I found that the AddThis.com tag in secure mode is a bit slow, sometimes preventing the remainder of the page from loading.
To prevent that, add the defer=”defer” to the script:
 <script type=”text/javscript” src=”….” defer=”defer”></script>
That is a nice trick I’ve never before and I wish I had. It can be useful with many other sites/scripts.
PRE FLIGHT
Email subject line
http://www.emaillabs.com/tools/from_subject_line_tool_popup.html
Convert to css to inline
http://www.soldesignco.com/dev-csstoinline.php
More Email pre-flight
http://code.dunae.ca/premailer.web/
Due to the International Financial Crisis :-), I decided to strip down my landline to the bare-bones, just local calls, not call features, no voice mail, nothing but a dial tone.
My local AT&T phone bills were way out of hand expensive and every member of my house has a cell phone. Why do I even need a landline? Well, in South Florida, landlines can be handy after hurricanes as they usually are the last thing to ‘die’….they’re old and reliable. Since we no longer have the hosted Voice Mail, we bought an old-school answering machine (remember those?!) They are awesome 
You can hear people leaving a message and you can even pick up the phone in the middle of the message…LOL. That ability to pick up a call during the message really eased the (lack of) Caller ID withdrawal syndrome.
The last issue to address was the fact that I call my family and friends in South America & Europe and since I didn’t have a Long distance plan from AT&T, I needed to have alternative means to reach my overseas loved ones.
One alternative was to go back to Voip companies but I didn’t want to create another monthly bill with Vonage or Packet8 so I decided to use Skype, which I am already a member. However, I don’t want to boot the PC for every call. I wanted something more transparent and decided to get the GE Skype Phone, Model 28310.
I now have this for a few weeks ago and I have to say I am really enjoying it. I truly forget it’s a voip gadget. It does feel just like a regular phone.
The device consists of a gizmo that hooks up to your router and a your-average-looking wireless handset.
Once you power up the phone for the first time, you’ll be prompted to enter or create your skype account, then the device may or may not do a firmware update. In order to call someone not on the Skype network, like a landbased or cell phone number, you will first need to buy this feature from Skype. Among many products you can buy from Skype (which I am not going to go over in this article) I decided to buy Skype Credits, which is essentially a Pre-paid service. I bought $ dollars of credit and I must say they go a looonnnng way. Of course International rates vary by World city and whether you are calling a land line or mobile phone but believe me they are really inexpensive.
The quality is also very good. I am thorough happy with this GE device and Skype.
Let me know if you have any questions or comments!
Several months ago, Mike Waldron surrendered his vBulletin mysql dump of the very useful “Unnoficial Covad Virtual PBX Forum”. At the time, I converted that Forum to Drupal, which was a fun migration in itself.
However, I didn’t get a domain nor promoted it any further. Right now, it remains a subdirectory of Otavio.org but I linked it from my Blog’s home page and hope to get it spidered and hopefully some activity can come out of it.
One of the many good email practices that should be consistently adopted when sending Mass emails is to include somewhere in the footer, the actual ‘Send to’ email present in the mailing list.
Many business today are sending email to their CRM contacts and in some cases, they are including footer messages like, “If you’d like to be removed from future mailings, please reply with REMOVE in the Subject line.”
That is fine (and dandy) but in many cases, you will receive a REMOVE request from an email only to discover that that email is not present on the mailing list.
Why? Â In many cases, you are probably sending emails to addresses that forward to other emails, such as aliases like “job@somecompany.com” or sometimes we send to “bob@somecompany.com” whereas “pete@somecompany.com” gets bob’s email because bob doesn’t work there anymore or because bob is on vacation….get it?
For the time being, let’s not discuss why this “non-automated” process is bad (automating may not be an option) and instead, let’s try to improve upon this practice.
The better way to do this is to ‘merge’ the destination email in the body of the communication itself.
For instance, if the merge variable is $email you’d want to use this:
“If you want be removed, please reply with “Remove $email” as the Subject line.”
Hope this helps. If you have any suggestions, questions, leave a comment below.
Hello, I am a PC but I am trying not to do Windows!
After a bad Vista experience at my job, I’ve since been dreading the end of the life-cycle of our current Windows workstations and laptops. Not only at work, but at home too.
For a long time, I’ve been thinking about switching back to the Mac OS, the platform that I was using during my music production days, back at Berklee College of Music.
Alternatively, I’ve been enamored with Linux as a desktop platform.
Why? Hmm, it’s free…and I love a good Bargain … it’s far more elegant than the Microsoft stuff … it’s different and exciting.
Is it good/better/worth it? Well, let’s find out. I will be posting some articles about my experiences.
I’ve been playing with different flavors for the past few years but now I decided to take a good shot at replacing windows with Linux and I recently installed Ubuntu 8 on a couple of spare laptops.
The installation process was fantastic. First of course, you want to download the Ubuntu image and mount it on a CD…just one good ole’ CD-R.
Ubuntu installation
One thing that really impressed me was the hardware compatibility. For instance, if you rebuild a brand PC such as Dell, HP, Sony, from a generic Windows CD, you will undoubtely have to get specific drivers from the manufacturer which can be a pain. It’s specially a pain when the Network card doesn’t work and you can’t access the Internet to get the darn missing drivers!
With Ubuntu, I ran the installation on an HP/Compaq and a Sony Vaio laptos with NO ISSUES. The OS recognized everything, including Battery, WiFi receiver, Video cards.
Just in the setup alone, one big point scored for Ubuntu.
…I’ll share more of my experience at a later post…
In 1956, 3 brazilian boyscouts embarked into a World Tour…from South Africa to the Middle East, onto Europe, then down through the Americas
