Rent My Brain

Search Engine Optimization, Content Creation and Blog Development

Decent applications

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Never Publish a “Clickable” Email Address on Your Website or Blog

Often, you will want to include your contact information – including your email – in articles or blog posts that you write.  Many programs automatically convert email addresses in to clickable links that open your pre-set email client.

For example, if I am reading an article on a blog about a doctor or lawyer and that professional’s email address is hyperlinked, all I need to is click on the link to open my email program (in my case Gmail, but it could be Outlook or Yahoo Mail or any one of several).

By contrast, if the email address is not a link, I will have to manually open my email program, past the address and then send the email.

In my first web sites, I intentionally made my contact email addresses hyperlinks so colleagues and potential clients could easily contact me.

Big mistake.

Spammers use programs called “bots” to troll the web and harvest these clickable email addresses. Within a few months, my firm email address was (and is) essentially useless because of all the junk that arrives daily. I still keep it active because a lot of people over the years use that email address and I am reluctant to close it.

For years I have recommended to my clients that they use email forms (like the one on this site) rather than live, clickable email addresses. If you do not want to devote the real estate to a form on your site, you can put the form on a separate page, then use a link shortening service like tinyurl.com or cli.gs and post that address.

I recently learned about another solution called HideText.net. This free service takes any line of text, such as emails and converts it into a graphic.   Here is an example:

Jonathan email address

This email address a graphic and thus not currently readable by spambots. A nice and elegant tool.

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Useful Tool – FriendFeed

If you use the Internet for business, you have no doubt come across numerous social networking sites.  There are a mind numbing number of these sites, all of which help you share what you are doing with the world, and to establish relationships with others who share common interests.   Examples of these social networking sites include:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • digg
  • flickr
  • yelp
  • Mixx
  • Reddit

These social networking sites can be useful if you want to learn what industry leaders are doing and thinking.  I frequently learn about new tools, websites and tactics from some of the people I follow.

The problem, of course, is time.  How do you follow a couple dozen thought leaders on multiple networking sites?  One elegant solution is called FriendFeed.  FriendFeed is basically a social networking site aggregator.  Once you sign up as a user, you enter all of your social networking feeds into a simple form, then save.  Next, you allow FriendFeed access to your email account to search for other FriendFeed users.

You can then “subscribe” to other FriendFeed users and other users can “subscribe” to you.  Every day thereafter, FriendFeed will send you an email digest of posts and activity by those in your subscription list.  This email digest is a fast and convenient way to keep up with any social networking activity by those on your list, all in one place.

Obviously the big drawback is that you can only subscribe to your target if that person has a FriendFeed account.  Still, for those who do participate in this service, it is a breeze to quickly track what they are up to.

If you are interested and want to subscribe to me, the link is http://friendfeed.com/jginsberg.

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GMail Assistant a Great Tool For Multiple GMail Accounts

I have been a big fan of GMail since it was released.  Unlike most email services that require you to think hierarchically, GMail stores all emails chronologically, but allows you to search for content in your emails very quickly.  I used to use an email client called Bloomba, which had an Outlook like interface but also included a very rapid search feature.  GMail offers and equally fast search on a web based email client.

Over the years, I have signed up for multiple GMail accounts for different purposes.  I always set up a GMail account for my consulting clients, and I use the account to add Google Analytics to my clients’ sites.   Until now, it was somewhat cumbersome to check all of those GMail accounts – you had to sign out of one and sign into another.

GMail Assistant solves this problem.  GMail Assistant is a Firefox plug in that allows you to add the login information for all your GMail accounts into one tab.  If you want to switch from one account to another, you go to the dropdown and select the desired account and within seconds you are looking at a different inbox.

You can run Gmail Assistant as a stand alone application or try a Firefox plug-in version that is slightly less robust.

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