The point is, if you need to open a .XPS file on a Mac, use your Gmail account (or someone elses) to make it happen. View it through Gmail, and then you can print/save as a PDF.

Here’ where I found my answer:

http://hintsforums.macworld.com/showthread.php?t=114977

You may notice that the answer is from 2006 so several questions come to mind.

1. Why have I never had this issue before? Honestly I’m not even sure where an .XPS document comes from. Maybe I just don’t deal with “those types” of people enough.
2. More importantly, why is this still an issue to be had? In 2006 this was something that happened, but that was way back when we were young and stupid! Aren’t we all grown up and have learned how to play nice?

No matter. Google saves me this time. Again. Sometimes I’m less worried about my privacy if I can at least get something done.

Hop.

When you are logged in to LinkedIn and looking at people’s profiles, by default they can see that you have been there. You may have seen it with your profile that the following people have looked at you.

This can be sort of creepy if you think about it, especially if you are just browsing.

You can change this setting if you want.

Change your LinkedIn Viewing privacy.

This is helpful if you are searching through linked in looking for a contact or resource, or many other reasons I’m sure people have. I usually let everyone see what I do because I am comfortable with that. If you are not, change the setting and you’ll be more private.

After people go through the GoToWebinar registration steps, they get redirected to a page that I specify, which I made as a great Thank you page. On this page I provide links to some other resources that are related to the webinar, constantly adding value every step of the way.

Clearly, when someone gets to this Thank You page, they are going to say “WOW! I didn’t do it before, but I really need to share this webinar with my friends.” And of course I want them to be able to do it. This is where things get sticky. When I put the ShareThis code on the page, it shares the Thank You page, not the landing page where people can register. This is no good. I could rewrite the Thank You page so that it makes sense to someone who hasn’t registered yet. Or do some fancy detection to see their referrer and redirect them if not the actual registration page. There’s got to be an easier way.

Thankfully, there’s a solution. ShareThis allows you to pass a series of values to the tool so that you can specify the URL, Title, Image, and description of the page that you WANT them to share. Very cool and helpful, and as a bonus, very easy. A lot easier than the custom redirect based on referrer approach for sure.

Here is a link to all the details directly from ShareThis. GO THERE >>

Hope you find this helpful. Have fun!

Web Voice Messaging Made (un)Easy

The last one with Google Voice didn’t go as well as I had hoped. It made you put in a phone number, and then it connected your phone to a machine so you could leave a message. Pretty clunky, not really intuitive, and really seemed to feel a bit creepy.

Fail.

A New Hope

This is another on-line voice message system designed to let you leave messages right from a website without going through a pesky phone device. Brought to us by the bright crew at Speakpipe, and soon to come out of beta, this web widget lets you leave a message, and me to hear it. Easy enough. The cool part is I can use the same widget on my blog, Facebook, and all other sorts of places. Care to test if it works?

On this page

On your right, you should see an orange little tab prompting you to leave a message. There are other ways to have it appear, but this one is default and I wanted to get this rolling quickly.

Click it, and a window comes up and starts the recording process.

On Facebook

If you are of the Facebook sort, hop on over to my Facebook fan page here and give the Speakpipe Facebook widget a try. (While you are there, if you wouldn’t mind tapping a Like for me, I’d greatly appreciate it.) They should all come back to the same place.

A Webpage

If you’d like to use a special SpeakPipe webpage, use this link.

Leave a message for Bugfrog!

Let me know what you think

There are even iPhone and iPad apps that work with the whole shebang. Maybe try those, too. The point is I’d love to hear from you, and to see how this system works! If you would share how your experience went, how you felt, what you were thinking, that would be great. It’s circle sharing time. I’ll let you know how it goes, and if you have any questions about it, I’d be happy to share share share back with you.

Until the next test!

bg

That brings me to this great feature of Google Voice. HTML Call Widgets. From anyplace you can embed HTML, you can allow your reader to initiate a call. You can decide whether the call goes to a phone or straight into voice mail.

When you click Call Me, it will ask you for your phone number, and if you would like to keep it private. I don’t need your number, so be sure to click that button. Then Google will call your number. As soon as you answer, it will connect you to my number. One of the great things about this is that you we can call each other without ever revealing our numbers AT ALL. I could schedule a call in pirate internet radio show and allow people to call me without ever giving them a number to call. It would be pretty easy to remove the Call Me button from a web page when I didn’t want people to have access to it.

I think there a many ways this could be a great engagement tool, and even a fun toy. Strange internet scavenger hunt ideas are flying through my mind.

Are you willing to give it a try? This simply plays my message for you, and asks you to leave a message. If you are brave, hit the button, make the call, and leave me a question or comment. Be brave, try it! I want to hear how this works.

Thanks for your help!

If you are on a mobile device, you may not see the image that should be here. That’s a drag.

There have been several times where I needed a simple gear or series of gears for something and it was always a pain in the ass. It was never a massive part of the project, just a small additional element, meaning I never really put any time into figuring out how to do it. I usually would find a free vector gear, or autotrace a jpg and clean it up. One time I even used to pen to make one with an image template.

I finally put a few (very few) minutes of thought on it and came up with this approach, which works just fine for what I’ve needed. After I take it into Cinema4D or something similar, it can get super funky, but this is where I need it for now, and a lot faster than it used to take me.

The real learning lesson? Take a few minutes to figure out how to do things right in the beginning and you will save a ton of time in the long run.

Like I typed already, I am very excited. I have been groomed by fate to be perfect for this position, and am looking forward to it like a frog looks forward to maggot transformation season. I do not have a long sticky tongue, but I’ll be able to make up for that. All I wished for this holiday season was a job, so now I’m set. I plan to spread my good luck around to as many as I can this season, and continue for the rest of the year. See you soon!

Bop Skizzum going old school with the jams.

Hope you enjoy. I needed a video up to test the tracking with MediaGauge from Epic Playground.