Best Practice Ezine #73
I bet you don’t know all these features of GoogleLet me start the year with one of my good old Litmus Tests. A reminder that Guy’s Litmus test concept is much like ‘Best Practices’. Each Litmus Test ask a simple question; the answer to which indicates whether you are dealing with an amateur or a professional Question: What response do you get when you email a company?
Professional companies reply to your email from an intelligent human being. Amateur companies either do not respond to your email or more infuriatingly, employ someone, to place random words in the email reply. I can only assume that those people’s job description includes, English must not be their first language, and they must know less about computing than the tea boy. Guy Recommends: Tools4ever’s UMRA Tired of writing scripts? The User Management Resource Administrator solution by Tools4ever offers an alternative to time-consuming manual processes. It features 100% auto provisioning, Helpdesk Delegation, Connectors to more than 130 systems/applications, Workflow Management, Self Service and many other benefits. Click on the link for more information onUMRA. Google need no help from me in promoting their excellent service. Nevertheless, I want to give you the benefit of my experience of Google and recommend that you trial their Personalized home page. These days it is rare to find any companies that match my litmus test of a professional email response, so I was pleasantly surprised with my dealings with Google. Not only did they understand my problem but they researched a solution that actually worked. But what really impressed me is that a different person contacted me out of the blue and explained how to run my Google Adsense campaign more profitably. The result was that we can now eat meat again. No seriously, they did improve my revenue dramatically. Calculating IP Address ranges is a black art, which many network managers solve by creating custom Excel spreadsheets. IPAT cracks this problem of allocating IP addresses in networks in two ways: For Mr Organized there is a nifty subnet calculator, you enter the network address and the subnet mask, then IPAT works out the usable addresses and their ranges. For Mr Lazy IPAT discovers and then displays the IP addresses of existing computers. Download the Free IP Address Tracker Six Great Features Google Offer.Now for my bet. I bet you that you did not know about at least one of these 6 features that Google offer. 1) Personalized Google Home page google.com/ig. The killer feature is the Bookmark section, where you can add a dozen or so of your favourite websites. Bonus items include, news updates, quote of the day and your local weather forecast. The only downside is the Personalized page is slow loading, presumably because it has to check your security each time it launches. 2) Google Images. You probably know of this Images tab from the main Google page, I am amazed that 15% of all the readers at my humour site enter via searching for pictures. I cannot resist a plug for Will and Guy’s free jokes. See Will and Guy’s humour. 3) Google Desktop. Just select more >> from the Google menu and install the desktop search. You know how quick and expert Googling is on the web, well now you can get the same speed and accuracy for your local machine. It makes Microsoft’s own search seem like a snail compared with Google’s gazelle. Bonus features include a Scratch Pad for typing notes to yourself, I am starting to use the Todo feature. Also Google desktop will search my emails and rapidly find key information. 4) Adwords and Adsense. I admit that these two features are really only of use to Webmasters and advertisers I daren’t say too much, the phrase ‘Killing my golden goose’ springs to mind. Suffice to say that this is how Google make their fortune, their unique feature is that they can get away with not telling the advertisers or the web sites how much they, Google, take of the fees. Naturally there have been advertising imitator’s but either they pay webmasters only a fraction of Google, or else they query every hit. Some imitators are bad payers, whereas Google pay regularly every month on the dot. Incidentally, the simplest, but most reliable indicator of a good company is one which pays on time. 5) Google Earth. Not to be confused with Earth Map imitations, you know you have the genuine article if you have downloaded an 11 mb program from Google. Then you can ‘fly’ to anywhere in the world, or zoom in on your own house. 6) Google Toolbar. I learned a little while back that on the web PR does not mean Public Relations so much as Google’s PageRank. Check that little green bar in the middle of the Google Toolbar. Any value over 4 is good (at least on my site). If you knew of all these 6 features then you win my bet. All I can do is say well done and check out Google’s >> more button for even more free features. Next week I will tackle Services Packs and R2 (Release 2) Free Jokes – Will and Guy’s HumourThe ‘killer’ feature of Will and Guy’s humour, is variety. Usually with joke books all the funnies have a sameness you either like the genre, or you hate it. Not so with Will and Guy’s humour, we give you a mixture, not only of pictures, jokes and stories, but also a variety of styles. Consequently, I guarantee that at least one joke will bring a smile to your face. I have repaired the links to the ‘Free joke of the day’. Check out our Train Driver’s Messages. I bet that at least one tannoy announcement will bring a smile to your face
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