A friend of mine who works for Sprint asked me through Facebook today how I liked my Palm Pre. It’s been two weeks and one conference since I bought it, so here’s what I told him. This is directly copy/pasted from my comments on FB. If I’m inclined, I’ll add some screen shots, pics and more updates to this later. Feel free to ask me questions in the comments.

hmmmmm…okay. Overall, I LOVE it. Such a vast improvement over PalmOS (or POS as I like to call it). Email handling is awesome, Calendar is fantastic, the camera is great, contacts are great, web browsing is excellent.

You can load mp3s as ringtones…very cool. You can take screen shots (which I have since forgotten how). The flash on the camera has made me the envy of many iPhone users.

The app store is still lacking in a wide range of apps. Most of them are tools to use in place of visiting websites (craigslist, opentable, etc). I’m hoping that there will be camera apps and other functionality apps in the future.

Where is it lacking? Cursor placement can be very frustrating. You have to tap very precisely to move the cursor to the beginning of a line and I miss most of the time. There’s no joystick ring around the one button to aid in cursor movement, which is stupid imho.

Also, You can’t highlight text you’re not typing. So, if there’s something in an email you want to copy paste into a text message, you’re SOL. I hope that changes soon. You can copy text in a text edit area.

I’d also like to be able to map the virtual camera shutter button on the screen to the actual button on the phone face. It’s incredibly difficult to snap a self portrait….or a pic with a friend. I wound up looking like a tard several times last week at the conference I attended because of this.

Oh, and big whoopsie. I forgot to mention battery life. The Pre is always updating, syncing, checking email. Definitely buy the car charger to juice up on the road. And always plug it in at night. The battery goes from completely dead to full charge in about 3 hours. I made it about 6 hours of what I’d consider heavy use on a charge.

There are some extended life batteries out there, but none made by palm yet, so I’m going to wait…wouldn’t want to void my warranty or insurance.

I haven’t splurged for the touchstone yet, so I can’t tell you about that.

USB and media sync are pretty rad. iTunes recognizes it as an iPod and iPhoto sees it as a camera, so very easy to sync/import.

Thanks to (jeff)isageek for inadvertently prompting me to write a blog post.

For more on the entire Tynt issue, see Eric Lander’s blog post on Tynt.

If you’re on an Apache server with mod rewrite & want to prevent Tynt from displaying your site here are some rules that may help:

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR}    ^204\.244\.109\.(2(4[0-7]))$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR}    ^204\.244\.120\.(1(7[6-9]|8[0-3]))$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$    [F]

You can do plenty of other fun things instead of “RewriteRule ^(.*)$ [F]” if you like. For an example, check out the 404 page for SEOconsultants.com

Many thanks to @IncrediBILL, @pageoneresults, @scottpolk and @ericlander for bringing the situation to light & coming up with the correct IP blocks.

If you manage websites of any decent size, you’re probably familiar with Xenu Link Sleuth for PC. It’s an incredibly powerful tool that allows you to check links on your site for errors. Well, bummer for me, it’s Windows only and I’m on a Mac. I’ve pretty much replaced every other application that I used on Windows, but a Xenu replacement was the, shall we say, missing link? (har har.) So, after a client emailed me with yet another broken link on his website, I finally went on the hunt.

There appeared to be two major contenders when I Googled “link checking tool for mac”…

Braxton’s Link Tester (BLT) looked pretty good. The website displays a 3.5 mouse rating from Macworld. After reading Macworld’s review, I ruled it out because there is no option to exclude specified URLs or domains.

Then, I found Integrity by Shiela Dixon at Peacock Media. Integrity is inspired by Xenu, and it’s freeware. Hooray! Have I found the last piece to my Mac migration puzzle? Am I finally free of the PC?

I’ll be using Integrity over the next few days and will post a full review in a couple weeks. Check back for updates!

If it wasn’t so irritating, it would be funny.

I just received an email forwarded by a client from an SEO firm trying to contact me. The SEO firm sent an email to the client’s “info@” address to try and reach me to solict SEO services.

I admit: I’m baffled.

I’ve received plenty of phone calls for SEO services directly, from firms obviously mining WHOIS information, but this was the first time someone had gone through the trouble of locating an email link on the client’s web site, and then sending the client an email to try and reach me. I mean, if you’re going to take the trouble to go to the client’s web site, which many firms of this nature do not, why not spend a little time on the “Contact Us” page and email the marketing director, well, directly?

I suppose I could be giving them too much credit… They may have just taken a stab with the “info@” address & not visited the site at all. Either way, I don’t think we’ll be working together anytime soon.

Here’s a tip: While you need valid contact data in your domain registration information, it might make sense to have a unique email address for your registrant and domain contact info. Or even unique addresses for each contact type like “admin-contact@,” “technical-contact@,” etc. Doing so will help identify firms mining WHOIS information for their leads.

Big Caveat: Don’t change information on existing domain registrations unless you have to!  Some search engines pay attention to changes in domain registration information.

I went to the DMV yesterday to get my new car registered. It’s not really new, but my mom’s old 2000 Mitsubishi Montero. I had all of my forms in hand, ready to go. Their hi-tech push-a-button-give-a-number system was down, so I approached the first window to declare my business and get my number.

I presented all of the appropriate paperwork and asked about also turning in the plate for my old car that I sold. I explained to the lady behind the counter that my old car was registered under my maiden name. She asked for my maiden name, which is Wright, and then just happened to ask if I was related to Susan Wright-Garcia (listed on the title for my new car). I told her, yes, that’s my mom. She then asked if I’d like to save $406.00. Duh!

Apparently, sales tax is waived in the state of Kansas if you purchase the car from a “lineal ascendant”. This would be grandparents, parents, son or daughter or their spouses. Siblings, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews do not qualify.

I took the photocopied form from the lady and headed home to fax it to my mom to sign. Now, I am pretty good at researching the proper procedures for dealing with the DMV, especially since their closest office is just far enough away to make the trip a chore. I thought to myself, how could I have missed this? I would have possibly blown an extra $400 if it wasn’t for their faulty hi-tech push-a-button-give-a-number system. So, I went back to their site and looked on the page with all of the instructions for “Titling a Used Vehicle“. Nowhere on this page do they mention this money-saving fact. I searched for the form, which is available on their site as a PDF. The form is TR-215, Affidavit of Relationship.

So, there you go all you used car buying Kansans! Save yourself some money and use that form!

After the Accel Partners Reception, we all headed to the Ask.com party at Club Fahrenheit. Ask always throws an excellent party and we all had an excellent time. The music kept everyone dancing and the drinks were flowing.

Jessica Bowman, Joe Morin, Rob Snell, and Craig Paddock

Bartender at Club Fahrenheit lights the bar on fire.

Bartender at Club Fahrenheit breathes fire. Cool!

Sally and David with Dave from Trellian. Gee, I want his Red Bull lanyard!

Just got my full-color, laminated, VisiBone Card Collection for Web Designers.  I knew I was going to buy one of their products months ago.  But there web site is quite usable on it’s own, and they simply had way too many choices for how their cards are formatted.

Now that I’ve got it in my hand, I’m sorry I waited!  I think it’s wonderful that VisiBone provides the information on their web site, it’s a great way to “test drive” their product.  But the bound collection of cards it truly impressive.  For all the information that’s in there, it should weigh a TON.  Seeing Colors, HTML, Fonts, Javascript, CSS, Character Entities, DOM and Regular Expressions compressed into a 10 page reference… Makes me wonder what the size of the layout file is!
Run out and get yours today.  (While this may sound like an ad for VisiBone, it’s not.  I just want to make sure that enough people keep supporting them so they keep making new cards!)

Just got the blog installed… it’ll look more like the rest of the site shortly. So far, I like it! Installation was easy, seems to be fairly feature rich. (And it’s the blog software Matt Cutts uses…) As WordPress is PHP/mySQL based, this will be a good excuse to finally learn PHP & mySQL…