After a short while I started looking for anyway to setup Office 2007 with the classic User Interface that Office had had up until Office 2003.

My prayers were answered when I found pschmid.net’s Ribbon Customizer which comes in two versions, Professional and Free. Both versions include Classic UI tabs which you can add to Excel, PowerPoint and Word 2007.

Since installing the Free version I’ve been able to use Office again.

There is a useful post on Cnet News on Changing the default folder view in Vista. This in turn points to detailed instructions on HOW-TO: Disable Automatic Folder Type Discovery.

While I don’t like the image, and won’t be putting it on my front page, it is gratifying to know that I must be doing something right as far as promoting my own website is concerned.

My immediate question was, how can I get into a mastermind group? A quick search on google for Mastermind Group threw up:

How to Create and Run a Mastermind Group by Karyn Greenstreet

A good description of what a Mastermind Group is and reasons to join one. This is a promotional page for a $12 downloadable ebook on How to Start a For-Profit Mastermind Group.

The Master-Mind Group, The Programme for Business Owners & Mangers

Promotional site for 12 month programme starting February 2008. Cost £297+VAT.

Forum Thread: Mastermind group, thinktank, brainstorm?

Erik of SPiN asked for groups in UK on 17 April 2006. SPiN appears to have gone out of business, but there is an echo on the web archive - http://web.archive.org/web/20060428020132/http://www.usspin.com/. John Wilkes of theinfoproductprofessionals.com replied 22 November 2008 suggesting a Mastermind Alliance group starting in February 2009.

From the Web Archive of the SPiN website: The idea of masterminding and mastermind groups was made popular by Napoleon Hill in his book Think & Grow Rich. They provided a downloadable PDF of Think & Grow Rich. [There appear to be many copies on the web: see the results of google search for thinkandgrowrich.pdf]

Mastermind Group Resources Blog

A blog on Mastermind Groups run by Evan Carmichael who also runs Mastermind Groups in Toronto. One or two posts per week.

Online Marketing Mastermind Group

A London based Mastermind Group with online marketing focus with free online membership for those not able to attend in person.

Bernadette Doyle’s Client Magnets, How to Attract Clients Like a Magnet

Promotional page for Bernadette Doyle’s coaching and mentoring programme - costs £50 per month or £500 per year.

Meet and Grow Rich: How to Easily Create and Operate Your Own “Mastermind” Group for Health, Wealth, and More by Joe Vitale

Described by Eruditor as: “A practical guide to creating, profiting, and growing your business with your own mastermind group. It is suitable for those who want to succeed in various businesses.”

Chris Cardell’s Wealth Mastermind Group

Promotional site for Chris Cardell’s Wealth Mastermind Group. A group with impressive benefits that provides both training, support and access to the “best Entrepreneurial minds on the planet”. Curently costs £295+VAT per month.

Did Napoleon Hill’s Mastermind group work because those involved were never actually communicating with each other?

Introductory article to a discussion thread on ecademy.

The Results Academy

Home page of The Results Academy. No direct reference to Mastermind Group but there is a page on their website (Mastermind Group) that contains an invitation to join their free membership area.

As a result of this initial research the following occur as items to persue:

• Obtain [done] and read Think & Grow Rich.
• While being in a Mastermind Group looks desirable, I already have a group of friends and colleagues who could act as my Mastermind Group. So do I want to be more proactive with this group, or should I find an external group to join?
• If I join an external group should I join:
  • A commercial group, severl listed above?, or
  • A non commercial group? or
  • Start my own?
• What would I want to achieve from membership of a Mastermind Group?

Are you a member of a Mastermind Group? Whether you are or not, what would your answers be to the above questions?

Here are the results:

                                                                                                   1
         1         2         3         4         5         6         7         8         9         0
----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0
All of this means that the average person viewing a Google results page -- who might ... I put both
Generate custom meta tags easily by filling in the questions, then copy and paste ... the title, description
Having a meta description tag on each page may give those pages an SEO advantage ... so 150 characters
i want to know the safe length for "meta description" and "title" .... in title tag. and in the case
Ok, lets get one thing clear - Meta tags are still important for SEO. Google uses the meta description
You can set the maximum number of characters that will be used to generate your Description meta-tag.
Meta Description Tag: required. Enter a description for your Web page. A maximum of 150 characters is
Your Title and Meta Description are marketing tools first since ... for the keyword meta tag is 1000,
Description tags consist the information on seo and google tips on writing meta description tags, length,
31 Oct 2008 ... A Good Example of a Description Meta Tag:. We will use a page on a ... Description Tag
                                                                                                   1
         1         2         3         4         5         6         7         8         9         0
----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0

1         1         1         1         1         1         1
0         1         2         3         4         5         6
0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0
 descriptions in short of in the description meta tag, ...
scription and keyword tags should be unique to the page. ...
ers (including spaces) is a good maximum length to use. ...
e of description tag maximum up to 330 ...
ion for its page descriptions, which while not directly ...
g. Longer is not necessarily better and a maximum of ...
is suggested for this Tag. You get one chance to capture ...
0, whereas scrubber.com says the max is ...
ength, limits, guidelines, suggestions, character limits, ...
Tag Tips. - Keep it to the Google Maximum of Less. ...
1         1         1         1         1         1         1
0         1         2         3         4         5         6
0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0----5----0

My best guess is that anything up to at least 155 characters (including spaces) will be displayed.

Why would I want to do this? I have recently started to actively administer four WordPress Blogs, three public and one private. The three public Blogs are:

• Dr Baker Comments (this blog)
• CSEM-BMP Comment
• Gordon Fricker’s Blog

Some time ago I saw a list of essential WordPress plugins, so I thought I should find it again. As I found, there are many such lists. From these lists I’ve created a Top Twenty List of Essential WordPress Plugins.

The ten lists I consulted from my google search were compiled by:

1. Design Meme
2. David Dairey
3. Mindful Geek
4. Michael Gray
5. Jiannis Sotiropoulos
6. Donna Fontenot
7. Quick Online Tips
8. Ben Yoskovitz
9. Adam Hirsch
10. Tech Roam

I also consulted Lists of Essential WordPress Plug-ins. Some of these lists showed up on google (listed above). The other lists were compiled by:

• Market Federation
• Sam Stevens
• Devanshu Mehta
• tube torial
• Joe Brockmeier
• Sean Aune
• Calvin Woon
• Vlad Akilov

I’ve written a paper detailing how I ordered the plugins. The results, the top twenty essential WordPress plugins are listed below.

I put this list together to see what is realy essential in terms of plugins. The advice I’ve read is don’t go overboard with plugins. So my advice is don’t load all of these.

I’ve also added advice on increasing the memory limit available to WordPress after the tables below.

The top twenty plugins appeared in from 3 to 12 lists (out of 18). Where several appeared in the same number of lists I compared the place they occured in the individual lists to obtain an overall position.

As well as the Top Twenty Essential WordPress Plugins, here are the runners up, the next twenty essential WordPress Plugins. These plugins occured in two lists each.

As well as plugins, Market Federation suggests:

Plugins can take a lot of resources, especially memory and many bloggers complain about their memory limit and wordpress cache system failing. Most shared hosting providers will limit the memory usage to 8Mb but you can alter this with a little trick. Login to your FTP account and find .htaccess file in your public_html directory. If you can’t find it then you will have to create it otherwise edit it and add the following line

php_value memory_limit 12M

This increases your memory limit to 12Mb which is more than enough for wordpress.

An alternative to using the .htaccess file would be to add the following to the wp-config.php file. However I’m lead to believe that this will only work if your hosting provider is not using PHP in safe_mode, and you would need to ensure that this is retained on any WordPress upgrade.

ini_set("memory_limit","12M");

This is not a new problem.  Email never has been a secure or certain method of delivering messages.  For example in an article “Too Many Lost Emails Leave us Unconnected“, written in 2004, Ray Everett-Church laments:

Today, a shockingly large amount of email is purposely lost. Some ISPs drop, delete, or delay billions of emails a day on purpose. Most of this is done in the name of security and spam-fighting. For example, many ISPs with dial-up access service will specifically block the ability of those using the dial-up connections from sending mail via any server not owned by that ISP.

I don’t think much has changed in the last 4 years.

So what are the options?

One option my friend is asking for is an automatic acknowledgement of receipt.  This would go along with a note on the website to the effect that “if you do not receive an automated response to your email, it means that either your message, or the response has got lost in transit.”

Another option that I’m thinking of implementing is a message system on his website.  This would allow anyone to leave a message for my friend that would be kept in a database on the website that my friend would check regularly for new messages.

In “Alternatives to Email“, Rob Hyndman suggests using wikis.  While this is good in the small work group collaboration sphere that he writes about, not suitable for private or confidential correspondence from first time contacts.

In “Facebook As An Email Alternative“, Nick O’Neill suggests, as the title says, Facebook as an alternative.

In “Alternatives to email“, Jordan Furlong has three suggestions, extranet with RSS feed for clients, legs or phone for colleagues down the hall, and cooperation tools such as Google Calendar and Google Docs.  These are good for people you are already in communication with, but not for those first contacts that my friend has been loosing.

If I’ve understood Penny Edwards in “Alternative to email“, she suggests using twitter to let people know your ’status’ or what you are doing and how you can be contacted at any one time. Then people can contact you via a variety of means including instant messaging and networking sites.

Another alternative would be to use the private messaging feature of Xing.

Are there other options that you could suggest?

This was to an address of the form Michael.Baker at domain. Until today I had not received spam with my first name in it. Lots of emails from marketing lists I’m on include my first name, but no spam. That’s probably because until recently the name part of most of my email addresses has been mbaker. Almost invariably I send any email with mbaker in the subject line straight to my spam folder unopened.

My first thought was that this was new, that spambots have recently learnt (some one has written one) to extract a first name from a dotted email address. While I’ve had the email address mbaker at pobox dot com for over ten years, I’ve only recently been using a michael.baker at domain email address, so have not received such spam before.

In Subject Line Customization: Too Much Like Spam? Karlyn Morissette points out that she and many others are likely to send any email with their first name in the subject line stright to their spam folder unopened, or at least not open it.

What are your thoughts on effective subject lines?

I recently wrote:

It is my contention that virtually no one will read anything at the foot of the page, but they will look for things there (but only things that they would expect to find, things like:

But then wondered, well what do people expect, what is “standard” for a page footer?

I expect a Copyright statement, and some links to items like Privacy, About, Contact, Disclaimer, Terms of Use and sometimes the actual contact details such as Name, Address, Post Code, Telephone number, Fax number, Email address.

I’m also not surprised to see logo, membership icons, trust icons, valid (x)html/css icons, accessibility icons, navigation links, sitemap link, search  box, home page link, page creation date, page update date, page URL, request for comment with link, etc.

Having written up (down?) what I expect in a footer, I thought a little use of google would be in order and found a very interesting article by Jeff Lash on More Than Just a Footer.  In his article he comments:

During countless usability tests, I have observed users who scroll to the bottom of the page when they are lost, only to be left helpless by the generic footer navigation.

Designers need to give as much attention to the footer design as to the other elements on the page. While simply blocking off some space for the footer might be an acceptable solution in some cases, there are many ways to take advantage of the bottom of the page.

He then goes on to suggest three inventive approaches:

 

1. An out-of-site map: where he references A Sitemap on Every Page. 
2. Rate it: a rate this button, useful for identifying most popular pages.
3. Sell it: “Bottom of the page deals” that the user is not expecting.

 

His page ends with Related Topics links.

Also worth reading is Best Website Footer Design? by Ronald Huereca.  While the article is short it is followed by many comments with links to commenters’ favourite footers.  Well worth a browse.  There is also this gem of a comment by Andy Faulkner:

If the reader has got to the bottom of the page, then it is highly likely that they read the content and therefore it is also likely that they found it worthwhile. If they found this worthwhile, then offering similar content in the footer seems like a good idea to me.

What do you expect to see, or think should be, in a footer?