Author: Stan Shinn

Stan is a seasoned digital strategist professional with broad Fortune 1000 and financial services sector experience. His specializations include accessibility, digital strategy and product roadmaps, large-scale digital projects, complex web redesigns, and enterprise website governance. Stan is also a published author and active innovator.

Photon for Photos

Photon is smart, intuitive, and highly configurable; Daikini Photon gives you the power to manage your Movable Type™, TypePad™, Blojsom and WordPress photo-blogs in the familiar surrounds of Apple iPhoto.

Video Guide to Understanding Trackbacks for Beginners

Great summary of trackback technology, plus a Video Guide to Understanding Trackbacks for Beginners.

Trackbacks are often misunderstood and so seldom used by new bloggers. Trackback is a powerful way to get content recognition from search bots crawling the rich blog link structures, it is a great way to alert others to your content as well as receive notice when other bloggers are referencing you. Trackbacks are a good way to get inbound links and generate FREE traffic. Trackbacks are definitely a powerful content promotion and distribution strategy. When used properly, Trackbacks can get you noticed and get you traffic

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New Nvu

Nvu 0.90 it out. This latest version of the standalone Linspire-backed Mozilla-based Web page editor includes an improved Link dialogue, a new default theme and printing fixes. There's also performance improvements (switching between the HTML Source view and Normal Edit Mode should now be much faster), better support for PHP code and HTML comments and several minor bug fixes. Available for Windows, Linspire 5.0, Fedora Core 3 and Mac OS X.

Get it here: Nvu - The Complete Web Authoring System

Turn It Off…

Remember Covey's 7 Habits lesson on Urgent vs. Important? Think about this fact from: Quick tips on processing your email inbox

Zen slap: An email auto-check set for every minute means 60 potential distractions every hour, or almost 500 per day. Look back at a week of your emails and ask yourself: how many distractions was that really worth? How much crucial, instantly actionable email did I receive to make it worth shifting my attention over 2000 times?

How about have email set to check every 6 minutes, and minimize your email client when working on projects that require concentration. If it's really important they can call you or IM you after all.

Email overload

Some practical tips on dealing with email overload. Make action requests clear!

If you want things to get done, say so. Clearly. There’s nothing more frustrating as a reader than getting copied on an e-mail and finding out three weeks later that someone expected you to pick up the project and run with it. Summarize action items at the end of a message so everyone can read them at one glance.

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Controversial Mac Emulator Released

CherryOS, the controversial Macintosh emulator for Windows that some commentators have accused of being a reworked version of open-source project PearPC, has finally been released, five months after its initial announcement. Created by developer Arben Kryeziu at Hawaiian company Maui X-Stream Inc., CherryOS allows users of Intel-standard PCs to run Mac OS X by emulating a G4 processor and accompanying hardware. According to Maui X-Stream, the product supports emulation of AltiVec, sound, networking and CD/DVD drive access, and is available for download priced at $49.95.

Want to try out the Mac on an old PC? This may do just the trick. I'd wait for some reviews to come out before spending money on this though.

Word Service

For those of you lucky enough to be on a Mac, here is a great Mac 'service' that you can install, that gives you many new and useful text formatting options in a variety of applications, including MS Word. Features:

Reformat, Remove line endings/multiple spaces/quotes, Trim line beginnings/line endings/lines, Sort lines ascending/descending, Shift left/light, Initial caps of words/sentences, All caps & lowercase, Mac/Windows/Unix line endings, Rotate 13, Straight/Smart Quotes, Encode/Decode tabs, Insert date/date & time/time/contents of path, Speak native/german text, Statistics.

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Word Service

For those of you lucky enough to be on a Mac, here is a great Mac 'service' that you can install, that gives you many new and useful text formatting options in a variety of applications, including MS Word. Features:

Reformat, Remove line endings/multiple spaces/quotes, Trim line beginnings/line endings/lines, Sort lines ascending/descending, Shift left/light, Initial caps of words/sentences, All caps & lowercase, Mac/Windows/Unix line endings, Rotate 13, Straight/Smart Quotes, Encode/Decode tabs, Insert date/date & time/time/contents of path, Speak native/german text, Statistics.

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Force IE to Properly Download Files

Here is a workaround for the IE problem of not properly respecting

content-type and content-dispositition HTTP headers which results in it

not being able to save attachments under certain circumstances.

A fairly good developer's writeup and discussion resides at

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/02/01/364581.aspx. It explains

why this problem exists and Microsoft's reason for creating the

problem.

There are cases where Internet Explorer will not allow a report to save when the URL was called directly. Sometimes you could trick IE by starting the download, cancelling, and refreshing the

page, but it's an absurd workaround that doesn't work reliably.

This article (http://www.onaje.com/php/article.php4/40) shows how to placing the following lines in a

PHP file:

header("Expires: 0");

header("Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate,

post-check=0, pre-check=0");

header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");

header("Content-Disposition:

attachment;filename=\"export.csv\"");

The Content-type, Content-Disposition, Pragma: no-cache, and Expires

lines worked just fine with Firefox, but not with IE. The only new addition was the

Cache-Control line which when added seemed to do the trick. The

preexisting Pragma: no-cache directive which was made redundant and so you

combine it into the Cache-Control line with the "no-cache" part of the

string.

References:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/02/01/364581.aspx

http://www.onaje.com/php/article.php4/40

http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html