We rely heavily on instant messaging, and the Skype client is the current favourite (largely due to the free voice calls and not because of the awkward interface).
When we talk about instant messaging someone these days we say we’ll ‘ping them’. Pinging is a direct reference to the noise most IM clients make when one sends a chat. Pinging is great, it’s fast, efficient and often saves having to write an email or pick up the phone. However, pinging can soon become irritating if it’s poorly used.
A colleague and I were discussing this and we both agree that sometimes a ping makes life easier and sometimes it doesn’t. More often than not, the neat brevity of a ping can become a distracting annoyance.
So, for a laugh, we came up with the following 10 commandments for happier ping life:
- IM does not replace the phone or email – use them all when suitable.
- If you’re dealing with a regular contact, start your IM chat with a direct question and question mark. If you open with greeting (Hi, Hello, Yo, whatever) than you have distracted your contact who then has to wait for the question.
- Use proper sentence-case capitalisation. Never use all-caps as it will look like you’re SHOUTING and that is liable to irritate.
- Use question marks if you want a response.
- Use ellipses if you don’t really require a response.
- Respond to pings with question marks and don’t bother responding to pings with ellipses.
- There’s no need to officially sign-off, avoid the temptation to say good-bye. Again, that good-bye ping is just another unnecessary distraction.
- brb meaning be-right-back is very useful for breaking a conversation and dealing with a phone-call, door-bell, earthquake, whatever.
- Keep you status updated then your contacts can see what you’re doing without having to ask. Additionally you could consider using a service like Twitter to manage your status.
- Don’t rush, take time to explain yourself clearly and concisely.
Tagged as:
etiquette,
instant messaging,
skype
- Export all contacts
- Export certain contacts by tag
- Clean-up the tag file so you have 2 columns Name, Email & Tag
- Clean-up the all contacts file so you have the same fields
- Copy and past the first tag file data into the all contacts file and then use the following Excel function to check for duplicates <code>=COUNTIF(B:B,E2)</code>
Tagged as:
highrise
4 places that I go to over and over:
- Bed
- Desk
- Sea
- Fridge
4 people who e-mail me regularly:
- John
- Eric
- Monz
- Billy
4 of my favourite places to eat:
- Cassareep, Speightstown, Barbados
- Roka, Charlotte Street, London
- Blue Legume, Stoke Newington, London
- Zen, Barbados
4 places I would rather be right now:
- Beach
- Bed
4 TV shows I watch:
- Mad Men
If you’re dealing with keywords, then Excel is your friend. Excel makes managing large lists of data very easy and it has a number of features that work especially well with keywords.
Here is a simple recipe to combine a few simple keywords together to create a list of long-tail terms.
Ingredients
Core terms
Geographic terms
- new york
- los angeles
- boston
- philadelphia
Recipe
In Excel, enter your core terms into column A.
Enter core terms
Now we need to multiply the amount of core terms (3) by the amount of geographic terms (4). So, in Excel we need to copy down the core to repeat them 12 times.
Select the cells A1 to A3 and click Edit -> Copy. Then select cells A4 to A12 and click Edit -> Paste.
Copy and paste core terms
Now sort the list by clicking Edit -> Select All and then Data -> Sort -> Sort By -> Column A -> Ascending.
Sort column A ascending
Now enter your geographic terms in column B and copy and paste them down.
Geographic terms enter, copy and paste
Now all we need to do is combine the 2 sets of data into to column C with the following formula: =A1&" "&B1
Combining formula
Now hit enter to see the results and the copy and past this cell (C1) into cells C2 to C12.
Copy and paste the formula
Now you have your long tail terms in column C. You can add these to your PPC campaign and improve and improve the chances of you add being seen.
This is obviously quite a simplistic example, but you can use this approach to build much richer, complex keyword lists.
Tagged as:
excel
More often than not when using NetInsight you’ll want to strip out sections of URL, rewrite parts and modify the query string.
A common task is removing session ids from the page, here is the regular expression you need to remove the session id from the following example:
URL
http://www.pickuppal.com/pup/intro.html;jsessionid=79FG987987987JGDGDK7YTTUYT
Regular Expression pattern
(;jsessionid=[0-9A-F]+)
Tagged as:
netinsight,
regex
If you use SSH SCP commands you may of noticed a subtle and annoying difference in the way you specifcy a custom port. SSH uses a lowercase p, whereas SCP requires an uppercase P:
ssh -p 08098
scp -P 09809
Tagged as:
scp,
ssh,
unix
- Build a blog.
- Write engaging articles about yourself or your business every day.
- Be open, candid and generous with your content.
- Plug said blog into every social syndication option out there (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.).
Tagged as:
blogging,
link-building
When importing CSV files into Bento it’s important that the date is exactly the right format, so if Bento has a date like 30/09/2008 then the CSV dates must be in exactly the same format.
In Excel, you can format the cells to be a custom date type by typing dd/mm/yyyy in the cell format dialog in the custom category.
Tagged as:
bento,
excel
Unica’s NetInsight is the best web analytics software ever!
A few reasons why it works so well for us:
- It allows us to host our own data on our own servers so we don’t share important metrics and conversion data with prying eyes.
- Our NetInsight installation is log file based so we don’t use Javascript code which can sometimes slow page loading times.
- It’s possible to create customised campaigns for every conceivable marketing initiative.
- You can plug-in external data sources and extend the NetInsight database.
- Unica are a talented, accomodating company and whilst they have many big clients they still have time for small business like Sky Rocket Inc..
Dashboards
NetInsight comes with lots of pretty graphs which are arranged into various dashboards. And you can create your own custom dashboard and focus on metrics that are important to you.
Robots & spiders
Because NetInsight uses your website log-files it can report on robots and spiders. This gives you great visibility into how active the search engines are on your site. It also alerts you to non-human script visits, content-scrapers and hacks.
Automatic marketing adjustments
You can also apply customised business rules to NetInsight to trigger various marketing events such as PPC adjustments, special offers, email newsletter and direct mail.
Landing page click-maps
Exactly measure how hot certain area of your landing page are.
Filters
One of my favourite features of NetInsight are the filters. ANY metric can be a filters, and ANY filter can be added on-the-fly to ANY report. It’s super powerful and I don’t know of ANY other analytics program that can match this.
Drilling-Down
Everything report in NetInsight has a hierarchy, and as such you drill down through this hierarchy to refine the data. You can also drill-through from onw report to another creating whole new dimensions for your data.
Date comparison
Easily compare 2 dates in 1 report.
Typed-in search queries
NetInsight can show exactly what people are typing-in to search engines. If you run PPC campaigns you can see how these terms relate to your paid keywords and use this information to improve your campaign.
A/B testing
A/B test anything! Create customise data sets and see them side-by-side.
Tagged as:
analytics,
netinsight
If, like me, you spent days hacking your iPhone to make it work on an unofficial cell phone network, then you can understand how scary it is when iTunes tells you that it wants to restore the phone to factory defaults with the error message: “iTunes cannot read the contents of the iPhone”!
If I’d followed iTunes advice my phone would’ve been rendered useless. So, I was quite pleased when I discovered another fix.
It seems that my phone went on the fritz in the middle of exporting images to iPhoto. So I found a fix online where you delete the contents of the media folder, then when you reconnect to iTunes you get the option to load a the backup. No restore, no factory defaults, all is good!
If you have command line access to your phone you can use the following:
rm -R /var/root/Media
Otherwise you can connect via SSH or SFTP and delete the files manually.
[UPDATE]
Please read the comments, the best fix is from Bosaka, but as new updates to iTunes and iPhones are are made things can change. The best bet is to read all of the comments below. This way you can be sure to get the right fix for your iPhone. I feel very strongly that this whole stance that Apple has taken to inhibit your access to your iPhone data and restrict carrier choices is very backwards, and we fully support everyone at Hackint0sh and the Dev Team in their efforts to fight this. You should check their sites for other solutions to iPhone and iTunes related problems.
Tagged as:
apple,
iphone,
itunes
