just an asterisk

It’s a bit of a misnomer actually – rich text doesn’t have anything to do with riches or wealth. In fact, it’s not even the correct name, as Microsoft has sole proprietorship of the term “rich text” so our emails are technically “enriched text” (which probably would have been a better name…)

But anyway…

Here is what is really important:  Gmail has always supported signatures, but they were lame. You could write in plain text and split it into multiple lines. This all changed today when Gmail introduced “rich text” signatures, so I thought I’d walk through what you can do now.

Part 1: Rich is mostly about formatting

To see your signature, go to Settings and then the General tab. You’ll see the signature window about half-way down the page.

As you can see from my screenshot above, rich formatting gives you that toolbar that you’ve seen above your Gmail for so long. Using the simple buttons like bold, italic and underline, you can add basic flourishes. There are also font options, colors and high-lighting for your spicy new signature. One of my favorite additions is that you can insert true links into your emails.  For example, you can put a link to “my site” rather than spelling out the web address of your homepage.

Part 2: Inserting photos

Inserting photos into your signature is now much easier, although it still requires a bit of work. The first step is to click on this little button:

Once you’ve done this, you’ll be asked for a website where you’ve stored your photo. Yes, I realize that it’s a bit of a pain to have to keep the image online, but as you can see, once you have the link it is very easy to include a photo – even a very stupid one.

When you’re done typing the address, you should see the image appear in the box below the address field (as mine did above). Click OK to finish.

When you’re done with part 1 and/or part 2, don’t forget to save your work! You wouldn’t want to lose it!

Have fun with the new signatures. Feel free to brag about any cool ideas in the comments!
~ab

Hi all,

After a few weeks with my new MacBook Pro, I’ve probably installed (and then deleted) 100+ apps as I try to rebuild my digital life on a new platform. Finding apps that did what I needed was a bit of a chore (not to mention a bit pricey sometimes), so it was great to find lists like this one from Mac.Appstorm.Net (check it out).  Some of my favorites?

1. Firefox – My alternative to Mac’s Safari browser.  Firefox is better supported, and so I use Safari until I hit a problem.

2. Fluid – creates applications out of websites.  It sounds a bit strange, but it’s way better than just a bookmark for sites like Gmail, Remember the Milk, etc.

3. Cinch – Snaps windows around like Windows 7.  I grew to love the feature and feel less-productive without it (this is not evidence-based…).

Are there any apps that I should try out?  Anything that a mac user out there is dying to know?  Leave a note or suggestion in the comments and we’ll take a look.

If you’re in the same boat as me – enjoy the transition!

~ab

Question asked, question answered.  My friend Curt needed a solution for sending headshots through his Gmail – but Gmail doesn’t support images out of the box (that means until you do something to fix it).  Here’s how…  Hotel airconditionning makes for poor audio quality, but at least the content is there…

PS: Best of luck Curt with the auditions!

PPS:  You’ll probably want to make the video full screen…

~ab

I received a request from Dave on this one – Thanks Dave! – and I couldn’t resist trying to do it.  Here is the Frankenstein-like result:

What the program does

This program is for emailing new events to your Google Calendar.  It checks your Gmail account for new events that were sent to a special label every ten seconds.  It can only process one calendar entry every ten seconds (but if you’r emailing in more than that, it’s pretty impressive and you are far too busy to be playing with my software).

I couldn’t find any 3rd party services that do this, so I had to improvise using AutoHotKey and a script I wrote previously for quick adding events to Google calendar.  The result is a bit rickety, but it does the job.  Improvements may or may not occur over time and currently it does not work with google apps (although it couldn’t be that hard to fix this).

Setup

It requires three pieces of setup (these are the defaults which can be modified if you know how to script):

1. Create a Gmail filter that puts take email sent to youraddress+jaacal@gmail.com into a new folder/label called jaacal.  You can also say “skip the inbox” so these emails don’t clutter things up.

2. Download the zip file from this link – Email to Google Calendar (93) – and unpack it to a directory of your choosing.

3.  Change the logon.txt file to include your email, your user name (email without @gmail.com) and your password.  Make sure you keep this file in the same folder as the EXE file.

Workin’ it

Once you’ve done these three steps, run the EXE file and walk away.  Send an email with your quick add text in the subject line to the address above and it will appear on your calendar within about 20 seconds.  An example of a quick add subject line could be something like “dinner with Dave to thank him for such a good idea tommorrow 10pm”.  It doesn’t matter what you put in the body, the program will just ignore it.

Download Email to Google Calendar (93)

And that’s about it! Let me know your thoughts at ab@justanasterisk.com or in the comments.

~ab

My dear wife,

You were right.  It took me nearly a year, I swore up and down that my Flickr account was the bees knees, I wrote articles and explanations of how to use Flickr’s advanced tool set, and I ruined perfectly good cocktail party conversations, berating all services that did not stack up to my personal choice.

A year has gone by and now, like a dope, I have to reverse my position.  Why?  Because Picasa just changed the game, and I can no longer ignore the beautiful integration between Picasa and all my other apps.  Before I start into the details, this isn’t to say that Flickr is a bad service – it’s just no longer for me (yes I’m trying to save face – but let’s not write off Flickr entirely… there are too many devotees).

Without any more ado, here are the top 4 reasons I’ve decided to change over.

Read more »

I recently converted over from Gmail to Google Apps for my domain and went through the process of transferring my email.  During the process, I moved 13930 emails.  With such a large data size to test with, it got me to thinking – are there any filters that nearly everyone could use?  Emails do not vary as much as you might think.  I took some of my favorite filters and checked to see if they worked only for me or if they could be applied to others as well.  Here is what I came up with:

Read more »

Note: my bookmarklets can be downloaded from my geekier sister site – thegeekiness.com.  Check it out if you want more detail.

We are know that web pages can be bookmarked.  The act of saving web pages for future browsing has become second nature.  However, today we’re going to talk about the bookmarklet, which is a bookmark but with magical powers (sometimes).

Read more »

Q:

Bill wrote:

I need to get some old emails from [my previous email provider] to be able to transfer them to Google so I can forward them to people. I can read and likely print the defunct notes, but can I transfer them to my Google email accounts?

A:

Thanks for the question Bill.  The good news is that I have an answer… the bad is that it’s not super easy and there isn’t a quick tool to help.  However, you can do it and I’m going to show you how.  There are three main steps:

Read more »

I was going to call this post, the anatomy of a domain, after a Kids in the Hall sketch that I had (incorrectly) thought was called the “anatomy of a joke”.  In fact, the sketch is called “Sketch Comedy” and the premise is to describe what goes into a good sketch.  If you’re interested, check the out the video and the transcript…

Despite my mistake, I still want to go into the anatomy of a domain.  I want to try convince you that (no matter who you are) you can have your own web domain.  You can have your emails go to me@bobsagget.me or me@JAAismyfavoriteblog.com.  It’s not hard, nor should it be only done by professionals.  If you want a weekend project, and don’t mind reading a little bit, you too can have your own space on the fantastic interweb…  I should point out that this isn’t entirely free.   However, for less than price of 3 lattes, we can get you up and running. Read more »

In the Part 1 of this series, I wrote about searching better. This article will be on using Gmail for productivity – we’ll call it remember better. Just for kicks, let me point out that this article was written from Istanbul. :)

Whether you use Gmail for work or play, it’s always good to have a technique for reminding yourself what to do and which email that started you on that path in the first place. As usual, Gmail does not let us down. Here are three thoughts to get things moving: Read more »