Well, this is a first. I’ve never seen an SEO / web marketing fortune cookie before. I guess even Chinese restaurants need to stay current with the times…
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SEO / Web Marketing Fortune Cookie
Mika
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Ubiquity Commands
Mika
Have you heard about Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs? If not, YOU NEED TO check it out. I believe this is absolutely going to change the web how we know it. Is it web3.0? I’m not sure, but I bet someone will come up with a buzzword for it.
Don’t bother reading the page at first, just watch the video (embedded below) to get an idea about how powerful this really is:
Basically Ubiquity lets you build your own on-demand mashups. Not in the sense that yahoo pipes does, but in the sense that any user can just type what they want to do, and embed that in an email or perform actions like calculate math shown on a page without cut & paste, etc. I’d call it micro-mashups.
Well, I built my first Ubiquity command to see how easy it would be, and it’s super simple. (Ok, I just took someone else’s code as a base - since it’s all OS anyway - and changed/added some things.)
How to use it:
- Install Ubiquity Firefox Extension
Reboot your browser (all FF extensions require this, which is a pain in my opinion, but the good news is that any command you subscribe to won’t require the browser reboot) - Subscribe to the command. Give it a few seconds to about minute (mine took a bit even though it’s a fast computer) to process in your browser.
- Right click any word on any page, and select “Ubiquity -> Shop” OR use control+space to bring up the Ubiquity menu and type “shop X” where X represents whatever you want to search for prices on.
Here’s more commands:
- Find more commands at Mozilla Labs Wiki
I’d love to hear feedback, folks.
- Install Ubiquity Firefox Extension
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Blackberry Bold Review Makes Me Want One
Mika
APC reviewed the Blackberry Bold, and it has me seriously wanting one. I checked ebay, and they’re still upwards of $800-1000 which is a joke, but I’m thinking I will probably pick one up after they’re released.Guess this means I’m switching to AT&T Wireless after a bunch (I can’t remember, but it’s probably 5-6) years with Tmobile. Amazing what kind power these gadgets have to make us switch providers like this, and I kind of detest that it’s hard to get the same phone on different carriers, with all these exclusive agreements between the carrier and device manufacturer. It definitely isn’t in the consumer’s best interest.
RIM, if you’re listening, I would buy one direct from you instead of switching carriers even if it cost a bit more, assuming you offer a similar replacement plan for damage and loss like most wireless companies do.
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Email Auto-responders in Cpanel
Mika
Sometimes the most simple stuff just escapes me - you know the kind of thing that seems like you have to do a bunch of work when really all you have to do is look right in front of your nose.
Yep, I had just one of those moments right now. I’ve been using my domain registrar (omitting the name on purpose) to forward and set up some auto-responder emails, but they are SO slow in actually forwarding the message or sending the response - IF either of those things even happen that I thought I need to find some other solution.
I googled a bit and found this simple tutorial for email autoresponders and cpanel which set off the light bulb. Doh! Why not just do it via cpanel like I do everything else. So now I just updated DNS, and pointed it to my hosting account for email and it’s on the way to everything working like a charm.
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Best Scientific Calculator?
Mika
Some of my friends may already know this, but I used to be a draftsperson / mechanical engineer trainee. When I was going to school, we used the old Texas Instruments engineering calculator although most of our time was spent figuring out how to program them for games.
I started searching around for a good calculator, and then started wondering what’s the best engineering calculator now days? (That’s such a Seanism: “What’s the best?!) These things look like microcomputers which are no doubt way more powerful that my old laptop used to be back in that day - even with all 133mhz of power that it used to have.
Anyway, I’m not looking to go back to engineering and even if I was, I’d be no good at it since my math skills are pretty much toast after not using them for years but I do want to pick up a new calculator and was thinking about something that would be more than just a standard one, and those engineering calculators have a nice big screen on them so you can see the history of what you’re doing.
Wonder if someone has any suggestions? Paul, Greg? You guys are kind of savvy, what do you think?
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Easy Whois Lookup
Mika
I use http://whois.domaintools.com a TON to look at who owns a specific domain / site. The format to use this is simple - just go to http://whois.domaintools.com/domaintolookup.com and it will do the lookup.
However, I get frustrated in typing it out, so I wrote a really simple bookmarklet that will get the domain of the site you’re looking at, and pass the request to domaintools.com so I won’t have to type it every time.
Here’s the bookmarklet - you should be able to just drag this link to your browser toolbar.
Disclaimer: I have only done this in Firefox 2, so it may not work in others but theoretically should.
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How to Search the Spam Folder in Gmail
Mika
For quite some time I couldn’t figure out how to search through the spam folder in gmail (and google apps mail) unless your search found no results in the other folders. Well, it’s actually really simple now that I figured it out. Sure, I could have read the instructions but that takes the fun out of it, and it wasn’t all that important anyway.
Here’s how to search through your spam folder in gmail - it also works in google apps mail.
In the search box, type your search like you normally would, just ad “in:spam” to the end of it. So if you were to search for “password” and wanted to search just the spam folder for a password recovery email or something similar, type “password in:spam” without the quotes, of course. You can also reverse it, if you wanted to because that’s the logic that works with your brain, so try “in:spam password” and it does the same thing.
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Testing Some New WP Plugins
Mika
There’s a couple cool sounding WP plugins that I’m testing out:
- AutoSocial: helps you post on social networking sites
- Yahoo Shortcuts: more easily integrate yahoo’s stuff like maps, flickr, etc
- Wordbook: integrates a self-hosted WP install with facebook
If there’s something cool about one of these, I’ll update ya’ll here
Autosocial and Yahoo Shortcuts that I’m just giving it a quick test to see what it does. It’s supposed to make posting to social networking sites a lot easier from WP.