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How Three Massive Companies Fail To Get VoIP Right

By on Jan 1, 2018 in Blog Posts, Internet, Software | 0 comments

For years I’ve been using Skype for my business telephone system. Although it’s never been perfect – the admin interface is atrocious and reliability is a problem – Skype is simple, cheap, and has all of the features I need. Well, it did have everything, until they inexplicably decided to axe custom voicemail greetings. Without the ability to have professional voicemail greetings for when customers can’t reach someone, Skype can’t really be considered a proper solution for businesses. I did a bit of research and asked around for better solutions. My needs are simple: I’m looking for a good softphone, an easy to use admin interface, the ability to import my contacts from Skype, and I need to be able to port my phone number. I came up with three companies that seemed to meet my requirements: Vonage, Jive, and 8×8. Although they all advertise...

How to Get a Static URL For Shopify Files

By on Dec 14, 2016 in Internet | 1 comment

Ran into an issue today where a Shopify app named Findify needed to be able to link directly to a CSS file hosted on the store it was connected to. For some reason Findify doesn’t inherit styles from your theme and you can’t simply override the styling using a typical stylesheet in your Shopify theme and you can’t make a lot of changes via the external Findify management interface and adding tags to their custom box doesn’t work, so you’re left with using the external CSS link. Findify support was…less than helpful with this. I was left to my own devices. Trouble is, Shopify doesn’t provide static external links to assets in your theme’s folders. For example, let’s say you add a new CSS asset to your theme in the standard way using the theme customizer. You’d think you could access it at www.domain.com/custom.css or maybe...

My Favorite People on Twitter

By on Mar 30, 2015 in Blog Posts, Internet | 0 comments

For some reason I have a really difficult time finding interesting people to follow on Twitter. There is a lot of useless noise out there, but every once in a while a magnetic persona shines through. Here are a few people that keep me coming back to Twitter like Adam Sandler to bad movies.   Laura Watkins – @OneHelluvaDame Laura is one of the funniest people I know. Her tweets are often raunchy but good-natured. She usually talks about her tiresome jobs, peculiar boyfriends, and sweatpants. My grandma once raised money for a poor family to buy Christmas presents. They bought a monkey. I probably think about this every week. — Laura Watkins (@OneHelluvaDame) March 2, 2013 If you're a Zumba instructor and they find out you don't have an ankle tattoo, do you get fired? — Laura Watkins (@OneHelluvaDame) August 17, 2012 Neighbors fighting....

Good Riddance, Serial

By on Dec 18, 2014 in Blog Posts, Internet | 0 comments

The first five episodes of Serial were wonderful. Well researched, produced and told by its creator, Sarah Koenig, the story followed an arc that lead the listener deeper and deeper into a mystery that seemed to be heading towards a conclusion. Instead, the story meandered for seven more episodes as the clearly obsessed Koenig tried desperately to justify her infatuation with the subject, Adnan Syed. Koenig employs every possible tactic to convince herself and her audience that she isn’t wasting our time. She hires a detective to be sure that she isn’t missing something; he says the case work was above average, that the detectives did their jobs well. She interviews a lawyer whose job it is to free innocent prisoners and who, to no ones surprise, finds some way to get involved in the now massively popular case. She wants to test the DNA on items possibly still in storage...

How to Migrate from Blogger to WordPress

By on Jul 13, 2014 in Internet, WordPress | 0 comments

After nearly a decade I’ve finally put Blogger behind me. Moving from there to my standalone WordPress site was a nightmare. I wanted to migrate all of my Blogger data including posts, tags and comments while maintaining the search engine traffic and ranking that had been bringing people to my blog for years. I achieved that goal and hopefully this guide will save you some time and a throbbing temple. Get WordPress Setup This is easy, but there are lots of ways to go about it. I setup an account on one of my servers and registered a domain name, then manually installed the latest version of WordPress. You could also setup an account at WordPress.com for free and then setup your domain name there, but I recommend Siteground for WordPress hosting and Namesilo for domain name registration. Import Your Blogger Content In your new WordPress installation, go to Tools>Import and...

Developing with Bigcommerce: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

By on Mar 18, 2014 in Blog Posts, Internet | 0 comments

Note: This article was originally posted to the new defunct Ecommerce-platforms.com back in May 2013. It got a lot of attention and Bigcommerce reached out to review some of the issues I presented. I’ve added an update to the bottom of the article as well.Six years of experience in ecommerce has taught me one thing: no platform is perfect. They all have pros and cons and often what separates the best from the competition is a handful of features and customer service. I’ve come to accept that I’ll never find the perfect solution without building it myself and let’s face it, ain’t nobody got time for that.I recently had a project come up and spent a lot of time testing different platforms to find one that could handle digital products the best. For various reasons I settled on Bigcommerce and began building out the store. I knew from reading the Ultimate Bigcommerce review that I...