The Daily Sucker

Another great Seth Godin post — you are reading his blog aren’t you?

The trap: Use all your money to build a fancy website and leave no money or patience for the hundred revisions you’ll need to do.

The trap: read the tech blogs and fall in love with the bleeding-edge hip sites and lose focus on the long-term players that deliver real value.

Definitely not a Daily Sucker.

The secret of the web

I’ve been looking for a brain-dead online tool to schedule committee meetings. I don’t need a full-fledged scheduling program and I can’t use Outlook because the people I contact are on a proprietary system. Fortunately, I’ve found what I’m looking for and it’s called Doodle and there’s no sign-up required. For a better description here’s the link at downloadsquad where I first read about it.

Doodle

Submitter comments: Their product looks interesting, but they’re using only images all over the web site.  I bet the search engines don’t think much of their pages… And there’s no alt text neither.

Vincent Flanders’ comments: This site is a really good example of a “nice looking” site that’s all screwed up. The top navigation is Flash and since there are a good number of folks who have Flash turned off, you shouldn’t use Flash navigation on your site. Fortunately, there is corresponding text-based navigation at the bottom.

The major problem is the contrast isn’t sufficient between the graphic text and the background colors. On the subpages, the light blue text on the white background also fails the color contrast tests, although the large type may make it acceptable. I noticed that the top of the “Savings” page is difficult to read.

A second problem with using graphics for text is that you have to be certain there are no typos. With text, typos are (usually) easy to find and they certainly are easy to fix. Also, if someone needs to change a page, it’s difficult to change the text on the graphics. Updating these pages is virtually impossible.

Oh, how do you buy the bulbs they make?

Elumination

One of the most horrendous TV shows in the history of TV was “Cop Rock.” Cops and criminals and people would just start singing in the middle of the action. When I told my daughter about this show, she wouldn’t believe me.

Here are a couple of YouTube links to prove my point.

Cop Rock 1

Cop Rock 2 (May be NSFW)

Have you ever wondered, “Did Bob read my e-mail that had my quote or is he just ignoring me?” Well, if Bob uses HTML e-mail (and lots of folks do) you can find out if he opened your e-mail.

About.com has an article entitled “Windows Email Return Receipt Tools and Services” and it mentions a good number of services and software. The one I bought and use is from a company called MSGTAG. (While MSGTAG has an affiliate program, I’m not a member.)

There are 3 versions (one if free, but your e-mail has a footer about MSGTAG) I bought the high-end product MSGTAG Status 2 ($59.95) and it’s really amazing. For example, I discovered that my daughter — the person I love more than anyone in the universe — waited 3 weeks and 23 hours to open one of my e-mails.

On the other hand, it only took Seth Godin 2 minutes and 12 seconds to open an e-mail I sent him entitled “Bad Marketing at the American Diabetes Association.” Hmm. I think there’s a point here.

I was really disappointed when a program called RescueTime stopped working. I tried everything suggested and I couldn’t get it back. Well, the great news is IT WORKS AGAIN. The solution was one of the following:

1. There was a new version of the software.
2. I updated Windows and the .NET 2.0 upgrade decided to finally install (third time’s the charm).
3. I created a new user account.

I really like the way it tells me how much time I’m spending on each application on my computer. It’s very cool and the individual version is free (the business version hasn’t been release so I don’t know pricing.) I have no commercial interest in this product. I’m just happy it’s working again.

On the other hand, WebLog Expert has gone down the tubes. Sigh.