An example from the King of the Internet

The other day I was applying for a job using my gmail account. I had written a sweet cover letter, edited it and reviewed it a few times, and hit send. What happened next saved me incredible embarrassment and jumping out of my bedroom window: Google popped up from behind the scenes and told me I was an idiot.

No, do not send anyway.

I attached my .pdf, sent, and immediately went to all other mail clients I could find to see if this was standard operating procedure. It’s not. This is Google going that extra step and holding my hand to make sure I don’t fail at the Internet. I’ve never found a better example of having the users best interest at heart before, and here’s why:

1. It’s important

There are a lot of things out there that try to help you, but don’t really need to. This is all well and good but can get to be too much. We’ve all been on a website and by the end of our visit thought “Come on, I’m not a moron.” Having your hand held when you don’t need it can become frustrating, so when using a pop up you have to make sure that pop-up is needed and will be appreciated.

2. It’s completely user-centric

It exists for the sole reason of making sure you succeed at what you’re doing. There are no ulterior motives, it’s not “helping” you buy more products, it’s just keeping you from being frustrated and embarrassed.

3. It’s unobtrusive

They didn’t go the route of a message displayed to all users. It only pops up when necessary. They know that most people are going to remember to attach their file, so they only whisper to those who didn’t.

A mail client is something that’s hard to be good at. That is, it’s hard to be better than the others. You can simplify your interface, you can put important features in easy-to-find locations, and you can send the actual mail. But e-mail has been around a long time, so differentiating yourself isn’t easy to do. Most people try to add more features on the front-end to make themselves special, in any facet of business, but sometimes you need to step back and think about how you can help somebody who isn’t asking for help. Thanks for having my back, Gmail.

A story on hatred for your users and fans

The other day I decided that I needed to invest (for free) in a good note-taking program for my Blackberry. After surfing the internet and reading reviews for the pathetic amount of choices available I settled on Evernote. After installing the program I was prompted to register. This makes sense since Evernote backs up your notes to a web server and makes them available anywhere, however there was one big flaw.

There was a captcha. And not just any captcha, but a captcha that didn’t seem to work. The doctors tell me I have pretty good eyesight, and this wasn’t a difficult looking jumble of characters but I still wasn’t allowed to register after 4 tries. So I didn’t. The glaring ridiculousness of this was staring at me and laughing. Here I was, on my Blackberry, not being allowed to use a program because I’m apparently not a human. (I am, by the way.)

There are two possible trains of thought that led to the inclusion of a captcha in this instance:

1. Evernote thought that it was plausible for a bot to buy and register a Blackberry with internet service, navigate to the Evernote website, download it, and try to register it in an attempt to spam itself with private notes.
2. Evernote was too lazy to make a separate sign-up for people coming from the mobile version of Evernote.

So which is it, friends? Regardless of the logic it was unnecessary. This is an extreme example, of course, as I usually see captchas on blogs and upload-friendly websites, but my sentiment is the same: There’s no need to annoy people with captchas with so many alternatives out there for spam prevention now. And that’s my gripe.

Here are some of those alternatives

1. A simple question

   My favourite! I know, it’s 2010, and asking a simple question sounds silly when you could have an image and a script that knows what the image says! But it’s much more user friendly. I’m sure you’ve seen it before, “5 + 2 =” and you fill in 7. Perfect!

2. A plugin

   Askimet is very good at catching spam on my blogs. There are other plugins that are apparently even better. Use them. This is only for blogging or CMS software but most places I see captchas are built on those platforms anyway.

3. Manual spam-checking

   I know. You’re too busy. You get a whole 1,000 hits per month on your blog and a few of them are spam and you can’t be bothered. Come on. If you have a low to moderately trafficked website it’s not too much trouble to ask you to go through your to-be-moderated comments and check them out every few days.

Or do you hate me?

Because I’ll tell you, for every 3 captchas I come across I’ll fail one of them. And leave.

For discussion

Do you agree? (You should.) Am I being a whiner? (I’m not.) Do you have any other alternatives that you’ve seen work?

This is hardly news, as it’s been happening almost since lists have arrived (which was years ago in Internet time), but I figured I’d share my favourite Twitter tip:

Using Twitter as an RSS reader

Not really, but close. I’m not a big list user yet for a variety of reasons. The main reason is laziness; I don’t feel like sifting through those I follow to put them in lists. The other is I don’t want to alienate people by not including them in a list they feel they should be on (See Chris Brogan’s post on the matter here). The third reason is tied to the second, but I know that I wouldn’t be satisfied until every user is on a list. A lot of those I follow wouldn’t fit in a “genre”-style list and the tediousness of including everybody would drive me bananas.

But I digress…

The one thing I have been using lists for (in private-mode) is to supplement my RSS reading. I love RSS feeds (Subscribe to mine here) but I think I love resources being shared on Twitter more. The reason being you don’t just find out what somebody has posted themselves, but also what they find interesting.

That’s why I suggest using Twitter as 2009’s RSS reader.

How? Well there are a lot of people (and companies) who only post resources. Link after link after link. Add them all to a list! The added benefit of this is you can still get great resources but keep your main stream social, if you’d like. You don’t need to follow people to put them in a list. This means that you can use Twitter as both a social tool and as a new fancy RSS-type news feed.

Here are two great lists already created by people for this purpose, in the design niche:
Design Links by @imrobg
No Blab, Just Design Links by @justcreative

What are some neat ways you’re using Twitter?

I’m interested in hearing them. Let me know in the comments.

I, like most people in my Twitter stream, love to tweet links. I do this both to share what I find interesting and useful on the internet, and as a personal bookmarking service that I can reference later.

I browse the internet quickly. A lot of tabs open all the time and usually Mad Men in the background. This means that when I click a link in my Twitter stream or my RSS reader, I won’t get to it for a little bit. When I get there, if I find it interesting, I’d like to send it along to my Twitter pals. The biggest thing that makes me NOT share a link is poor on-page Twitter sharing functionality.

Here’s are 3 tips to encourage tweets (from me, anyway) of your blog post:

1. Get TweetMeme

It’s classy looking, easy to spot, easy to implement, adds social proof, and gives readers an easy way to share your post.

2. Change the @user

I don’t @reply TweetMeme, as it’s set on default. TweetMeme is a great tool, but it did not write the post and should not get credit. Go to the settings and make sure that your Twitter username is behind the @. Sounds simple. but I encounter this a lot.

3. Write a good headline

First of all, make sure there are capitals. A link without capitals will look out of place on my stream and thus will not become a part of it. Also make sure that it properly describes the post and is interesting sounding. When I click a link to tweet a post, I don’t want to have to edit it. We move too fast here on the Internet; no time for that. Check out CopyBlogger for headline tips if you need them.

So those are 3 very easy ways to ensure you’re tweted. Make sure these are taken care of, write and market quality content, and you should be on your way to Twitter stardom.

Do you have any other tips or resources? Let me know in the comments.

Dropbox is a wonderful little program. What it does is put a folder on your computer, and anything you place inside of that folder will be backed up to the internet. I shouldn’t need to convince you that keeping an off-computer backup of all your project files is a good idea.

Unfortunately, you have to manually put anything you want backed up in your Dropbox folder, and that’s lame, especially if you have multiple folders that you want to be constantly backed up. The good news? It’s 2009, robots are about to control the world, and we can automate it!

This tutorial will show you how to use Dropbox and Automator to do automatic backups of multiple folders.

Get Dropbox

Obviously, if you haven’t already, you’re going to need to get Dropbox and install it.

Create Action

Now you’ll have to create an Automator action so your syncing will be automated.

1. Load up Automator (It should be in your Applications folder)and create a Custom Workflow
2. In the Files & Folders tab, find “Get Specified Finder Items” and drag it to your workflow. Choose the first folder you’d like sync’d.
3. Now drag “Copy Finder Items” to your workflow.
4. Choose your Dropbox folder as the destination, and click “Replacing existing files” if you so desire.
5. Keep doing this for all of the folders you want to keep sync’d with Dropbox.
6. Save your Workflow.
7. Right click on the action you’ve saved, and go to “Open With”. Navigate to System/Library/Core Services and choose to “Always Open With” Automator Runner. This makes it so when your action is opened it automatically runs.

Sync

Now, already we’ve made syncing multiple folders with Dropbox easier, as you can just run the action you’ve saved whenever you want to backup your things, and it will copy everything from your selected Folders to the Dropbox folder.

But wouldn’t it be nice if your computer would do this automatically at a specified time every day? I think so. We can do th

at with iCal Alarms.

1. Load up iCal
2. Go to File > New Event, and call it what you’d like.
3. Double click on your Event and go to Edit
4. Choose the time you’d like it done
5. Repeat: Every day
6. For Alarm, choose “Open File” and then find your Dropbox action

That’s it!

I hope you enjoyed the tutorial.

Note:  There’s also a free version of Dropbox available but it’s limited to 2GB.

I love RSS feeds. It makes digesting the internet so much more pleasant and efficient. There are a lot of desktop clients that are available for reading your RSS feeds but I prefer to use a combination of the Fluid app and Google Reader.

What Fluid does is create a site-specific browser so you can have an offline desktop version of Google Reader. Sounds simple enough, right? Well it is.

Here I’ll detail how to get this all set up, and then some tweaks to make your RSS reading even better.

Set Up Fluid and Google Reader

First you’re going to need to get Fluid and install Google reader as the site.

1. Download and run Fluid

2. Plug in Google Reader’s information.

Set up Fluid

3. Find the app in your Applications (or wherever you saved it) and run it

Make it “All Inclusive”

By defaut, when you click a link from your RSS feed it will open in a new browser. Well that’s no good for us; that’s messy and we’re trying to make a desktop client here. Here’s how to make your new links open in your wonderful new Google Reader app.

1. Go to Google Reader > Preferences > Advanced and click on “Allow browsing to any URL”.

Allow Browsing to Any URL

2. Go back to the main preferences window and hit “open in a new tab in the current window”.

Open in New Tab

Make it Pretty

That’s it, you’re done. You have a complete offline desktop client for Google Reader now. If you want to go a bit further you can make the app prettier by using a skin. I use Helvetireader. It even has a nice icon to accompany the application. Beautiful. Details of how to install Helvetireader can be found here.

Helvetireader

So that’s how I do my RSS feeds.  How do you do yours?

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of spam on another website I own . Most of it is the “BUY VIAGRA CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP U R GONNA MAKE SEXY WITH NEW” kind of garbage or the “great post, i think to converse about your view with reply” flattery but a new (to me) type of spam has emerged:

Terrible Jokes!

I guess by offering a terrible joke, I may think “How relevant and delicious!” and approve the comment. Not so much. But anyway, I thought I’d share some of them with you:

What do you call a dumb balloon? An air head.

Did you hear about the farmer who was found guilty of stealing rotten fruit? He was judged by his pears.

What would you get if you put a light bulb in a suit of armor? A knightlight.

Why do hurricanes travel so fast? If they traveled slowly we would have to call them slow-i-canes. (My personal favourite)

Which side of a dog has the most hair? The out side.

I always knew spammers were lame, but THIS lame?

These wonderful, wonderful jokes have made me beg the question:

What is the best spam you have ever received?

Update 11.10.09: They keep coming in. Here’s some more delightful spam jokes.

Where does satisfaction come from? A satisfactory.

What did the cannibal do when he saw an “All you can eat” restaurant? He had two waiters and a busboy.

Why wouldn’t the bike move very fast?? It was too tired!!

What did one cloned sheep say to the other? I am ewe.

What did one ocean say to the other ocean? Nothing, they just waved.

Why did the pig cross the road? Because he was a road hog.

What happens when a ghost haunts a theater? The actors get stage fright.

What did the big chimney say to the small chimney? You’re too young to be smoking.

Why are Bankers good bike riders?? They are good at keeping their balance!!

I get more of this every day. From the same IP address, mind you, so it’s one hilarious spammer. I could ban the IP, but this is too much fun.

If you’re interested in the Twitter marketing phenomenon and haven’t read The Science of Retweets then you’re missing out. The report is a 22-page PDF by Dan Zarella focusing on what, when, why, and how Retweets are sent out. From the time of the day and day of the week most Retweets are sent, down to what words and punctuation marks are used most. Forget paid courses and programs; if you’re interested in Twitter marketing this is the best resource that I’ve found on the internet yet. And it’s free. All you have to do is subscribe to Dan’s website either by e-mail or RSS (which you should do anyway) and it’s yours.

“Over the course of 9 months, beginning in December of 2008, I’ve collected over 40 million ReTweets, including Tweets that contain variations of “RT,” “ReTweet,” and “Via.” I’ve also collected a random sampling of over 10 million “regular” Tweets that may or may not be ReTweets. The Tweets come from Twitter’s search API and its streaming API, both of which I have whitelisted access to. I use these 2 data sources and my own PHP scripts to analyze and compare the characteristics of both.”

DanZarella.com
@DanZarella on Twitter
The Science of Retweets Report

A forum without the crap.

If you’re a blogger (or would like to be one) then you have to sign up for the newly launched Problogger.com forums.  Run by the owner of Problogger.net, Darren Rowse, the gates were opened in beta mode on September 29th, and the masses were notified “October 2nd. There’s already 1,691 members as of this post (notice how we’re still on the official launch day), almost 300 threads, and over 3000 posts.

Forums such as Finding Readers, Making Money, Writing Content and Blog Design showcase the main theme of the site, which is as you guessed it: to be succesful blogging.

With a modest entrance fee of $1.95 per month (limited time offer ?) the spammers and not-so-serious are weeded out and all you’re left with is a great community of people trying to help others.

So if you’re serious about blogging and don’t like wasting your time with drivel-filled posts and spam, then get over to Problogger.com and sign up.

You can find me over there under the username Matt.