Keith Shirley

I thought this video story on CNN might be of interest to you. I do of course have a motive. It’s about a disgruntled employee deleting the files at their office and shows the importance of a reliable backup system.

For quite some time I’ve encouraged people to provide videos on their website of demos and trade-shows etc. As they say – A picture is worth a thousand words. My suggestion is actually to put the video on Youtube and to embed it. They have the infrastructure such that you’re not penalising your other customers – and you have access to the millions of Youtube viewers.

In order to track who was watching the video we had various methods that we could work with but it seems Google is now going to make it easier. As this Youtube Insight entry on the Official Google blog shows – they are now linking up Google Analytics and Youtube so you can get a better idea of where your viewers are coming from.

Over the next weeks you may start receiving error messages that say a mail
you sent was blocked because your mail server is listed in the ORDB spam
database. This is not always true.

The database was shut down in Dec 2006 but some spam filters still have it
set in their configuration. In an attempt to force these people to remove
the entry the ORDB system was set yesterday to begin returning false
positives.

The result: Mail is blocked on servers still set to use the ORDB service.

If you are trying to send a mail and it comes back as blocked because your
server appeared on ORDB then the person you are sending the mail to will
need to change their spam settings – obviously you can’t mail them about it
and will need to call them.

Creating PDF files seems to be one of those things that people either already use or think it’s going to be really complicated to do. It’s not.

If all you want to do is create PDF files then I suggest downloading the PDF995 Printer Driver and Converter. The converter is what does the actual PDF creation and the printer driver makes it look like a standard printer on your PC. Don’t worry about the separate parts however – just install them both. If you want to create a PDF file you can do it from any program that can print – you just choose the PDF995 printer from the list and it will ask you for the file name.

The software is just 9.95 USD so it’s certainly not expensive. You can also find an edit tool and signature tool on the website (all part of their Suite package). I’ve never used the other tools as generally I just want to create the PDF file.

I recommend sending PDF files for numerous reasons

- The formatting generally stays consistent on different machines. MS Word docs can get messed up on the other side

- Most people just have the reader so the files won’t be changed. You can sign them if you need to guarantee that a file has not been changed

- They are easy to zoom into if you are sending technical drawings etc

Most scanners will have an option to save in pdf format as well. This is a handy fall-back solution – but the quality will be much better if you can print from an original program.

Used with Fineprint the PDF printer driver can be used to pull together pages from different sources and create one uniform document.