calmighty » Technology

Xobni Makes My Inbox Happy

Mon, 05 May 2008 23:01:39 +0000

I love Outlook. It is probably the best thing that’s come out of Redmond. Now, with Xobni, it’s even better. Xobni is now in full public beta. So, even though I have some invites, it appears you don’t have to ask me for one.

What’s it do? Simple, it aggregates all of your messages and attachments and presents them in a sidebar view so that it’s easy to keep organized. Sick of cleaning out your inbox? I was. Now I don’t think I’ll even bother anymore. Here’s the feature list:

Fast email search
Rankings, graphs and statistics about how you and your contacts use email
Navigate email by people — who’s connected by email
Threaded conversations — click a message and see the entire thread
Looking for attachments to conversations? Look no more — they’re right in the sidebar
Phone number are extracted from email and appear in the sidebar
And other stuff I haven’t even figure out yet

I had to call a contact to day and clicked on her email message. Her phone number jumped right out at me. I have 500+ contacts and finding a phone number can be a pain. Not anymore.

Part of being productive and successful boils down to how you manage your time. Software like xobni will definitely make me more productive when it comes to managing my email. Now, let’s see if it can make me even more successful. That would be a crazy trick! Using Xobni? Tell me what you think in the comments below.

Desktop Virtualization with Dexpot

Thu, 01 May 2008 19:02:04 +0000

I’m a huge fan of multitasking. At any given time I have ten or more programs, windows and widgets open on my desktop. Although desktop virtualization is common to Linux and Mac users, I didn’t realize there was a windows solution available. That is, until I found Dexpot.

Dexpot allow you to have up to 20 virtual desktops at your fingertips. A simple click on the Dexpot tray icon brings up a desktop selection window (see screenshot below). Need a fresh desktop? Just click an empty square, your desktop is created and you are taken directly to it. Switching between desktops is as simple as clicking Alt+1 through Alt+4. You can define numerous hotkeys to make managing your desktops a snap.

Efficiency experts will tell you to work on one task at a time. I’m not buying it. I move from task to task and focus my work based on two criteria a) priority b) mood. If it’s super important, I’m getting it knocked out. But, if it’s anything less than urgent I work on whatever suits my mood. If I get bored I move to something else and come back to it later. Now, Dexpot lets me segment all of my work into discreet virtual desktops each with their own purpose.

Dexpot runs on nearly every version of Windows (including XP and Vista) and is free for private, non-commercial use. I’ve been running it on XP using two monitors with no problems. So, go get your geek on and grab a copy of Dexpot for yourself.

WordPress 2.5.1 – Update Now

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 01:50:35 +0000

An update to the recently released WordPress 2.5 is now available. If you’re like me and running WP, you need to update now as this release fixes an important security issue:

We recommend everyone update immediately, particularly if your blog has open registration. The vulnerability is not public but it will be shortly. In addition to the security fix, 2.5.1 contains over 70 bug fixes.

Be safe WordPressers!

Get a favicon on Blogger or Other Blog Hosts

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:29:36 +0000

I wrote about the importance of a favicon for your blog or Website and how to get one, but left a crucial piece of the puzzle out. Want to use your own favicon on Blogger or another blog hosting service? If you have access to a server or image sharing account, it’s pretty easy.

Just edit the header of your theme/template and insert the following between the tags:

Note, you’ll have to figure out how to edit the header with your particular blog host. For example, in Blogger, log in to your dashboard, choose layout, then choose the tab titled “Edit HTML”. Insert your relative link to your favicon then save your template changes.

Depending on how you upload files to your image host or server, you’ll either FTP in or upload to your directory. If you need some for favicon hosting, here is a short list of free image hosting for your favicons.

Once you’ve made the changes, you will likely need to clear your browser’s cache before you’ll see your custom favicon in the address bar.

Kick Ass Email with FuseMail

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 17:43:20 +0000

Sure, you can use Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail or whatever as your email provider and get good things like forwarding, your own domain, POP3 access, but if you want kick ass email you have to check out FuseMail. But, before you click, no it’s not free.

However, it is super affordable. At $0.99 per email account per month (minimum 10) and 1GB of storage, the price is looking right. But that’s not all. FuseMail has a ton of other sweet features. From a brand-able webmail client (that’s pretty slick I might add) to consolidating all of your other emails into one account to calendaring, contacts, notes, tasks, syncing — FuseMail has it all. Heck, I even use them as backup DNS for some of my sites. Their list of features is ridiculous. Heck, I even use them as backup DNS for some of my sites.

I’ve been using them for just over a year now and there service and support is hands down the absolute best. Disclaimer: I’m writing this because I love them. I don’t know anyone at the company and am not paid a cent by sending you their way.

If you are looking for a crazy, rock solid email provider, you can’t go wrong with FuseMail.

Free PDF Software Makes eBooks Easy

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 13:54:15 +0000

If you are a subject matter expert, it’s time to fire up your favorite editing application and write an eBook. eBooks are a great incentive to get visitors to your site to subscribe to your blog, newsletter, etc. in exchange for a free informative eBook.

Trouble is, if you don’t have Adobe Acrobat (the full version not the reader) producing a PDF is going to cost you. Or is it? Well, judging by the title of this post there’s a way to do it free.

The is an open source project called PDFCreator that lets you print PDFs from any application that has print functionality. And, it’s totally free as in beer. I’ve been using PDFCreator for years. Whether I want to deliver a proposal in a format that isn’t editable or provide a universally accessible version of any document or presentation, PDFCreator is a great solution.

Now, if you do need to edit or collaborate, you’ll need Acrobat, but for most uses PDFCreator will fill the bill.

Shared IP Addresses and Hosting

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 14:23:46 +0000

Monika at Easy WordPress wrote the other day about the risks of shared hosting. I thought I’d clarify and write a little more about the issue here.

Using a shared hosting plan for your Websites or blogs can be problematic if you are sharing your IP address with other domains not under your control. Yesterday’s post about name based virtual hosts described how one IP address can have many domains. What I didn’t mention is that if you use a shared hosting plan where you do not control all of the domains on a given server, you are accepting a certain level of risk. As Monika pointed out, what if a domain on the same IP address you use is a spammer?

Once discovered, many networks may block access to that IP address. Also, what if there are sites that contain adult content? Lots of employers use filters such as Websense to filter the content available on the corporate network. Can you afford to be offline or banned by Google AdSense? Or any other revenue stream for that matter?

It pays to know who your neighbors are. There’s a neat tool called My IP Neighbors which allows you to enter your IP or domain name and returns a list of any other domains hosted on the IP address associated with your domain.

If like me, you are using an inexpensive host to incubate your sites, there isn’t a lot to risk. However, once you start to scale, it makes a lot of sense to at least make sure you move up to a dedicated IP address if not a virtual private server or dedicated server. Sure, it’s a lot more expensive, but it does mitigate a bunch of risk.

Have you ever had a hosting problem due to problematic neighbors? Share your story in the comments.

Email Campaign Management

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:20:00 +0000

I’m not afraid of technology and damn it, I’m a cheap bastard. Unfortunately, that arrogance and frugality came back to bite me this morning. I learned a hard lesson about why you need to use a professional email campaign management solution when you are managing large email campaigns.

Yesterday, I triggered an email campaign distributed to roughly 260,000 recipients. I’ve done this in the past to a slightly smaller distribution without too much difficulty. Not this time. For my list, bounce backs come into an address that I download and move to a bounce folder using an Outlook rule. I then siphon the email addresses associated with the bounces. I then run a script against that file to opt those addresses out so that they don’t receive any further email. It’s a pretty simple, cost-effective solution.

Well, I opened Outlook yesterday morning and saw I had about 65,000 messages to download! Yikes! In fact, if I had actually tried using Outlook to download them, I’d be downloading email for the next week. So, I had to set up Outlook Express to download the messages. The good thing about Outlook Express is that it is way faster than Outlook when it comes to message processing. This is especially true if you have lots of rules or add ins running.

So, back to campaign management. You can go a couple different ways here. You can either outsource your email distribution, host and run your own solution or utilize a software as a service (SaaS) provider. I’ve done all three in the past. Outsourcing is very expensive, but you don’t have to do anything. It’s nearly hands off once you are set up. Using a SaaS set up is the next logical option. It’s cheaper and you don’t have to invest in the hardware and software. Generally, you pay a fee depending on how many messages you wish to send in a given month. Obviously, with large lists, this can be pretty expensive. Next, is licensing software and running your own server. This isn’t for the faint of heart. In my case, the distribution is sent by my server. The good news is I have people a lot smarter than me managing it. Deliverability is a huge concern and you need to get the necessary relationships in place with the major ISPs or your email will get blocked. For that reason, you really don’t want to send messages, say, from your desktop to large lists. Most ISPs will raise a red flag as soon as you start sending massive amounts of email. Some of them will even suspend your Internet connection until they can figure out what the hell is going on.

Moreover, the biggest advantage of using a service or having list management software on your server is it takes all of the administrative overhead away. Things like processing opt outs and bounces can be a huge pain. The software takes care of this for you. You don’t even have to think about it.

The downside is extracting the data from a database for your distribution segments and then maintaining those segments. It’s tedious and time consuming. Plus, you are still relying on a third party to get it right or for you to configure it correctly.

What solution do you employ to manage your email campaigns? Tell me the good, bad and ugly — I’ll have a very empathetic ear.

Name based virtual hosts

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 12:20:01 +0000

Yeah, I’m a geek, but understanding the technology behind your Internet venture is a must in order to be successful.

Name based virtual hosts is a sweet way to host more than one domain name on a single IP address/hosting account. This is especially handy if you have a large number of domains with micro-sites or niche content that don’t get a ton of traffic. As I mentioned before, I use GoDaddy to host this blog. However, I also use it to host a number of other domains that I’m currently marketing. GoDaddy has configured its servers (whether Windows or Linux) to examine the host name of the request and then direct the request to the appropriate site/folder on the server to call the correct site.

A side benefit to the rest of the Internet is that you aren’t using up already scarce IP addresses. IP addresses are the unique numbers that identify each device publicly connected to the Internet. When you type a domain name in your browser, the domain name system (or DNS) translates that name into a number — the IP address. Unfortunately, there are only about 4 billion IP addresses and they are beginning to run short in supply.

Having only one or two hosting accounts versus dozens not only keeps costs down, it also makes each site easier to manage because they’re all on only one or two IP addresses which means that you are only connecting to or managing one or two FTP accounts.

Before deciding on a host for your site, see if they allow unlimited domains on one account and use name based virtual hosts. It will really help as you continue to roll out your marketing destinations.

Get a favicon.ico for your site

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:59:14 +0000

Look in your browser’s address bar. See that “C”? That’s a favicon. The purpose of the favicon is to replace the default icon displayed by your browser of choice in the address bar, tabs and in your bookmarks. The advantage of having a favicon is that it is a good way to highlight your site. It helps it stand out in bookmarks making it easier to identify by those who might wish to visit your site or to find by those who bookmarked it awhile ago.

A favicon is a 16×16 pixel image. You can fire up your image editor and create one on your own or you can use a free service like favicon.cc to generate an icon you design. They have a really simple and effective browser-based tool for you to use to easily create your very own favicon. Check out some of the icons that others have produced with the tool to see what’s possible (or even to get some ideas).

Once you’ve created your favicon, put it in the root folder of your website and you’re all set. Go ahead and clear your browser’s cache to see it in your own browser.

In internet marketing, every edge you can get is worth it.