Dashboard view of the Analytics360 plugin

From the MailChimp blog:

…it uses the power of Google Analytics to tell bloggers what kind of an effect they’re having on overall website traffic. We’ve made it super easy to tell if your blog posts (and email campaigns) are driving traffic to your website…

There has already been a lot of nice things said on Twitter, and over 250 downloads. Check out the video to learn a bit more about how it works:

Overall, this was a great team effort. The folks at MailChimp had a great idea, access to great APIs (both MailChimp and Google Analytics) and a lot of foresight. We at Crowd Favorite were greeted with the challenge and built one of the slickest analytics plugins out there (those visualizations are easy, but not that easy).

Now I had three GMail accounts, all with different email saved in them. Oh, and suddenly, Google Voice and Contacts appered on the scene. I realized I wanted go go back to my gmail.com account. I had email all over the place.

I had Google email stored in three difference places

I wanted to consolidate the email from my two Google Apps accounts (devinreams.com, reams.me) and have my thousands of emails stored all in one place (gmail.com). “No sweat”, I thought. But, this process is harder than may appear on the surface. Below I outline a multi-step process where I

1. physically copy email to one account to another, and
2. setup rules so that new mail (incoming and outgoing) is coming to/from the right places.

Step 1: Setup Mail.app using IMAP

The biggest endeavor is moving the mail which is a process of: configuring multiple IMAP accounts in Apple’s Mail (I assume you can do the same in any IMAP-compatible email client), and physically copying the messages between the two servers. A few notes before we get setup:

• Labels: Using IMAP, GMail labels will appear as ‘folders’. This means that one email with a label applied can appear in at least two places (All Mail, Label 1, Label 2). For simplicity’s sake, I decided to abandon the two-dozen-or-so unique labels that I had across the three accounts. There was no easy way to reconcile the different wording or usage I had evolved over the three years of different accounts. So, I stuck to simply moving ‘All Mail’ to ‘All Mail’ across accounts.
• Connectivity: In order to make this (potentially HUGE) move, your network connection (upstream) will be in use the entire time. Basically, the email client is constantly sending commands such as “Copy Message A from Account A to Account B.” Needless to say, this will take a while and will require some bandwidth.
• Timeouts means batching: In my experience, Google had a hard time keeping a connection open if I simply tried to copy 12,000 emails at once. I couldn’t tell if it was idling out (idle commands were queued to be sent after the copy commands…) or just choking on the request. I found I could easily queue a month (about 1,000) emails without Google disconnecting.
• Duplicates: Despite my initial connection failures, IMAP and Google were smart enough not to copy duplicate messages. In other words, if I copied Message A already, and tried it again, it didn’t. So, if you lose your place when batching, don’t worry about it.
• Crashes: Mail will crash when you first try to open your ‘All Mail’ folder (or any large IMAP folder for that matter). Just relaunch a few times and it’ll get there eventually. Trust me, it may take a few tries. This is where the ‘Activity Window’ can help tell you what’s going on.

With all that said, here’s the process:

1. Go into your Gmail accounts and enable IMAP (Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP).
2. Open Mail.app and set up your first GMail account (do not check ‘Automatically set up account’) following these IMAP instructions. DO NOT check ‘Take account online’.
3. In the ‘Accounts’ screen, select your first account and disable all the ‘Mailbox Behaviors’ (not necessary, but prevents server-side things from happening).
4. Switch to the ‘Advanced’ tab and change the ‘Keep copies of messages..’ setting to: ‘Don’t keep copies of any messages’.
5. Repeat this process to set up your other account(s) that you’re moving to/from.
6. Close the ‘Accounts’ screen and save your changes.
7. Open the ‘Activity Window’ (command + 0) so you can watch what’s going on in the background.
8. Now you can ‘Take All Accounts Online’ from the Mailbox menu.

At this point, you now have a Mail client setup so that your emails can simply copy across accounts without locally downloading each message. Now the fun part.

Step 2: Copy all your email from one account to the other

1. Browse to the account you want to move email from and open the ‘[Gmail] All Mail’ folder (this is where the crashing is likely to happen, relaunch, watch your ‘Activity Window’, repeat).
2. Start wherever suits you and select a good batch of emails (I would do one month at a time, approximately 1,000 emails per month). Do not try to copy all of them at once. If it works, congrats, if it doesn’t, you’ll have no idea how far it got before crashing or timing out.
3. Right click your selection and select ‘Copy To’. Browse to the ‘[Gmail] All Mail’ folder of your other account. (notes: you can also drag/drop or ‘Copy and Paste’, you can also repeat this process using your labels instead of ‘All Mail’).
4. Sit back and watch the bits and bytes fly through the internet in the Activity Window.
5. Go ahead and queue the next batch of emails (eg: February). Repeat as much as you’d like. You can see these batches saved in the Activity Window and monitor progress.

Over the course of 3 days I was able to move about 30,000 emails in the background (set this up before you go to sleep and use an application like Caffeine to keep your computer awake). Trust me, this is much faster than the ‘POP import’ process that GMail has built-in (don’t even look it up).

Once you’ve arrived here you’ve successfully copied all your email from at least one account to another. You can confirm by browsing to your account online and doing some math. Now, I want to make sure all my future email goes to and comes from the right place.

Step 3: Setup forwarding from the old account

Very simply, all you need to do now is visit the old accounts and browse to ‘Settings > Forwarding and POP/IMAP’. Configure your old address to forward to your new address. Perfect… moving on.

Step 4: Setup your new account to send ‘from’ your old account

You’re likely aware that GMail can send email “on behalf of” other email addresses. Set your primary email account to send from your old ones (if so desired):

1. Browse to ‘Settings > Accounts’
2. Under “Send mail as” click the ‘Add another email address you own’ link
3. Follow the instructions, your old address will be sent a confirmation (it should appear in your new account if you followed Step 3)
4. If you want to use an old address as your primary outgoing address (eg: all email comes to gmail.com but I want to still send as if I’m at reams.me), then click ‘Default’ next to that address and check the “When receiving a message:” options below.

Now you can send email from your primary account as if you were still at your old ones. Learn more about custom ‘From’ addresses.

The consolidated life

Great, now I have all my email accounts flowing into my gmail.com account. My GMail contacts and Google Voice contacts are all synchronized (in addition to my iPhone contacts and Apple Address Book contacts).

Plus, I have over 4 years of email all in one place. I can find receipts from 2004 without having to login to my old accounts!

I tell you, I’m living the dream…

If you have any questions, be sure to post them in the comments.

In 10 questions or less, Hunch will offer you a great solution to your problem, concern or dilemma, on hundreds of topics.

Although Hunch is in a private beta for one more week, it has amassed over 2,100 topics on everything from Electronics to Sports and Fitness .

Hunch is the lazyweb

Frankly, Hunch is a great idea and I have no doubt will become another staple of the internet. What Wikipedia is to knowledge sourcing, Hunch is to decision making. With the ability for anyone to make edits, suggests decisions, vote up, vote down, and leave comments in the form of pros and cons of a decision, Hunch will become the platform for decision information.

With thousands of topics, one can make a decision about nearly anything.

If you think about it, people are making decisions every day. Very often we involve our friends. Too often I see friends on Facebook or Twitter ask questions like: should I buy the new iPhone 3GS or the Palm Pre? What should I do over the weekend? What graphic design book should I read? Or they’re answering the questions like “What cocktail am I?” [note: who cares?] My selfish dream is that this chatter disappears and relocates to Hunch; a site dedicated and perfectly designed to handle these questions (much better designed than 140 characters on Twitter).

Badges are always a win

If you want to build a web application that encourages people to immediately sign up and be active: add badges. I’ve used Hunch maybe a dozen times and I already have 8 super sweet badges. No doubt I’ll be back to get more. But seriously, credibility is important on the web. Banjos are to Hunch what edits are to Wikipedia and reputation are to Stack Overflow. It encourages more participation, though, arguably may incentivize people to add junk. That’s fine though, in theory, as the community will sort out the user generated signal from the noise.

The hidden value: Teach Hunch

Hunch asks a lot of questions about you. It gains a lot of information not only from your decisions, edits, recommendations, etc. It also asks you, point blank, “Do you enjoy shopping for clothes?” or “Do you have a car?”

My previous answer was the same as 48% of respondents. I'm in the minority?

From the plethora of information that thousands of users are providing you can quickly get some very cool (anonymized) correlations.

Liberals are about twice as likely to prefer arugula to iceberg in their salads, but the exact opposite goes for conservatives.

Of course, the concern being how much Hunch can learn from us, where that information will go, how it will be used for/against us, etc. Some will argue its harmless in the beginning, others say that

I find a lot of interesting sites and articles online and I’ve continually found myself thinking “shoot, what was that site name?” or “where did I read that article about ____?” I’ve come back to Delicious to help catalog these sites.

I’m also interested in sharing my thoughts on restaurants and bars I’ve visited. Yelp has been an invaluable source for finding good places to eat. I love being snarky and sharing my opinion, so, I’m also back on Yelp posting reviews.

An interesting side-note: I’ve stopped actively using Brightkite. In the numerous interactions, I’ve found little-to-no value in cataloging and constantly keeping track of my location. It is fun to engage in conversations at conferences and get togethers.. but certainly nothing that Twitter can’t achieve.

But it gets better. I rarely, if ever, am forced to use our daytime minutes thanks to Google Voice (formerly, GrandCentral).

Add your Google Voice number as a Fave

It’s not crazy, you do want your own phone number as a contact. Once you add your number to your MyFaves you can receive and make calls from/to that number with no charge. But first, make sure you set your incoming calls to display your Google Voice number instead of the caller’s number (so the calls appear from your MyFave contact):

Why is this awesome? You never use your minutes and have more than one way to complete a call:

1. Call your number, dial a number: though not very practical, when you dial your Google Voice number from one of your existing phones (added to your Voice account) you are then prompted to listen to voicemail OR press 2 to dial a call. You can then dial a number and, while you’re still on the line, Google Voice will connect the call (unlimited talk time!). Keep in mind, the receiver will see the incoming call coming from your Google Voice number.
2. Use the web service: your Google Voice contacts are the same as those in your Gmail account. If you sync your phone’s contacts with your Google Contacts then this is a seamless integration. All of your friends’ phone numbers appear in the Google Voice dashboard and you can click to call them. You are then called (the incoming number is your Google Voice) and your friend is connected. Again, since the call was from your Voice number, no charge!
3. Use the mobile interface: same as the web interface, you can select a contact and have Google Voice connect the call by dialing your number (incoming from your Google Voice number).
4. iPhone app: An application called GV Mobile for the iPhoneis available in both a free and premium versions and will interface directly with your iPhone contacts. The premium version also allows you to do cool things like review your call history, incoming SMS messages (to the Voice number), and listen to voicemail.

Bonus: free conference calls

One thing you’ll notice about T-Mobile MyFaves is that toll and toll-free numbers can not be added as a Fave. Bummer! No free calls to customer service, conference call lines, etc. Lucky for us, there’s FreeConferenceCall.com.

FreeConferenceCall assigns you a phone number that is not a toll free dial-in (in my experience, all the numbers are area code 605). This means you can add your conference call number as a Fave, dial in, and never be charged for the call.

(or, yes, you can just connect to the conference number through Google Voice)

How long will it last?

Hopefully this can be continued forever and ever as I don’t see any simple or legitimate way to block this behavior by T-Mobile… knock on wood.

UPDATE: Some users have claimed that Google Voice acts as a forwarding service and you don’t need to turn on the ‘display Google Voice’ number setting in order to have your minutes counted as myFaves. This is false. I’m looking at my call records from T-Mobile and can easily identify two calls that were charged to me though they came through Google Voice number. The display number does matter. The call presentation (announcing who is calling) does not.

I easily annoyed by people on Twitter who ‘RT’, or ‘re-tweet’; they simply post an update that says exactly what someone else says, plus attribution. Frankly, answering the Twitter mantra “What are you doing?” with “this is what someone else smarter, funnier, or more charming is doing” seems inane. It’s poetic, though, in the sense that it’s a quick litmus test for people worth “following.” Alex has always been against this practice and suggested an alternative to RTs: favorites.

There are very few features on Twitter: updates, direct messages, replies, favorites, followers, followings. I charge everyone to use the favorites feature more often. In fact, there’s a site dedicated to finding the real good ones: favrd.

Point being: I’m a huge proponent of using the little star. I’ve started publicizing my favorites here in the sidebar of Mind/Averse and it took less than 30 seconds using WordPress. It’s really quite simple.

Add Twitter favorites with the WordPress RSS widget

Assuming you have a widget-friendly WordPress theme installed, simply do the following:

1. From the WordPress dashbord, Browse to Appearance > Widgets
2. Select the ‘Add’ button next to the “RSS” widget
3. Visit your Twitter favorites page and determine your personal RSS feed (view the page source if you’re stuck here; find the <link> tag with http://twitter.com/favorites/youridhere.rss)
4. Insert the favorites feed into your RSS widget, give the widget a title, pick your options, etc.
5. Save the widget and save the changes to your sidebar

Now everyone who visits your site can immediately find the tweets you find useful. You’ll get to be cooler, smarter, and funnier simply by association.

Other ways to integrate Twitter favorites

I can think of various creative ways for individuals and businesses to use Twitter favorites.

For example, if I were a company with customers sending @replies to me telling me how great I was, I may favorite those. I can then use something like SimplePie to integrate my favorites into my blog as a separate page of testimonials. I know 37signals uses ‘buzz’ from Twitter on their site.

Bonus: do the same with @replies

The @replies RSS feed is a bit different and uses the Twitter API and 401 authentication, not a custom RSS feed, for your replies. No worries, you can either pull the RSS feed from Twitter Search or you can do the same thing using the following syntax:

http://twittername:twitterpassword@twitter.com/statuses/replies.rss

In theory, the API will include all mentions (any time @devinreams is included in an update, not just at the beginning of an update).

Ha, this is why they call me a social media pro.

Ramit Sethi is a brilliant guy (he hired me once or twice) and there’s no doubt in my mind that he is, indeed, rich (you have to be to live in San Francisco). Insert one more joke here about him being Indian. Seriously, I’ve been a long time reader of his blog, aptly titled, I Will Teach You To Be Rich and couldn’t wait to get my hands on this book.

Photo: Devin Reams, Ramit Sethi, Jon Otto, Noah Kagan

More than just a book

This book serves as a six week, step-by-step guide to:

• reducing debt,
• using credit cards,
• eliminating fees,
• maximizing earnings,
• automating finances,
• allocating assets, and
• reducing spending.

If these all sound like scary things, don’t worry, Ramit will hold your hand the entire time. His cheeky, informal writing style sounds more like your best buddy chatting about money than some writer on a soapbox trying to impress you with big words. This book is easy to read, follow-along with and teaches you all the things about finance you wish you had known when you were in your 20s.

Crash course in money

I took two personal finances classes in academia: one in high school and one in college. The former taught me lessons like: how to write checks (I don’t use paper checks anymore) and how to balance a checkbook (I use Mint to track that information). The latter taught things like: the importance of owning real estate (we all know how that turned out) and how to manually complete your 1040 form (I use TurboTax for that). Point being: traditional finances courses and books aren’t doing you a lot of good.

I Will Teach You To Be Rich cuts through the noise (Jim Cramer, anyone?) and gives it to you straight: start saving now, don’t invest in individual stocks, real estate isn’t the best investment, banks sucks, but despite all of this, feel free to spend lots of money (on the things you love). If you disagree with any of the previous statements, you’ll love this book.

Bottom line

Though I’m biased, I do think this is a must-read for anyone, especially anyone under 30. Plus, I have the benefit of hindsight: the book already hit Amazon’s #1 best seller and is still #1 in personal finance.

If I could walk up to each of my friends and slap them with a copy of this book I know it would make a huge difference in their lives. Seriously, I want all of my friends from school to read this book now. Pick up this book and start acting today. It’s not hard stuff, and even the simple things like setting up automatic monthly payments have huge benefits: you’ll never ever pay a late fee again. You’ll never have to remember to set aside money for investing. Simply asking for an increase in your existing credit lines means you can raise your overall credit score saving you hundreds of thousands of dollars in financing (if you buy a house or car).

Enough said: go buy I Will Teach You To Be Rich.

But seriously, I hate getting home and not feeling motivated to do anything else. So, I’ve gone back to something I perfected in college: napping.

At the time, biphasic and polyphasic sleep were being (re)discovered online. I stopped taking naps after I started my big-boy job out of college. But now, I realize, it’d be great to take a nap and start a ’second day’ every night.

So my schedule is as follows:

• 08:00 AM – Wake up, go to work, etc.
• 06:00 PM – Leave work, have dinner, etc.
• 08:00 PM – Sleep
• 11:00 PM – Wake up, start ’second day’ (read, watch movies, blog, etc.)
• 05:00 AM – Go to sleep

My body is, luckily, still used to the 80-90 minute sleep cycles so I can get away with two chunks of 3 hours and feel energized all day.

Two days in and I’ve hit the ground running. I’m pretty stoked. If you have any questions and want to try biphasic sleep / naps just leave a comment.

The display is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The screen doesn’t look digital, its almost like it was ink printed right on the device. Let me reinforce: this thing looks amazing! It’s almost as cool as a Book (comic, Penny Arcade).

But, nay, I mustn’t buy one yet. With over a dozen books on my bookshelf (the real ones, dead-tree books) I shall wait until I finish those before I buy up yet another gadget that may-or-may-not persuade me to do more of something (I’m looking at you Nike Plus).

Update: I bought one! And the dead tree books are still on the shelf. :\

• Start early, anticipate bumps: no matter how many times you plan an event (this was not my first) you forget details. Get started early, take lots of notes and outline all the various things that need to happen (including the minutiae that needs to happen the day-of the event). Also, be sure to follow-up with people (speakers, sponsors, venues, printers, etc.). If we hadn’t pro-actively followed-up on some details (and assumed everything was taken care of as promised) we may not have had shirts printed in time nor a venue reserved for the after-party.

• Leverage your network: luckily for us, a lot of great friends and contacts in the Denver/Boulder area stepped up to volunteer their time (speakers) and money (sponsors). Because these people made themselves available, we were able to throw a full-day event at an awesome venue (Denver Art Museum), and an after-party for people to mingle and mix (and still keep it accessible for 300+ people to attend).
• Tickets will sell themselves: though nerve-wracking and always a concern, conferences and events like WordCamp will sell out. Every event I’ve organized has always had dozens of people clamoring for tickets at the last minute and offering cold hard cash at the door. As a participant, I understand the reasoning: you hear about it late, you realize cool people will be there, your plans were TBD up until a certain point, etc. As an organizer, consider setting aside some ‘reserve’ tickets that you can open up for the people that realize ’sold out’ means ‘I can’t come’. Frankly, you can charge a premium for these tickets.

• Let the people socialize: one criticism, though from a vocal minority, is that there weren’t enough structured breaks. On the contrary, we set aside a full two hours at the Paramount Cafe so that people could mingle and meet each other and the speakers. What you’ll often find at conferences is people will set aside their own time. If they don’t like the panelists, they’ll go into the lobby and strike up conversations. Make sure you have adequate space for people to step out and not disturb sessions in-progress.
• You can’t please everyone: it’s a well-known fact that you can do your best and people will still leave your event unhappy. We tried to mitigate some of this risk in a number of ways. You’ll notice a number of conferences split up sessions into multiple tracks so that individuals can attend those that appeal most to them. We also (thanks to sponsorship) were able to keep the ticket prices lower (which means a higher perceived value of the event): if people give you a hard time after organizing an 8-hour conference that only cost $30, well, it’s hard for anyone to argue they didn’t get their money’s worth.

Keeping this all in mind: have fun. As an organizer it’s amazing how many people will go out of their way to find you and say thanks; it’s why we volunteer to put on events like this. Thanks to everyone who attended WordCamp Denver 2009.

PS: nobody has perfected the art of wifi/phone service when massive amounts of people are in the same place at once (look at the inauguration or SXSW 2009). I’m really, truly sorry you had a hard time live-tweeting about how young Dave Moyer was. ;)