No doubt by now you know I am a huge WordPress fan – sure there are things that irritate me but so far they have been livable. I also love, love, love developing and modifying themes particularly to use a CMS. Over time, the WordPress community has been inundated by well… less ethical designers. First it was requiring link backs, then it was ads, then it was hidden ads and there are also reports of adding stuff that ‘call home’ or inject malicious code that harm your visitors or even steal your traffic. A shame. Problem is, most theme users don’t have the ability or resources at hand to check these themes thoroughly. I recently bumped into this really cool plugin – Theme Authenticity Checker and quickly took it for a quick run. First impressions – neato! I think this is much needed to help anyone novice or expert take a quick look. The plugin itself is pretty straightforward and looking inside the code, there doesn’t seem to be anything malicious inside this plugin itself – that’s important too! What you should know: The plugin did warn me of two themes which came packaged with a contact.php Page template. Read More→
As promised, a few days ago, here’s a theme based off Kubrick. This was originally done for my husband’s blog. At that time, I didn’t have the time to code it up from scratch so I used Michael Heilemann’s fabulous theme as a basis. No hidden code or crazy linking terms. Download here to by clicking on the screen shot.
Have you got a million tasks at hand? On any given day, I have my own tasks as well as tasks that have been handed out to others that I need to manage. While there are many excellent task managers out there, I believe I’ve found my ideal tool over the weekend. One of the most important features I wanted is something that would be able to create tasks by email. When I found Hiveminder, I thought it was the answer but later found out it’s more than what I asked for which makes it so sweet. You see, not only can Hiveminder create tasks by email, you can also update these tasks by email. Also, the person you are working with does not need to have a Hiveminder account. Confused? Let me explain. Inside Hiveminder, I can set up a special email that clients can use to email me whenever they have a new task for me. Any email sent to that super secret address will automatically be converted into a task. I can then choose to accept, decline or ignore the task. When I do, a notification email will be kicked back to the client and a code (much like a Read More→
Right now, most of us consume video content online, on our computers. But, like audio, more and more people will demand their video content to go. I still remember very briefly touching on this oh maybe 1-2 years ago. Then, portable video players were very expensive. Now? Shoot, you can buy a video/mp3 player for under $50. Then, I pondered about the popularity of screen videos to-go since these are such tiny screens, you can hardly see anything. Still do – but you know what? People are weird – me including. Sometimes it’s not the clarity of video we want but rather the rough gist of it. Have you seen some of the video quality on places like YouTube? You know then it’s not great. This leads me to conclude, sometimes, it’s not the quality of video but what people get out of it. Well, am one of those people. As a long time subscriber of Reese Report – I love the content but sitting through the videos is a bit tough for me. I’m antsy and can’t sit to view something longer than 10 minutes. But if I don’t watch the videos, I may miss something important. Besides, who Read More→
Been absent from here lately. That’s because I’ve been working on a lot of different things. Including two very interesting services. They are both low tech products but given the extra zing with the latest technologies. I’m talking about Instant Teleseminar and Send Out Cards. These are by no means ground breaking products, but made much better with today’s technology. Most of us don’t really see how services like these can work for us. So, I wrote a case study – A Phone Call And A Postcard. How simple tools can help improve your conversion. It’s a quick read, under 5 pages. Click here to download. There are also details inside the document, how you can witness these two tools in action on May 30th, 2007.
Here’s an interesting question for you. How many email addresses do you have? Too many? It doesn’t matter if they are all mailboxes or just forwarded. As you build more sites, you know the email addresses start getting a life of their own. That’s what happened to me. Each site had it’s own [email protected] address, had it’s own support email address and on and on. Well I had enough of it. Last week, I spent some time going through all the different email addresses on all the different web sites I own. Those that aren’t in use anymore, got deleted. Those that are, were directed to a bounce back message telling people the email is no longer active and to contact us through out help desk. This should create a single contact point for all websites. It was such a big sense of accomplishment. Then you know what? That nagging feeling came in. What if my team wanted to contact me on an urgent support request? After some thinking, I settled on using SMS because: I didn’t want my team to spend money on long distance (or international calling fees) to call or leave me a voicemail. I didn’t want yet Read More→
We can now expect [tag]Google [/tag]to keep a tighter watch on our landing pages – as if they weren’t already. Reported in the Inside AdWords blog, Google pulled all ads that redirected people to malicious sites that would attempt to install malware on your computer. As a consumer, I very much want them to review the pages they send me to because my computer (and data) is at risk. In today’s world that’s a pretty high risk. As an advertiser, though I’m not super worried. Yes, it does mean we’ll probably have to jump through more hoops to advertise. Some might even see this as advertising censorship – though that’s a bit drastic from where I stand. All this again boils down to a simple thing John Reese and Alice Seba keep drumming into my thick skull. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Some businesses live (and die) on one or at best, two traffic sources and when there’s trouble, their business goes South. In a traditional brick and mortar business, if you have a store on a busy street and the city decides to divert their traffic through a new highway, most businesses suffer badly. It’s not easy for them to relocate or Read More→
I’m so excited to announce, I just uploaded my new theme TBMClover to [tag]WordPress[/tag]’s Theme Viewer. This is a simple, beautiful and very functional theme designed by my friend and designer extraordinaire, Nola Cooper. The theme also has a lot of functions. For example, if you want to change the header image, you can do it directly from WordPress Presentation dashboard. It’s also widget ready. As a widget user, I cannot imagine a releasing a theme that doesn’t do widgets. Below is a screen shot of the theme Download it from here. Enjoy!
That seems like a hot question these days. A friend of mine created a video using Windows Movie Maker. Now she wants to put it on her website. But she’s not sure how. Here’s my suggestion. The quick way is to upload the WMV file to your site then use a code like this in your pages (make sure you’re pointing to your video) Code: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 <object NAME="Player" WIDTH="320" HEIGHT="240" align="left" hspace="10" type="application/x-oleobject" CLASSID="CLSID:6BF52A52-394A-11d3-B153-00C04F79FAA6"> <param NAME="URL" VALUE="yourfile.wmv></param><param> </param><param NAME="AUTOSTART" VALUE="false"></param> <param name="showControls" value="true"></param> <embed WIDTH="320" HEIGHT="240" align="left" hspace="10" SRC="yourfile.wmv" TYPE="application/x-oleobject" AUTOSTART="false"> </embed> </object> This is by far the quickest, easiest solution. However – I would advise you to use Flash. Any web video is better with flash because of compatibility. WMV is a pain to view on Macs and Linux, MOV is a pain on Windows. How to you make your video flash? Convert it using a converter like Super. Upload the SWF to your site then use the following code to embed it into your web page (again make sure you edit the code to enter the video’s URL properly) Code: 1 2 3 4 5 6 <object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"WIDTH="550" HEIGHT="400" id="myMovieName"> <param NAME=movie Read More→
Many of us today work with people virtually. I myself have partners and team members who live no where near me. So sometimes there are challenges that aren’t present when you have a physical office location. For example, how do several people check the same email account and still know which emails have been read or unread and which have been replied to? This was the very same question someone asked me recently. My co-worker and I are going to be co-managing an email account. We’d both receive not only the incoming messages but also all the replies that we send through that account so we can keep up with quotes to clients, clarifications and so forth. She handles everything until 4pm daily and then I take over from there. Here’s the problem. When I check the mail, she obviously doesn’t get a copy and when she checks it, I don’t get a copy and neither of us get a copy of the replies without CCing one another to a different address. I set mine to leave the message on the server but will she be able to download them since the server will recognize that is has already been read? I don’t suppose you have Read More→
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