If your email address still has the name of your ISP in it, then it’s not your email address. It belongs to your ISP and always will. These days, most people have the choice to switch ISPs when service is bad, or there is a better option out there. If you are tied to your ISPs email service, then the option to switch – for any reason at all – is much more difficult. I can not imagine having to change my email address. It’s used by many websites as a user ID, and it’s just such a pain to send everyone you know a message to tell them that they need to update their contacts.
There’s a super easy, free alternative to using your ISPs email service, and that’s to sign up for Gmail (my choice), Yahoo mail or Hotmail. But there’s an even better option. It’s not free, but it’s really cheap.
Buy a domain, create your own addresses, and let Google manage all your email traffic.
You can buy domains for $5.00 to $50.00 per year. If you are incredibly lucky and have a very uncommon last name, you may find your last name is available as a domain in some form. Otherwise, you are going to need to get clever, and think of a unique domain name. You will have much more luck if you go with something other than .com for your TLD (top level domain). In Canada, the .ca TLD is a good option, and you would be surprised how much easier it is to find a good domain. Many more top level domains have opened up recently as well.
Once you’ve chosen a domain it gets a little geeky. If the next steps are confusing you, feel free to send me an email, and I can help you out. You need to register your domain with a registrar that allows you to manage your DNS records. Some registrars allow you full control over your DNS entries, and some require you to just point your domain to a series of DNS servers. I manage a bunch of domains, so I use a service called DNS Made Easy that gives me my own DNS servers to which I can point my domains. They charge what amounts to a couple of bucks per domain annually, and give you full control over where your domain traffic goes. DNS Made Easy gives you DNS addresses which you give to your registrar.
The next step is to sign up for Google Domain Services. Google currently offers a service that will manage your domain email for free. They give you 25 email accounts, each with over 7GB (and increasing) of storage, and each account can have unlimited aliases. They even give you shared calendars, and distribution lists. All of the services can be accessed with an address like mail.<yourdomain>.com and can even be customized with your own logo.
Sign up with your domain information and follow the directions. Google will give you a series of “MX records”. These are DNS entries that handle the mail traffic that goes to your domain, and there will be several of these to add. When the setup is done, Google gives you an admin interface where you can add your accounts, and create your addresses.
Having your own domain email has a ton of perks. The best way to manage it is to have one main email address that you only give to close friends. Don’t ever use this address to sign up for anything. Then set up another address (or several addresses) that you give to everybody else. Gmail’s spam filters keep almost all spam out, but it’s good to have a throw away address to use for signing up for services that may sell your address. I also like to register an email address that I use to send nasty messages to people offering $10 an hour for web development jobs on Craigslist. You don’t need to manage multiple mailboxes for all these addresses – just forward them all into one.
I’ve just about had it with the blog posts, articles, and Twitter comments about the death of ColdFusion – all from those who have never even read up on it, let alone used it. Aral Balkin’s ignorant blog post about ColdFusion back in January was uninformed, and was quickly attacked with the full wrath of the ColdFusion community. Numerous people took issue with his lack of knowledge about the current iteration of, and future plans for CF.
Many of his criticisms were resolved 8 years ago. Also interesting to note is the fact that there are almost 100 comments to date, and the author has yet to back up his criticism.
Let me step back for a minute here. While ColdFusion is currently my preferred language for RIA development, I am not hanging my hat on the language, and neither are most of the people I know in the CF community. I make a lot of time to learn other languages. I’m currently knee deep in learning Python/Django and try to keep up with PHP as well. Learning new languages benefits you by broadening your abilities with something new, as well as supplementing your skills in your old language.
The more I learn about other languages, the more I believe that there is very little that CF can not do well. I’ve read these posts about ColdFusion’s death before. We’ve been reading them for years. The criticism of the language does not bother me – that is necessary for improvements to happen. What bugs me is that the blog posts about the death of CF are always by someone who does not know the language, and it gets read by people who are equally ignorant about the language, but have the ability to make decisions about choice of platform.
It’s finished. By “finished”, I mean “please, just leave it alone”. Most social networking sites have added so many new features that the one thing they started doing well is completely lost in the shuffle. I hope they don’t do that to Twitter.
Successful social networks usually start out doing one thing very well, and that is the draws for users. Once they have reached a critical mass, they start adding features to grab more users, or grab more revenue from existing users – an inevitable result of the pressure of venture capitalists who want a return on their investment. I think Twitter’s success is a little different in that its popularity is the result of what they do not do. Facebook, to me, is almost unbearable. The two-way model of linking people together results in being “friends” with people you barely know, or have anything in common with. I have people in my Facebook friend list that do not even say hi to me in the elevator at work. Twitter allows me to have a peek into the lives of the people who interest me, and only lets us see what they explicitly share.
So, I’ve done a couple of sites lately that need to display well for a wide variety of users, many of whom may be using older computers. Since IE7 has replaced IE6 for most Windows users, I’ve spent limited time making sure sites appear perfectly in IE6. I always make sure they are at least completely accessible, but they may not be perfect.
For developers, it’s not easy to test a site in IE. If you use Windows Vista, you have IE7 installed by default, and it’s not trivial to install IE6. If you use a Mac, you would need multiple instances of Windows running as virtual machines in order to test in IE7 as well as IE6.
Then I came across this: Multiple IE from Tredosoft This little application will install IE3, IE4.01, IE5.01, IE5.5 and IE6 on an XP machine with IE7. They can all run concurrently. I runs multiple versions of IE in Parallels, and can test all my sites without booting up the old Windows boxes to test sites.
Coda is marketed as “one window web development” and it really is. I’ve been going back and forth between Dreamweaver and Eclipse for coding over the past few years, and both are great tools. I still use Eclipse for large sites at work, but I needed something for building small sites, and for quickly editing sites I’ve built in the past.
Coda lets you set up as many sites as you want, and for each site, remembers which files you have open. To make a change, you edit the file, or files and hit publish. It FTPs the files in the background, and keeps everything synchronized. You can even edit files directly on the remote site, which is great if you have specific server config files that you don’t want to be synchronized.
Also, code recognition is available for HTML, CSS, Javascript, Actionscript, Coldfusion, Perl, Ruby, PHP, Python, and several more. Coda is one of those programs that I’m happy to pay for. It’s $79, but will save you time every single day. There is a free trial that I think is fully functional.
Once in a while you find software that solves a problem you didn’t know you had. I could never have imagined how useful this free little piece of software could be. It’s called “Teleport”, and it allows you to control one Mac with another Mac’s keyboard and mouse. Seamlessly.
You install the software on both machines, and once set up, it acts as though each machine has multiple monitors. your mouse pointer goes off the edge of your screen, and appears on the monitor of the other machine (it will even wake the other machine up it it is asleep). When your mouse pointer is on the other screen, your keyboard switches control also, and you have full control or both machines.
Can it get any better? Yes it can. You can drag and drop files. Teleport seamlessly transfers files in the background, and the drag and drop action of your mouse between two machines acts as a file copy. I use this all the time, and it saves so much time. I can come home from work, open my laptop on my desk, and with the mouse from my desktop machine, drag any files I need from my laptop to my desktop in about 5 seconds. Teleport also synchronizes your clipboard, so copy and paste works between machines as well.
If you don’t have multiple Macs, and still want to try something like Teleport, there is an application that has most of these functions, and will work with Windows, Linux, and Macs. It’s not an easy to set up, but there are good instructions on the site. It’s called Synergy.