the giving of credit card numbers. The credit card also has to be processed and verified to check for validity. This means that the issuing bank will be contacted and checked. The transaction is completed once the card is authenticated and the money is charged or debited from the account.

Because the Internet is filled with hackers and identity thieves, it is very important that multiple security filters are applied to the site so that no unauthorized people can get to the sensitive data the site contains in its database. Different layers of security are required and every single access to the site has to be evaluated for hacker attacks. In the Internet world, hacking could happen any minute of the day. Therefore, it is very important for e-commerce sites to be tested regularly everyday.

With all of these said, it is very clear to see that maintaining an e-commerce site on your lonesome is not easy. In fact, it is even impossible to do single-handedly. No e-commerce site has been successful by putting up a site independent of today's popular payment gateways. Unless your business is to be a payments processor, there's no other way to go but to commission a payment gateway to help you out.

If you're thinking of setting up an e-commerce website, you have to consider which payment processor you have to sign up for. And it follows that you choose only the best company around.

There is good news for all the PS3 fans out there who would like a console different in colour then Black. Following in the footsteps of Microsoft, Sony has decided to release PS3 console in ceramic white ( MS did the other way around from White to Black )

The console has already been released in Japan and had a good response. Looking at this, Sony has now decided that they will release this new model in other countries where they had good sales figure. This mean that fans in US, Europe & UK will soon be able to their hands on this new snow white console.

Let’s hope that they release this beauty sooner rather then later :)