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Do You Like A "2006" Retail Design?
Hate Deferred Email? Bcc Yourself From A Different Account
Convert Windows Media Center Video Recordings To Other Formats

Do You Like A "2006" Retail Design?

Posted: 29 Mar 2011 03:00 AM PDT

When it comes to the design of web sites specifically tailored for commerce (meaning not blogs), the clock appears to have stood still for some major retail outlets. Once such example of a really old design is Costco:

This design has been used at Costco since 2006 and has barely changed since that point.

Here are the things you immediately notice about Costco’s site:

It still, amazingly, fits in an 800×600 display.
The top of the site is bombarded with department link buttons that take up two rows.
Sidebar is purposely very skinny, and the first thing seen is to sign up for promo offers by email.
The logo itself actually has a ".com" in it (as if you need to be reminded of that?)

Compared to other major retail sites, there are several things missing from Costco’s site.

Hover-over menus are very simple whereas sites like Target and Wal-Mart use menus that have shadows and are at times multi-tiered.
Other than a single Facebook promo graphic buried in the left sidebar, there are no other social media connectors.
With the exception of the home page Flash promo, Flash is mostly absent from the rest of the site.

What do I think of a 2006 retail design?

I like it. It seems to load faster compared to other retail sites, and while the interface is clunky, it’s predictable. This means once I learn where things are, I can be comforted by the fact they will be in the same place tomorrow, the next day and so on.

"Cool", generally speaking, has no place on a retail web site. But I could be wrong.

What do you think? Does a 2006-design still work today?

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Do You Like A "2006" Retail Design?

Hate Deferred Email? Bcc Yourself From A Different Account

Posted: 28 Mar 2011 07:00 AM PDT

A standard spam deterrent that several major webmail providers utilize is deferred mail. What this means is that your email on send is purposely delayed from 5 minutes up to several hours. For example, you know Yahoo! Mail’s deferment is in effect when you receive an error 451.

It’s most likely true you weren’t doing anything different than what you normally do with your mail, but there are things which trigger mail deferment that aren’t your fault at all. For example, something as simple as logging into your mail from a public Wi-Fi location can set off a flag as a known "bad" IP address. You’re obviously not responsible for that, but unfortunately have to deal with it.

The way around mail deferment is to simply use a different mail account using a different reply-to header in combination with blind-carbon-copy, commonly known by its abbreviation bcc.

Here’s an example using Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail. Bear in mind you could also use Gmail, GMX, In.com mail or whatever you decide to use.

Situation: Your primary email is a Yahoo! Mail account, and one day you encounter the 451 deferment error, disallowing you to send any mail for a few hours – but you need to send out mail now.

Solution: Login to a backup Hotmail account configured with a different reply-to, and bcc yourself on mail-out to your Yahoo! account.

Set up the Hotmail account as follows:

1. Specify the reply-to to point to your primary Yahoo! Mail account:

2. When composing an email from the Hotmail side, bcc your primary Yahoo! Mail account:

What this does is two things. First, when the recipient replies to the email, it will be directed to your Yahoo! account and not Hotmail. Second, the bcc sends a copy of the message to your Yahoo! account that you can drag/drop into the Sent folder; a manual way of synchronization so you can keep track of what went where.

This may not be the most elegant solution in the world, but it works with any mail account – as long as the two accounts are from separate companies (using two accounts from the same company rarely works because both accounts will be deferred at the time you encounter it).

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Hate Deferred Email? Bcc Yourself From A Different Account

Convert Windows Media Center Video Recordings To Other Formats

Posted: 28 Mar 2011 06:00 AM PDT

If you use Windows Media Center to record TV shows and you want to convert your recordings to another format, check out the free utility MC-TVConverter.

MC-TVConverter is a FREE (GPL) GUI (Graphical User Interface) for various commandline video converters. It’s mainly targeted to convert recordings from Microsoft Windows MediaCenter, which introduced the new WTV format in Windows7 and Vista with TV-Pack.

While the function this utility performs is self explanatory, it has some additional features which may be useful if you are in the market for this type of application:

Conversion from WTV, DVR-MS, MPG, TS, AVI, MP4 and WMV.
Conversion to TS, DEMUX, MPG, WMV, AVI, FLV and MP4 (depending on the input format).
Supports WTV-HD recordings.
Automatically remove commercials from MPEG2-streams
Watch folder: converts all supported files in a folder and its subfolders in the background (checks if file is in use and creates a history file to convert a file only once).
Minimizes into the tray for minimal invasive appearance.

If this sounds like something you can use, give the free MC-TVConverter a look.

Post from: PCMech. Helping Normal People Get Their Geek On And Live The Digital Lifestyle.

Convert Windows Media Center Video Recordings To Other Formats