257 birthday wishes on Facebook.

11 from family members, 9 from people I have never interacted with on or offline other than to “friend” them, 112 from people i have never physically met, 9 from people I have dated(ish), 26 I have known for at least 30 years, 9 I have kown for at least 40 years, 4 I have known for 51 years.

7 I have worked with recently, 19 past customers, 4 people from my childhood neighborhood and 5 currently serving in state government positions including the Lt Governor of Georgia, Casey Cagle.

Did I get even one paper card? Well, actually I did but none of them came snail mail. It’s a new world. I never (probably never) would have received that many birthday greetings without Facebook and years of actually building engagements – not just hoarding followers.

By the way, I don’t think getting 257 birthday wishes on Facebook makes me anything better than anyone else. It does make me blessed, added to my happiness and caused me to reflect on some great memories with some really awesome people.

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Adobe Acrobat 9.3.3 installation – 240 megabytes

Foxit PDF reader installation – 10 megabytes

Space saved – 230 megabytes

Of course you ask, “why worry about 230 megabytes with today’s terrabyte hard drives?” Have you noticed the system resources the Adobe brand reader consumes at idle? Of course there are functions the Foxit reader doesn’t handle but quite honestly when all you want to do is read the free eBook on optimizing your notepad PC who cares?

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Recently I informed a Facebook friend I had deleted his comment. It wasn’t “that bad” but it just needed to be done for my personal reason. In an email to him I told him I deleted it and explained why and he was okay with the deletion. On the other hand had I simply deleted his comment without notifying him that could have been a different story.

Let’s examine when it it okay or even a good practice to delete Facebook comments and whether or not you should inform and explain to the commenter. Keep in mind these are my opinions and not scientific results:

1. Spam – always okay to delete and never requires an explanation.
2. Off topic – okay to delete and may require an explanation depending on your relationship.
3. Off color – always okay to delete and does not necessarily require an explanation.
4. Personal attack – I would say to leave these. If someone disagrees with me or criticizes me I leave it. My friends usually come to my defense and if they do not then perhaps I should ask some rather pointed questions.
5. Political – I do reserve the right to delete wall posts about opposing views but comments I leave.
6. Religion – see politics.
7. Attacks on other friends –  I lean towards deleting these. I recently had two connections who did not know each other and one attacked the previous. I left the comment but defended the first person. It turned into a banter match and several other friends became involved.
8. Profanity – totally your call.
9. Nudity – depends on what it looks like. Just kidding. I delete, you can do whatever you wish.
10. Coarse humor (innuendo etc.) – I stick with the “if it isn’t for everyone’s ears including my 15 year old daughter or 13 year old great-nephew it’s coming off”.

Your comments are welcome and invited. What would you delete from your Facebook wall?

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2. Tee shots are like business connections – some fly straight and long. Others make you trek through mud and briars and some get so lost you elect to replace them because they weren’t worth the continued trouble trying to find them. The ones to avoid are the ones you can see but take you out of bounds.

3. Playing in bad weather requires dedication and love for the game. Playing in driving rain storms with gail force winds are the times when you own the course – there is little competition in adverse conditions.

4. Playing with a good natured group and scoring badly beats playing with grinches and scoring well.

5. Nothing beats using the combined talents of 4 mediocre players in a best ball match. Pick team members you like and who have talent for the game and there is no stopping you.

Instead of  GOLF think BUSINESS. You’ll get it – hang in there!

When I was much younger there was a dance called “the bump”. Did I mention that was when I was much younger? Today a new bump craze may be on its way and you may be able to profit from it if your development ideas are the right stuff.

Bump Technologies has introduces a new app for iPhone and Android which, by their own description, “is a quick and easy way to connect two phones by simply bumping them together. Exchange your phone number, photos, or compare friends with just a bump.”

On the Bump blog over at Posterous they give a wish list of sorts for developers to get them thinking in the direction of creating apps using the Bump API. http://blog.bu.mp/requests-for-apps

What could you do with a bump app?

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Stop.

Try this before you start digging around in your .htaccess file. Look in your uploads folder for the year folder and then the month folder and look in there for any .zip files that may be upgrades and not files you want to have available later. Unless you specifically placed .zip files in your uploads they are probably from upgrades that either did not properly install previously or the one you are currently trying to install. The WP dashboard upgrade function “should” automatically delete the .zip (compressed) files for upgrades as soon as the upgrade is installed.

There have been a few times I have had the .zip file not deleted after installation which has prevented me from installing the next upgrade until those files are deleted. Always make sure you keep a backup of any files you are uncertain about and DropBox is a great place to store files you don’t want using up your space. After you delete the .zip files try the upgrade/install again.

There have been a couple of times I had to completely download all of the contents of my uploads directory from the server, delete all the directories from uploads down (shell command rmdir -Rf uploads) then upload all the files again – which was extreme but worked. If all of that doesn’t work and you are stuck there are some other things that may need to be done like changes to the .htaccess file or the server/PHP config. If that is the case you can contact me and for a reasonable cost I can help you if needed. No windows and no Mac. Linux only please

The Business of WordPress Conference will be held at the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s Conference Center on 14th Street in Midtown Atlanta. Designed as a high-tech event space, the GTRI Conference Center is home to more than 300 events each year; over 10,000 square feet of event space and copious free parking in the attached parking deck – it is the ideal place for this Conference.

Follow this link for full details. Contact me for discounted admission – there are only 10 discounted admission tickets available to you through me at this time so act quickly.

Today it dawned on me the phrase doesn’t seem to be as prolific as it was some months ago. Especially in the real estate industry, or so it seems, hungry real estate agents latched on to the idea quickly and many who had at least 50 followers on Twitter and 40 friends on Facebook were soon found teaching social media to unsuspecting agents all across the nation.

This short lookup for the terms “social media” followed by “guru”, “expert”, “planner” and others was interesting. See if you are surprised by the results. These are Twitter users who use those phrases in their Twitter profiles:

social media guru 330
social media expert 470
social media trainer 69
social media consultant 726
social media advisor 29
social media planner 27
social media strategist 705
social media marketer 342

My supervisor ordered two 4G dongles and accounts on Monday and they arrived today. Since she is in Valdosta, about 160 miles away, I got to play with mine first. Nanny boo boo. Of course my idea is to make it prove itself and quickly. I’m headed on a 4 hours driving trip on Thursday afternoon, actually I’ll be the passenger, and plan on giving it a try several times on the trip. From right here in my office in Atlanta, however, it is fairly impressive.

Unlike plugging in your standard wireless network dongle this baby takes a little time. In fact a little over 10 minutes including the system reboot. Not bad since that should be the only time the wait is that long. They supply you with a cute little USB drive that looks more like a divot replacer which installs all the necessary drivers and files on your PC. I’m assuming it is also loaded with Linux and Mac components but honestly I was so hurried to see how fast the network is I didn’t explore, yet.

Since I installed it first on a Windows Vista powered laptop it did require a restart which added a few minutes to the installation time. On first connection I waded through about 20 pages of agreements (three separate agreements) and updated my user information to match me and clicked “go go go!” The knowledge it’s being billed to the Veep’s corporate card helps but also means it better improve my productivity and corporate revenue

Then, wouldn’t you know it, I went straight to SpeedTest.net and ran it through the simple paces. The first result was dismal and disappointing. That initial test delivered an upload speed of .47 Mb/s and a terribly slow download speed of only 1.13 Mb/s – much less than I expected. Immediately I took a few spins around the internet downloading some MP3s and watching some streaming vids. The speed seemed much higher than 1.13 down.

After lunch I went back to SpeedTest. net for another run and while the upload speeds still left a little to be desired the download speeds looked better. Much better in fact.

On the second run the upload speed remained at .47 Mb/s but the download speed turned an impressive 5.75 Mb/s which means I can download a full 800mb movie in 19 minutes. My battery will even last long enough to do that!

Since I have yet to travel with it I’ve got more testing to do but in my office I am pleased with the speeds. I was pleased with the installation time – it’s easy enough for anyone to do it if you can read 3 lines of instructions. Cost is reasonable at $65 per month for two and unlimited bandwidth (subject to Clear’s AUP). The dongles were a little pricey at roughly $235 each but we didn’t want a contract and we didn’t want to lease.

Test speed results from SpeedTest.net

Initial speed test
Results
Second speed test
Results

Color picker EyeDropper

Remember the days of doing a screen shot, pasting that into Paint Shop Pro and using the eye dropper to select the color? Gone are those days if you use Chrome. The EyeDropper plugin works great. Simply install it, go to the page you are working on, activate the extension, find the color you want and click. Seriously – it’s that difficult.

See the screen capture to the right for an image of the pop-up.

Site traffic reporter SitezMeter

When you manage SEO and SERP for multi-million dollar companies there is one thing you always want to know and always want to be able to tell them at a moment’s notice: how much success we’re having. Enter SitezMeter for Chrome. Once the plugin is installed simply visit any site and activate the plugin and it will deliver traffic charts from Google Trends, Alexa and Compete side by side, as well as ranks.

Give me the SEO details!

I want to know my backlinks, my social bookmarks and so much more. This work in progress is looking mighty good! All those little tasks I used to keep two dozen bookmarks for are now contained in this little plugin. Seriously saves me a lot of time and my clients a boat load of money. Now that I can go to their site and use these tools all from one location I can get more done faster and thus get back to the real job of content creation and site optimization. This plugin called Chrome SEO really does put it a lot of tools you need all in one neat little kit!

Have fun and enjoy!

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