Tag Archives: internet

The Many Words on Spam and Email

Posted by admin on March 8, 2008 None comments

spamYears ago when I first began blogging, I thought I’d blog alot about spam. I’ve had plenty of opportunity, and have done minor posts here and there over the years – either here or on the Return Path blog, but never did keep the momentum going.

I guess the biggest reason I don’t blog more about spam still is that there are lots of other folks blogging about spam – and their doing a pretty darn good job, so what else could there be to add?

Here’s some of the spam blogs I follow:

The Spam Diaries by Ed Falk
Al Iverson’s Spam Resource
E-mail, tech policy and more by John Levine
SpamSuite.com
Terry Zinks Anti-spam Blog
Word to the Wise

There are a lot more than this – but these are the ones that I enjoy. Also, Planet Antispam, I think by Mr. Levine, seems to aggregate at least three of the above blogs if you want a one stop shop.

There are *many* blogs on E-mail marketing and deliverability, and while they may touch on spam, they are really focused on the better sides of email. Blogs I enjoy in this category include:

Return Path’s Online Resource Center for Email Marketers – (of course I’d list this!)
The Email Wars
Campaign Monitor Blog
Maximizing Deliverability
No man is an iland
Email Karma

As far as Internet Privacy blogs go, I haven’t found many, but here are a few I track:

BenEdelman.org
Chapell Blog
Privacy.org

I suppose I could blog more Privacy stuff, but face it, privacy stuff is dry and boring on the face of it. Yeah that’s a big part of my career, and although privacy online and data issues continue to get more and more relevant to ecommerce and business online, it is not a topic folks clamor to chat about.

I probably enjoy email deliverability blogs the least – maybe because I feel like I know all that stuff (and I probably don’t) or maybe it just feels like continue rehash of a lot of unchanging basics (don’t be an evil spammer or inadvertently behave like one). Maybe I’ve just worked in email WAY TOO LONG.

The anti-spam stuff is good – John Levine and Terry Zink hit good topics, are clear and succinct, and always have an interesting perspective that I usually don’t hear elsewhere.

So, all that said, I may try to pick up the pen a bit more on “spam” – maybe there is more to add on this nowadays. We’ll see.

Signature Upgrade

Posted by admin on February 28, 2008 None comments

Check out my new signature:

You might think I’ve been practicing for a while to get this just right…

Can you imagine a room full of crumpled up paper, scattered all around, everywhere but in the circular trash bin?

Well, if you can, you’d have to imagine it somewhere else – not here. See, that’s my name, but it isn’t my signature. But, it is a signature of my name…

I ran into this site, mylivesignature.com, via lifehacker.com, and so gave it a whirl.

Kinda fun, and the result – well if you know me, not very believable. I don’t write quite this cool, and well, it is a tad bit foofy for me, though there are 120 or so other fonts to choose from.

First enter your name, choose a font, then select some size, slant, and ink characteristics, and voila, an image to be used online – like in a blog. They also provide a Word Processing document version – I haven’t tried it though.

Doesn’t seem like the site solves a major problem in people’s lives – though I did just do this the “old-fashioned” way recently for my wife, who needed her signature in a word document. I had her sign a piece of paper which I scanned and tweaked with Adobe Photoshop. Not terribly difficult, but for folks not adept at Photoshop, this is an alternative.

It’s just not really your signature, but a signature of yours.

Also, they’ll sell you an animated version of a signature you create. That (along w/ Google Adsense) explains how they keep the lights on over there. I’m impressed – pretty cool.

Give it a try! Enjoy!

Feedblitz Test

Posted by admin on February 25, 2008 None comments

Pardon the intrusion. If you missed my earlier post, I’m amidst a blog technology “reset” – moving from Moveable Type to WordPress.

So far, I continue to be impressed by the ease of administration and customization with WordPress compared to MT.

As I continue to transition – I’m amazed at the various plugins, widgets, etc. that I must also update.

Feedblitz came up on my list tonight. I once blogged about moving to Feedblitz from Bloglet way back in the day. I have to admit, as I dug up my Feedblitz login and password, I gave pause considering that I might just skip it and go with Feedburner.

Feedburner is a similar company, recently purchased by Google, that “burns my feed” for me. Feedblitz handles email subscriptions for folks who want to be pinged when there is a new post to the blog.

I could probably just switch to Feedburner for both, but I have to say, going back through the Feedblitz interface – things have been upgraded since I’ve last checked.

The user interface isn’t fantastic, but it does seem to be feature-rich. While they weren’t purchased by Google – it seems like they have a fighting chance at competing. I wonder how it’s going over there.

Also, my subscribers are with Feedblitz – so why make them move (not that there are that many).

At this point I see no compelling reason not to stay loyal for the time being and try out some of the new features – it sure seems like they’ve been working hard over there.

For the email subscribers to Not That You Asked, served through Feedblitz – holler if you get this. Thanks. :)

Hello world!

Posted by admin on February 23, 2008 2 comments

Yes – Hello World!

I’m back! After, wow, nearly seven years with blogger.com and then Moveable Type, I’ve now just completed a relatively smooth transition to Word Press.

MT was great – until I recently upgraded to their newest release a few months back. It completely hosed my template – and the new template management stuff was too complex for me to figure out. I’m no newbie, but not enough of an expert to get through that.

So, enough fighting it, I’m switching – from Coke, to Pepsi. Budweiser to Coors. Moveable Type to WordPress.

I’ll need some time to get things tweaked from here. I’ll stick with the standard WP template for now, but am checking out themes.

I’ve also unveiled the new domain – notthatyouasked.org – so I’ll be working on some identity for that.

Stay tuned…