Recently, Twitter has started automatically converting all URL links in tweets (i.e. twitter messages) into 20 character “shortened” links. For example, if you send the message: “http://ChristopherPrice.com is awesome!” everyone will actually see something like: “http://t.co/IzKOWFnE is awesome!” Both links will go to the same place, but the shortened one is, in effect, cloaked. (Go ahead, try it.)

Shortened URLs are very handy sometimes, especially within the confines of a 140-character tweet. Additionally, you can convert a super-long, column-wrapping link into something you can email to the team and avoid the concern that Outlook will break the link.

There are times, however, when transparently sharing a URL is not only appropriate, but also important. Like when one is trying to develop a website’s brand. Or maybe an author believes (correctly, IMO) that fully disclosing a real link will provide some additional level of trust with readers. After all, in many cases, you really have no idea where a shortened URL is going to send you. On some devices, merely visiting a “bad” website can be harmful. That won’t happen too many times before increasingly suspicious people stop clicking on shortened links altogether.

Why is Twitter doing this?

Twitter explains:

Twitter’s link service at http://t.co is used to better protect users from malicious sites that engage in spreading malware, phishing attacks, and other harmful activity.

A link converted by Twitter’s link service is checked against a list of potentially dangerous sites. When there’s a match, users can be warned before they continue:

That seems fine except Twitter states it won’t shorten URLs from other URL-shortening services, such as my preferred service, bit.ly. I would guess that bit.ly and other legitimate URL shortening services screen their converted links too. Yet, it may be possible for someone to to use a legitimate service to create thousands or millions of “disposable” links each of which will only work a time or two until the service catches on. This is just a different spin on current spammer techniques. For that matter, why not just create a URL shortening “service” for the purpose? Coincidentally, the only lame workaround I found uses a sort of “dummy” shortener to get around the issue, for twitterfeed.com users anyway:

insty.info now has a non-shortening solution for twitterfeed. Just use the custom shortener option and enter

http://insty.info/noshort.php?url=%@

in the custom endpoint box. It will return your url untouched.

Quora contributor Jaison De Montalegre laments that even the “secret settings menu” for Twitter developers offers no way around this “t.co madness”. If you are a big enough geek to care, he shares the magic key. From the terminal, enter:

write com.twitter.twitter-mac DebugMode -bool true

Seriously, I’m not likely to go to these lengths to try to work around this issue and I don’t know many others who would either. (Nate might.) Let’s hope someone comes up with a resonable solution before the bad guys spoil the fun for all of us. Again.

Do you know a way to get by this Twitter “feature”? Please post it in the comments! In any case, if you like this article, please share it with your favorite social network, or just hit the Anonymous Green Thumb of Karma below. (It will make both of us feel good. Try it!)

Warning: This post has a pretty high geek factor.
You’ve been warned.

Since Otto (@ottodestruct) fixed the wordpress permalink issue in WordPress 3.3, when I moved christopherprice.com to a different WP install, I decided to eliminate the /%year%/ portion of the permalinks he recommended previously.

Since it is very bad for SEO to have previously ranked pages just disappear and show up at different URLs, I needed to set up a 301 redirect (permanent) instruction for each old URL to each new URL. For example:

http://domain.com/2011/post/ should now redirect all visitors (including Google spiders) to http://domain.com/post/.

Rather than tediously writing a specific set of instructions redirecting each post, I wanted to put one single instruction that would take care of all of them. Since the “formula” is repetitive, this should be possible.

But there is another challenge: Usually, each domain would have it’s own .htaccess file. WPMS, on the other hand, has one single .htaccess file to handle all the rewrites for all the domains mapped to the network.

Starting with Ipstenu’s advice for someone in this wordpress support forum, I came up with the following modification to the main wordpress .htaccess file. Note this should go ABOVE all the other wordpress calls.


#Domain Specific Redirects
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?domain\.com/2012/(.*)\.(php|html)[NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*).html$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]


I hope someone is helped by this. If so, please leave a comment, share this post on your fav social network, or click the anonymous green thumb of karmic goodness. Thank you!

Some people enjoy puzzles or sudoku, I like to explore possibilities. The sender thought enough of my thoughts to send it on to the folks he forwarded the message to, so maybe someone else will find it interesting too. Below is my reply, followed by the original email:

The premise: There is a law that requires non-US based phone agents to transfer callers to a US-based agent upon request.

Photo courtesy: Agência Brasil.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/servicerep.asp  (First place to check outlandish email claims.)

Most companies consolidate call centers — domestically or internationally — to contain costs and simplify operations. They are unlikely to have both for the same function (e.g. technical support) even for redundancy of non-critical operations. In fact, many outsource the entire call center operations and have no in-house capability.

And what would the law say? Every company with free phone support must maintain a domestic service center? What about foreign owned companies? What size company? What about automated phone services like the airlines use? Are hold times to be regulated also? 4000 Pakistani agents transferring calls upon request to 3 US-based agents would satisfy that requirement. 60 second hold vs 60 minute hold; Take your pick. (“Of course, for $30 we could bump you to the front of the US queue!”) Are hours of operation to be regulated too? What about mixed voice/digital services such as video/screensharing/instant-messaging/VOIP/etc.?

More likely, companies doing a substantial portion of their business in the US (or whatever standard the law would set out) would simply eliminate phone support altogether and offer only email support like Google and many others currently do. In fact, most would welcome the excuse to terminate phone services due to the “unreasonable cost burden created by meddlesome government regulation.” They’ve been waiting for a long time for just this sort of excuse.

Email support centers would remain international, of course. In fact most email support services are currently managed by distributed networks of home workers throughout the globe anyway. Frankly, that is pretty handy when I’ve needed assistance at odd hours. In fact, quite a few phone call centers work the same way, such as Denver’s own http://alpineaccess.com.

The Original Email

 

Any time you call an 800 number

Now that I know it is the LAW – I will do it for sure. . Any time you call an 800 number (for a credit card, banking, charter communications, health and other insurance, computer help desk, etc.) and you find that you’re talking to a foreign customer service representative (perhaps in India, Philippines, etc.), please consider doing the following:

After you connect and you realize that the customer service representative is not from the USA (you can always ask if you are not sure about the accent), please, very politely(this is not about trashing other cultures) say, “I’d like to speak to a customer service representative in the United States of America.” The rep might suggest talking to his/her manager, but, again, politely say, “Thank you, but I’d like to speak to a customer service representative in the USA.”

YOU WILL BE IMMEDIATELY CONNECTED TO A REP IN THE USA.

That’s the rule and IT IS THE LAW.

It takes less than one minute to have your call re-directed to the USA.

Tonight when I got redirected to a USA rep, I asked again to make sure – and yes, she was from Fort Lauderdale. Imagine what would happen if every US citizen insisted on talking to only US phone reps from this day on.

Imagine how that would ultimately impact the number of US jobs that would need to be CREATED ASAP. If I tell 10 people to consider this and you tell 10 people to consider doing this – see what I mean…it becomes an exercise in viral marketing 101.

Remember – the goal here is to restore jobs back here at home – not to be abrupt or rude to a foreign phone rep. You may even get correct answers, good advice, and solutions to your problem – in real English.

If you agree, please tell 10 people you know, and ask them to tell 10 people they know….etc…etc.

If you appreciate this article, please give me an anonymous thumbs-up below. It makes me feel good. If you’re really worked up, I’d love to read your comments!

I own a Buffalo LinkStation LS-CHL NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. It basically gives your home network a network disk like the one you probably have at the office. Super easy: Just plug it to the network and to a power outlet and you’re good to go. One of the many* great things about the LinkStation is you can attach an external drive to it to expand your disk space.

I had a 300GB file (a backup of an old laptop) I wanted to move from the LinkStation to an attached USB drive. Since they both appear in the Finder (i.e. Windows Explorer) I just grabbed the file from one drive to the other and it started copying as expected. Wait, remaining time 17 hours? There has got to be a better way. And there is…

The file transfer was going to take so long because my laptop was playing a game of monkey-in-the-middle with my network. The file I was copying from the source drive had to come to my computer (via wifi) and then from my computer (again, via wifi) to the destination drive. It would slow down my computer and the network for the entire 17 hours. It’s just the way these things work.

Since the LinkStation has a server built in (!) it should be able to manage the copy process without involving my laptop. After searching for a while in the BuffaloTech forums, I finally found the solution from rickjames8 (paraphrased):

1. Log in to the LinkStation admin console via your web browser. (See the instructions that came with the LinkStation for details. Default username: admin, password: password. You *DID* change the password when you set it up, though, didn’t you?)
2. Under the tab “Shared Folders” you’ll see “Folder set up”.  You should see both ‘share’ and ‘usbdisk1′. Make sure under the ‘Support’ column both disks should say at least “Disk Backup”.   Mine say “Windows, Apple, Disk Backup”
3. Click on the “System” tab, and go to the “Backup” tab. Click the little button that says “create new job”.
4. Assign a job name (whatever you like), mark the schedule ‘immediate’, and the operation ‘normal’.
5. Click the green “Add” button under backup folders. From backup sources, select “usbdisk1″ and for backup targets, select ‘share@LS-CHLF22′. (Your model number may be different.) It may take a few seconds for it to find the available source and target drives as it searches the network.
6. Finally, click “Apply”. The screen should now show your transfer name with the status ‘running’.

The copy process is slower than I’d expect it to be, but at least it will run in the background, so you don’t have to keep your laptop connected if you don’t want to. Nor will it slow your wifi network to a crawl for anyone else while it’s working.

* Other things I think are great about the LinkStation, and I believe the newer model:

• It is inexpensive – Not much more than a plain-old external drive.
• It is small – About the size of a plain-old external drive.
• It has a gigabit ethernet connection! (Of course, it will work with the more common 10/100 ethernet too.)
• If you are on a Mac, you can use it for wireless Time Machine backups.
• If you want, you can set it up to be available from anywhere via the internet. (I don’t use this.)
• Generally, it is very easy to use. After you set it up using the clear printed instructions, you really don’t need to ever do anything else to keep it running. It will just appear as a drive available to all computers on your network.

Expect the usual underwhelmed critics who will roll their eyes and inform us that thermal printers are nothing new and how anyone could build their own better model from old labeler parts and 4 lines of code. Once again, they will miss the point.

Nice work Berg!
(Via Shawn Blanc)

After digging for far too long, I excavated the table below from the depths of the Google support site. (Spoiler: It Archives.)

Source: http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=161771

Top Producer CRM for real estate agents has just released a new version that appears to embrace new web standards and is no longer joined at the hip with Internet Explorer.

TopProducer has long championed the many years-long email “drip” campaign — until a prospect “buys or dies”. In short, they turned legions of agents into the most vial of spammers. So, I was shocked, shocked to read the following in their latest ad:

Drip marketing’s gone the way of the dodo, and your consumers already know all about daylight savings time. To connect with today’s customers, you’ve got to give them something more than Aunt Emma’s “Can’t miss Cobbler”.

I guess pigs can fly. I’d give them an “amen!” but that has been true for many years. And they knew it while all the while they pitched TopProducer as a way for agents to “automate” their marketing. As a productivity coach, I watched them encourage a lot of agents to damage their most important asset — the trust of their sphere of influence — by abusing the implied permission an agent has to communicate with their friends and family. Just so they could ensnare more subscribers. Hell yeah I’m bitter. They’ve disrupted a lot of relationships and real estate careers.A few years ago, I was a beta tester for TopProducer’s previous version of this online system. Even though we were paying handsomely to use the product, hundreds of us testers spent a lot of time making suggestions and doing our best to help the company improve their flagship product. From what I could tell, they ignored all of our contributions, but maybe they are finally making use of our feedback. The biggest usage issue for me was that TopProducer only fully supported IE. While there was some ability to use Safari or Firefox, one couldn’t do things like edit emails, flyers, etc. That’s kind of a big exclusion.

Top Producer’s latest offering claims to embrace HTML5, which should mean that any browser should work and flash and other temperamental plugins are not required. They have images of the site running on iPad, iPhone, and Android devices to support this impression. For years, TopProducer has been an internet-only application, but they are just now calling themselves a “Cloud-based solution”. Buzzwords are free, they may as well use them.

So do I recommend Top Producer?

For most agents, No. Let me be clear that I have not tried this new version, so my opinion has nothing to do with the quality or usefulness of their software. Rather, it is because:

On the positive side:

Who should use Top Producer?

Who should NOT use Top Producer?

This tool is too expensive and time consuming for new and developing agents. Let me put it this way: I know a lot of new agents who pay for TopProducer. I know none who use it regularly. Please, use this money to buy coffees for your friends and ask them PERSONALLY if you can do a CMA for their house or keep an eye out for a particular sort of property.

For what it’s worth, I recommend Heap CRM for most agents who don’t prefer working with paper-based systems (which can work very well, by the way). It is easier, only $9/mo, and doesn’t require a contract. I’ll be writing more about Heap soon.

What are your experiences with Top Producer and other all-in-one CRMs?

In my last post, I received a number of requests for me to be more specific when I say: “I am focusing on a career of technology leadership”. I apologize, that is a little jargony. How’s this…

I am seeking a position as an “IT Leader”.
Translation: “Head Geek with an MBA“

An IT Leader is the most senior executive in an organization responsible for the information technology and computer systems that support organization goals. The IT Leader most effectively reports directly to the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and is a key contributor in formulating strategic goals and implementing immediate business plans.

Common titles for the IT Leader role vary by organization size and structure, but include:

• Chief Information Officer (CIO) or Chief Technology Officer (CTO)*
• Vice President of Information Technology
• Director of Information Technology

* The title of CIO is sometimes used interchangeably with Chief Technology Officer (CTO) though they are different functions. In smaller technology-oriented organizations, the IT Leader is often responsible for both roles.

More specifically, an IT Leader is involved with analyzing and reworking existing business processes, with identifying and developing the capability to use new tools, with reshaping the enterprise’s physical infrastructure and network access, and with identifying and exploiting the enterprise’s knowledge resources.

I’m touched by all the support I’ve received from friends, family and coworkers. I hope this post helps clarify those situations where I have the most to offer!

View my resume.

For the past five years, I’ve been a full-time real estate agent. Working in real estate affords a lot of flexibility, and I’ve needed flexibility to lead a team of partners to develop a patent application for an invention of mine. As I was indulging my enthusiasm for exploiting opportunity, I delighted in concurrently offering my services as a marketing consultant, a sales productivity coach, and a CRM systems integrator. Sixteen months ago I added work-from-home father to the list. Twelve months ago I started a real estate firm with my wife, Jacy.

Confucius said: “The man who chases two rabbits, catches neither.” In support of his expression, I’ve had a ball chasing rabbits, but I haven’t caught many.

I’m good at most things I try and, in an odd way, this has been a big challenge for me. I secretly fear (until now) that I might be a virtuoso at something, but I’ll never know what it is because there’s not enough time in this life to explore every possibility. Though not comprehensive, I’ve assembled an impressive list of disciplines for which I am definitely not a virtuoso. Nevertheless, I’ve decided to keep practicing to play guitar.

I’ve put a lot of energy into mastering the dark arts of marketing and strategic planning, even earning an MBA. In fact, I’m a pretty good marketer, though my clearest differentiator from others is a visceral distain for BS. Unfortunately, it turns out, there are lots of pretty good marketers with no such hangups. And as a pretty good management consultant, I found strategic planning akin to weaving a cloth so fine that only an emperor can see it. Plus, I hate being only “pretty good” at anything.

No matter what my role or title, I’ve always been most appreciated for my understanding of technology and it’s implications to business and society. Yet, for a long time, I sidestepped this talent choosing instead to develop more conventional business and leadership skills. Well, as Grand Master Oogway teaches: “Often the steps we take to avoid destiny lead us to it.” I’m grateful to finally recognize my calling, so I am deliberately embarking on a path of thoughtful constraint and seeking to apply the leadership skills I’ve developed to my innate talents.

My first steps in this direction are these:

1. I am no longer practicing real estate sales. I will, however, keep my broker’s license and refer people to agents who are better than me.
2. I am focusing on a career of technology leadership. This is an area where I can deliver extraordinary contributions.
3. I am thinning out the sidelines that compete with family time. In other words, I’m in the process of aligning my attention with my priorities.

Thank you, my friends and family, for supporting me as I adjust my course. Of course, I will appreciate any opportunity leads you can send my way. In any case, please “Like” this post and help me spread the word!

Click here to view my resume

It wasn’t like I was expecting to come away with a life-changing experience. Maybe just some peaceful memory or interesting insight. I was sitting by the ticket booth on a wooden bench waiting for my turn to enter the temple when a few of the staff shuffled up an silently offered me a cup of tea while I waited. Tea at the Zen gardens — how perfect! Probably the leaves were picked this very morning by monks on the verge of attaining enlightenment. Of course, I bowed in appreciation as I accepted the small cup and prepared myself for a… well, some sort of minor spiritual moment. I half closed my eyes and became more aware of the warmth of the sun, the chirps of frolicking birds, and the scuffing sound of shuffling feet in the gravel. And when I was completely psyched and fully present with this gift, I raised the cup to my lips.

My first thought was that I was savoring the flavor of a nose bleed. Salty and warm with hints of grass — or was it leaves? Blech! I subtly twisted around with puckered face looking for somewhere to subtly spit the slug into a plant or something. But then I imagined that someone — probably a venerated spiritual master — might witness the event and hold it against me somehow. So, instead, I reluctantly swallowed it and chased by a quick gasp for air. Was this a joke? Surely this must be the locals having fun with the tourists.

From the corners of my eyes, I stealthily surveyed the faces of the other victims around me expecting to see similar reactions. Idiots! They were all falling for the trick and pretending to enjoy the foul brew. I continued to suspiciously scan the pleasant expressions of nearby visitors sipping from their cups and sharing conversation in various foreign tongues. It was then that I overheard one woman speaking in English with a German accent exclaim to her companion: “It’s a pretty good soup!”

What?! Of all the stupid things… And to demonstrate just how stupid, I took another reaffirming sample from my cup while mentally preparing to resist a freshly primed gag reflex. “I’ll be damned.” This time the worst tea I ever had revealed the flavor of a mild but comforting vegetable broth. I recalled the bouillon my mom offered me as a child when I wasn’t feeling well. I took another quiet sip, and then another, as the the warmth of the sun, the chirps of frolicking birds, and the scuffing sound of shuffling feet in the gravel returned.

It was my turn to enter the temple.