Remind People To Answer Your Emails – Followupthen.com

What can you do if you send an email to someone and need to make sure that they answer it?  One solution is a free website that will send a followup reminder on any email that you send, it is called FollowupThen.com and is available here.

How it works

The premise to FollowUpThen is that you need to send an email to followupthen.com with the time interval that you want the followup to be.  For example, the following are valid email addresses:

• tuesday@followupthen.com
• mar30@followupthen.com
• 2010-05-30@followupthen.com
• 1minute@followupthen.com
• 2hours@followupthen.com
• 3days@followupthen.com
• 4weeks@followupthen.com
• 5months@followupthen.com
• 6years@followupthen.com

Sending followup emails to others

There are two ways to create a followup message, you can send an email to FollowUpThen in either the CC field or the BCC field.  The differences are (from the FollowUpThen website):

CC Field

Both you and your recipient will receive a followup if they have not replied within the time interval you specify. (Note: Your recipient has to “reply all” to include followupthen on their response for us to know about it).

BCC Field

Your recipient never knows about followupthen. You are the only one that will get the followup.

(This is good for something like a sales followup call.  You can mark to get a reminder say 3 months in the future.)

The originating email

Your copy of the followup (if you used the CC field):

The recipient’s copy of the followup:

Sending a reminder to yourself

If you send an email to FollowUpThen with a time interval, the site will send you a reminder email at that time.

For example, if you create this email with a To address of 5minutes@followupthen.com:

It will send the following reminder:

What about privacy?

Since you are forwarding your emails through to another site, privacy can be a valid concern.  Here is what the company says in their documentation:

We don’t share your information with 3rd parties. (And no, we are not spammers) We automatically delete your email contents once the followup has been sent, as well as your recipient’s email address. Also, your data is stored in an encoded format in our database so is not viewable in plain text to our system admins. Read more about the company behind followupthen here: http://www.followupthen.com/about

Get a list of pending followups

If you send an email to pending@followupthen.com from your email address, you will get a list of pending followup messages, along with a way to cancel any of them.

If you click on the link, you will be sent to their website

One problem – verifying your email address

Despite the site saying I didn’t have to, it did send me the following email and made me verify my email address.  Until I did, I was getting error messages from FollowUpThen saying that they couldn’t send the emails.  Once I confirmed my email, then everything went smoothly.  So if you want to use this initially for followups that are only an hour or two out, you may want to wait until you get a confirmed email address.

Using A Virtual Desktop Manager – Dexpot

If you are like me, you have a lot of programs up on your screen.  What can you do if you don’t have a lot of screen real estate to display all of the programs?  One option is to get a second monitor and run a dual monitor configuration.  We’ll talk about that in another blog post.  If you can not get a second monitor, another option is to use a virtual desktop manager.  One that is very good, and free for personal use, is Dexpot, and you can get it here.

What is a virtual desktop?

A virtual desktop is a way for your computer to make a separate desktop that appears to be independent of another desktop.  If you had four virtual desktops, it is like having four separate monitors, each with their own programs running.

Note, your computer will still need enough resources to run all of these programs.  If you have a computer that is capable of running 6 programs simultaneously at a reasonable speed, then if you run virtual desktops, you shouldn’t have more than 6 programs open between all of the virtual desktops – they are all still running on the same computer.

Scenarios to use virtual desktops

Here are a couple of scenarios where having several virtual desktops might be useful.

1) You are working on something and don’t want to be distracted with email, Twitter, etc.  You can have one desktop that has your work programs on it, and another desktop that has the “entertainment” programs running.  When it is time for a work break, you can switch to the entertainment desktop to check things out and when it is time to go back to work, go back to the work desktop.

2) You have a child that wants to use the computer and you have a bunch of work things up (maybe quicken, websites, etc.)  You are also afraid that they may startup/delete something that they shouldn’t.  With Dexpot, you can create a virtual desktop with only the programs running that they should be using.

There are other scenarios but these are two to think about.

What it doesn’t do

This isn’t like disk virtualization.  For example, if you delete a desktop icon in one virtual desktop, it is gone in all of them.  Look at it as different independent views of the same desktop.

Using Dexpot – setting the configuration

All of these options are found by right clicking on the Dexpot icon in the system tray and selecting Settings.

The General Configuration screen

Here is where you can determine the number of desktops and which one will start up.

Keyboard shortcuts

An easy way to tell what desktop you are on.

If you turn on “Show the desktop name,” the printed name will appear on the background of the desktop when you switch to it.

Setting up individual desktops

These screens are found by right clicking on the Dexpot icon and selecting “Configure Desktops.”

Configuring desktop characteristics

You can do things like name each desktop, password protect it, and set up the resolution.

Protecting your system from your children – configuring what they see on their desktop

For me, this can be the most important screen, this allows you to determine what is visible on a desktop.  With this screen, you can make sure that all system type options are not visible (i..e the start button, desktop icons, etc.)

NOTE – if you shut everything down in the “Hide desktop components” option, you need to remember the keyboard shortcut to switch to the main desktop.

Here’s a desktop that only has Firefox running in it.

Setting up programs to automatically run on a desktop

I use this to set up my daughter’s desktop with the programs that she needs.

Other tools in Dexpot

You can get to these tools by right clicking the Dexpot icon in the status bar.

Desktop Manager

An easy way to switch between desktops.

Desktop Preview

If you want to see what a desktop looks like.

Desktop Rules

This is a way to configure rules for a desktop.  You can do this to determine what to do with new windows as they are created.  For example, below is a rule that will automatically open up desktop 3 and load Firefox in it regardless of which desktop I start Firefox from.

What happens when you exit Dexpot?

When you exit Dexpot, it will ask you whether you want to move all open windows to Desktop 1.

How to qualify for free shipping on Amazon – item fillers

Have you ever had around $20 worth of items for an order and realized that you are going to pay around 5 dollars to ship the order?  Wouldn’t it be better to buy an extra $5 worth of stuff and get the shipping for free?  Well, you can legitimately do that with the help of these websites.

How it works

With a lot of Amazon items, there is an icon stating that the item qualifies for free super saver shipping if the total order is over $25 (note, this is for economy shipping, if you need it quicker, then you will still be paying the shipping costs).  Generally, this is for items that Amazon is directly fulfilling and not used items.  The Amazon website has the details.

What do these websites do for you?

In all cases, what you will do with these websites is enter the amount of money you need to spend, and possibly the item categories to look in, and it will return to you items that will get you over the $25 amount.

The websites

This is not an all inclusive list but are two that are out there.

FillerChecker

SlickFillers

Is it useful?

I’ve used this to get some CD’s I normally wouldn’t have gotten but now are coming essentially free since I’m not paying the shipping anymore.

Proofing text on the web before submitting it – The After The Deadline Firefox extension

OK, I’ll admit it, I’m not the best when it comes to typos and grammar.  If you are going to post comments on the web (for example in Twitter or Facebook), wouldn’t it be nice if you could have an easy proofreader to make sure it is all proper?  There is an add-on that can help, it is called After The Deadline and is available here.

Where did it come from?

Automattic, the owners of WordPress launched an After The Deadline plug-in for wordpress in 2009. Now they have added a Firefox plug-in.

Why not just use the build in Firefox spellchecker?

One of the first questions I had was why use this when Firefox has its own built in spell checker.  I have found that Firefox’s is a good spell checker, but it isn’t customizable and also doesn’t check grammar,  If you want these two features, than this add-on is worth looking at.

How it works

After The Deadline works on most text boxes on the web.  It doesn’t do any checking until you ask it to.  There are a couple of ways to activate it.

• By pressing a configurable key (the default is F4)
• By clicking on the icon that will appear at the bottom of the text box (the abc checkbox).

• Right click in a text box and select “Check Spelling and Grammar” from the menu.

Once you activate it, it will mark all of the issues that it sees in different colors.  The color code is:

• Red is misused words and spelling errors
• Green is grammar mistakes
• Blue are style suggestions

Does it work for other languages?

The documentation says that it will spell-check for the following languages:

• French
• German
• Portuguese
• Spanish

There is also some grammar checking for French and German.

Configurable Options

If you go to the Tools/Add-ons menu and click the Options button for After The Deadline, you will get the following screens.,

The “Warn me” option can be a nice option to make sure that everything is proofread before being submitted.

Here are the definitions of these options from the documentation:

• Bias language may offend or alienate different groups of readers.
• Clichés are overused phrases with little reader impact.
• Complex phrases are words or phrases with simpler every-day alternatives.
• Diacritical marks are accents and marks attached to letters in some nouns and words borrowed from other languages. This option helps restore these marks in your writing.
• A double negative is one negative phrase followed by another. The negatives cancel each other out, making the meaning hard to understand.
• A hidden verb is a verb made into a noun. These often need extra verbs to make sense.
• Jargon phrases are foreign words and phrases that only make sense to certain people.
• Passive voice obscures or omits the sentence subject. Frequent use of passive voice makes your writing hard to understand.
• Phrases to avoid are wishy-washy or indecisive phrases.
• Redundant phrases can be shortened by removing an unneeded word.