The only constant is change

Consider what the web looked like when Tantramar Interactive launched this site in 1997:

• Netscape 4 ruled
• Google was still a year away
• Internet Explorer 6 was 4 years away
• The iPod was 4 years away
• Social media as we know it (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) was non-existent
• The iPhone was nearly 10 years away; the iPad: 13.

Better late than never — 2013 relaunch

Needless to say, this site hasn’t gone unchanged since 1997 — far from it. While the look and feel got refreshed every few years and the logo was updated in 2008, the site has never really been rethought from the ground-up.

Now it’s a world of Retina displays, LTE networks, GPS–enabled HD videocameras in everyone’s pockets and Facebook everywhere. Broadband is ubiquitous. Dropbox, Evernote, and yes, even iCloud, make so many things that used to be impossible tivial. The how, why and when of your website’s goals may all have changed fundamentally.

The cobbler’s children had no shoes

As an old friend and colleague was fond of saying, “the cobbler’s children have no shoes.” As with any small firm, clients get more attention than in-house projects: the corporate website has long suffered from this neglect. So while the first priority is cleaning things up a bit on the content side, the look-and-feel has also gotten a much-needed overhaul.

Fully buzzword-compliant

In addition to the speed and efficiency of working and publishing with the open, dynamic WordPress platform, this site now uses CSS3, HTML5, web fonts, high-resolution graphics (for many newer mobile devices & some laptop models), along with SVG graphics, responsive layouts and casts off the albatross of supporting ancient, maddeningly-quirky browsers like Internet Explorer 6.

A lot of thought has gone into this relaunch. Different approaches have been weighed. A lot of soul-searching went on and more coffee was consumed than can possibly be healthy.

As has often been the case with client sites in the past, re-examining the website critically has resulted in asking some hard questions about the nature of the business itself. These are all good things.

I know it’s been worth it; hope you like it.

Now put this experience to work for you

Tantramar Interactive Inc. has seen a lot of technologies come and go, and a ground-up website relaunch is familiar territory.

What changes could you use some help adapting to? Let me know via the form below.

—Christopher Mackay, Sackville, NB

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Congratulation, Harold, and thanks for the shout-out.

Don’t forget to follow @hjarche on Twitter.

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Let’s take a look at what’s at stake and some recommendations on handling your company’s domain names.

Domain names are cheap, but losing them is costly

We all know that registering a domain name costs almost nothing, and there is no shortage of companies offering registrar services (note: Tantramar Interactive Inc. is not one of them). It’s no harder to register a domain for 10 years than for 1, so why wouldn’t you save some time? Let’s look at the downside.

Losing control of a domain name can mean:

• wasted time retrieving login information for your registrar account
• losing access to your website
• damage to your brand (the extent of which is determined by who takes control of your domain if you lose it)
• losing search engine placement
• losing access to email messages
• instant obsolescence of anything tied to your domain name (especially printed material like ads, business cards, brochures, etc.).

The question, then, is why would registering a domain for 10 years mean losing control of it? The answer?

Institutional memory is fragile

What made this situation particularly painful for my client is that…

• the domain was purchased nearly 13 years ago for a 20 year period — a challenging length of time for any organization to keep track of login information.
• In 20 years — or even 5 years — people change jobs (if not employers or even careers); they change names, they change software and computers, they retire, they die…
• Even without any big changes, how many people can put their finger on an email message they got 5, 10, or 20 years ago? (How about a message someone else got that long ago? Are you even sure who got that message originally?)
• the email account used to purchase the domain was defunct (its domain lapsed years ago; in this case, as a result of a merger), so a password-reset link from the registrar’s site won’t work.

 Advantages to buying long-term

• you lock your domain name in, preventing competitors from getting it
• you may get a volume discount on the per-year cost (although I vividly recall one prominent registrar *cough* Network Solutions *cough* offering domains at “$35/year or 10 years for only $350!”)
• you’ll save a few minutes each year when you don’t have to renew

To me, these advantages are not compelling.

Advantages to buying short-term

• you’ll remember who bought what domains from what registrar using what email account (and if you don’t, you’ll track it down more easily if it’s a year or 2 old than if it’s 5 or 10 years old)
• you’ll be ideally positioned to take advantage of the downward-pressure on domain name pricing
• you’ll be more likely to recognize renewal messages from your registrar, which keeps your domain safe from accidental expiry

Domain name registration recommendations

• Register domains for 1 or 2 years at most — and stay on top of them
• Have your trusted web hosting company register on your behalf — they should have procedures in place to manage renewals without relying on the registrar’s reminder emails — but make sure you’re listed as the Registrant and Administrative contact (your host can be Technical and/or Billing contact).
• Use an email address tied to a position (e.g. marketing@yourcompany.net) rather than an individual (e.g. jsmith@yourcompany.net) as your contact.
• Make sure that others in your organization know the login information associated with your domain name(s), or know how to retrieve it.
• If registering yourself, go with a reputable and well-established registrar over cheap-cheap-cheap every time. Tantramar Interactive Inc. has used Vancouver, BC,-based Webnames.ca for years.
• Deploy encrypted login-storage-and-retrieval software such as AgileBits’ 1Password for Mac/iOS, Android & Windows (this may not scale well to larger organizations with more complex policies, but for smaller firms or for individuals, I consider 1Password essential).

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The problem

As the owner of a MacBook Air, I was looking to keep a lid on the size of OmniFocus’ backups directory. As an example of how this can get out-of-hand, on my iMac this directory had nearly 900 files (dating back more than 3 years), and had swelled to over 70 GB. This was choking my Time Machine drive to death, and clearly wouldn’t make the tiny, SSD on my MacBook Air very happy.

The solution

David’s suggestion was to make a Hazel rule that would delete any files older than a certain age; a couple of weeks, for example. That’s a great idea that I implemented immediately.

The fly in the ointment

Then I had a thought: what if I go on vacation for a month (I know: never happen — work with me, here), or work exclusively from one workstation for 3 weeks? Hazel will, as instructed, delete all of the backups on me. Not so cool.

As it happens, I had asked Noodlesoft about making a rule that would allow deleting files older than a certain date but retaining a certain minimum number of files, and they told me it wasn’t possible. That was before Hazel 3.0 came out, though.

The answer

Now it can be done. Add a rule (choosing “Other…” from the pop-up menu and searching for “number”). Set the “Number of items” to whatever you’re comfortable with. I chose 5.

Here’s the screenshot:

And here’s the finished rule:

Now any backups older than 7 days are tossed, but I’ll always have at least 5 files retained. Sweet.

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As part of my daily routine, which is based on Daily Morning Review Routine with OmniFocus, at Simplicity Is Bliss by Sven Fechner, I check my spam folders for false positives — messages that got mistakenly flagged as spam.

Because I use C-Command Software’s excellent SpamSieve Mail plug-in on my MacBook, I don’t spend much time worrying about spam, but every once in a while something from a client gets caught in its filters. To keep this from turning into a big deal, I give my spam folder a cursory glance every day or so.

At least I used to.

Spam got out-of-hand

Today I discovered 404 messages in my SpamSieve folder. Been a while since I took a peek in there, apparently.

OmniFocus to the rescue

Since I already have OmniFocus tasks for each workday to remind myself to check email at 10 am and 4pm, I decided to add a reminder to check the spam folder once a day, too.

Tasks’ notes fields — not just for text

That’s a good start, but I want to make this as foolproof as possible, for obvious reasons (not just because I have 2 spam folders), so I was hopping to be able to add a link directly to the mailbox, rather than just the link to Mail.app that I have in my regular daily email tasks.

You probably know that you can enter notes, URLs and aliases to documents and individual email messages in your OmniFocus tasks’ notes field, but did you know you can drag applications in, too, making clickable aliases? It’s very handy.

It turns out that you can drag .mbox files in, too, and instead of revealing them in the Finder, it switches to Mail.app and opens the mailbox. This is very cool.

How to set this up

You can find your mailboxes’ .mbox files in ~/Library/Mail/V2/IMAP-@your-email-account-@your-email-host/, which you can get to under Mac OS X 10.7 Lion by choosing Go to Folder… from the Finder’s Go menu (Command-Shift-G).

Then typing ~/Library/Mail/V2/ into the sheet that drops down:

Double-click your email account folder. You should see a bunch of files like these:

After creating a “check the spam folders for false positives” task in my Monday daily routine project, I simply dragged my SpamSieve.mbox file into its notes field:

And, since I have 2 spam boxes — 1 for SpamSieve and 1 “On My Mac” — I dragged the other one in, too. (Purists might want to create a separate task for that. I didn’t: life is short.)

Spam isn’t a one-time thing, so…

The next step is to make it a repeating task with a 5-minute window just before the end of the workday:

Then set it to repeat every week (until OmniFocus understands weekends, I have 5 nearly-identical weekday projects, which isn’t all that bad, since Mondays and Fridays have extra tasks associated with them anyway), duplicate it and move copies into each day’s routine.

Set it and forget it

Now I won’t have to remember to check for false posititive in my spam box any more, and fewer things will slip through the cracks.

The more of these things that can be triggered without having to remember them, the better.

Happy GTDing.

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