Thursday, November 19, 2009

How to stop Firefox stealing your focus

While I love Firefox, it has an annoying little habit. When you click on a hyperlink inside a program or document - for instance in an email - it launches a Firefox window and puts the other program in the background. There are a couple of fixes for this annoyance, which Rhiannon explains over at the Gizmo website.

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Creating better email presentations

These days a lot of selling is done by email. I use "selling" in the broadest sense of the term - whether you are promoting a club, your own interests, or a business, you just want your email to look more attractive. But most email programs are not up to the job of formatting them attractively. And most of the professional emails you receive have been created with expensive software, or using specialised marketing services. The organisation I work for does indeed utilise such a service, but recently I needed to send out a promotion for another person. It took a lot of hunting, but I managed to track down a free program that does the job simply and well. It's called Email Marketing Pro, and not only does it help you to create the email presentation, it also manages the distribution process nicely. It's reasonably intuitive to use, although it pays to look at the instructional videos the makers helpfully provide, particularly to set up the sending and receiving accounts. A knowledge of html and web authoring will enable you to get the best out of the program, but you can get by using the visual tools which are pretty similar to what you have already become familiar with in Word.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Overwhelming social media, slow computers, retrieving lost data, and so on...

A few sightings from the last day or two:
Feeling overwhelmed by social media? You're not alone
Why is My Computer Slowing Down? Lincoln Spector provides answers to some of the most common reasons why a once-fast PC is slowing down. Surprisingly, though, he omits one of the most common - an email program that has become clogged with messages. The simple solution: clean out the Sent and the Deleted Items folders.
My data is gone. How do I recover it? First, don't panic, writes Bob Rankin. Data is incredibly durable and seldom unrecoverable. In fact, it's extremely difficult to erase data when you want to. Government agents have recovered data from hard drives that have been reformatted and had new data written over their entire surfaces nine times or more! Your presentation is probably still there; the key to the storage locker is just a little bent out of shape, is all.
What to do about Windows Registry errors. (Another helpful article from Bob Rankin.) The Windows registry is a database of settings and options for Windows features, programs, data files, and computer hardware. You can think of the registry as Windows' way of remembering which printer you prefer; what files you accessed most recently; where to find your hard drive; etc. When errors creep into the registry, Windows may behave oddly or not work at all.
10 of the Best Free Webmail Services. Sean Aune provides a list of 10 of the best free Web-based email solutions currently on the market.