Ross Cooney of Rozmic contacted me recently to tell me of their latest product, EmailCloud.
EmailCloud is a server-side anti-(email)spam application which is accessible and configurable through a browser. The setup wasn’t as straightforward as I had hoped (I messed it up!) but a quick email to Rozmic and I had the solution back in minutes!
As you can see from the stats below, up to 75% of the emails I get are spam! However, because EmailCloud is server side, my email client never sees those emails saving me bandwidth and hassle.
The great thing about EmailCloud is that, being a hosted app, you can simply set it and forget it.
[Full disclosure - Ross set me up with a free EmailCloud account so I could try it out.]
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
[Final Update] – Post title changed one more (and final) time. I have updated this post one final time because I didn’t realise how quickly and more importantly how high up my post would come in a search for Noah’s name. I have spoken to Noah and he is genuinely sorry and I don’t (now) think the hotlinking was done maliciously. Lesson learned, Google places a lot more stock in what I say than I had realised. Must remember to think before I Publish, must remember to ….
[UPDATE] I have changed the title of this post. Many people have responded in the comments of this post to say I was too harsh on Noah – and they are completely correct. I thought about titling the post “Reasons not to steal bandwidth” (Noah’s post is titled “Reasons not to blog”) and taking a much more humourous approach to the issue but it was Monday morning and I let my temper get in the way (red hair!). Lesson learned – take a deep breath before hitting Publish!
If you link to an image on someone else’s site you really should ask their permission. Otherwise, every time someone views the image on your site, you are stealing bandwidth from the site hosting the image.
Noah Kagan did this recently. He used an image from this site on his blog without asking my permission. This is theft. I pay for the bandwidth that he and his site’s viewers are consuming.
Of course, there is another very good reason not to link to images on someone else’s site – you have no control over those images. They could be deleted, renamed, or changed at any time – like below – I replaced the image Noah was using with a more appropriate one – now Noah’s site is hosting an image which tells it as it is!
Poetic justice. That bandwidth I am happy to pay for.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
A picture is worth a thousand words or so the old saw goes and it is certainly true that an image can greatly help the look of a blog post.
Several people have asked me recently how to add images to blog posts so I thought I’d put up a blog post explaining how I do it in case it would be useful for others.
I store my images online on Flickr. When I want to use an image in a blog post I use the copy of the image which is stored on Flickr. This has the advantages that:
- it saves me diskspace from my hosting account,
- it saves me bandwidth from my hosting account and
- it is easy because Flickr provides the code to use the image from their site!
Being a simple soul, I like it when things are made easy for me.
How do I do it?
Well, click on the image you want to use in your Flickr account. If you don’t have a Flickr account, get one! A free account will allow you to upload 200 images and if you need more than that it costs around $25 p.a.
Once you have selected your image, click on the All Sizes button above the picture.
This brings you to the Available Sizes screen. Here you decide which image size you want in your blog post and select it. I generally go for images around 500 pixels wide (although the one selected below is 240 pixels wide).
When you select the size you want, the code required to place the image in your blog post is in the field under:
1. Copy and paste this HTML into your webpage:
Copy and paste that code into your blog post et voilà , you now have an image in your blog post.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Recent Comments