Web and Graphic Design HQ

I see this month that the Mozilla Foundation has released the first beta version of Penelope, the open source successor to Qualcomm’s Eudora (which stopped development last year, although Qualcomm employees are helping develop Penelope).

However, it’s still early days. The current Penelope bug list is enough to ensure I wait until we get past beta versions, release candidates, the first official 1.0 release, and then at least one “dot point” release (eg 1.01, 1.1) until I come on board!

I LOVE Eudora, and its features, and am very much looking forward to Penelope, and hopefully the ironing out of the final Eudora quirk that irks me (cannot reliably forward an html formatted message)… but in the meantime, I’ll stick to Eudora and wait patiently…

Congrats to Qualcomm and Mozilla for keeping on with Eudora in its new open source guise. Eudora, IMHO, is at least 20-times better than Outlook will ever be. I spent 10 minutes yesterday showing an Outlook user some features of Eudora that had them nearly drooling… especially with handling multiple personalities, and the use of personalities within filters.

Currently working towards a couple of information products to be published, and looking at options for “making it safe” with ways to help stop online thievery.

DL Guard looks to have it properly sorted in terms of the actual download page, how many times a digital product can be downloaded (and for how long the page can be reached). There is even a FREE lite version.

Secure-eBook reminds me of the Corey Rudl style protection system: control of the content remotely. You can have a section unlocked, and then activate the remainder only after the fee is paid. You also get to set the number of computers that can view the unlocked content. My only thought is that, if you allow printing, someone could print to the PDF driver and just create a fresh pdf file with no security. Not allowing printing might cheese of legitimate purchasers!

LockLizard claims to “simply, securely, and cost effectively distribute and manage your digital content with our digital rights management products, pdf security, web page protection and copy control software.

Publish your documents, e-learning courses, PDF files, web pages, images, flash, and software applications, knowing you have full control over them at all times. Control who uses your content, what they do with it, for how long, and when.” Looks like an interesting alternative to Secure-eBook.

My thoughts are that a combination of both will assist: DL Guard to protect acquisition of the digital files, and then either Secure-eBook or LockLizard to control the content. Although, if you had either of the latter two, you may not need to worry about guarding your downloads, as they’d be safely rendered useless if either Secure-eBook or LockLizard was in place.

At least I know that kind of product is around should the need arise!

A new blog “widget” from IM guru John Reese is all about traffic exchange, and growing traffic for blogs.

I added the widget to this Web and Graphic Design HQ blog in about 4 minutes. Easy to do: just add the code to the Sidebar file within my active WordPress theme. (I added a blank line above it, to separate it from the RSS feed links).

Here’s what appears in the sidebar (this graphic below is just a static screen shot — as you can only have the widget appear once on any page):

It will be interesting to see if traffic improves as a result of the widget, or how long it lasts on the blog! I used to love Snap Preview Anywhere, but it soon became annoying, so whether BlogRush lasts the distance, we’ll wait and see.

I guess it will partly depend on whether BlogRush stays true to normal users, or is abused as outlined on the Warrior Forum.

If you’re into making money online, then a new service launching tomorrow (18 September 2007) US time will surely “rock your socks”.

It’s DealDotCom — each day, they’ll have only ONE product for sale. It’ll be for sale at an insanely low price, and there will be an extremely limited number of copies available. That product will only be available until it sells out, or until midnight the next night, when we pull it down and start selling a new product.

Products for sale will be anything and everything related to building an online business, increasing traffic, monetizing your websites, blogging, web design… in short, we sell all things “Internet Marketing”. The site developers have spent 4 months tracking down big-name (and not-so-big-name) Internet Marketers who sell high-quality products, and convincing them to let DealDotCom sell their stuff at huge discounts.

If you’re involved in IM in any way, shape, or form, these are the products that you’re probably already buying… but here’s your chance to snag them for much less than the little people buy them for.

Get Your Free Account Now

Go to DealDotCom and get your Free Account now. Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to log in and get your affiliate link. Then tell everyone about how awesome DealDotCom is, and give them YOUR affiliate link. When DealDotCom starts selling product on September 18th, you’ll already have a bunch of people that you referred making YOU money.

Here’s the part you’ll love!

When you refer others to DealDotCom and they get their free account, they are marked in DealDotCom’s system as having been referred by you. Anything that they ever buy from us nets YOU a 35% commission. It doesn’t matter if they buy something tomorrow, next week, or fifty years from now - you’re going to get paid. What’s more, anyone that they refer to DealDotCom goes on your second tier. Anything people on your second tier buy nets you a 15% commission. Again, forever!

Go to DealDotCom now!

PS: Deals will be released at midnight each night, US Central Time. I checked out the fixed Houston time to see what time it is here in Melbourne (we’re currently 15 hours ahead, as US is in daylight savings time and we’re in standard time).