the sephone blog

It was 1984.  I was in college and I laughed so hard the tears rolled down my face and my sides ached.  Though I was never a jock nor was I a nerd, I was caught somewhere in between. But I remember some quote (that I couldn’t find the exact one when I googled Revenge of the Nerd quotes) about Nerds ruling the world someday.  But you get my idea.

Has the millennia morphed the lovable nerd into today’s computer geek?  Are you feeling that maybe the things you do best or the things you like to do most are disappearing and being replaced with folks that don’t speak the same language that you do or perhaps don’t want to talk WITH you at all?  That “IT” guy that uses big words makes your eyes glaze over and you think, “HELP!  End this, PLEASE!”

Don’t give up, do what you are good at.  As I mentioned earlier, I am somewhere in between the nerd world and the jock world, but now I have heard people refer to me as “a creative type.”  Well, when I think of a “creative type” I cringe.   I picture me as an old hippie drifting down Central Street in my wrap around Indian print skirt, a tie-dye t-shirt and some bad sandals.

I wonder what nerds or geeks think when they are referred to as such?

I started poking around in some blogs today and came across one from Brett Slater, of Slater’s Garage. He was talking about exercising your creative muscle.  It is a good one that makes you feel better about the occasional off the wall idea, or outburst you may have.   I also found this woman named Shannon on my Twitter and she wrote an article on her blog called “Is everyone in PR wearing the same dress? “

I loved this post.  Though she is a lot younger than I am, I completely agreed with what she said.  Here she is from Detroit, MI and I learned from her without buying a book or going to a conference!  Pretty GROOVY!  (That’s one for the hippies!)

I am thinking us “social-ites” that have been long doing the social things – some fun, like cocktail parties, business after hours, receptions, volunteering and some not so fun, funerals, hospital visits, weddings, showers (whoops!)  are quickly becoming “social networking – outcasts” and need to make sure we embrace the new ways of learning and socializing, because “The Beat Goes On!”

You may have just seen an email that was from barracuda_notice@ sephone.com recently.  If so, you are probably wondering what it is.

If you are, well let me share.

Sephone knows that SPAM is the number #1 P.I.T.A.* of all e-mail users.  SPAM stinks.

As a means to fight SPAM, Sephone acquired SPAM Firewalls from Barracuda Networks-  Customers wishing to enhance their SPAM filters from the included services with all our hosting packages are able to subscribe.  There is a small monthly fee per account.
Call or email us support @ Sephone.com for more details.

The service was initiated in early 2008 for a small test group and over the last several months we have been adding new subscribers as they inquire on how they can improve their SPAM filters.  Until now, we have been providing the services to help train the filters- BUT NOW-  all subscribers to the barracuda can have access to their own quarantine lists.

Every day you will get an notice from barracuda_notice@ sephone.com IF you have anything in quarantine.  From the email you can go directly to the account and manage your queue.

• So if you dont get that important email you have been expecting-  login to your quarantine account and see if the message is in there.
• If it is, then mark it as “Not SPAM” and let it be delivered.
• If you see mail in there that is “unknown” , take a few minutes; look at it, if it is SPAM, mark it as such, if it is marked as SPAM and you want it delivered, mark it “WhiteList” Or NotSpam and now when ever email is received- from that sender-  the Barracuda will let it thru instead of quarantining it.  This is also “Training”.

Sephone is pleased to offer this service to help rid you of SPAM.

To learn more about fighting SPAM or to subscribe to this service contact us at support@sephone. com.
To learn more about Barracuda Networks, visit http://www.barracudanetworks.com

Fees are for each email account that you wish to be protected.  Aliases are included.  Additional Domains and associated email accounts are extra.  A small set up fee may apply depending on the number of domains and accounts to be included.

*P.I.T.A = Pain in the A$$   

Recently I spent 10 days in Europe including traveling through some of the major airports ( JFK, Frankfort, Milan, Heathrow) and would you believe-  ONLY in the USA do you need to Pay for Wifi. (FYI in the International Terminal in JFK I was able to get on to Boingo for free)

I was extremely impressed with the amount of free coverage or atleast sponsored coverage, (where I need to sit through a 15sec ad in order to get free access) that I was able to experience and stay in touch.

The USA is the leader of the FREE World, but not in connectivity!  That is NOT Free!

In most of the towns, provinces and cities I visited- WiFi is considered a necessity and is easily accessible.  Why not here?   At one time- it was a potential revenue source- but access should be free in public areas.

On the ship- we had to pay- OK  Satellite and limited access.  But once on shore- La Dolce Vita!

If we are to stay competitive in the GLOBAL markets AND locally too-  WiFi needs to be opened up to ALL.

Restrict certain URLs and keep it for email and safe surfing-  There is no need to visit XXX sites when you are not in your own private space- but allow google, yahoo, itunes, etc to be freely accessible.

The more we are in touch with eachother- the smaller the world is and the closer we are to each other.

The Europeans dont do everything right or better than U.S.- but in this case we need to get on the same level-

PS THIS IS NOT A VOTE FOR GOVERNMENT SPONSORED MANAGEMENT FOR THE INTERNET!!

Providers beware-  some one is going to do this-  why not YOU!  Talk about Brand Awareness and Community Outreach!!

Thats my opinion-  whats yours?!

I hope our datAvenger lite users don’t feel too left out because of the launch of datAvenger 4.3 last week. dA lite (or basic content manager) is really popular with our clients, and we like giving our dA lite users new features, too.

That’s why we’re launching datAvenger lite 3.6 today. We’re adding just one new feature this time around, but it’s one of the most requested ones: search engine friendly URLs. The full version of datAvenger has had these for a while, and we’ve now pulled them over into datAvenger lite as well.

What are search engine friendly URLs? Well, earlier versions of datAvenger lite had URLs (Web addresses) that looked something like this:

http://www.example.com/index.php?area=about

It’s tough to say, difficult to write, and not optimal for how search engines index pages. We’ve improved all three of those with the new URLs in datAvenger lite. The same page will now have this URL:

http://www.example.com/about

That’s it. See the difference?

We’re excited to include this new feature in all new installations of datAvenger lite. As we do with datAvenger, we’ll be upgrading older (datAvenger lite 3.x) sites for free as well. If you have any questions, please get in touch with us.

All this talk of dAs and lites might be confusing for anyone new to the Sephone world. If you’d like to learn more about the content management solutions we provide, check out our feature comparison of the two products.

Happy July! Today we’re happy to announce datAvenger 4.3, the latest version of our full-featured content management system datAvenger. In this latest release we’ve focused our efforts on text page editing (known as Standard Content to dA users). We wanted to incorporate some of the feedback we’d received from our clients and make editing as straight-forward as possible.

Although there are are dozens of enhancements and fixes throughout the entire datAvenger application, I just wanted to run through some of the biggest changes.

Auto-drafts

Has this situation ever happened to you? You’ve got a lot to do on a Standard Content page. You sit down, finish all your work, and hit the Save button. All of a sudden, you’re redirected back to the login page… and your changes didn’t save! datAvenger’s login security features occasionally made large edits difficult to do.

Starting in datAvenger 4.3, a copy of your Standard Content changes are saved automatically every two minutes. Though you still need to press the Save button to confirm your changes to a page, datAvenger saves auto-drafts within the version listing of every Standard Content page. To access these drafts, click on the icon of the file cabinet in a Standard Content page’s article list.

While you’re in the version list, you now can click on the Preview icon next to any version to bring up a full preview of that version’s content.

If you have a lot to do on a page, we still highly recommend that you use the Save and Continue Editing button in Standard Content to save your work every few minutes. In any case, datAvenger’s Standard Content auto-drafts are your backup!

Spell checking

That’s right – Standard Content page editors now have a spell check built right in. When you’re done with a page, click on the new ABC checkmark in the toolbar to make sure everything is spelled correctly. Don’t forget to save your changes!

A new, but familiar, toolbar

You may notice that the toolbar in the Standard Content editor looks a bit different. Don’t worry… all of your buttons are still there. We’ve reorganized the toolbar so that most formatting functions are on the top row and more advanced functions are on the bottom.

From the top

We’ve tightened up the editor in a lot of ways for this version. That makes it a lot easier for us to work with the editor code for the future, but it’s also great for you. If you ever had a sticky popup window that wouldn’t close or a style that took a few tries to apply, you’ll notice that these quirks have disappeared in this version.

We upgrade datAvenger installations regularly (for free) to keep sites up-to-date the latest features and bug fixes, and we’ll start updating existing dA sites very soon. We’ve been testing this latest version for months and are excited to get it out the door.

These latest editor updates will make it even easier for us to give you the best editor possible in the future. As always, if you have any questions or issues, give us a call at (207) 262-5040 or e-mail support@datavenger.com!

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