One of our clients recently approached us with an interesting problem. The email edition of their newsletter was too long. Readers who were interested in the side stories were giving up rather than reading or even scrolling past the lead story and subscribers who were interested in old articles would have to search issue by issue.

What the client needed was a website which would index and continue stories that began in their newsletter.

Enter WordPress.

WordPress.com is one of most popular blogging sites in the United States, and with some custom programming, it’s open source counterpart becomes …

Some business owners have found that review sites such as Yelp! and Google Maps can be a boon for business, while others have developed a love/hate relationship with them.

Well, love the fact that customers can go online and express their opinion about an experience with your business or hate the fact that prospects and search engines alike are making reviews a key data point when making decisions about your business, they don’t appear to be going away anytime soon.

Read the entire article at www.openforum.com

Each morning I walk Archee McLeash passed JFK University’s lovely creekside campus. Recently, they installed new No Smoking signs. The signs look like this:
Please

That’s the sign: The word please with a no smoking graphic.

Why did they include please on the sign? Please implies a request, that a person can make a choice to comply — or not.  However, here in California, it’s against the law to smoke within 20 feet of a public building. There’s no choice. I’d rather see a sign that says, flat out, Don’t smoke …

Are you planning on sending holiday greetings to your clients and colleagues? Here are some thoughts to keep in mind:
Plan ahead. “Ahead” as in right now.
It takes time to prepare and send a holiday greeting, and the deadlines are drawing nigh. You’ve got to:

• Make a list and check it twice (because you might want to differentiate who-gets-what).
• Write a suitable message (or more than one message).
• Choose stationary if your plan to use postal mail.
• Choose a suitable email template if you plan to email.
• Allow time to format your message, including sending yourself a  test message to make sure it looks spruce.

Pick a …

There was a time when campers would spend their lengthening autumn nights huddled about the laptop, warming their hands above the processor and letting the eerie blue glow of the monitor light their faces from beneath. It was during hours such as these that people would take turns telling tales about digital gremlins and computer projects gone wrong. Here are just a few excerpts from those half-told tales.
“The Next Day, It Was Gone!”
Who hasn’t heard the story of the phantom server? Hour after hour of labor poured in to perfecting a website until it is a resource for one and …

A blog is an invaluable tool when dealing with a public relations crisis. With a blog you can correct errors and quash rumors, advance your company message, and deliver the facts ahead of the news cycle. Through fair and timely treatment your blog will show that you are concerned and responsive, and allow you to influence the lens through which others view the crisis.

It is important to focus on transparency, information sharing, honesty, and accountability. These four elements are essential to maintaining trust and credibility, whether you are a multinational aerospace company or a local coffee shop …

Last week I started building a glossary of acronyms essential to understanding the modern internet.  Links to that article are interspersed amid five new acronyms to help you master the web.
Yet More Acronyms to Rule the Web
API - Application Programming Interface
An API is a set of standards used by one program so that it can interact with another without having to reveal what goes on inside. It’s sort of like a postal address for computer programs. So long as you properly format the address on the envelope, your letter will reach the desired destination, even if you do …

Earlier this week I discovered that one of my best friends from college, who is now a professor in his own right, had never seen the abbreviation RT for retweet.  It was a somewhat sobering realization that even though we grew up with personal computers and Internet access, social media ken is not inherent to my generation. Finding out that a good friend, who is one of my more learned contemporaries, was operating without the base vocabulary for today’s online world inspired me to put together a quick primer of acronyms to rule the web.
Five Definitions to Start With
RT - …

I’ve been recommending Mark Twain’s treatise “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” for years now. Read it! You’ll learn a lot about writing, and you’ll enjoy a few laughs.

Here are Twain’s points 12-18, with my own comments beneath. He says that these “little rules” require that the author shall:

Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.

When you merely come near to it, your reader might be confused. Worse, your reader might not be confused; he might accept as true what you don’t mean.

If you mean to say “Wednesday at 3:00″ don’t say …

People regularly confuse I with me—or confuse me with I. Who among us stops to think, “Am I using this first person pronoun in the subjective case or the objective?”

But there are simple ways to remember how to use first person pronouns correctly.
First Person Technical
In case you’re interested, here are the technical details:

• Use I in the subjective case; as the subject of the sentence. “I ate ossobuco.”
• Use Me in the objective case; as the object of the verb. “That pesky armadillo chased me down the canyon.”
• Use Myself in the reflexive case;  following the noun that refers to …
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