Announcements

Today I'd like to wish Douglas Godbey a Happy Birthday. Today, Doug turns the ripe age of 60! Since this past November, Doug joined our Editing Team and has proven to be invaluable in helping to answer the many email questions sent in daily from our ... Readers. Doug has been in the IT industry for the last 38 years and is a Certified Software Quality Assurance Engineer, UNIX System Administrator, and a self-proclaimed software-a-holic. Doug is also a recent Stroke Survivor which left him partially paralyzed on his left side, hence the name of his Blog web site, "The Handicapped Computerist." In ... (view more)

Since November 2005, infopackets has opened its doors to volunteer authors to share their thoughts and ideas with our audience. The transition to a multi-authored web site has been both enlightening and challenging. On one side: infopackets now ... offers a variety of fresh and interesting discussions almost daily to its audience; on the other hand, acquiring and maintaining material on a regular basis has proven to be particularly difficult. Let me explain. Since our volunteer bloggers are not paid to submit articles, submissions have been (for the most part) sporadic. Further to that, my work ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader John B. writes: " Dear Infopackets Team, I have been a subscriber for over three years now and am always excited to see infopackets in my mailbox. I have purchased a number of software programs to support infopackets and have been ... very satisfied with my choices. I am writing today to request the whereabouts of Dennis? I miss his 'questions and answers' style articles and also the software reviews. If you could please pass this message onto Dennis, I would very much appreciate it. " My response: It's nice to be missed ;-) Actually, I've been busy "behind the ... (view more)

I'm happy to announce that we have a winner in Clif Note's Photobucket Give-away contest! To recap: Photobucket is a free photo and image hosting service for web site owners and bloggers. Photobucket was recently named the Fastest Growing Site of ... 2005 by Nielsen/NetRatings and is now the leading image hosting, sharing, and publishing site in the world. They have over 11 Million registered users and are now growing by over 1.2 Million users per month. That's pretty impressive! Here's what the winner, Paul G. had to say: " Dear Clif, Thanks for allowing this opportunity to write in about the ... (view more)

With respect to the previous article, " GoodBuy AOL and GoodBuy Yahoo Users! ", Infopackets Reader 'BigTShane' from AOL writes: " [I can't believe that there will be] no more infopackets [email] newsletter because *you* are giving up without a ... fight. You are going to let AOL and YAHOO censor email? UNBELIEVABLE!! " My response: Whoa! Now wait a minute. I didn't say I was giving up! If you read the previous article closely enough, I provided two viable alternatives in order to continue to receive our newsletter if you're an AOL or Yahoo user. To recap, you can either: a) ... (view more)

Two years ago, I started up a blog to document my adventures in freeware. Unfortunately, I later discovered that my blog host didn't allow me to store any images on my site. The reasoning was that images can eat up a lot of bandwidth, and bandwidth ... costs money. So (for example): if 100 people came to visit my site and they all viewed a picture that was 50k in size, that would eat up (100 x 50) = 5000k, or 5 megabytes in bandwidth. Obviously this isn't an issue if you're a small-time blogger like myself; nonetheless, if a blog host [company] is hosting 1000 blog sites and there's 100 people ... (view more)

If you haven't already heard the buzz, AOL and Yahoo have teamed up with Goodmail Systems, and will soon be charging a "voluntary" per-email fee to bulk-mailers in order to guarantee the delivery of emails to recipients. A story at internetNews.com ... summed it up nicely (posted February 9th, 2006): " ... Companies that have buttered their bread by sending free e-mail via AOL and Yahoo will soon have the option to pay to ensure their messages arrive at their target destinations. AOL in the coming months will begin charging a fraction of a penny or more per message in what they ... (view more)

Since announcing the contest a few weeks ago, I received several letters from Infopackets Readers telling me why they wanted to win a premium pbwiki website. To recap: " PBwiki stands for 'Peanut Butter Wiki' [because it's as easy to set up website ... as making] a peanut butter sandwich! Wikis are easy-to-use web pages that let you collaborate online and share information; [with a PBwiki website, you can] run a project at work, plan a trip with your friends, or even save your recipes and let other people add theirs! " (Source: pbwiki.com ) The decision wasn't easy -- but after giving ... (view more)

If you've subscribed to our email newsletter, you may have noticed that the format has changed. Specifically: Infopackets.com and the Infopackets Gazette email newsletter are now spotlighting articles written by other authors. With that said: Over ... the past few weeks, I've received *many* requests from our Readers to participate in writing articles (I.E., to "Blog with Infopackets"). Unfortunately, many of the letters I received were ambiguous, which tells me that perhaps the initial request to allow individuals from our audience to "blog" was not made clear. Allow me to ... (view more)

Have you ever been tempted to create your own website online? It sure can be a lot of work! Thankfully, there are some web sites that can automate the technical aspect of starting up your own site. One such place is PBWiki.com: " PBwiki stands for ... 'Peanut Butter Wiki' [because it's as easy to set up website as making] a peanut butter sandwich! Wikis are easy-to-use web pages that let you collaborate online and share information; [with a PBwiki website, you can] run a project at work, plan a trip with your friends, or even save your recipes and let other people add theirs! " (Source ... (view more)