You Too Can Benefit From The Power Of Email Signatures

A signature tells you something about a personality. Just as two people hardly write alike, they also sign differently. That’s how the “science” of Graphology came into being. But the digital age and the email signature have reduced the way you sign-off on a mail to a footnote. Just a typed name, and maybe a phone number or a Twitter handle – how utterly dull. Just as there is a way to write and format proper emails, there are also ways to end them well.

A few years back, I showed you how to create custom signatures in Gmail with Firefox add-ons. Much of that information remains true. So do thesix tips to get more out of your Gmail email signatures. The common thread is to not only create a stylistic impression, but also create a personal brand or promote a corporate one.

So, without further ado, let’s look at how you can benefit from the power of email signatures.

The Benefits of an Email Signature

1. An email signature shows your openness to communicate.
2. A well designed email signature conveys professionalism via your emails.
3. An email signature is a promotion tool for a business, a website/blog, a book, or a social cause.
4. An email signature with the relevant information is your short-biography.
5. An email signature is also a social networking tool, like a business card.

The Absolute Basics of an Email Signature

A neat email signature says just one simple thing – you care about the way you communicate. So, a basic email signature without a touch of pretension should answer who you are, what you do, and how you can be contacted. I personally prefer an email signature that is minimal and does not hog space. Our attention spans being limited as it is, I feel you could start with these points…

1. Your full name.
2. Your contact information.
3. Your personal or professional website/blog.
4. Your business address (or any other you might want to include).
5. Include links to your social network profiles only if they are important enough.

Designing a Simple Text Email Signature

Email signatures in simple text allow you to create clean lines of information without fancy graphics and logos. They are also consistent across devices and aren’t handicapped if image blockers are in place (as in Gmail or Outlook). Designing a simple text signature for your email takes some creative thought because you can only work with fonts, font sizes, symbols, spacing, and the colors available. The following image illustrates a neat text signature created in Gmail:

This is a simple signature that took me just 3 minutes to set up in Gmail. All I used was the Verdana font and some spacing between the letters of my name to make it stand out. If it suits you, you can pick the colors of your company logo to design your text signature. Here’s another look at it with a placement of the address:

To take your default Gmail signature beyond text, you can use the rich text editor in Gmail to spice it up with hyperlinks and images too.

Take Your Gmail Signature beyond Simple Text

The rich text signature editor in Gmail also helps you create HTML logos. You can insert small transparent logo icons for the services you want represented in your signature. An advanced Google Image Search will give you the location of such icons. Many services have media logos in different sizes, for instance: Twitter. Preferably, go for 16px by 16px sized transparent icons. Upload and position them appropriately. Here’s a sample signature I created quickly:

Also note (as this Gmail support page says) – if you send mail “from” multiple addresses in Gmail, you can set a different signature for each address in the General tab of your settings. You can also use the power of canned responses to set up multiple email signatures in the same account.

Create a Signature with LinkedIn

LinkedIn has a rich signature generator that helps you populate your emails with HTML signatures. The signature generator comes with many hued themes to give your emails a stylized look. The LinkedIn signature generator gives you a JavaScript window as seen below. You can copy-paste the code into email clients which support HTML signatures.

The signature generator does not say that it supports online email clients. But there is a simple workaround you can implement for Gmail. Simply copy all the text in your LinkedIn signature and paste it into a new compose window. Gmail automatically displays the signature with the LinkedIn theme chosen exactly preserved. You can save and re-use this signature as a canned response.

Spice Up Your Emails with Third-Party Email Signature Tools

WiseStamp

WiseStamp is a browser add-on for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Thunderbird. The browser extension comes with many email signature templates which you can customize with your own information like a profile picture or logo, IM & social profiles. The singular feature of WiseStamp is that it gives you a choice of apps across the social web which you can connect to with your signature. For instance, you can add a Facebook email app to promote a Facebook page or a WordPress app to give your blog readership a boost.

The free version gives you two signatures (e.g. personal and business), while the paid version with different plans comes with multiple signature support.

Last year, Tina did a comprehensive review on WiseStamp. Since then new apps like Pinterest and Instagram have been introduced. Outlook.com is a webmail platform that is supported. One of the significant additions are the Sidebar Apps.

Sidebar Apps allows you to showcase your content alongside your emails. The sidebar placement allows you to promote your content on the right-hand side of your emails and potentially garner more eyeballs. Sidebar Apps are available for YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest for now.

Sigwich

Sigwich is another third-party app that helps you create an appealing signature. It works with email clients like Outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo, and on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. Sigwich has a powerful signature engine that helps you build a creative signature easily. It has 6 different signature layouts that give you enough room to design a customized look. After touching up your signature, you can install the signature file and use it with your email client. Do note that you have to sign-up for a free account before you can click on download.

The optional signature layouts are good, but I wasn’t too satisfied with Sigwich. One of the little bugs I found while using Sigwich was that the Image Cropper wasn’t working properly.  I missed the ability to color the fonts. Going head-to-head, WiseStamp is far more powerful and easier to use.

There are many do’s and don’ts for creating the perfect email signature. Using the right tool is perhaps number one on the list. Keeping it simple and slim should be at number two. The benefits of using an email signature are often intangible. But you never know where the good word is being carried to. What about you? Do you consistently use an email signature? Mention how it benefits you? How did you design it? If not, it’s about time you did.

Note Src:- http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/you-too-can-benefit-from-the-power-of-email-signatures/

Touch Up Your Photos With A Single Click Using Photo Commander 11 [Giveaway]

    Sometimes you just want to fix up a picture without all of the baggage and learning curves that come with powerhouse image editors like Photoshop andGIMP. Obviously, a program as primitive as Paint won’t do, and even middle-of-the-road programs likePaint.NET sometimes won’t cut it. Thankfully, Ashampoo’s Photo Commander 11 steps in to fill the gap.

I’ll be honest: I’m really not one to do a lot of photo editing. I rarely do anything related to photos, whether it’s taking them, touching them up, or even looking at them. But even for someone like me, Photo Commander 11 was a breeze to operate. For those of you who actually like photo editing, this program will serve you well.

Photo Commander 11 is available for USD $49.99 on Windows XP, Vista, 7, and 8. But for you, we’ve got a great offer that you just won’t be able to pass up: we’re giving away 10 copies of Photo Commander 11 worth a total of $500 for free! Keep reading to see how you can take advantage of this awesome offer.

Photo Commander 11 Review

When you first start up the program, you’ll be met with a quick setup wizard. This wizard allows you to choose file associations, languages, interface layouts, and a few other simple settings that’ll help you get started. It’s not the most helpful introduction, but it’s something.

Photo Commander 11 opens up to a clean workstation layout with pleasant aesthetics. I chose the photo editing layout as opposed to the photo manager layout (I don’t have many photos to manage) or the film strip layout (didn’t really appeal to me). I admit that I felt overwhelmed at first, but it all started to make sense after a few minutes of exploration.

The main aspect you really need to become familiar with is the top bar – not the usual menu options that you’d see in any other program, but the special blue navigation bar that holds all of the actions and options that you can play around with. It’s similar to Microsoft’s ribbon interface except not so wieldy.

• Quick Fix: This section of the bar is where you’ll find a bunch of one-click photo fixers like cropping, contrast & brightness, color correction, red eye removal, tilt shifting, visual effects, and more.
• Objects: This section of the bar lets you edit the photo by drawing some boxes and circles if you please, or maybe some speech bubbles or image stamps if that’s what you prefer. It’s not as feature-rich as Photoshop by any means.
• Create: Despite the name, this section of the bar is less about creating photos and more about organizing them. There are buttons to create slideshows, albums, collages, panoramas, and other containers along those lines.
• Organize: Again, despite the name, this section is less about organization and more about utility. Rename a bunch of photos at once. Find duplicate images on your hard drive. Burn images to a CD or DVD. Rotate and optimize JPG files. Lots of miscellaneous actions that don’t fit under the other sections.

Visual effects are one of the most elementary operations you can perform on a photo, but they’re just so awesome and Photo Commander makes them so easy. It really is a one-click action and you can stack multiple effects on a single photo in case you really want to touch up an otherwise subpar picture.

When you want to create a photo container – like an album, a slideshow, a collage, etc. – Photo Commander again makes it easy thanks to the various wizards that come as part of the program. No matter what you want to do, all you have to do is fill out a few fields and check (or uncheck) a few checkboxes, and voila! You’re done.

Photo Commander 11 lets you take command of your photos without requiring you to have any prior photo manipulation experience. Here are some more great features that you’ll find here:

• Automatic photo backups as you work and easy restore.
• MiniMap live preview of the photo you’re editing.
• Fullscreen editing mode to cut away all other distractions.
• Comparison mode where you can compare before and after image modifications.
• Image conversion between multiple supported formats.
• Share your photos through email, Facebook, Picasa, or even YouTube.

Note Src:- http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/touch-up-your-photos-with-a-single-click-using-photo-commander-11-giveaway/

Google Play For Education Set To Enter Classrooms With A Play Store For Educational Apps [Updates]

      Another one of Google’s I/O announcements, Google Play for Education is a new initiative that aims to make it easier for schools to implement mobile learning in classrooms. Google Play for Education is a customized, curated version of the Play Store designed for K-12 needs. Announcing the launch at the I/O event (Google’s annual developer conference), Google said the education-centric Play Store will launch this fall.

Google Play for Education will contain apps organized by subject and grade level, so when looking for a specific app (e.g. a Math app) for a specific grade level, it will be easily discoverable. The apps will come with recommendations from teachers to ensure quality. App purchases by schools will also be streamlined with app purchases charged to a common school credit card which Google will have on its files. The most interesting feature, however, is that the new Play Store will allow schools to simultaneously download the same app to multiple devices — Google’s cloud infrastructure will push the apps across the board and help schools scale up rapidly.

Large scale distribution could enable Google to gain traction in the trending area of educational technology. An it won’t end with Android apps, as Google will surely follow this move up with videos and books as well. With Android devices like Nexus 7 on hand, Google could easily cut into Apple’s pie in the education sector. Could it be a win-win situation for schools that can avail of cheaper teaching aids thanks to Google’s push? This remains to be seen.

What do you think of this new initiative? Will you use it?

Hola Unblocker – Easily Access Region-Blocked Content

Access sites like Hulu, CBS, iTV and Pandora regardless of which country you're in. Even better, there’s no need to change your DNS settings or setup a VPN. Hola Unblocker is an Android app, a browser extension and a program for Windows that makes bypassing region restrictions a snap. Seriously, this app could not get any easier to use.

The web is full of great media content – if you live in the right country. Otherwise, it’s blocked for most of the world. James told you that VPNs are old, and showed you better ways to access region-blocked video. Chris showed you how to beat region blocked media sites on Android, and Hola was one of the apps listed.

Hola Unblocker is among the easiest tools for the job. Even better, it can seriously speed up the wireless web, if you’re an Android user. By default it supports a (very) limited number of sites, but with a little tweaking you can add more.

Getting Started With Hola

Head to Hola.org to get started. You’ll be presented with the various versions of Hola Unblocker.

Android users should download the app. Windows users can download a system-wide app (Windows 8 not supported). Everyone else can use the browser extensions.

Most of the sites this service allows you to access are US-based, but that doesn’t mean those of us living in America can’t also benefit. For example, we could use it to watch Downton Abbey months ahead of the PBS broadcast.

Spoil every plot twist! Ruin the show for everyone! Prevent your friends from talking to you! You can also create your own scripts to access other region blocked content – more on that later.

The Android app is similar to the Windows one – simply download the app and it will run in the background. You can configure which services are on and off:

You can also pick which sites you’d like to bypass region restrictions on:

As you can see, Facebook and Twitter are included in the list. This is useful if your corporate firewall blocks the sites, so office drones rejoice! Both of these sites are also blocked in certain countries –notably China – so Hola can help you access them while traveling. Note: breaking the law in a foreign country is generally a bad idea, and we’re not responsible for anything you do.

Creating Your Own Unblocker Script

The number of sites unblocked is currently quite limited, but advanced users can add more. Just click the “I’m Smart” link in the Hola settings, and check out this GitHub page for instructions. Be warned: this is mainly ideal for advanced users. Don’t be too nervous, however: it’s not as bad as it sounds. I’m a hockey nerd, and I was able to quickly make a script for bypassing NHL Gamecenter blackouts based on code I found on GitHub:

Add my NHL script to Hola here, if you’re interested. Subscription required, of course, and you’ll need Hola installed in order to use the link. It basically routes all NHL.com traffic through Spain; tweak a little and you’ll get the hang of making your own. Currently you can only route requests through three countries: the US, the UK and Spain.

Android users probably don’t want to type code on their device. Don’t worry, just create the script on your computer, then send the link to your Android device using the provided share link. It works, regardless of what browser you use on Android. Note that you may need to turn off location services for this to work on Android – certain apps check your location via the device settings before checking GeoIP.

The flexibility to create your own unblockers really gives Hola an edge over the alternatives – there’s no need to wait for someone else to unblock a site you love. That said, there are limitations: I would like to create another script for CBC.ca, but sadly there is no Canadian server to route traffic through at the moment. Someday, hopefully.

Hola As A Web Accelerator

Bypassing blocks isn’t all Hola is good for – it also promotes itself as a website accelerator on Windows and Android. Here’s their demonstration, on an Android phone:

I can’t so I noticed much of a different personally, but my connection is relatively fast to begin with. Let us know if this improves your speed in the comments below.

Download Hola Unblocker

Ready to get started? Just head to Hola.org. You’ll find multiple versions there for most platforms (though nothing for iOS – Apple presumably won’t allow them into the App Store).

What are you using Hola to unblock? Let us know in the comments below, along with any custom scripts you maybe have written. Seriously,share your scripts. There don’t seem to be many floating around the web at the moment, which is too bad.

Note Src:- http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/hola-unblocker-easily-access-region-blocked-content/

5 Ways to Take Advantage of Microsoft OneNote

Microsoft’s OneNote is arguably the best note-taking software out there. It can simply take care of all your note-taking needs, and there’s virtually nothing that comes close to it besides Evernote. While you can do some creative stuff with Evernote, OneNote can pack quite a punch as well in helping ease your life.

While some of you might just use Microsoft OneNote in very simple ways, note that there are a few scenarios which can greatly increase OneNote’s effectiveness for you. Here are five tips that can help you get more out of OneNote so you can reduce your stress, become more organized, and find time for other things in life.

Get OneNote for Free!

If you use Windows 8, Android, iOS, or Windows Phone, did you know that you can use OneNote absolutely free? While it won’t be as fully functional as the version found in the Microsoft Office suite, there are official OneNote apps available for Windows 8, Android, iOS, andWindows Phone absolutely free from the respective app stores. You can even use the OneNote Web App.

These apps allow you to use the main features of OneNote that make it so great. The only limitation are the number of notes you can have, which won’t hurt you if you do some routine cleaning. So anyone can get their lives organized with OneNote without having to pay anything.

Sync Your Notebooks

Synchronization of OneNote’s notebooks is key if you have multiple devices. Being able to access and modify your notebooks from any of your devices can help save you time and possible frustration. Recent versions of OneNote can automatically sync via your Skydrive, which makes it easy to access the current versions of your notebooks from any computer or mobile device.

If you’d rather not use Skydrive, but instead use a different cloud sync service like Dropbox, you can simply save your notebooks in your Dropbox folder instead. It may help to enable sharing on the notebook, however, so that you won’t encounter any issues if you have the notebook open on more than one device at a time.

Organize and Use Often!

OneNote can be used for a lot more than simple note-taking — it can be used to store everything important in your life. This can include anything from keeping up with a simple to-do list to organizing client info for a business to organizing research when planning out a trip. If you come across anything that may be important in both the short-term as well as long-term, put it in OneNote!

Just remember that there is a difference between keeping random daily notes and keeping organized notes. With organized notes, it’ll be a lot easier to find things you’ve saved, making OneNote a lot more useful for you.

Busy Student Lives

If you're a student who hasn't used OneNote before, then you seriously need to take a look at it. OneNote’s organizational structure for notes makes it perfect for students to organize their notes by class and topic or lecture. OneNote also offers a great template which students can start off with and then modify to meet their own needs. Microsoft OneNote is simply fantastic for a student’s every need — homework lists, quick notes, lecture notes, reviews, and more.

Additionally, as a student, it’s even more important to have a system set up for synchronization, so that you are able to access your class notes wherever you are, even on the go.

Do Math in Your Notes

Besides being great for a number of different usage scenarios, OneNote also has a few features that aren’t very well known. One of them is OneNote’s ability to take care of mathematical problems right in your notes. You can give this feature a try right now: open up any random note and type out a simple math equation like “25/5=” but without the quotes. As soon as you hit enter or return after the equals sign, OneNote will automatically calculate the value for you. This helps combine notes and actual math work at the same time.

Microsoft OneNote’s math capabilities reach much farther than that, however. OneNote can also calculate trigonometric functions, logarithms, radians, derivatives, integrals, and a few other common math functions. Please note, however, that some of the advanced math functions can only be found in the paid version of OneNote, so your experience may vary if you are using a free app.

Conclusion

Hopefully these five tips have convinced you that Microsoft OneNote is definitely worth a try, or worth diving further into if you’re just a casual user. You can also check out some othergreat OneNote tips, or check out this comparison between OneNote and the infamous Evernote.

What OneNote tips do you have? What note-taking solution do you use if not OneNote? Let us know in the comments!

Note Src:- http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-ways-to-take-advantage-of-microsoft-onenote/

How I Import Internet UFO Sightings Data Into A Google Spreadsheet

       When it comes to online databases and information that can be found inside what is commonly known as the “invisible web“, I’m not your typical user. Sure, I spend a little bit too much of my time sifting through online databases at places like the National Archives and the CIA FOIA reading room, but I have to say nothing makes me more excited than when I find an HTML based table filled with volumes of seemingly complex and unconnected data.

The fact is, data tables are a goldmine of important truths. Data often gets collected by armies of data-collection grunts with boots on the ground. You’ve got people from the U.S. Census traveling the entire country for household and family information. You’ve got non-profit environmental groups collecting all sorts of interesting information about the environment, pollution, global warming and more. And if you’re into the paranormal or Ufology, there are also constantly updated tables of information about sightings of strange objects in the sky above us.

Ironically, you would think that any government in the world would be interested to know what sort of foreign craft are being spotted in the skies over any country, but apparently not – at least not in the U.S. anyway. In America, the collection of unusual sightings of crafts have been relegated to teams of amateur hobbyists who flock to new UFO sightings like moths to a flame. My interest in these sightings actually stems not from a fascination with aliens or crafts from other planets, but from a scientific fascination with patterns – where and why more people are seeing things in the sky, and whether those sightings could reflect something very real and much more down-to-Earth actually going on.

To explore the volumes of data collected by teams of UFO hobbyists, I’ve actually developed a way to import large HTML tables of data into a Google Spreadsheet, and then manipulate and analyze that data to extract and discover meaningful and important information. In this article, I intend to show you how to do the same.

Important HTML Data Into Google Spreadsheet

In this example, I’m going to show you how to import any data that might be stored in a table on any website on the Internet, into your Google Spreadsheet. Think about the enormous volume of data that’s available on the Internet today in the form of HTML tables. Wikipedia alone has data in tables for topics like global warming, the U.S. Census Bureau has tons of population datasets, and a little bit of Googling will land you a whole lot more beyond that.

In my example, I’m starting out with a database on the National UFO Reporting Center that actually looks like it might be a query-style deep-web database, but if you observe the URL structuring, it’s actually a semi-complex web-based reporting system consisting of static web pages and static HTML tables – exactly what we want when looking for data to import.

NUForc.org is one of those organizations that serves as one of the biggest reporting centers for UFO sightings. It isn’t the only one, but it’s big enough to find new datasets with current sightings for every month. You choose to view the data sorted by criteria like State or Date, and each of those is provided in the form of a static page. If you sort by date and then click on the most recent date, you’ll see that the table listed there is a static web page named according to the date format.

So, we now have a pattern to regularly extract the latest sightings information from this HTML-based database. All you have to do is import the first table, use the most recent entry (the top one) to identify the latest update, and then use the date of that posting to build the URL link where the latest HTML data table exists. Doing this will simply require a couple of instances of the ImportHTML function, and then a few creative uses of text manipulation functions. When you’re done, you’ll have one of the coolest, self-updating reporting spreadsheets of your very own. Let’s get started.

Importing Tables and Manipulating Data

The first step, of course, is to create the new spreadsheet.

So, how do you import HTML tables? All you need is the URL where the table is stored, and the number of the table on the page – usually the one first listed is 1, the second is 2, and so on. Since I know the URL of that first table listing dates and counts of sightings listed, it’s possible to import by typing the following function into cell A1.

=importhtml(“http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxpost.html?”&H2,”table”,1)

H2 holds the function “=hour(now())“, so the table will update every hour. This is probably extreme for data that updates this infrequently, so I could probably get away with doing it daily. Anyway, the above ImportHTML function brings in the table as shown below.

You'll need to do a bit of data manipulation on this page before you can piece together the URL for the second table with all of the UFO sightings. But go ahead and create the second sheet on the workbook.

Before trying to build that second sheet, it’s time to extract the post date from this first table, in order to build the link to the second table. The problem is that the date is brought in as a date format, not a string. So, first you need to use the TEXT function to convert the report post date into a string:

=text(A2,”mm/dd/yy”)

In the next cell to the right, you need to use the SPLIT function with the “/” delimiter to break the date up into month, day and year.

=split(D2,”/”)

Looking good! However, each number needs to be forced to two digits. You do this in the cells right below them using the TEXT command again.

=text(E2,”00″)

A format of “00″ (those are zeroes) forces two digits, or a “0″ as a placeholder.

Now you’re ready to rebuild the entire URL to the latest HTML table of new sightings. You can do this by using the CONCATENATE function, and piecing together all of the bits of information you just extracted from the first table.

=concatenate(“http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/ndxp”,G3,E3,F3,”.html”)

Now, on the new sheet you created above (the blank sheet), you’re going to do a new “importhtml” function, but this time for the first URL link parameter, so you’re going to navigate back to the first spreadsheet and click on the cell with the URL link you just created.

The second parameter is “table” and the last is “1″ (because the sightings table is the first and only on the page). Hit enter, and now you’ve just imported the entire volume of sightings that were posted on that particular date.

So, you’re probably thinking this is a nice novelty act and everything – I mean, after all, what you've done is extracted existing information from a table on the Internet and migrated it to another table, albeit a private one in your Google Docs account. Yes, that’s true. However, now that it’s in your own private Google Docs account, you have at your fingertips the tools and functions to better analyze that data, and start discovering amazing connections.

Using Pivot Reports to Analyze Imported Data

Just recently, I wrote an article about using Pivot Reports in Google Spreadsheet to perform all sorts of cool data analysis feats. Well, you can do the same amazing data analysis acrobatics on the data that you’ve imported from the Internet – giving you the ability to uncover interesting connections that possibly no one else has uncovered before you.

For example, from the final sightings table, I might decide to use a pivot report to take a look at the number of different unique shapes reported in each state, compared to the overall number of sightings in that particular state. Finally, I also filter out anything mentioning “aliens” in the comments section, to hopefully weed out some of the more wingnut entries.

This actually reveals some pretty interesting things right off the bat, such as the fact that California clearly has the highest number of reported sightings of any other State, along with the distinction of reporting the highest number of craft shapes in the country. It also shows that Massachusetts, Florida and Illinois are big hitters in the UFO sightings department as well (at least in the most recent data).

Another cool thing about Google Spreadsheet is the wide array of charts available to you, including a Geo-Map that lets you lay out “hot spots” of data in a graphical format that really stands out and makes those connections within the data quite obvious.

If you think about it, this is really only the tip of the iceberg. If you can now import data from data tables on any page on the Internet, just think of the possibilities. Get the latest stock numbers, or the most recent top 10 books and authors on the New York Times bestseller list, or the biggest selling cars in the world. There are HTML tables out there on almost any topic you can imagine, and in many cases those tables are frequently updated.

ImportHtml gives you the ability to plug your Google Spreadsheet into the Internet, and feed off the data that exists out there. It can become your own personal hub of information that you can use to manipulate and massage into a format that you can actually work with. It’s just one more very cool thing to love about Google Spreadsheet.

Have you ever imported data into your spreadsheets? What kind of interesting things did you discover in that data? How did you use the data? Share your experiences and ideas in the comments section below!

Note Src:- http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-i-import-internet-ufo-sightings-data-into-a-google-spreadsheet/