|
|||
|
This is the main blog for Mike McBride Online, where you can keep track of everything I'm in to in one place.
Comments Feed
Categories:
 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
| Friday, November 12, 2004
Reader suggestion Craig wrote, in response to my post about using the Googlebar in Firefox, that he uses a toolbar from http://www.firefoxtoolbar.com that has many more options. Apparently, only the Standard Toolbar linked on the download page is compatible with the 1.0 release but hopefully the specialized ones will be soon. I might just have to take it for a spin! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 11:59 AM | 0 comments | 
Links to this post
Not as useful as it could be. SO I was doing my normal morning review of feeds to see what's going on in the blogosphere when I saw a mention of a new utility on Slipstick called Outlook Central. According to it's description: Use Outlook Central to share calendars, contacts, journals, notes, tasks and email folders with other Outlook users without the need for an expensive server. Now this is the sort of thing that comes up every once in awhile around the office. Mostly it involves talk of getting out own mail server, and having autoresponders, shared calendars, etc, but it never gets real far because of the expense. Anytime I see a mention of a tool like this one, I always want to go take a quick look at it, and see if it's a fairly inexpensive solution, so I can have it documented for the next time this discussion comes up. Only problem is, there is no pricing information on the site. There's a page to sign up to be a reseller, but no links to current resellers that might have a price listed at their site either. Here's a hint. I don't want to contact you and go through the whole sales pitch, I just want to be able to get an idea of cost in case someone starts pushing the concept again. Since I can't get that, I guess I'll just skip it and move on. :) Update: Wait, I found pricing information, about 4 links deep and in a PDF "Datasheet" about the product. On the other hand, $995 for a five person license, $495 for five more after that? Not exactly a cheap alternative to the "need for an expensive server". Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:31 AM | 0 comments |
Links to this post
Thursday, November 11, 2004
Trillian Have you seen the sneak preview for the next version of Trillian? You should take a look at it. I know lots of folks use MSN or Yahoo for more than just text IM (unlike me), and haven't gone with a tool like Trillian because of that, but it looks like they are going to be addressing that by making it interoperable with even the advanced features of the various IM programs. The free version will allow for audio chat, while you'll have to fork out for Trillian Pro for video chat and interoperability with Jabber clients, for example. There's a nice little feature comparison over there too. Looks like a nice upgrade is in the works. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 4:15 PM | 0 comments |
Links to this post
Depressing morning How's this for a depressing way to start the day? I was woken up from a dream about work, so that I could get ready to go to work, by a wife who doesn't have to work today. It can only get better from there, right? :) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 11:35 AM | 0 comments |
Links to this post
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Firefox upgrade Just to see whether they got better at dealing with my pet peeve, I downloaded and installed the 1.0 release of Firefox. The good news, is that rather than having to download and reinstall all the extensions again, now the browser disables all of the extensions. Then, at first startup it checks for updates to those extensions that are 1.0 compatible and gets them for you. If the extension hasn't been updated yet, it leaves it disabled and you can check later for an update to it. The bad news, it didn't find the update to the GoogleBar extension, I had to go get that myself. When I did, the new version of the Googlebar is, umm, a problem. All of the icons are repeated, leaving you with a search box too small to actually see what you might be typing, or have typed in the past. What I mean is, the toolbar is there, it has all the same icons across the top of my browser, but with a smaller text box. When I went to resize the text box, there wasn't any room to move it into because the toolbar icons start over again at the end of the first set of icons. Three quarters of the way across from left to right is another text box, with the same icons continuing from there as with the text box on the left side of the screen. Gee, and this is the one extension I use more than anything else. Guess I'll wait a couple of days and see if it gets fixed. Update: completely uninstalling the Googlebar and installing the new version, rather than updating in place, fixed that problem. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 4:41 PM | 0 comments |
Links to this post
Attention law firm IT people Just a request, and maybe you can provide an explanation of why this happens too. Can you please train the lawyers and legal assistants that you work for to actually attach a document when they're sending it to an outside entity, like the one I work for? I'm really tired of getting yelled at by my users because they can't open the attachments when all that really got sent to them was a link to the document as it exists in your document management system. Obviously, from here, that link is useless. Thanks, I'd appreciate it! :) Update: Dennis Kennedy provides some insight, and a good suggestion for people in my shoes, in response. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 10:40 AM | 0 comments |
Links to this post
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
Lunchtime shopping Remember when I said I was going to take that $40 I earned doing a little side tech support and use it to repay some of the places that have helped me be better at my job. Well, I wound up making a $20 donation to Spywareinfo.com, and purchasing two paid subscriptions to newsletters that I had been getting the free version of, Tech Support Alert, and the Office Letter. (The Office letter, by the way, is running a deal where signing up for the paid version gets you a free copy of ActiveWords SE until the end of this week. Not too shabby of a deal...) So there you go, three resources that I find enough value in to spend a little cash on. There are more, and if/when I do some more side work and bring in some more extra money, I'll probably be hitting them with donations too! (Depending on how the version 1.0 of Firefox goes for me, that will be high on that list, if you're curious.) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 2:48 PM | 0 comments |
Links to this post
Busy, busy firefox Gee I can't even get to the front page for Firefox, you'd think they released version 1.0 or something today. :) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 9:52 AM | 0 comments |
Links to this post
Monday, November 08, 2004
Bloglines subscribers Sometime over the weekend, the number of people who subscribe to this blog using Bloglines hit 100. Now, I realize that isn't a big total compared to some other places, however the significance of it, for me, is that is just about the same number of actual visits to the page on a daily basis. So that means there are now just about as many people reading the RSS feed of these posts just on the Bloglines service, than actually come to the page on a typical day. Based on other traffic patterns I would say there are probably just as many people using other aggregators to read the feed as actually come to the page too. So, my best guess is that 2 out of 3 people who read the posts to this blog, do not visit the site. According to most marketers, that probably means I'm doing a crappy job, but I don't think so. First of all, this isn't a commercial site. While it would be nice if 300 people per day saw the Amazon links that I use to help fund a charitable donation by coming to the site, it's not now, and won't ever be, the main purpose of this site. When I go back and think about the reasons I started this blog, the desire to share ideas, to become part of a larger tech community because of the lack of a peer network in my workplace, the ability to both post helpful information and get good, informative feedback from readers, those things are being accomplished. I envisioned a small group of IT guys in similar situations to me, using the site to network and share resources. I never dreamed that a few hundred people would be reading every day. Can you imagine how many of those people would read if I made them come to the site every day instead of providing a feed? Would you? Yeah RSS keeps my traffic lower than it might otherwise be, but it allows for more feedback and more shared information, which was the point of this whole thing when I started way back. So I may not be a marketing success, but I have been more successful than I ever dreamed at doing what I set out to do, and I'm pretty happy about that. :) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark| 2:42 PM | 0 comments |
Links to this post
|
 
My Other Projects:
My Child Abuse Blog Latest link blog posts:
Latest Child Abuse blog posts:
|
