Spam - html or text
It's not often that I open junk emails, it's hard to keep up with those at the offices to then come home and sort through all the forwards, prayers, and funnies, to then look at spam.
One recently did intrigued me, it came from Verizon Wireless. At first, I thought it was my cell phone bill, but I quickly saw through this, as the subject read "The LG Chocolate is here." What a clever subject line this was, it made me actually turn this spam into html so I could see the graphics, after all chocolate is my weakness.
The
LG Chocolate is part MP3 and part phone with the promises to be sweet and the tag line "Everybody loves chocolate." I think this is a very clever campaign and definitely out of the box. What I can't figure out is why is the phone black and red?
With expandable memory, navigation system, picture and video camera, games, and Bluetooth stereo, how can you go wrong? The bottom line is that with all these options it's not surprising that the campaign for sweet definitely promotes what the phone offers. With a price tag of $150, the deal is even sweeter.
Check it out.
Real Estate Appraisal
With interest on the rise and the boom of real estate market coming to an end, maybe is time to finally lock in that great interest rate you have been hearing about.
If you decide to do this, simply tell your bank that you want
The Barrett Appraisals Group to appraise your home. These folks are extremely professional, prompt and courteous.
They call before my appointment to ensure I still remembered, kind of like the doctor's office does. They were on time and extremely thorough to ensure that the value of my home is what it is supposed to be.
The bottom line is that when you find someone who provides a service that is above and beyond what you expect, you want to pass the word. In this day and age, it is rare to find people who still care and perform their duties as advertise, these folks went above and beyond, as such, I highly recommend
them for your next appraisal.
Detecting IE7
With the release of Internet Explorer 7, I have been doing a lot of testing to ensure that all my sites will look as thy should in this new browser. I downloaded the beta version, which by the way I find very user friendly and way more stable than any other previous IE versions.
I found out that some of my styles and absolute positions weren't working as previously intended. During my research, I founded very hard to find an easy way of detecting the newly release browser, especially in a manner to which I wouldn't have to revisit as the beta becomes the standard.
I finally found a way via Microsoft's MSDN,it is done using something that has been in place for a long while now, but I just never need to use this. It is called conditional comments. Here is the usage:
< !--[if lte IE 6] >
code here for browsers equal to or previous to IE6
<![endif]-->
<!--[if gt IE 6]>
code here for browsers after IE6
<![endif]-->
<![if !gte IE 6] >
code here for browsers other than IE
<![endif] >
There are a multitude of other options that you can view and explore by visiting
Microsoft's Web site.
The bottom line is that you are not alone out there. If you find yourself stuck in a small issue, don't drown in that glass of water,turn to the Web and the answer is soon to come up by simply doing a little research and a lot of testing.
Music for your health
Recently I came across an article that spoke of relaxation and health. Apparently the sounds of wind chimes are a major contributor to allowing people to relax. Makes sense, you're in the outdoors, a gentle breeze followed by a gentle tune can be relaxing.
I typically don't like wind chimes, I find them annoying, as a matter of fact, I find every repetitive sound annoying. However, in my search for health and much needed relaxation I came across
Musical Windchimes.com Their wind chimes seem different and I liked that they provided
sample sounds for each of their products.
Besides, unlike many ecommerce sites, I enjoyed the design and flow of
this site. The purchase process was good and simple. Free shipping on purchases over $75 was very encouraging when you compared to going to one of those craft fairs on your town green. Most vendors charge over $100 for a wind chime, while these folks start at $45 and most of their products are under $100, and perfectly tuned.
The bottom line is that most small businesses don't take the time to design a proper site. It is understandable, most folks starting a business don't have the cash flow to hire a designer and rather spend their money in inventory. What these folks failed to realize is that a Web site is the first thing a person sees, if they see a dinky site, they will most likely decided to go shop at a major outlet like
Amazon as poor appearance encourages lack of trust. You wouldn't open a top notch store in the ghetto, so why give your site a ghetto appearance.
Google at risk to loose its trademark
Yesterday the term 'google' was entered officially into the English language. The problem is that Merriam-Webster this wee announce the entrance of the word as a verb with the lower case 'g.'
Google in term release an announcement this week notifying of their fear to loose their trademark to the English Language. The worst has happen, the verb to google is now synonymous with the action of doing a search using an internet search engine. This is the equivalent of what happened to Coca Cola. Coke has now become the synonym for a cola soft drink. When you enter into a restaurant and order a coke, often time they give you a Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, or otherwise.
The bottom line is that to retain your identity, you must discourage your company name from being used in everyday language. This is a catch 22 situation though. You want your company name to be known, you want people to use it and talk about it with others, but at what point do you want to avoid crossing the line, that's up to you. I don't think google will suffer or loose visitors, but the English language has now evolved. What technological idioms will come next?
Yahoo and Store Hosting
So I'm working with someone in creating a store and ran into a small problem. My file was working fine, until I decided to add an include file. For those of you who don't know, an include file, is a chunk of html code that you can use over and over again within your pages by simply calling the include function. In php this code looks like:
< include(filename.inc) ? >
So I call text support and right off the bat Roy tells me "I'm sorry, but Yahoo support doesn't offer php or html support." I tried to remain calm, as this is clearly not a php issue, but instead an issue with the fact that although we purchase a php hosting solution, Yahoo Store Tags just don't work with a filename that has an extension of php.
Roy offered to send me some informational text via email that "was going to help fix my issue", I promptly offered him my email address and cordially said goodnight. A few minutes later I receive an email from the tech support team, I eagerly opened it to find out a document stating that which the Tech Support ID10T had just explained, "Yahoo does not offere HTL, PHP, MYSQL, or Perl support. You can learn more by visiting... some Yahoo half ass link."
After getting over my frustation with Yahoo, I came across a wonderful
forum post, which promptly offered all the help I needed.
To save you the trouble of reading the solution, here it is:
Go to the table editor in your catalog manager section. Edit the default table and add a custom field. Give it a name like MyHeader, then give it a type of big-text and don't require it. Save the table.Now, go into your catalog and create a new item. Call it say "htmlholder". Fill out the required fields, make it unorderable and untaxable, and put the contents of the file you wanted to include in the MyHeader fieldSave the item and publish the changes to your catalogIn the HTML file you'll use on the site, use the following store tag... ystore_catalog id=htmlholder field=MyHeader format=html -->The bottom line is that although there are a lot of hosters out there, this time we decided to use one with a big name to avoid the hastles of dealing with a smaller Web hoster. Unfortunately, it seems that just because you are a big corporation doesn't mean you operate as such. True to the hosting, we were able to find a half ass solution for a half ass hoster.
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