Posts Tagged ‘email’

Possible e-mail issues with the Learning Labs? (Update: Resolved)

I’m investigating an apparent issue with receiving e-mail notifications of new forum posts in the Learning Labs. Registration and password reset messages are being delivered–just not forum notifications.

If you’ve been receiving notification messages from forums in the Learning Labs, please let me know by leaving a comment below or e-mailing help@stratepedia.org.

This may require intermittent maintenance on the Learning Labs sites this afternoon–I apologize in advance for any inconvenience.

Update: I think this is taken care of now–it could be that these notifications haven’t been sending out in awhile. This was my fault–I missed a rather important setting change–and I apologize again for the issue.

By Aaron | August 7th, 2009 | Comments

How to keep up with Stratepedia online by Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, and RSS

Here are four ways you can stay in touch with Stratepedia. There’s some overlap, so don’t feel like you have to follow us everywhere (though we’d love it if you did!):

Follow Stratepedia on Twitter: We share links to new things we post in our blog or find online on Twitter. We’ll also be sure to reply to your questions if you drop us a tweet at @stratepedia.

Become a Stratepedia fan on Facebook: We also share our blog entries on our new Facebook page–be on the lookout for more Facebook-oriented activities here. If you’ve got a question or comment (or maybe even a virtual gift) you can leave it on our wall.

Subscribe to our blog via RSS or e-mail: You can get the latest news from our blog delivered direct to your e-mail inbox or RSS feed reader. Link on over to our blog to leave your comments, or feel free to drop us a line directly via e-mail.

Like I said, there’s no need to use all of the above services–we make sure important things like blog posts get shared across all of them, and if something interesting starts in one place we’ll make sure to note it elsewhere.

By Aaron | August 4th, 2009 | Comments

Is Google Wave the e-mail of the future?

0E2D3451-8FEA-496F-9039-499B08DA08D2.jpgGoogle I/O, a conference for web developers using Google and open web technologies, is going on right now. Google has taken this opportunity to introduce what could be a major shift in how we communicate online, called Google Wave. As its developers (the same guys who invented Google Maps) noted, it’s what e-mail might look like if it had been invented today instead of 25 years ago.

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Google Wave will work inside your web browser. It borrows from familiar concepts behind e-mail and instant messaging–two technologies developed in the 1960s to mimick snail mail and the telephone, respectively–to create a dynamic communication space that combines synchronous and asynchronous communication into ongoing discussions, real-time search and analysis, and web publishing. In addition, Google is making Wave open source, giving other developers the opportunity to build upon it, and the opportunity to have “federated” Wave servers capable of talking to one another, just like e-mail servers do today (and totally unlike existing services like Facebook or Twitter).

As Tim O’Reilly notes, Wave is to e-mail as Windows/Mac is to DOS. Just as digging into your computer’s command line is seen as archaic to most, will we one day look back at e-mail and wonder how we got along with it as the core to our online communication? What do you think?

(via TechCrunch, O’Reilly Radar)

By Aaron | May 28th, 2009 | Comments

Three ways to replace what you’re doing now–with Twitter

Soren Gordhamer of Mashable has posted thoughts on How Twitter is dethroning the “old guard” of common Internet tools–namely, social networking sites like MySpace, web search (Google), and e-mail. Whether or not you agree that Twitter will become a de facto communication system, you might pull the following takeaways from Soren’s argument:

  1. Twitter is the first “everywhere social network”–you can use it on your computer or your mobile and stay up to date wherever and whenever you’d like.
  2. Twitter searches yield realtime results–not what Google’s search engine found yesterday. Twitter searches can also quickly and easily solicit opinions from the masses–like Soren’s example of querying about web hosting, I’ve used Twitter to get recommendations for mechanics, home repair, and places to eat when out of town.
  3. Twitter gives you an outlet to share information you wouldn’t otherwise share via e-mail. Setting up an e-mail distribution list of all your friends, just to tell them “I’m going to San Antonio next week!” might be a little off-putting, but sharing this little personal news bite on Twitter is almost expected.

My takeaway: This is all a reminder that a post on Twitter really is more than just a 140-characters-or-less “what are you doing?” message, and that the service is well on its way of sitting side-by-side social networks, search engines, and e-mail (if not “dethroning” them).

What do you think? If you’re using Twitter, have you tried any of these functions? Or if not, what do you find off-putting about it? You can share your thoughts in the comments section below.

By Aaron | May 2nd, 2009 | Comments

Stratepedia mail service update

The e-mail-related issues I mentioned earlier are resolved, as far as I can tell, though you may still encounter problems receiving e-mail from one of our automated services. The good news is I know what I need to monitor now and will be keeping tabs on it overnight. Everything will hopefully be back to normal tomorrow morning. I apologize again for any inconvenience this has caused.

By Aaron | April 7th, 2009 | Comments

Possible problems receiving mail from Stratepedia and other hosted sites

I’m having some problems with our primary mail server that may result in you either not receiving an e-mail from us (such as for resetting a password or your Learning Labs subscriptions), or you may get an error message along the way. I think I know what’s going on and am working to correct this issue. I’m sorry for the inconvenience this may cause.

By Aaron | April 7th, 2009 | Comments

Social networking now more popular than e-mail

This just in: Neilsen Online reports that people spend more time on social networking sites and blogs than personal e-mail. Specifically, last year 66.8% of global Internet users accessed “member communities,” vs. 65.1% for e-mail. As noted in Mashable, time spent in these member communities is up 63% from last year. Facebook is the fastest growing of these communities, with 566% growth in time of usage, and a new 12.4 million new users between 35-49.

ReadWriteWeb’s takeaway is particularly interesting:

Our take away from these findings? People prefer the clean, controlled, multi-media and publicly social experience of social networking communication over the relatively open, individualistic and spammy medium of email. The fact that there is effectively no data portability allowing communication archives to be ported from one social network to another as there is with email doesn’t appear to be bothering people in the short term. We wonder if it will in the long term.

Personally, I wonder how long it will be before social networking sites have taken on some of e-mail’s less-desirable traits, such as spam, silo-style storage, and did I mention spam? At any rate, if these numbers stay pat we could be looking at the next major shift in how we communicate with one another. What a great time to be working in online development!

(ReadWriteWeb and Mashable)

By Aaron | March 9th, 2009 | Comments

Creating a PDF file

One of the easiest ways to transfer documents from person to person or from your desktop to a printer is through the use of PDF files. From Adobe, the creator of the PDF format:

“Invented by Adobe Systems and perfected over 15 years, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) lets you capture and view robust information—from any application, on any computer system—and share it with anyone around the world. Individuals, businesses, and government agencies everywhere trust and rely on Adobe® PDF to communicate their ideas and vision.”

There are many benefits to using this type of file. PDFs are multi-platform which means that they’re viewable on Mac, PC, UNIX, mobile and many other formats. This is really handy if you use a Mac and need to send a file to a PC user! Another key benefit is that they maintain the document’s integrity. All of the fonts, images, and graphics will remain exactly how you created them, regardless of what application you used to make the file. This has been a huge benefit to the printing community because you can submit a file without worrying about font problems or embedded images. PDF files are also searchable and can even be made secure, requiring a password to view them. One thing to be aware of is that the contents (text, etc.) of a PDF cannot be edited once it is made, so you cannot send a rough draft as a PDF file and have others edit it and send it back.

Another great benefit of PDF files is that they can be compressed easily to make a large file more manageable. For example, say that you have a Powerpoint presentation that has a number of photos that you’ve taken. Files like this can often be 10+MB large and this is often large enough to shut down some email boxes! By saving to a PDF file, you can shrink the file down to 1-2MB which is a much more reasonable size.

How to make a PDF file:

This process is slightly different between Mac and PC computers. I am definitely more familiar with the Mac platform, so I encourage the PC users out there to post suggestions in the comments below!

On a Mac, PDF creation is built into the operating system. If you are in Microsoft Word or Powerpoint, go to the File menu and select “print”. In the print dialogue box, there is a button that says PDF. Click on it, select “save to PDF” and you’ll be asked to give the file a name. Type in whatever you want to call it and press “save” and you’re all done! Apple has also included a great PDF application call Preview in with the operating system that allows you to read these files.

creating a PDF on a Mac

On a PC, there isn’t a native way to create a PDF file straight out of Word or Powerpoint. The best way to allow easy PDF creation on a PC is to purchase Adobe Acrobat Professional. It can be a bit pricey, but it will give you all of the features that you could ever want.

There is also a program that has come highly recommended to me called CutePDF Writer. This will allow you to set up a PDF printer on your machine and print PDF files out of most print applications. If you have any experience with this, be sure and share your thoughts in the comments below!

So, that’s a brief overview of PDF files. Here at the Center for Research on Learning, we post almost all of our document online as PDF files to make them available for people to download. Even if you’re not planning on ever creating a PDF file, it is easy to read them from any machine. Adobe has provided a FREE PDF reader called Adobe Acrobat Reader and it is available for download at their website www.adobe.com.

By Dave | April 15th, 2008 | Comments