Posts Tagged ‘e-mail’

Use Safari 5′s Reader to e-mail good-looking web content

I’ve talked about the Reader function in Safari 5 in the past–it lets you remove the navigation, ads, and other clutter from a web page so you can focus on the content. It’s a wonderful tool for readability and a great example of universal design in action. A neat side benefit of Reader is the ability to e-mail the cleaned-up view to a friend or colleague. I made this short video to show how this works.

Use Safari 5′s Reader function with e-mail from Stratepedia on Vimeo.

Safari 5 is a free download from Apple. You need Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or 10.6 (Snow Leopard), or Windows XP, Vista, or 7. If you prefer Firefox or Chrome, check out these Reader-like add-ons for your browser.

By Aaron Sumner | August 2nd, 2010 | View Comments

From last week: Facebook, phishing, Depot tags, and more productive e-mail

It’s Monday again–here’s what you might have missed last week:

On Tuesday, I wrapped up (for now, anyway) my series on shoestring social media by looking at how we manage our Facebook page.

On Wednesday, Amber shared a tip for using tags in Depot. This is something you’ll want to start doing now; it’ll get even better in Depot 2 this summer.

On Thursday, Amber defined phishing–be safe out there!

On Friday, we stepped away from social networking tools a little bit to look at ways to make e-mail a more productive tool for you. Share your tips, too!

I’m also excited to share that we pre-ordered an iPad on Friday! We’re looking forward to receiving it and will let you know all about it when it arrives. Have a great week!

By Aaron Sumner | March 15th, 2010 | View Comments

5 ways to boost your e-mail productivity

Last December, productivity blog Lifehacker polled its readers to determine their preferred tool for online collaboration. In an age of wikis, social networks, and Google Wave, it may surprise you that the early adopter-types who read Lifehacker chose e-mail as their favorite collaboration tool. The possible reason for this is that we’re all pretty familiar with how to use e-mail, whereas newer tools have learning curves we haven’t all tackled (yet). E-mail, though, can become an impediment to productivity if you let it. Here are five good ways to get your inbox in order and reclaim some of that time you use sending and receiving e-mail:

1. Achieve Inbox Zero

How many messages are in your inbox right now? Unless your answer is “none, Aaron!” then you have too many. Inbox Zero is a method created by productivity guru Merlin Mann to cut through e-mail clutter via the four D’s–delete, do, defer, delegate. For a few details, check out Amber’s post about Inbox Zero from last summer. Once you’ve cleaned house, make sure to pick up your nerd merit badge!

2. Use subject line rules

Sadly, searching for e-mail subject writing rules will return primarily tips on ~~spamming~~ marketing to consumers via e-mail. There are some good tips out there, though, such as these four ways good subject lines will make you more productive (basically, make them specific, accessible, and relevant); some more tips on good subject lines (concise, summarizing, “don’t tease”); and even some e-mail subject line protocols to really get productive.

3. Ditch the attachments

I hate e-mail attachments. The disk quota on my work e-mail account is quite low compared to what I’d get if I used Gmail or some other free mail service. A large PowerPoint file or video clip can lock down my e-mail account. Be considerate when sending attachments, especially large ones. Online services like Dropbox make it easy to safely share files via web links instead of attaching them to your messages.

4. Shut it off!

Whenever your computer pings or pops up a notification that new mail has arrived, what do you do? You probably drop what you’re doing, go over to your e-mail program, and see what’s new. If you don’t, you’re probably thinking about it. That’s distracting. My solution to this, especially when I’m working on something that needs my concentration, is close my e-mail program completely. I fire it up every few hours to check on incoming messages, process them as necessary, and then shut it back down.

I know that might sound drastic, especially if you’re addicted to e-mail. But give it a try. At the very least, shut off the bleeps and bloops and pop-up window notifications drawing your attention from your task at hand to your inbox.

5. Express yourself (clearly)

Last month, WebWorkerDaily published five ways to express yourself more clearly online. Clearer expression makes you a better communicator makes you more productive, because you’re not having to re-explain yourself.

What are your tips for getting the most out of e-mail? Share them in a comment below. See you next week!

Photo: S Migol on Flickr

By Aaron Sumner | March 12th, 2010 | View Comments

How we manage a social media presence on a shoestring, part 2: Keeping the audience connected

Last week, I began a series of posts about making your social media presence manageable, with a series of tips to help you make blogging a more manageable process. Now that we’ve written content, though, and are trying to build an audience, how do we keep them connected and let them know when we’ve got new material for them to read (or listen to or view, if you’re podcasting)?

If our blog is the core of our social media presence, then RSS is the technology that glues it to other services. RSS is typically recognized as an acronym for “Really Simple Syndication,” though I prefer to think of it as “Ready for Some Stories”. Simply put, RSS makes it easy for a reader to keep up-to-date when new content is posted to a blog, newspaper, or other site providing an RSS feed. Instead of you going to each site to see if it’s got something new to read, new content comes to you. We thus provide an RSS feed of our content, so people using a tool like Google Reader, NetNewsWire, or NewsGator can access our news stream anytime.

However, RSS adoption rates vary. Depending on whom your blog’s audience is, you may find that very few of your readers use an RSS reader (or even understand what RSS is). It’s important to make your information available to people via a variety of channels, as opposed to forcing them to adopt specific technologies to access and use your content.

Let’s start with e-mail. We provide a daily e-mail version of the previous day’s blog posts. It’s opt-in, and people can unsubscribe at any time. We use a free service from Google called FeedBurner to handle this. Essentially, FeedBurner listens to our blog’s RSS feed and collects information for each daily e-mail. No new blog posts for the day? Then no e-mail is sent. FeedBurner takes a few minutes to set up, but it’s worth the effort.

Our daily e-mail goes out around 7:30 central time each morning, so we schedule each day’s designated new content to publish around 6:45. This makes sure the new content we want to feature shows up at the top of the e-mail message.

Next up is other social networks. Facebook and Twitter currently rule the roost in terms of overall user bases. We have a Twitter account and Facebook page for users of those services to be notified of new content from us. I’ll talk more in-depth about what we do with Twitter and Facebook in a future post, but the key takeaway here is that the links you see on either to new content on our blog are all posted automatically through a great, free service called TwitterFeed. Create a TwitterFeed account, then point it to an RSS feed you wish to share. You can then schedule new items from that feed to post to Twitter, Facebook, and a few other social networking services automatically.

We’re thus able to spread the word about new blog content in four ways: Through an RSS reader, through a daily e-mail message, through Facebook, and through Twitter. As a blog author, I’ve only had to spend real time focusing on my content and not on distribution. For us as a group, this makes our social media presence manageable and allows us to reach readers using the delivery mechanisms of their preferences.

Next week I’ll dig deeper into how we use Twitter to not only share links to our own content, but share cool work and ideas done by others we meet online.

By Aaron Sumner | February 16th, 2010 | View Comments

Some Stratepedia services may be briefly unavailable Tuesday, 12/22

At some point later in the day this coming Tuesday, December 22, I will be moving e-mail services for stratepedia.org to a new mail server. If all goes to plan we’ll only be down for a few minutes.

This means three things for you:

You may encounter error messages from functions in Coaching Calendar, Depot, Dossier, and Learning Labs that try to send e-mail notifications.
You may not receive e-mail notifications from Stratepedia applications during the migration.
We may not receive messages you send to our help e-mail address (try using our online help form instead).

Sorry for the relatively late notice. We usually try to do things like this over the weekend, but with the pending holidays Tuesday will be the only day we’re all here at the same time to make sure this goes off without a hitch.

By Aaron Sumner | December 21st, 2009 | View Comments

Blogging is easier than ever with Posterous

When the Web was young, publishing your thoughts online required some work. You needed access to a web server. You needed to understand the ins and outs of HTML, the markup language that tells a browser what to make bold, italic, or a link. People who had something to say could get that server access, learn HTML, and publish their thoughts for anyone to read.

Then came programs like Dreamweaver, making creation of an HTML document as easy as typing a paper in Word; and sites like GeoCities, which offered free website hosting for the masses. this was a step in the right direction, but Dreamweaver and its contemporaries priced some would-be publishers out of the business and still had a bit of a learning curve that could be intimidating to some.

Then blogs started showing up. To publish a blog (short for weblog), an individual needed only to set up an account with a provider like Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress, or TypePad. Now you could just type your thoughts into a box, press publish, and presto–you officially became a member of the blogosphere. As you added more posts they would index by date and subject; visitors could even leave comments and keyword search your blog with no extra work on your end. Things just worked.

Easy enough, right? Well, last week it got even easier.

Posterous is a new, free blogging service that makes blogging as simple as sending an e-mail. Seriously. Type a message to post@posterous.com. Attach files, even. Don’t forget a subject line–that will be the title of your first post. In a moment you’ll have a blog of your own, ready for the world to see. From here you can do a few optional things to customize your blog, but for all intents and purposes you’re officially a blogger. Congratulations!

So now that you have no technical reason to not blog, let’s talk about content. Most people say, “Nobody cares what I have to say.” Write for yourself, then. Blogs are great tools for self-reflection. Did you see a documentary that really made you think? Write about it in your blog. Maybe you had a big revelation at work today? Blog it! You might be surprised that there are others out there interested in what you think, and who want to talk about the same things you do.

Here are some ideas to get your blog rolling:

Going to the SIM Conference in a few weeks? At the end of each day (or more often if you’re so inclined) write what you took away from each session you attended.
Reading a good book? Each time you set the book down, take a few minutes to jot your thoughts about it in your blog. (If you’re a student, this is an easy way to create indexed, keyword searchable notes on your reading!)
Did something thought-provoking or just plain cool happen at school or work today? Share it in your blog, then spend some time later looking back at the event and thinking about its relevance.
Type meeting notes into a blog, and share the post with others in attendance.

There you go–visit Posterous now to set up your blog, and start sharing! Share links to your blogs, whether they’re through Posterous or another service, in the comments below.

By Aaron Sumner | July 2nd, 2008 | View Comments

Subscribing to this blog by e-mail

If checking this website regularly or setting up an RSS reader is too much of a hassle, don’t forget you can also receive news from the Stratepedia Blog by e-mail.

By Aaron Sumner | January 23rd, 2008 | View Comments