Automate Your Business

Archive for the ‘Rants and Raves’ Category

I thought I was just getting old, and the spammers had cottoned onto the fact. (I turned 40 a couple of months ago).

But no, apparently Aweber was hacked, and email addresses were stolen.

Fortunately, I use a unique email for each list I’m on, so it’s easy to identify the list I should be on, re-subscribe using the new address, and consign the old address to the deletion queue.

But for a while there, I was being buried by an absolute avalanche of mail every time I checked my email on my mobile phone. It only summarises up to 99 mails unread, and every time I looked at it, I saw “99+”. I then logged in, deleted them all, and 30 minutes later there was another “99+” visible.

You can imagine my delight at this…

I just received this mail yesterday, from BulkRegister, who were bought out by Enom but who now seem to be the actual front-end for Enom customers:

Dear Andrew Peacock:

Remember, take no action and we will process the renewal order and attempt to extend the domains and services for you.

The following services in your account ‘XXXXX’ will automatically renew in two weeks:

Service               Expire Date   Description

————————————————————–

Bulk Membership       03-15-2010    Bulk Premium Membership

All dates are in MM-DD-YYYY format.

To renew these services do nothing. If you DO NOT want any of these services to auto-renew, please do the following:
1. Go to http://www.bulkregister.com.
2. Login to your account.
3. Go to the domains and services you DO NOT wish to renew.
4. Go to the auto-renew settings for these domains and services.
5. Select the appropriate option to have the domains and services NOT automatically renew.
6. Save your changes.

So, I’ve got no idea what the service is. I don’t know what benefits it provides. Nor do I know how much I’m going to be billed automatically.

It doesn’t appear in my renewal list. And I have no domains with Enom – sorry, BulkRegister – that are up for renewal till May.

And I can’t find any references to it either on their site or online, apart from another person who posted about receiving this mail.

And to top it off, I can’t log into their support center to submit a ticket.

Well done Enom, what a smooth, customer-friendly transition…

Anyone got any idea what this is about?

UPDATE, 10 MINUTES LATER:

It gets even better.

I got an automated response saying:

Hello,

Unfortunately, the update to your ticket has not been received as this mailbox is not monitored.

To update your ticket, you can click on the link in the email to immediately access your ticket and enter the updated comments.

So Enom… will I get a response or not?

Disaster! My main evernote 2.2 database won’t open in the 2.2 – I get an “invalid file size” error!

Aaaargh..

Edit: Got there in the end. My rigour with backups resulted in a version of the file which opened OK. Phew.

I’ve been searching for an Evernote 2.2 installer for a while now, as version 3

A) Has less features

B) Lost some of my data when I imported

C) And is generally crap (although still amongst the best note-taking app that I’ve tried).

Fortunately, I found a new source of the Evernote 2.2 installer.

Just thought I’d share it in case anyone else is looking for the same.

I loved Evernote… I hate Evernote.

(Evernote is a note-taking application – somewhere to store all those ideas, tips, and other useful info that you pick up online – or offline – complete with tagging, categorisation, etc).

Evernote 2.2 was fantastic. I foolishly upgraded to Evernote 3, which (like  most people) I assumed would give me extra benefits. But no! It’s essentially:

1. The capability to centrally store your data with Evernote.com (which you can then access via other PCs, online, via your iPhone, etc)

+

2. A missing set of features (removed whilst they adapt to the centralised data).

A few of those missing features were ones that I used regularly, which was disappointing. However, before I noticed this, I uninstalled evernote 2.2 and I no longer have, nor can I find, the installer for 2.2. So I’m stuck with version 3.

Well, I would be stuck, but I’ve found an alternative. It took me a long time, trying many, many note-taking apps to find one I liked. Then I was playing around with a piece of software, and realised it had all the features I like:

- Category-based notes + a richer tagging facility
- Date-based notes
- Short preview vs the “full view” capability
- A rich and ongoing development cycle to resolve issues, add features, etc.
- A stable platform
- An open and easy-to-use (for me) API (so that I can import all my old Evernote files into it).
- The ability to link between notes
- The ability to (relatively) easily transfer my data between PCs (or to a central web or FTP location)
- The ability to backup automatically.

And much more that I don’t use now, but will do in future, such as:

- The ability to change the view of notes to show titles only for lots of notes, as opposed to titles + previes for a few notes.
- The ability to create handy shortcuts in the side bar or in the “menu” area to frequently used notes
- The ability to auto-capture different versions as I update old notes
- The ability to create draft notes that aren’t visible in the main view.

And what was this wonderful software?

Was it Microsoft OneNote? No.
Was it any other formal note-taking application? No
It was…

Well, see if you can guess. Read that list of features again, and replace with word “notes” with “posts”. What do you end up with?

That’s right. WordPress.

Neat, eh?

Obvious, when you think about it.