I’m sure you have become used to seeing all the advertising that pops up while you are watching a YouTube video, even if it is a video embedded in another website.

If you own the rights to that video, you can turn off the advertising in your YouTube (Google) account settings.

Go to YouTube, and log in. Under your name you will find a ‘Settings’ link. On the left side of this page you will see ‘Manage Account.’ After clicking on that you will see ‘Content displayed along with my uploaded videos,’ expand that and you will see a radio button that says “Do not allow advertisements”

There you have it. While in here you may want to poke about and see if everything else is set up as you like it.

Your domain information is public knowledge unless you request otherwise. We by default set up our clients domain information cloaked so that they can only send an email and not find your mailing address. However if your address is on your website, or if you have in the past registered without cloaking, you can bet you are in some databases.

The letters often have some sort of urgent plea about your domain expiring, or other way to encourage you to act fast (and not allow enough time to think “this might be a scam”). However one that I recently saw was just very generic, like any other bill you pay every day (see below).

If in doubt about your registration, and whether a letter is legit, please contact us immediately and we will be happy to help you determine who your hosting provider is and whether it is up for renewal.

Oh, and if someone calls and says they service your copier and then asks for your model, hang up on them!

Try not to use too many selling words. Some are ok, but if your email has too many “free offer” “great deal” “save now” and even “click here.” One or two are ok, but if the ratio of text to these types of messages gets too high, the spam filter rates your email too high and blam, you’re out. Never, even in jest include a word like ‘viagra’ and avoid the word ‘pharmacy,’ or other words you see in common spam.

Also avoid using things like colored text, ALL CAPS (especially in subject line), and never use invisible text (same color as background). The spam filters are on the lookout for anything like this, besides you may want to think about how this looks to the public. If your email look professional your odds are better that the spam filter will let you pass.

One way around any of the rules above is to use graphics. You can use colored text and as many of the dangerous words and phrases as you like in a graphic as spam filters can only see words. this being said, spam filters do look for too many pictures. A high ratio of graphics to text will alert the filters.

Let’s talk about links. Too many links is bad, especially to sites outside of your own domain. If you need to include a lot of links, you might want to consider hosting a page on your website with the links and then a single link to that page. If you are using a sending service that converts your links for tracking, Thunderbird, and to a lesser degree Outlook has started hitting links written out in text with a spam flag. This is not quite as bad as getting knocked out, but if a person’s spam filtering is set high on their email reader, they may not see it, and it is not nice to have your message flagged as ‘spam.’ This means rather than having a link: http://lowthian.org make your text links to the page such as visit our blog.

Beware of sloppy code. If there is a lot of unnecessary coding in your html, you are a big target for the spam filter. Use as little code as possible, and never past code directly from other programs such as Microsoft Word. The leaner the better with your code!

Use a reputable email service. Outside services work hard to make sure that their addresses are not blocked by spam filters. This is something you do not get if you try to send it out from your own domain or email program. Our clients have been using Campaign Monitor and we have been very pleased with the results.

Whether or not you use your own domain, be sure to register your domains for E-mail authentication. This is an important way to tell the spam filters that you are legitimate (don’t worry if you are a client, we handle this for you).

These are just a few tips, be sure to follow some sort of plan to not only check your current email, but recheck it periodically to make sure that you haven’t inadvertently made yourself a target.

For more information, feel free to contact us, and if you are a justice based organization, we might be able to help you set up or improve your current email updates and newsletters.

When graphics are created in Gimp, Photoshop, or another graphic design program, they are created in layers. This allows for nice effects such as depth, shadows, overlap and transparency. Once the graphic is finished, it is converted to one that will show up correctly in browsers, jpg, gif and png are the usable extensions. By converting it the graphic is now “flattened” and all the layers are merged.

Down the road, you may decide to make changes to these graphics. Your designer can either recreate them from scratch, which is very time consuming, or get a copy of the originals which will save much of the time involved.

Unfortunately what we have run into often is the originals are not available. Either they can not get a hold of the person that made them, or that person did not keep the originals.

So, every time you have new graphics made, make sure and get a copy of the originals (with the layers intact), and even drafts if there are any so that you can look at them for new ideas. Ask them to be sent to you, or you can ask them to do what we do at Lowthian Design, and put them in a folder on your website so that you know where they are when you need them.

Please contact us if you need more information.

By clicking on it you will place similar ads on your own profile automatically. If this happens to you, be sure to go to your own profile right away to clean up the posts.

If you cannot read something without clicking on a link, don’t do it..

Apparently these scams are numerous, but also be even more careful of the phishing attack, and if you are ever asked to enter your username and password make sure the url is really Facebook’s (ie www.Facebook.com). If you make this mistake, immediately change your Facebook password.

You can read more about Facebook scams here http://ldw.me/k5

• When taking photos, be sure to set the resolution high, then back up far enough on your subject that no cropping occurs.
• Remove photos often from your camera to prevent it from becoming an overwhelming task.
• When removing photos from a camera, or copying from another source, take the time to either tag, or at least create sub-folders to separate different events.
• If sharing your photos with others, use an easy to use online service such as Flickr, Picasa, or allow us to set up a ZenPhoto site or other cms based site for you.
• When uploading photos, only upload the ones that you feel will be useful and choose the best of duplicates rather than uploading them all.
• Before uploading, resize your images for the web, this will save you much time in uploading, but also make the photos ready for website use. You should keep the original in a corresponding folder on your computer for print use. form more information about resizing, you can see our blog post “How to optimize photos for the web or email“
• While uploading, or immediately afterward, tag your photos and add captions. This is something we have seen over and over where a client uploads a ton of photos, thinking I’ll tag them later and then never do. It is better to upload a smaller set of useful photos than an unruly bunch that are not.
• Tagging is what makes the photos useful. Create many tags, but try to use a consistent system for tagging (for example if you used a tag ‘bird’ be careful not to tag others ‘birds’ but rather use ‘birds’ even for singular items).

Taking some time to organize photos will save a lot of time later on when you want to start using these photos. Contact us if you would like more information on photo management systems that can be installed on your website.

This article is to help those using Postie to easily post articles, images and even movies to their WordPress blog.

Postie will only accept emailed items from a pre-approved address, so make sure you are using an address that is setup in the Postie configuration, let us know if you need to add a new address.

When sending an article, put the title of the article in your subject line, it will be converted by Postie into your title. If you are sending via SMS, put your title in hash marks “#your title here#”.

If you want to categorize the article in a single category, put the category followed by a colon (ex  News: Title) If you need to put it in multiple categories use  [Cat XXX]s (ex: ‘[Cat XXX] [Cat YYY] Title of My Article’ ). You can also wait to categorize your article until you are online and can log in to WordPress.

Start your article with “:start” and finish with “:end”, this will strip out any signatures etc. that follow your article, and only what is between these tags will be published.

If you want to add tags, add this at the bottom of the article in this format:
tags : one, two, three (must be in lower case). You can also add tags later when you get to a computer and login to WordPress

To add a comment to a post, use ‘Re:’ in your subject line. For example, if your original post had a subject line “New Post”. If you then send an e-mail with the subject line “Re: New Post”, it will get posted as a comment on the original post.

You can delay posting of the article with the following:

If you are sending a picture, with or without text, use the :start and :end tags and the following:

#img1 caption=’caption for the image’# (the caption is optional)

You can attach more than one photo, just make sure to attach them in the correct order to correspond to your img1, img2 etc.

If the float is set up, the image will allow any text added after the tag to float around the image. If you want the image to float in the body of your text, include the #img1# at the place where you want the text to begin wrapping.

Add video’s one at a time. Send them as and attachement and put any text inside your :start end tags.

To use the Nautilus image converter simply go to the command line and install by typing “sudo aptitude install nautilus-image-converter”, no quotations. Once installed restart nautilus by using the command “nautilus -q”.  Now you can simply right click on any image and have the option to resize or rotate it in the drop down menu.

For Gimp users there is a plugin called David’s Batch Processor.   It can be downloaded for linux or Windows here or installed as part of the “gimp-plugin-registry” using Synaptic package manager.   This plugin allows many more options than the Nautilus option including batch resize.

For more information on image optimization or if you prefer an online solutions to image resizing please refer to this blog.

Enjoy!

First create a new menu and call it “hidden” or something useful for yourself to remember. Do not create a corresponding module for this menu, alternatively you can create a module but mark it as ‘registered’ or ‘special’ so it will not be seen by the public.

Using this new menu you can create links to articles, or any other available menu item choice. When you create the menu item there is a field called “Link” that is automatically populated when you create the item. This is the relative URL of the page (add http://yourdomain.com/ in front of it for a complete URL to use on another site). If you are using Joomla SEO settings, you can use the alias field to create user friendly links to this menu item.

Note: Though this menu is not published, you can still set your modules to show or not to show on the pages of this menu, or you could even create a different template for these pages.