Climate change has no regional boundaries and threatens more than the environment. If we continue on this path, famine, flooding, war, and millions of refugees are the likely outcome. Given the urgency of the issue and the upcoming international climate negotiations in Copenhagen later this year, it’s only natural that this years’ topic for Blog Action Day, is climate change.
All throughout the day, you’ll no doubt be reading on the many actions you can take to help stop climate change. But did you know that if you are using WordPress, you could be making minor adjustments that also help? Making your website “green” is as easy as reducing the number of of calls to your database. Let me show you how.
I received a very official looking Domain Name Expiration Notice a little while ago. It looked like the real thing and I might have fallen for it if I hadn’t been (a) wary that the notice was so far in advance of the actual expiry date; and (b) already aware of phantom invoice scams.
Back when I worked in big companies, it was a fairly regular occurrence to get an official-looking invoice for overdue payment that upon closer inspection was fraudulent. Sometimes it was for copier toner, other times for a directory listing or other common supplies. Now the scam has gone high tech.
I believe in knowing what I’m paying for (I prefer not to be described as “cheap” thank you) so I always looked into what I was signing off on. That’s how I uncovered the scam and learned just how persistent and unscrupulous these companies can be.
The invoices are often to the attention of a former employee
They always look very official
There was always a sense of urgency
The invoices keep coming even if you call the source and confront them
If I was like the many small business owners who do not keep close tabs on their domain name registrations and are too busy to read the fine print, I’d have paid over 4 times what I should have to renew those domain names AND I would have transferred them to a disreputable registrar.
Like spam, the phantom invoice scam must work or it wouldn’t keep appearing. I caution you to keep an eye on your domain names and pay attention to the details.
With the start of a new year comes the time to make resolution. Most of us will plan on losing weight, exercise more and get organized. Professional organizer, Linda Chu, asked me to write a piece about using the web and get organized and we sent out the newsletter yesterday. In this article I mentioned my top three free online tool to de-clutter my desk and brain; Ma.gnolia, Ta-da lists and Flickr.
Coincidentally, common craft released another great video explaining how photo sharing works on the web.
I recently had a discussion with Mhairi about a possible project. Mhairi had a client who wished to add a blog to her site and she asked if I could provide her with a quote. Unfortunately, the website was built with ColdFusion and thus I told her that I wouldn’t be able to work on it because I’m simply not familiar with that tool. Mhairi was a bit confused at first and unsure why the code should matter.
Back in early May, Mhairi wrote a piece about Google Reader and how its use allows you to keep track of your favourite blogs. I thought I would provide a step-by-step guide for those who may not know how to get started.
Google Reader is a great piece of technology developed by the folks over at Google labs that lets you easily subscribe to information on the web. In tech terms, Google Reader is an RSS or Atom feed aggregator. For those of us without propeller heads, this simply means that it allows available information on the web such as blog articles, e-zine pieces and news bulletins to come to one central place so that you can log in and enjoy at your leisure.
Climate change has no regional boundaries and threatens more than the environment. If we continue on this path, famine, flooding, war, and millions of refugees are the likely outcome. Given the urgency of the issue and the upcoming international climate negotiations in Copenhagen later this year, it’s only natural that this years’ topic for Blog Action Day, is climate change.
