What do you think?  Is WALL•E jammin’ or what?

1. Always online and availabe to me.
2. Doesn’t take up space on my webserver.
3. The labeling system is fantastic.  I didn’t really know this until I really started using it.
4. Integrated nicely with Mail.app or other email applications like Thunderbird and Outlook.
5. I can send and receive email from multiple accounts via one Gmail account.
6. iPhone ready.
7. Email is up even if website is down.
8. Google has the best spam protection I’ve seen.

So how did I move years worth of email to Gmail?  

1 - The first thing I did was organize my inbox.  This step is optional, but it helped me to have things in order.

2 - You either need to setup a Gmail account or Google Apps for your domain.  I did the Google Apps part as I didn’t want an additional Gmail account and it was free.

If you are doing Google Apps for your domain, make sure to move all your email into local folders in your inbox.  This includes your inbox, drafts and sent if you want to keep them.  Get them off the server so you don’t loose them when the MX records are changed.  Then go ahead and follow Google’s instructions on getting things setup and work with your host to get the email records updated.  Once that’s in place, continue.

3 - Go into your Gmail account and enable the IMAP settings.  
Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP -> Enable IMAP

4 - Follow Google’s configuration instructions on getting your account setup in your email client.

5 - Once that’s done, you should now have two separate email accounts in your email application.  One for your old email and one for Gmail. 

6 - Setup Gmail labels to match your folder structure that corresponds with your email.

7 - Copy all your email from your old account to your new Gmail account.  Since it’s setup via IMAP, all the email will be copied to Gmail and available online.  This step may take some time if you have a lot of email.  It isn’t hard, it’s just time consuming to upload all those emails.

Really that’s all there is to it.  It’s quite easy.  It took me some time to complete, but that was because of the large amount of email I had.  

This will work on Mac or Windows or Linux; Thunderbird, Mail.app or Outlook.  The only real requirements are a Gmail account and an email application capable of IMAP.

Since moving my email over to Gmail, I’ve moved over to using Gmail as my email application via Mailplane. Google’s labeling system is just so smart!

It’s really simple to do too.  Here’s how.

1 - Grab a cool iPhone background.  Here is the blue iPhone background I’m using.

2 - Open Adium and go to the preferences and click on the messages area.

3 - See that area for a custom background?  Check the box and drag and drop your iPhone background in there.

Wa la.  You’re done!

There are a few things to keep in mind.  

First, the width of iPhone backgrounds are a bit limiting.  Your window will need to be a fixed width or your background will need to wrap nicely.  The window is not to skinny though.  Also, most iPhone backgrounds don’t repeat well vertically.  Some do though, so pick a nice one.

That’s it.  Enjoy!

So how’d I do it?  Here are my keys to success.

1. Create folders for topics that best match your email style.  Like Friends, Family, Shopping, Wife.  Think of who you get the most email from or what topics you get a lot of email on.  Then create folders to file all those emails into.
2. Search and delete.  Not all messages need to be saved.  iTunes Tuesday emails for the past six months, Amazon Newsletters, Target ads and so many more emails are just un-necessary.  Find them, and delete them.  Search by sender or by subject to find them all at once.
3. Search and file.  I searched for all the email from my Mom and filed that in my Mom folder.  All my email from my wife when into her folder.  Searched all messages for iTunes receipts and they went into my Shopping folder.  The key here is to search search for email from people, for emails with the same type of subject to get a lot of emails at once.  Filing your email away one at a time will take forever.  By selecting 25 or even 100 at once, you’ll be able to knock out a of of email quickly.  
4. Mark as read.  As you’re filing things away.  Start marking emails as read.  I had a lot of email from last year, or older, that was still marked unread.  Sorry, I’m no longer going to email you back if it was that long ago.
5. Once you start getting down fewer emails, you may find your folders need to become more generic.  I have one folder named Friends for those that send me an email every so often.  I don’t have enough to make an entire folder, so I just drop them all into Friends.
6. If you’re like me and have email from 2004, then create archive folders.  2004, 2005, 2006, 2007.  If you can’t figure out which folder to stick an email in, or you just want to make a lot of progress fast, then go ahead and just archive it by year.  At least it gets out of your inbox.

Eventually  you should have a clean inbox.  It took me an hour or so to get my inbox under control, but it’s much nicer now to see less than 20 messages in my inbox.  Even that number is starting to sound high.

Keep it under control!  This is just as important as cleaning out your inbox.  With new email, don’t file it later or leave it just sitting around, take the time to keep your inbox organized.  I find this extremely easy to do with a combination of labels and filters in Gmail.  The system is setup beautifully.  Heck, I don’t even go back to my desktop application any more.

I think the biggest thing I get out of a clean inbox is the sense of accomplishment.  There are no longer hundreds or thousands of emails sitting there.  There are only a few and they seem really easy to manage.

Take some time and get cleaning.  You’ll be happy you did.

Do you have other tips you’d like to share on how you organized your inbox?  Share in the comments below.

Sorry about that!!

Thanks for MacManX for tipping me off even if he didn’t now he was doing that.

There are so may things to talk about that I just don’t have time right now to go through them all. From the revamped admin menu to the simplified post screen it’s just so much cleaner. The ability to add media such as video and audio is also a great addition. I just love this!

All my plulgins seem to be working fine, however there are some other plugins with issues. The plugin compatibility list can be seen over at wordpress.org.

So much new to play with, to bad I don’t have the time to sit an play all day.  My one tip though, after upgrading, clear your browsers cache.  That’ll help avoid any odd issues like the ‘add link’ window not opening.

Recently I ran across Hands Held High by Linkin Park, another song that really makes you think and holds nothing back.

The video above is an un-official video. YouTube is full of them and this is the one I liked the most.

If you like the song, you can download Hands Held High from:

☆ Support Our Troops & Support Peace ☆

I’ve finally got Ubuntu (7.10) up and running. I tried, and failed, to get it running under Paralles a while back and finally took the time to try again. This time on a Windows machine that had some extra space.

Overall the install was great, but once up and running there are a lot of items that are just to complicated. I understand that Ubuntu is a great alternative, but until it becomes more user friendly in some aspects, it’s going to be a hard sell.

First off, the install was simple. Easy and straight forward. Before to long, Ubuntu was up and running. Not as fun as installing OSX, but way better than installing XP.

The interface is clean and is a mixture of the Mac menubar and Windows task bar. It’s not overly complicated to get use to, but it does have it’s own way of doing things.

If you turn on the fancy window effects, the animations and Jello like windows are quite fun. It’s makes for some nice eye candy.

Ubuntu has all the basic applications like Firefox, Pidgen (IM), Evolution (Email) and OpenOffice (Word & Excel). It installs all the necessary applications to get most users up and running.

However, installing additional applications is to difficult. I wanted to install Firefox 3 and Prism, but once downloaded, it just showed the package contents. No application. Even when I tried to update Firefox 2 and that wasn’t an option in the browser itself.

It seems Ubuntu controls everything via an applications area and you either install or upgrade what they recommend or you have to go to the terminal and figure it out. This applications area is great for any applications in list, but if you want something that’s not in the list, you better know how to install it via the Terminal. And the terminal is uber geeky. I just gave up on installing additional apps.

I also wanted to install the Flash plugin in Firefox. Unfortunately it didn’t install through Firefox and I had to do it manually. After lots of Googling and trying to understand tutorials I finally got it installed via terminal commands and frustration. It’s actually quite simple, but no one tells you that.

How to Install Flash in Ubuntu the Easy way.

Go to Adobe.com and download the tar.gz choice. When the Ubuntu opens the tar.gz file drag the install folder to your desktop. Double click on flashplayer-install and choose run in terminal. Follow instructions.

That’s it! Now, everyone else’s way seems much more complex. But that’s my main issue with Ubuntu; it’s to geeky.

Now, I’m a geek and I’ll admit that. But having to do most everything via Terminal isn’t my thing. I will follow simple instructions, but I’d rather run an installer or copy and program to my applications folder.

I did have a lot of terminal fun though trying to get wireless internet via TrendNet’s USB adapter to work. It’s not officially supported, but through a handful of terminal commends, a lot of Googling and some swearing, it’s possible. This tutorial helped a lot to. Not as simple as it states, but maybe I screwed it up a time or two before getting it right.

Overall, Ubuntu is pretty nice. It’ll be interesting to see where they go with it and I’m just happy to try it out. It won’t be my main OS, but it’s fun to play with. Hopefully some day it’ll be a bit more user friendly for those that aren’t fond of the Terminal.

These are just my personal experiences and thoughts. This is not a professional, in depth, well tested review. Just my first thoughts. If I’m missing some importing things, do share in the comments below.

I was excited about Mozilla’s Prism application when it first arrived on the scene. But then Fluid came out and I realized how un-polished Prism was.  However, Prism 0.9 is quite a large step forward.

What’s new in Prism 0.9?

The big thing is that it’s based off of Firefox 3.   It’s got the speed and upgrades that the Firefox 3 betas have.  Also us Mac users now get native widgets!  It’s no longer got ugly checkboxes and drop downs.

The Firefox 3 rendering engine alone makes it feel much snappier and more responsive than the first Prism 0.7 release.

The file size has also been cut cut down a bit too. Prism went from 43 Mb to 30 Mb.  It’s still hefty, but smaller.  Each individual site is only a few hundred KB though so that’s good.

Another notable update is the ability to add custom icons.  By default it’ll grab the site’s favicon, or you can select your own image.  These can look much nicer than the old globes.  Hint: Head over to the Fluid Flickr group to grab some great icons to use with Prism.

There is also a Firefox 3 extension.  This will be handy once Firefox 3 goes live as it’ll give users easy access to creating Prism desktop applications.

You can now run multiple Prism programs at once too. There were conflicts before, but now each application is independent and you can run Google Calendar and Gmail at the same time in two Prism applications.  You can even run one Google account in one Prism application, and a separate one in the next.  This is very handy if you have more than one account for any online service.  I tested it with two Gmail accounts and it worked perfectly!

So what’s missing?

From what I can see, the only thing that bugs me is no keyboard shortcuts.  I’m so use to using a shortcut key for back in Firefox, that I use it all the time in Prism.  When Prism doesn’t go back, I get annoyed.

Overall Prism 0.9 is a great update and if this is any insight into what is to come, I can’t wait for Prism 1.0!

Here are the top 5 reasons why I dropped Entourage 2008.

1. No Hyperlink Support - You can’t link a few words in emails. This was one that really gets me. I’m always linking phrases to tutorials or additional resources so that people know what I’m talking about.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer: This function is not available.
2. No Table Support - Entourage 2008 can read tables, but as soon as you hit reply, the table disappears and you are left with a mess of text. I get a lot of messages with tables in them (copied from Excel and pasted into Outlook) and so I do need to keep the formatting.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer: Entourage can *display* complex HTML such as tables but it can not *compose* messages with HTML. That’s why when you reply the formatted is gone.
3. No Strikethrough support. - Another basic HTML item that is just not available. You can’t strikeout any text and Entourage can’t read it. When someone sends me a quick update to a webpage, if I can’t see what they want me to remove, I can’t do my job.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer: Neither bugs nor features. Entourage is simply working as it was designed to work. Its HTML capabilities are limited. Strike-through is not one of its supported text styles.
4. Calendar Syncing is OK - I often had conflicts when I had Entourage automatically syncing to iCal. I’d open up iCal and it’d ask me which even was right; the one in iCal or Entourage? Then, trying to update my Google calendar online was another issue in itself.
5. Not so friendly help. - There is a good community of Microsoft Mac MVPs (MVPs are not Microsoft Employees) over at the official Microsoft site (also syndicated via Google Groups) and their answers are sometimes not so friendly. It made me feel bad just to ask questions.
   • Official Microsoft MVP Support Answer:
   (on the subject of inserting links into emails)
   Plain text is the preferred method for emails by people who know the internet. It is efficient, safe, virus-free, will be readable by any mail client at the other end, doesn’t impose your font, size, style preferences on others, and has far smaller risk of being filtered out by spam filters.

   HTML email is dangerous because it may contain links to external sites that will do malicious things. For instance, a spammer can include a link to an image, but this link contains a tag as data. The server at the other end will get that request when your *read your email* and based on the tag, will be able to confirm that you’ve read the email and not only flag your email address as active/good, but also use your IP with geolocation servers to assign a location code so that they can then sell your email address to other spammers along with your general location. If everyone stopped sending HTML emails, everyone would block it, and then spammers would be left with very few means to escape spam filters because their messages would have to b simple and without tricks.

   HTML email is wasteful, dangerous, and rude, IMO. It’s just plain evil.

Overall, Entourage 2008 is a decent application. But it’s missing so many small items that eventually, I just got frustrated and moved back to Thunderbird.

Entourage was unable to perform in a business environment for me. If your company never sends, or receives, HTML in emails, than it might work out OK for you. However, I strongly suggest checking out Thunderbird. It is an excellent email application and I’m very happy to be using it again!

• I’m now running Firefox 3 betas thanks to MultiFireFox.
• MidnightFox was updated the other day with incorrect buttons.  Oops.  That has been re-uploaded and should be made public soon.
• yExplore and GA? have been updated for Firefox 3. Actually, for the beats not the official release.  That’ll happen when the final release comes out.
• Now that I am running Firefox 3, I can start theming it.
• Just started to watch Entourage.  It seems like a pretty cool show.
• Watching the second season of Monk too which is an awesome TV show.
• I’m totally lost on Lost but I love it.
• I’m going to be speaking on SEO and web design next week at the Art Institutes MN.  That’ll be fun since I use to go to school there and I’m not big on public speaking.
• I just bought Delicious Library.  It’s such a great program to keep track of music, movies and games.
• I’m now using MoodBlast to update my Facebook, Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku status’.  I’d love to see this as a web based app much like TwitterFeed so it can automatically post my blog posts too.

That’s what I got at the moment.

MidnightFox has always been a great theme. It’s dark, yet usable and, as stated by others, one of the best dark themes out there. However, I wanted more.

While fixing a few toolbar issue with MidnightFox, I started updating other pieces. I reworked the tabs, the bookmarks, some menus and the the navigation buttons. Taking extero’s icons and leveraging Pixelmator’s menu design, I created much nicer toolbar with icons that ‘pop’ when you roll over them.

MidnightFoxy was first set to replace MidnightFox, however some of the testers were partial to the old buttons. So MidnigthFoxy was born. It’s basically the same theme, only with a more polished toolbar.

There are certainly areas for improvement, but aren’t there always? I’m going to focus my theme updates on Firefox 3 and we’ll circle back with MidnightFoxy when it’s slated for the browser upgrade.

But, for now, it’s available for Firefox 2 and for everyone to enjoy!

Download MidnightFoxy

Currently in Mozilla’s sandbox.

Things I love:

• Projects - Projects are cool in the fact that I can group emails together, file them away, yet have easy access to them. I need to dig into this more and use it.
• Full Calendar Support - No more Outlook meeting request issues or confusion. This was a big factor in changing to Entourage at work.
• Notes & Checklist built in. Handy.
• Mac look and feel. I do think it looks pretty.
• Little Growl like email and calendar notifications.
• The day planner window is nice. Kind of in the way, but you get use to it.
• It auto corrects some of my spelling mistakes. That’s quite handy.
• It saves folders as mbox files which makes easy import/export with Mail.app or Thunderbird. Moving everything over was slick. Moving back would be just as easy.
• It links emails replies to the orgional message so I don’t have to go search for them if I want to know what I said.

Things that make me go What the @+#!

• No ability to add clickable links on text to an email message. You can’t highlight any text and and a link to it. You can only drop in a URL and let the other email client automatically link it. This is really bugging me. See the heated discussion.
• When I get links in emails Entourage often picks up the next word in the sentence so I have to manually edit quite a few links I click on.
  Example: http://www.apple.comApple
• Calendar syncing to iCal works great, but Entourage’s calendar files contain information that iCal or Google Calendar doesn’t understand. They then cause issues if trying to export from iCal and import into anything else. Or, I get sync issues and end up loosing half my dates. If there are event sync issues, never fix all of them at once. Do it one by one.
• Syncing up with Google is another issue in itself.
• No way to delete people from the ‘collected address’. Entourage adds everyone you ever emailed, or got email from, to some ‘collected address’ address book and doesn’t allow you to delete them.
• If I have text selected when I hit reply, it only puts that selected text as the quoted message. Personally, I want the entire message every time. At least Apple Mail has a checkbox where I can enable that functionality.
• No grammar check. I really thought I’d have this as I thought Entourage an Word were like BFFs.
• When importing email, it auto accepted all my old meeting requests and then notified me. Not a huge deal I guess, but annoying none the less.

Overall, Entourage 2008 isn’t horrible, but it isn’t fantastic. It’s not Outlook for the Mac, but it’s closer than anything else. For every positive there is a flaw and if there were any other solution that worked flawlessly with Outlook calendar notifications, I’d consider switching away. Ok, I’ll admit, 10.5’s Mail.app is pretty good, but I don’t have 10.5 at work.

Background. This is my first experience with Entourage. I recently used Apple Mail and then Thunderbird 2. My computer is a MacBook Pro with 10.4.x on it.

One of the biggest updates were all new toolbar buttons. I used the same icons I have in extero and I took some direction from Pixelmator for that’s the graphic design program I was using. I also tweaked the tabs and a few other areas to create a darker more polished version of MidnightFox.

Before I shock all the current users by releasing an update, I’d love to get your feedback. Do you feel it’s a worthy update to MidnightFox? Or do you feel that this should be a spin off theme all together and leave MidnightFox’s buttons alone?

It’s always best to try things out first, so you can get a real feel for the theme. You can install the latest MidnightFox beta, give it a spin, and leave your comments below.

To install, right click this link and save the file to your desktop. Then open Firefox’ addons window and drag and drop the mf66a.jar file onto the addons window.  It should then install.

Firefox 3 not yet supported.

Here is the video for Workin’ For A Living’ featuring Garth Brooks, Huey Lewis and Nascar!

[flashvideo filename=downloads/garth-workin.flv /]

(If you are in an RSS Reader, click through to the post to watch the video.)

This has to be my favorite new song off the Ultimate Hits collection.

The iPhone Facebook Sidebar extension opens Facebook’s iPhone page and allows you to keep tabs on your friends, update your status, message people and accept friend requests.

Features include:

• Seeing friend’s updates.
• Updating our status.
• Viewing Friends
• Writing on friends wall.
• Viewing inbox.
• Sending messages.
• Other miscellaneous Facebook fun.
• Works on Mac and Windows. Possibly Linux too.
• Works in Firefox 2.x and 3.0.

The iPhone Facebook Sidebar is accessible three different ways in Firefox.

1. Via an icon in the toolbar. Once the extension is installed, customize your toolbar to add the Facebook icon.
   
2. Via the ‘view menu’
   
3. Or by using the keyboard shortcut ‘Control Alt F ‘ on Mac and Windows.

This extension made possible by the great programmers at Facebook who coded the iPhone application to work with any browser. All features and design elements are created by Facebook and this extension is merely a way to make it easily and quickly accessible for Firefox users.

Install iPhone Facebook Sidebar v0.8

Firefox may pop up a message under your bookmarks bar or tabs bar that says “Firefox prevented this site (www.twistermc.com) from asking you to install software on your computer.” If this happens, click on the “Edit Options…” button and add www.twistermc.com to your allowed sites. Then click the install button again.

*If you can’t get the button above to work, right click this link and save the file to your desktop. Then open the addons window and drag in the xpi file to install.

Let me know what you think by leaving your feedback in the comments below.

Also, thanks to autodafe0728 for the Facebook icon used in this extension. It really looks nice.

Mac users, also check out the similar Facebook Dashboard widget.

In my daily use, I’ve tried many extensions and uninstalled most. However, here are 8 that I love:

• Lightning - Having a calendar right in your email client makes it easy to see your schedule and what you’ve got to get done. Plus it brings along the ability to accept Outlook meeting requests which is needed in a corporate environment.
• Provider - What’s better than a calendar? Well a calendar that synchronizes back and fourth with Google Calendar. And for free!
• QuickText - This little buddy saves chunks of text like bookmarks. You then choose the bookmark and it inserts the text to go along with it in your email. Works great for any repetitive items that you find yourself typing over and over again.
• Growl Notifications (Mac) - Get notified of new mail messages without bring Thunderbird to the front. Windows has its own notifications, but Mac users were left out until now.
• GMailUI - This handy extension takes searching your inbox to the next level by allowing expressions to work with searches. Take the 5 minutes to learn it and you’ll love it.
• Nostalgy - Another brilliant extension that makes filing emails, or navigating to other folders, a snap via a shortcut and a quick search. Huge time saver.
• Mail Redirect - Just because the email came to you, doesn’t mean you are the best recipient. Forward emails as though they were specifically sent to someone else. This is handy for me as I build a lot of forms, and sometimes forget to update the ‘to’ email when they go live.
• AttachmentReminder - This handy extension reads the email you’re composing and reminds you if you said you were going to send an attachment, but didn’t attach anything. Very handy!

Yes, there are lots of other extensions out there, but not many that I’ve come across that really bring additional functionally and usefulness to Thunderbird.

Do you have others that you find quite helpful? Post them below in the comments as I’d love to check them out!

Granted, I think that even being dead, he’s got better link love. He’s a Harvard grad that has written eighty scientific papers, two scientific books, had six inventions patented, and published three novels. Yea, well I’ve created like eight Firefox themes.

If you’d like to help me beat out Thomas McMahon (Harvard guy) in Google searches, link back to this post (or www.twistermc.com) with ‘Thomas McMahon’ as your link text. If you want to vote for the other guy, well that’s just rude.

Yes, it’s true, I could probably go and re-optimize my website for ‘Thomas McMahon’ but I don’t really want to go that far. I’m hoping just a few links help. If not, oh well.

What do I get if I become #1? Nothing. Except the satisfaction that if someone searches for my name, it doesn’t immediately pop up and tell them I’m dead.

When I wrote about Mozilla’s Prism project a while ago, I was very excited for the possibility of bring web applications to the desktop. Since then, a new project called Fluid has popped up. It’s the same ideas as Prism, however is Mac only.

Fluid is a small application that is used to create stand alone applications for web apps. Think of going into your applications folder and seeing Facebook or MySpace. In the end, they are individual web browsers that are created specifically for one website.

Fluid is moving a quite a fast pace and coming up with a lot of nice features. One cool feature that Prism lacks is custom dock icons. Fluid lets you choose an icon for your application, or, if you don’t have an icon to use, it’ll automatically pull the site’s favicon.

Fluid is also starting to tie directly into websites. Facebook, Gmail and Yahoo mail applications all come with un-read message count badges in the dock just like Apple’s mail.

The biggest downside to Fluid is that it only works on Mac OS 10.5. The main application, and mini applications it creates, don’t work under 10.4. This is the only area I see Prism winning. Neither project works under 10.3 either, even though Prism claims it does.

If you are on Windows or Linux, then Prism is a great project to watch grow. If you are on a Mac, Fluid is a great contender. It’s actively being built with new features and updates every week or so.

One thing to keep in mind here is that neither application is complete. Both are still under development and features will continue to change as they grow.

This year for Christmas, my wife got me an iPod Touch! This little device is extremely cool and I’m completely addicted.

I now have an iPod that plays videos and Handbrake will become my new friend. It also has a calendar built in with two way syncing with iCal. Cool!

And lets not forget Safari. I sit at home on it and surf the net. I’ve already spend hours looking up iPod Touch (or iPhone) web apps. I just wish there was a way to download them and use them offline. I guess I’ll have to wait until February when Apple should start letting developers build offline apps for the iPod Touch.

I’ve also been looking for work arounds. I wanted a text application and found a great tip where I can create an address book entry and use that. So I now have A List in my address book and it just contains one notes field where I put my shopping list or whatever else I need.

I also tried jumping on other people/companies wireless networks. As my wife drove through town, I asked her to slow down when the iPod started picking up an open wireless network. I do have to say that many more people password protect their networks than I thought. I guess that’s a good thing though.

Christmas was very good to me this year and I’m extremely happy with all gifts. I hope yours was too.