Yesterday I was hoping to have some free time to visit the grocery store to pick-up a few necessities. Unfortunately, I realized all too late that hopping in a car for a trip to the grocery store was out of the question.
Having heard a thing or two about the "convenience" of shopping online for groceries, I decided I might as well give Safeway.com a try. Considering I shop online for miscellaneous items like clothing, gadgets, video games, or anything else non-consumable, why not order produce, eggs, cheese, or Oreo's? Amazon's announcement of AmazonFresh (direct competition with mainstream grocery stores for "fresh produce" who have gone online) is proof that ...
UPDATE: According to a comment on digg, gmailupgrades.com has been taken down.
Important FYI update for any Gmail users. If you receive the following email in your Gmail account, do not follow the embedded link. With the recent announcement of Google paid Google storage upgrades, the following phishing emails will undoubtedly become more and more the norm.
Dear Gmail customer
From now if you need more than 2 GB of space use this invitation and upgrade your account to 100 GB of space also you can register one free domain name via this invitation
your account upgrade will done after 24 hours
your invitation code is: http://gmailupgrades.com/Gmail-Account-Upgrade/.../
Thank You
Gmail Support Department
The email From: address is gmail-noreply@google.com. ...
Earlier this evening I caught a sneak preview of The 11th Hour (Warner Independent Pictures) at the Seattle Art Museum thanks to Yelp & TheWarrenReport. The film, produced & narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio (no joke), looks back at global changes - namely global warming. The film is somewhat similar to the Al Gore's heavily marketed An Inconvenient Truth. While Gore's film was staged in a presentation-like environment with rich Keynote slides focusing heavily on Hurricane Katrina, DiCaprio's narrated film featured interview clips from 70 authoritative scientists, designers, and academic figures - focusing on global warming, sustainability, and forward thinking.
Towards the end of the evening, an open floor type discussion ...
If someone were to ask you how to improve credibility and increase constructive exposure online, what would you say? Would you say things like "setup a blog" or "comment and interact with other individuals in your interest group(s)"? Better yet, what would you do? What are you doing right now to improve your "branding"? What does Google know about you? Yahoo? What do search results say about you? Even more important, what do others know about you?
Roughly 10 months ago, I was invited to the 9rules network (visit to find out more). Although I have been fortunate enough to meet contacts both within and outside the network, there ...
Last year Drew introduced me to web based service which expedited the process of sending, receiving, signing, and returning legal documents - contracts. Without the help of EchoSign, we would have lost a few days waiting for FedEx to deliver and return the signed documents. Why put up with the waiting time to send & receive documents? We live in the digital age! We live in the here & now; send, sign, done. That is exactly what EchoSign delivers.
EchoSign is the only true signature automation solution on the market today. Unlike virtual fax or e-signature software, EchoSign offers an end-to-end solution by automating the entire contracting process from the request ...
Smashing Magazine recently polled 35 different individuals whose livelihood deals in some shape or form with web design. If you're not already a subscriber, I highly recommend their feed which regularly publishes some of the most detailed and exhaustive resource lists on the net. Their latest "list" showcases the responses to 5 distinct questions answered by 35 different designers. Their method of identifying & locating interviewees:
How do you find the best designers worldwide? OK, a legitimate question. The fact is that we’ve tried so select the best ones, but we definitely have missed many creative, talented artists with solid portfolio, but quite unknown in the community.
We didn’t choose by ...
Not too long ago I posted a review & comparison of three online collaboration applications - Basecamp, Goplan, and activeCollab. Through personal experience, as well as input from readers, I realized that the online collaboration tools niche is one of constant change and continual competition between various services. Each tool offered its own strengths and weaknesses.
However, the review did not take into account the fact that oftentimes, decentralized team members find it challenging to consistently log into and utilize a centralized service outside of their daily routine. Translated, the aforementioned web services are useless unless team members or clients are capable of training themselves to consistently utilize the web ...
For some time, I've left a small Crazy Egg <script> at the bottom of my site which provided information as to where readers were more inclined to use their mouse. My impression(s) of the service has changed little from when I shared my thoughts during the beta period.
5thirtyone.com Overlay & Heatmap 3 day campaign results - Click for full previews
Crazy Egg has changed with welcomed improvements over the last few months for the service. From Dashboard refinements, to added Developer Tools providing site administrators with additional resources, the service has received a number of feature updates created to enhance an alternative overview of activity on your pages.
Dictate how ...
Here are a few tips for local web development which, for the most part, are applicable for both OS X and Windows users. Simple little steps which can be implemented in order to "automate" the creation of web documents.
Local development requires a development environment
Simplicity is the name of the game. With less time worrying about completing installations by hand - checking libraries, installing multiple packages, etc - I say go for the drag 'n drop approach.
Windows users can setup a full development environment using Apache Friends XAMPP packages for Windows.
OS X users see Living-e AG's MAMP (MySQL, Apache, and PHP) previously mentioned here.
Once you've created a suitable development environment, you'll ...
Purchased a new Apple computer lately? Apple recommends supplementing your new purchase with a yearly subscription to their Dot Mac (.Mac) service.
Touting such conveniences as iWeb publishing (no HTML/CSS knowledge necessary), Photocasting (think personal photo broadcasting), iDisk (access files anywhere at anytime or share files with others), Backup (schedule automatic backups offsite or to external media), Groups (communicate and socialize with others), Mail (desktop & web based email access), and Sync (data & preference syncing between machines) what's not to like? What may not be so enticing for users is the admission cost(s) for such "conveniences". $99 for single users and $179 for family (up to 5 members) per ...
Development applications & utilities surface with announcements and updates on a regular basis promising increased productivity, time-saving innovative features, and my all-time favorite - the ability to "deliver awesome standards-based sites in no time!" If only achieving the end results were so simple...
I have fielded a handful questions from contacts inquiring about applications used in my daily routine. The following are the applications & utilities which have proven their merit through the past few months of work. Applications which I have personally trusted / relied on and would happily endorse. I urge potential users to ignore claims promised in the first few introductory lines on a developers page opting instead ...
The website stat whore within each of us shares a similar yearning for tracking specific links to gauge popularity. The reason? We like knowing what tickles a readers interest, what keywords entice readers to click-through, or what ad campaigns work where and when.
Over the past few months I have managed to keep myself entertained and informed concerning link popularity - on my own site - using one of or a combination of the following services and utilities. Two of these utilities are offered free of charge and in many ways, allow users to gain a better grasp of user activity on any given web page.
Although comments can be ...
Khoi Vinh recently announced an awesome utility for anyone who frequently passes long URLs out to contacts. The service, known as Shorty, is a self-hosted alternative to URL shortening services like TinyURL or URL123. Shorty is self hosted. This means that any long URLs you pass through the utility will be prefixed with your own domain.
The critical difference between Shorty and TinyURL is that Shorty resides on your server. You install it (all you need is a MySQL database and PHP) and you then have the power of TinyURL and its ilk, but rather than being tied to a third party, it's a part of your brand.
Seeing as though ...
Blogging is very much the medium of choice for publishing personal content on to the net. From as little as free, the average internet user can be up and publishing within 5 minutes. All it takes is a little know how, the proper tools, quality content, and a little perseverance to see through the early hurdles of getting off the ground.
The tools & services
You have ideas, words, the motivation to publish your own content on to the net. In order to do so, you'll need a solid publishing platform. Something which will allow you to focus on your writing with a certain degree of professionalism - this does not include ...
Update: Follow-up - BoardPusher custom board arrives.
Anticipating an upcoming birthday, and realizing that the most memorable gifts are of the personalized type, I set out to find a service which would allow me to convert something created in Photoshop into a physical object. In this particular scenario, I discovered a custom skateboard design service known as BoardPusher.
For a small startup fee, skateboard artists can open up shop and sell their own unique designs to the public. Boardpusher's will collect a small commission off of boards sold, and the rest is available for use as purchasing credit or profit. Check out the catalogue comprised of individual board artists or opt to ...
Every now and then during moments of free time, I stop to peruse some of the incoming referrals from sites utilizing one of the following WordPress themes: Foliage, Foliage Mod, or 5ThirtyOne V2.
The above sites, in one way, shape, or form, utilize 5ThirtyOne releases as a base from which to build upon. I've collected 3 which recently caught my attention.
