Mail.appetizer for Leopard

Woohoo! Mail.appetizer is back!.

Mail.appetizer is a great little freeware “notifier” for mail.app — the mail program that comes with Apples OS X.

What it does is pop up a little translucent window on your screen with the sender, subject and an excerpt of the message each time you receive mail. It also has buttons to mark the message as read, delete it, or go to mail to view it.
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Getting rid of Cyrillic spam

My spam filtering has gotten pretty good the past few years, largely due to doing a lot of work at improving the spam and virus filtering techniques we use on our mail servers. Some still gets through, however.

Some always gets through.

I’ve noticed for awhile now that of the spam that IS getting through, the vast majority of it was in Cyrillic — you know, the alphabet used by Slavic languages such as Russian, with the characters that tend to look a little backwards and odd to those of us only used to European alphabets.
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Introduction to dynamic pages

One of the most powerful features of blogs and other content management systems (CMS) is that they can create pages “on-the-fly” that to all intents and appearances look like a hand-built static web page.  This allows you to focus on developing your content itself, while the software generates the pages for you.
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“The Long Tail” and your web site

“The Long Tail” is a term that has generated a lot of buzz over the last few months.  In short, it says that the total demand for goods that there is a slight demand for far exceeds the total demand for goods that there is a strong demand for.  Confused yet?  How does this apply to your web site?
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www and your domain name

It’s common knowledge that your site should come up for users both with and without the “www” on your domain name. Unfortunately, the way this is usually done may cause search engines to penalize you.

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Google, “nofollow” and Comment Spam

The ‘net is all a-buzz with word of a new initiative by the Google, MSN and Yahoo search teams to “eliminate” comment spam from blogs.  What does this mean to you?

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All About Links

Backlinks, inbound links, outbound links, reciprocal links, etc.  There are too many names for a relatively simple concept.  Let’s de-mystify all of this, shall we?

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Why you should read weblogs

You’re a busy person, and you already spend all of the time you can afford keeping up with your industry.  Should you bother taking the time to learn about weblogs?  You betcha — the benefits to your business and your bottom line can be immense, and once you do, you’ll wonder what you were waiting for.

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Selling is selling

Conversion Chronicles has a nice little write-up on writing sales copy for your web site. Their take is that when it comes right down to it, all successful methods are essentially the same method. Check out the article here for some good common sense guidelines for writing your sales copy.
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E-Mail Addresses & Web Pages

It used to be a common sight to find e-mail addresses on small business web pages. Unfortunately, putting an unprotected e-mail address on a web page anymore is tantamount to erecting a giant billboard reading “Please Spam Me!”. Address harvesting robots trawl the ‘net relentlessly, looking for anything that resembles an e-mail address. When they find an address, it is added to spam mailing lists and sold to all of those people who like to send you e-mail about your mortgage and your sex life.

But you still need to have a way to have visitors to your site contact you.

Fortunately, there are a couple of good alternatives.

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