I don’t do a lot of product or contest plugs here… and I don’t think I’ve ever done one when I’ve actually been given the product. But I jumped at the chance to do this one, because a) it involves a friend, social media smart guy Tris Hussey at Simply Computing, and b) it involves a truly handy piece of kit, the Grid-It organizer.

Tris told me about Simply’s contest where you stuff your Grid-It with your various do-dads, take a photo and upload it to their Facebook contest app. He invited me to come into the store and try it out.

The Grid-It is deceptively simple: a frame covered with criss-crossing rubberized elastic bands. You tuck in your gadgets, dongles and cables, and suddenly your tangled jumble of wires-’n'-crap is one handy package.

Here’s Tris showing it all to me:

I’ve been using it for a few days now, and I love the little beastie.

And while I was there, Tris showed me the new Pogo Sketch Pro stylus. It’s a dramatic improvement over the Pogo Sketch, a worthy competitor to the Bamboo (that’s my highest praise for a stylus), and I used it to draw a concept sketch for a mega-sized Grid-It for storing social media strategists. (Upload to come in a few minutes! It’s here!)

From the historic renewal of the Downtown Eastside and the Woodward’s redevelopment, to the Portland Hotel Society, to InSite, to the city’s thriving arts scene – in pretty much every big initiative to make this city fairer, more affordable and more liveable, you’ll see Jim Green’s hand at work.

Read on…

I just received an email from the good folks at MacRabbit, about my recent purchase of their Espresso web development app:

This notification is just a friendly reminder (not a bill or a second charge) that on 23-Jan-2012, you placed an order from MacRabbit Store. The charge will appear on your bill as “FS *macrabbit”. This is just a reminder to help you recognize the charge. You will not be charged again.

[....] Our customers have found this notice useful in confirming otherwise unknown credit card charges, as “FS *macrabbit” may not be easily recognizable on your bill.

As somebody who has, in fact, had to track down baffling references on Social Signal’s credit card bills (full disclosure: Morgan does far more of our Visa sleuthing than I do), I was touched that they’d thought of this. I was even more pleased that the email seemed to be only about being helpful; there was no call to action, no “Tell a friend about our new CSSEdit integration, improved language support and JavaScript-based API!”

The thing is, I really love using Espresso. And although it’s capable of some pretty heavy-duty web work, I find it’s my go-to tool these days for even a little light CSS wizardry or email template creation. There aren’t too many software tools that make me think “Damn, I wish I had more tasks that let me use this,” but Espresso’s high on the list of the tools that do.

So since their thoughtful email didn’t push me to buy anything or do any evangelism on their behalf, I’m going to do it unbidden. If you’re on a Mac and want to check it out, there’s a 15-day free trial. It isn’t free, but even an occasional user like me can make a solid case that it’s saved me its $79 pricetag many times over in increased productivity.

And even if you aren’t a Mac user or web developer, but you are in the business of sending email, consider looking for opportunities to send the occasional helpful message that doesn’t have an obvious self-serving angle. It can do wonders for your client relationships. It might even score you the odd flattering blog post.

Sometimes the best part of a speech isn’t the one with the brilliant metaphor, the side-splitting joke or the devastating retort. It’s the part where the speaker makes a case plainly but eloquently, and where the drama comes from the clash of ideas instead of from cranked-up rhetoric.

President Obama’s best moment tonight may have been this one. I don’t think it took anyone’s breath away at the time… but I’ll bet you see this language repeated in speech after speech by Democratic candidates and incumbents in the coming months:

We don’t begrudge financial success in this country. We admire it. When Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes, it’s not because they envy the rich. It’s because they understand that when I get tax breaks I don’t need and the country can’t afford, it either adds to the deficit, or somebody else has to make up the difference – like a senior on a fixed income; or a student trying to get through school; or a family trying to make ends meet. That’s not right.

Jump ahead to the solution to my problem

Every Sunday, when my cartoon gets posted on ReadWriteWeb, I head on over to have a look and join whatever conversation’s going on.

Today’s visit was much the same thing… until I noticed a little wonkiness: a sentence that stopped dead just before the cartoon. Worse, it was a linked sentence… and worse yet, it was the sentence that links from ReadWriteWeb to Noise to Signal.

I clicked on it. Good news: I landed on RobCottingham.ca. Bad news: I was on a 404 page. Because I forgot to include a closing quotation mark in the link to my cartoon site, that link points to:

http://robcottingham.ca/cartoon%3ENoise%20to%20Signal%20cartoons%20here
%3C/a%3E.%3C/em%3E%3C/p%3E%3Cdiv%20style=

No surprise it doesn’t go anywhere useful, right? That’s kind of a big deal, because a) I don’t like people getting frustrated when they click on my links, and b) a lot of people drop by my site every Sunday thanks to that link.

I dropped my editor a note apologizing and alerting him to the issue (apart from everything else, it also broke the layout on that page). Which is a start, but there’d be a few hours until he saw my email (remember, this is Sunday). And in the meantime, there’d be a lot of people clicking and saying “Wha’a?”

What I wanted them to do was click and be taken instantly to the original link. To do that, I needed to set up what’s known as a redirect – an instruction to my web server saying “If anyone tries to load that screwed-up address, take them to the real address instead.”

And ideally, it should be a particular kind of redirect — a 301 redirect, to be technical — that tells search engines, “This item has permanently moved to this other location.”

I could have done this by editing a file in my site’s folder named the .htaccess file, which has a series of instructions for the server covering everything from memory allocation to redirection. There are plenty of great tutorials on how to do exactly that.

But that’s a little cumbersome (especially because this happens just infrequently enough that I have to relearn how to do it every single time). And as a WordPress user, I’ve grown accustomed to talented programmers creating great plugins to solve nearly every technical issue that might come up.

Which brings me to John Godley, and a great little plugin called Redirection.

The Redirection plugin allows me to deal with a whole slew of issues. Had to change my permalink structure because of a plugin update? I can take care of it with a few clicks and keystrokes, permanently redirecting traffic from the old URLs to the new ones. Discovered a bunch of frequent 404 errors from someone’s mistyped URLs? Fixed! And I can see all of my redirects at once, group them however I want, and see just how much traffic each one has diverted (read: “just how much traffic Redirection has routed to the right destination”).

It’s great, it’s free, and it saved a lot of people from thinking ill of me tonight. Check it out.

Recently, a team of skilled Internet (small-e) explorers set out to find some trace of well-known adventurer, bon vivant and conversationalist Mail.app. After chasing down several false leads (one of which ended with a grisly discovery: the frozen, lifeless body of Eudora for Mac OS X Lion), they found this tattered journal, buried under a simple cairn of stacked BCC messages.

July 15: Setting off today on greatest adventure yet: traversing the fabled Mailbox Hierarchy. This mighty peak is the tallest I have scaled yet, and is known for its treacherous queries and unnavigable tables. Can’t wait to change the flags up at the top!

July 17: Slow moving so far. But I’ve just found a lost message, and I really think I should try to recover it.

August 2: Still trying to recover that message. I know I can get it, but it’s wedged into this crevasse really tightly.

August 16: Just replenished supplies and updated to 10.7.1. I wonder if I wedged my penknife in between this outcropping and that message if it would come loose?

August 19: Discouraged. Instructions relayed from user at base camp say to stop trying to recover that message. Fine.

August 20: User has now told me seven times to stop trying to recover the message. OKAY. WHATEVER. Moving on.

September 4: High enough now that I’ve finally crossed the spamline. Huge drifts of the stuff. Just spent three days rerouting to avoid a cornice of weight-loss messages.

September 9: Will have to connect with that Exchange server on the other side of this neve field. Checking all my equipment three or four times over. Nervous, but excited.

September 10: Incredibly frustrated!! Connection to server failed, and I slid down about 60 metres over rough ice and crashed. Filters are broken, and this inbox is getting jammed.

September 16: Supplies are running low. Many obstacles in way that aren’t marked on the IMAP. Altitude sickness setting in, and occasionally delusional. Maybe I should try to recover that message again?

September 25: Maybe footwear is the problem? Will reboot.

October 18: Have subsisted for more than a month on thawed spam and old phishing messages. Weighed down with mailing lists and Facebook notifications. Can’t go up, can’t go down, and can’t go on like this much longer. Shrouded in the Cloud for days.

October 21: For a few minutes, the Cloud went down and all was clear. Magnificent – beautiful – found myself meditating again for first time in years. Revelation: seems my whole life has been a struggle to free myself from attachments.

October 24: Decision made. Will attempt last-ditch maneuver: rebuild mailboxes while deleting everything older than two months. Could lose everything. Will let you know if I make it. Either way… see you all at Inbox Zero. 221 Bye.

We can only assume Mail.app’s desperate risk ended in a painful and most likely fatal bounce.