In the fields of observation, chance favors the prepared mind…

-- Louis Pasteur, 1854

In the summer of 1995, while exploring the outer peripheries of Macworld Boston’s smallest exhibit hall, I spotted Charlie Jackson sitting all alone at a very modest 8’ skirted table. A few years prior, Charlie had sold his beloved Silicon Beach software company for a handsome profit, and he had recently bank-rolled Wired Magazine.

I approached Charlie and asked him what he was up to. He explained that he was helping his former employee, Jonathan Gay, start a new software company, called Future Wave. Jonathan was working on a new drawing program. I wondered out loud if the world was clamoring for another drawing program. He agreed, and then he added, “It also has a cool animation feature. Do you think vector-based animations might be useful for Internet content delivery?” Absolutely!

Before I left, Charlie had me signed up as a beta-tester for their little drawing program. The program was called “Smart-Sketch”, which evolved into “Future Splash” and eventually became the product we now know as “Flash”.

The Point?

I found something special that day, because I was looking for something special…So, I encourage you to live each day looking, with your eyes and mind open to the possibilities and opportunities that God presents! -- SL

Whenever I sign-up a new web client, sooner or later they get the "Digital Garden" talk. It's a metaphor, to explain the importance of keeping your site current. In case you've missed this talk, here it is...

The Digital Garden

A web site is an investment. Done well, it is a powerful marketing tool, tirelessly promoting your business 24/7.

On the other hand, if it is hastily conceived or poorly executed, it can actually work against you, turning off potential customers.

It is helpful to think of your website as something living; a digital garden of sorts. And like a real garden, with proper care and feeding, your website will grow and mature over time. Ignore it, however, it will wither and die over time − stale content quickly erodes the credibility and relevance of your site, and therefore the your site, truly will wither.

The gardener of a website, is its content owner, or owners – very likely this is you!

So, in order to to protect your investment, you must allocate time and resources to the care and feeding (fresh content) of your digital garden.

Here's the scenario:

These days, it is not uncommon for a user to have multiple email accounts, that they may need to access from multiple devices, such as a desktop computer, laptop and a phone. Setting it all up, to work seamlessly, can be a little tricky for the average user.

If you are a G-mail user, and there are millions of us, you are in luck! If you are not a G-mail user, you should be, especially after yo read this post. Not only does Gmail provide you will all the tools to manage multiple e-mail accounts, across multiple devices, they also provide the best SPAM filtering on the planet -- it's amazing what a bunch of smart people can accomplish with a few hundred thousand servers! ;-)

When people ask me how to manage their email, especially if they are being inundated with SPAM, my response is, "No worries, you just need to set a G-mail account to simplify your mail management." More often than not, the response I get, is something akin to the RCA dog look. You can't miss it; even over the phone!

So, in the spirit of being a good Netizen, I thought I would to make this easy for everyone, by posting some step-by-step instructions, for what I consider the ULTIMATE Email Hook-up!

I'm breaking these instructions up into three separate articles:

Part 1: Setting up G-Mail
Part 2: Setting up Outlook
Part 3: Setting up iPhone

Special thanks to my friend, Chipp Walters, for turning me onto this concept, in the first place.

Enjoy!

SL

Since e-mail has been around for a couple of decades, you might think that a primer on e-mail etiquette, is unnecessary because everyone figured this out years ago, right?. Unfortunately, that's not my experience.

While plenty has been written on this subject, over the years, what follows is my list of e-mail basics -- 13 common sense e-mail rules to live by, that will absolutely improve the effectiveness of your e-mail communication and may even keep you out of trouble...