Create rich Gmail signatures in Firefox with Blank Canvas

February 10th, 2009 •
Tags: Blank Canvas, e-mail, email, Firefox extensions, gmail, gmail signatures, signatures

Blank Canvas is a FireFox extension which allows you to create HTML signatures for automatic inclusion in your outgoing mail from Gmail. Gmail has offered signatures for some time, but they are plain text only. This means no images, no links, and no layout. You simply enter some characters, spaces, and line breaks, and the recipient sees those in your message. This is a little inflexible for web nuts like you and I. We want to be remembered. We want attention! Blank Canvas gives us all that in a slick package.

Once you have installed the extension, it places three or four (depending on your options) controls to the right of the “From” field in Gmail when composing a message. The first is a dropdown menu which allows you to select one of four different signatures. If you have multiple sending accounts setup in Gmail, you have four signature slots for each one. In other words, the signature I have named “Default” can be different when I am sending from my primary account versus sending from the account provided by my employer. This is very handy. For most of my accounts, I am posting my personal contact information as well as the raddevon.com logo linked to the site. For my work account, I have my name, work e-mail account, and work phone number. Once I change sending accounts, these signatures are automatically swapped.

The second button displayed activates the editor. The editor is where the action happens. The top box allows the user to enter the HTML to generate the desired signature. The bottom pane displays the preview. There is also a link above the editing box that sends the user to a page with some basic tips about building a signature.

The third button reinserts the signature in case there are problems. It is only visible once activated using the fourth button—Options. The options are minimal. You may choose whether to insert the signature above or below quoted text when sending a reply, provide alternative names for your four signatures, and display the “Reinsert” button.

The extension works wonderfully. I have noticed two quirks with my e-mail signatures, and I’m almost certain they are limitations within Gmail itself. First, the preview will show alternate link colors when your signature is styled as such with CSS. However, these are reverted back to default colors when the e-mail is actually sent. Second, I had included a Skype link to allow recipients to click my Skype username and call me directly. That link appears to be nerfed by Gmail when it reaches its recipient. I imagine Gmail limits the protocols of any links in e-mail to a list of “safe” protocols. Evidently, “skype:” is not among them.

If you’re not already an HTML guru, there are a few concepts you will want to keep in mind:

1. Line breaks in HTML are not as simple as pressing the “Enter” key. HTML ignores any white space beyond the first press of the space bar. Line breaks must be invoked by placing a <br /> in the desired location.
2. Images use this tag: <img src="http://path.to/image.jpg" />. Of course, you will have to insert your own path based on the image’s location. It can’t be on your hard drive. Otherwise, anyone without access to that drive (which describes most of your desired recipients) will not see it. Try a free image hosting service like ImageShack if you aren’t sure where to put your image.
3. Hyperlinks are made with <a href="http://path.to/page.html"> </a>. You may notice this tag has two sides. Anything between is linked to the path referenced by the “href” attribute. This can be plain text to link a word or words, or it can be an image tag to link that image.
4. If you want to use CSS in your signature, you can use it inline by adding a “style” attribute to whichever element you want to affect. If it’s an image, that would look something like this: <img src="http://path.to/image.jpg" style="insert CSS here" />. If you want to style a block of text, you can enclose it in a <div></div> tag with a style attribute like this: <div style="insert CSS here">Text to style</div>. There are other ways to add CSS as well, but this is the simplest.

This should get you going. Now, get out there and create a killer signature to make a big impression on your recipients. Plug your blog, give people a way to contact you, and pimp your expertise. Ready, set, GO!

Facebook emulates FriendFeed, adds “Like” feature

February 10th, 2009 •
Tags: Facebook, friendfeed, Social Web

Facebook has taken a page from FriendFeed‘s book and added a “Like” feature. Now, if you, like, “Like” a, like, post on Facebook, you can, like, “Like” it by, like, clicking on the “Like” link. Facebook looks to like… if looking liking move.

I have not yet had an opportunity to try the new feature, and I am unclear if it does anything more than telling the original poster of the content that you did, in fact, like it. The FriendFeed “Like” link reshares an item to your subscribers which is really handy. It makes sense that, if you do like something, you would want your friends to be able to see it regardless of whether they have a relationship to the original poster.

The consensus seems to be that this will not have a profound effect on the FriendFeed community. FriendFeed is a very tightly knit community whereas Facebook is looser and all-encompassing. I tend to agree that FriendFeeders are not going to leave the service for Facebook. FriendFeed is to Facebook as a small rural town is to NYC.

Send emails to the future!

February 9th, 2009 •
Tags: deferredsender, email, reminders, schedule

People with horrible memories (like me) will appreciate this service which allows e-mails to be scheduled for the future. Send your e-mail to deferred [at] deferredsender [dot] com along with all the pertinent details like recipients and delivery time. Deferred Sender will hang onto the message until the desired time and send it on through the tubes. Check out the site to register and setup your time zone otherwise messages will be delivered on UTC. Who wants to figure that out? Not me.

Anyway, this seems like a useful service. If you know you need to send an e-mail at a certain time, just set it and forget it! Now, where have I heard that before?

An Online Free Scheduler For Emails To Be Sent In The Future (via Smashing Apps)

Cream of the cloud: The top premium web services

February 9th, 2009 • 7 comments
Tags: Backblaze, cloud computing, Dropbox, Flickr, lynda.com, metafilter, MobileMe, o'reilly safari, online services, Photo sharing, premium web services, SmugMug, web services

Photo by Flickr user zerega

There has been much talk in the past year about cloud computing. Some like it; some don’t. Say what you will, but there are some services that can only be provided through the cloud. As a result, the concept has been around forever and will probably never leave. There are some really stellar services available that make your computing life a lot easier. Several weeks back, I posted a question on Ask.Metafilter asking what are the favorite premium online services. Some of the answers I expected while others I had never heard of. Let’s hit the highlights (in no particular order).

1. Flickr- This was one of the most oft repeated responses. Flickr is a fan favorite. It has a huge community and a great featureset for organizing and sharing photos. If you’re going to use a photo sharing service, it’s a pretty safe bet your friends already have accounts here because Flickr offers both free and paid accounts. The free account limits uploading to 100MB per month and only allows you access to your last 200 pictures. The paid account lifts both of these limits and comes with a few other perks as well like video storage for video up to 90 seconds. Paid accounts are $24.95 per year.
2. SmugMug- SmugMug fans are quick to talk about features and support which are the two areas that make this service stand out. It is a photo-sharing service like Flickr, but it doesn’t have quite the userbase of the Flickr service. They do not offer a free version of their service, but users may share with people who do not have a membership. SmugMug has three different levels of accounts offering different features. Each of these is more pricey than Flickr’s service which is probably why they have fewer users. Accounts range from $39.95 to $149.95 per year.
3. Dropbox- If you want an easy way to store files online, Dropbox has to be it. Install the client, tie it in to your account, and drop files into the Dropbox folder. You can also install the client on multiple machine, link all of them to your account, and wait for it to synchronize your Dropbox folder across all computers. It supports Mac, PC, and Linux. This is another service with both free and paid offerings. The free service offers a healthy 2GB of storage, but the paid version (at $9.99 per month or $99 per year) gives you a whopping 50GB of storage space.
4. Backblaze- Get unlimited online backup from Backblaze for $5 per month per computer. It supports Mac and PC. Backblaze prides itself on requiring little to no user intervention. It backs up all the files on your computer. Everything. If you lose your data, you can redownload it or, for a fee, they will mail you the files on DVD or an external hard drive.
5. Safari- O’Reilly Publishing offers online access to a huge library of technical books. Users may access 10 titles at a time for $22.99 per month or an unlimited number of titles for $42.99 per month. If you need to catch up on your knowledge or if you just need to keep up with the ever-changing tech landscape, this would be a cheap alternatives to purchasing a plethora of books at $40 to $60 each.
6. lynda.com- For $25 per month, lynda.com offers a plethora of video tutorials for many current creative and programming technologies like Flash, Photoshop, and PHP. It seems like a great quick way to get up to speed on a particular technology that you need familiarity with for an upcoming project. You can watch some of the early lessons for free before you buy. They are very well-done.
7. MetaFilter- A predictable response coming from the community, but this is truly justified. The cost is $5 for a membership. That’s not $5 per month or per year. Just $5. This entitles you to post on the “community weblog” at metafilter.com once per 24 hours and ask a question at ask.metafilter.com once per week. I have never actually posted to the blog, but I frequently tap the community for answers and am always surprised by the quality and depth of knowledge. Almost any question no matter how specialized or obscure receives attention.

I’m not entirely sold on the cloud as a place to create and store data. I will probably never subscribe to Apple’s MobileMe and be locked in to paying $100 per year for access to my data and services I have become dependent upon. However, some services are uniquely suited to being outsourced to the cloud. In these services, there is often value and justification for a reasonable subscription fee. We are not returning to the days of dumb terminals in which most of our activities take place outside our own machine, but people are beginning to realize the merits of the emerging trend of “the cloud.”

F*** My Life

February 8th, 2009 •
Tags: anonymity, anonymous, bad day, f*** my life, problems

Anonymity on the Internet is a double-edged. For one, it leaves people less inhibited and feeling more free to be hurtful and insensitive. It can also be cathartic. That’s where the site F*** My Life comes in. You’re having a terrible day, and you only want someone to feel sorry for you. Post your problems anonymously on the site, read others’ posts and comments on your own, and maybe feel just a bit better about your horrible, despicable life.

Use Backtype to track your and your friends’ comments online

February 7th, 2009 •
Tags: backtype, blogs, commenting, comments, social networking, weblogs

For those of you who are active commenting on lots of blogs, Backtype is a wonderful service that tracks your commenting. Register an account and claim your comments on blogs and a number of other social sites. Backtype itself is a social network around your comments and the comments of friends. Follow people and have them follow you, and, when comments are posted by people you follow, you see it on your Backtype page.

You may know that WordPress blogs ask for your website URL. This is what Backtype uses to attach your comments to your profile. Tell Backtype any of the URLs you use when commenting. It will look at the indexed comments to find comments that are posted with your URLs which will then be attributed to you. If someone else starts posting with one of your URLs, you can mark them as “Fake” to remove the comments from your page. Comments on other services are a little more straightforward. You enter your username so there isn’t much guesswork to be done in attributing your comments.

A fantastic secondary feature is comment subscription. Some blogs (this one included) provide a means for users to subscribe to comments via e-mail. Unfortunately, many do not. Rather than depending on the blog owner to set this up, Backtype allows users to subscribe to any comments thread via bookmarklet.

Before the launch of this service, it was difficult to track this aspect of friends’ activity online. Now, all your comments can be shared and accessed as you wish. It makes it much easier to become involved in the discussions online your friends value. Online comments are, for the most part, very encapsulated and disconnected. Backtype unifies comments and makes them a part of the social online experience. It reorganizes comments around individuals rather than around the content that inspires them.

If you decide to try Backtype, follow me on the service. Also, if you like this post, subscribe to raddevon.com!

Google Chrome getting extensions soonish

February 5th, 2009 • 1 comment
Tags: extensions, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, web browsers

I really love Google’s Chrome browser, but it really seems to lack polish in some areas like RSS support and platform support (Mac, please). It’s true that many browsers lack support for extensions, but I have been spoiled by Firefox. It is now impossible for me to switch to a browser that lacks exstensibility. Luckily, when the Mac version of the browser is released, I may not have to choose between speed (Chrome) and extensibility (Firefox). An observant blogger noticed a session at an upcoming developer conference called “Developing extensions for Google Chrome.” The conference takes place in May so we can assume the browser will support extensions by then… or perhaps it is a red herring!

Google Chrome Extensions Coming Out by May!

Receive all your Twitter @replies via SMS

February 3rd, 2009 • 5 comments
Tags: @replies, @reply, iPhone, Short message service, sms, text message, Text messaging, tweets, twitter

Twitter‘s mobile updates text message you with tweets for your selected followers. It will also text message you with any direct messages you receive. Unfortunately, @replies are left out in the cold. Using the magic of Twitter Search, Yahoo Pipes, and Yahoo Alerts, you can begin to receive all @replies directed to you on your cell phone!

Enter your Twitter username into my Twitter @replies pipe

Right-click “Get as RSS” and click “Copy Link Location”

Go to Yahoo Alerts. If you haven’t already setup the service, you will need to configure it now. Be sure you setup your mobile phone to receive alerts.

In the “Create an Alert” tab, click “Feed/Blog”

Paste the URL we copied earlier into the box labeled ‘A’

Check the box for mobile alerts at the bottom and be sure your phone is selected

Click “Save Alert”

You will now receive all your @replies via text message on your phone. Enjoy!

SocialWhois gives a deeper look at Twitterers/FriendFeeders

February 3rd, 2009 •
Tags: friendfeed, Online Communities, profiles, Social network, social networking, Social Web, SocialWhois, twitter

Mashable pointed out this new site with a great concept. Both FriendFeed and Twitter have incredibly minimalistic profiles—FriendFeed having none to speak of and Twitter offering only a short bio. SocialWhois allows users to look up potential follows to learn more about them. This information depends partly on the user having created a profile with the service, but, for FriendFeed users, SocialWhois will “guess” at a profile by pulling in all the services a user has linked from the FriendFeed account. This still gives you quite a lot of information but no more than you might get looking at the user’s FriendFeed profile yourself.

This is another one of those services that will depend on having a critical mass of users before it actually becomes useful. It definitely fills a need in the social web space—one that some social networks do a better job of recognizing than others. It is really difficult to get a feel for a person by looking only at their Twitter bio and latest tweets, and FriendFeed could use a brief bio for each user. SocialWhois provides all that, but its utility is currently hampered by a small userbase. If it is able to expand that userbase significantly, it will be very helpful in determining whether or not to follow back that latest follower.

iTunes is now DRM-free. So what?

February 2nd, 2009 •
Tags: Amazon, DRM, eMusic, iTunes store, lala, MP3s, music, online music stores

Apple has kindly decided to allow users to pay 30 cents per track to remove the crippling DRM which would otherwise render users’ songs useless should the iTunes DRM servers vanish (as Wal-mart’s did last year). I understand that this charge was probably mandated by the RIAA, but I still have a problem with a store that charges me again to have unfettered access to my own purchases. This is especially true since other stores have already been selling DRM-free music for a while now. Many of us who care about owning music with fewer conditions have already found iTunes alternatives. Here are a few of the iTunes store alternatives that have made my radar.

eMusic- eMusic is a subscription-based service that offers a number of downloads per month for the life of your membership. The current entry-level plan is $10 for 30 tracks which is significantly cheaper than ordering from other online music stores (except maybe for those based in Russia). The drawback is availability of major label artists; there is none. Because eMusic was among the first services offering DRM-free music, they still don’t really have a relationship with the majors. They have gained something of a reputation of being the online store for indie titles and have developed a following as a result. I can’t argue with the pricing!

Amazon- Based on my experience, Amazon’s music store comes closest to iTunes in size. Up until recently, Amazon was the place to be if you wanted DRM-free music from the majors. One unique aspect of this store is that they actually run discounts and deals on songs and albums. They offer a daily deal which is often an entire MP3 album for $2. Not bad at all!

lala- In lala’s previous life, it was a CD trading service. Someone got smart and decided CDs weren’t going to be around forever. Now, lala is a DRM-free music store with good selection (although not quite as good as Amazon’s) and a number of very unique features. Lala has a web-accessible music library. You can choose to purchase an MP3 for $.89 or the web-playable track for $.10. If you buy the MP3, the track is automatically added to your web library. If you buy the web track, you can upgrade it to the full MP3 for $.79 more. When you first sign up with lala, you will download the Music Mover app which acts as a downloader for purchased tracks. It does double-duty as an uploader for any MP3 tracks it finds on your computer. These songs will be added to your web library as well giving you roaming access to your entire library for no more than you would pay (or have paid) for the tracks themselves. It’s a really nice service, but the store is excellent as well. Most albums are $7.50 which is a pretty healthy savings over iTunes typical $9.99 price. I have also had to deal with customer service on a couple of track downloading problems. They were very responsive and provded me with an opportunity to redownload any tracks I did not receive. This one is my current favorite by far.

There is little disadvantage to using these alternative services. In many cases, you get much more for your money than you would from iTunes. The advantages are clear: extra services and better prices. Both Amazon and lala are easy to try since there is no subscription and eMusic offers a free trial. The only disadvantage is that these stores are most likely not integrated into you computer’s media player. Fortunately, the features and savings you get for that little extra effort are really worth it. Even though iTunes now offers DRM-free music, there still remain compelling reasons to give the alternatives another look.