Pat Howe's Blog

Avoiding the spam filters for legitimate email campaigns

Sending a marketing campaign by email is very easy, very cheap and a very effective method of communicating your message. However, because the sending of unsolicited email (spam) has been so rife in the past, some legitimate email campaigns can get lost in a spam filter. So what is there to help? In this article we have twelve tips for you to help get your email campaigns to the intended recipient’s inbox. Double opt-in subscribersIf your mailing list is derived from people signing up to your newsletter online then always

Straightening images using Photoshop

Something that I use Photoshop for quite often is to straighten up wonky images. Most pictures don’t really need straightening but sometimes they look silly or need to be straight to fit in with another part of a design. In this article I will show you show to straighten an image using Photoshop. It involves a bit of rotation and a bit of cropping but is quite simple and effective. Let’s get started. First you need to open your image in Photoshop. I always work on copies so if you

Finding a value in a range using Microsoft Excel functions

Following on from my other Microsoft Excel articles, this one is devoted to looking up information from within a range of values such as a table of data but using the functions that Excel provides. We will look at four functions used for finding operations within Excel; VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, MATCH and INDEX. First we will have an explanation of each and then walk through some examples of their usage. Finally in this article I will explain how to look up a value in a table based on multiple criteria using

Update on new live domains extensions and those coming up

This is the latest in my domain name availability updates and I have changed the format slightly so all domains that are being considered for use are shown separately from those that are now live and available to purchase. Since my last update early in August, there have been 38 new domain extensions released for general availability (GA). These are: .accountants, .bio, .care, .cash, .church, .claims, .clinic, .cologne, .cooking, .country, .credit, .creditcard, .dental, .digital, .direct, .discount, .finance, .fishing, .fitness, .fund, .furniture, .guide, .horse, .host, .insure, .investments, .koeln, .life, .loans, .london,

Rework on My Web Minder and Pat Howe websites

We have been moving things around a bit over the years between several of our business websites and now, after 5 years of Pat Howe Web Solutions and My Web Minder being separate websites, we’ve merged them back together again. Previously, design and development work was handled by Pat Howe Web Solutions and all the other web-related services were handled through My Web Minder. Now My Web Minder serves as one place to get all web-related services including design and development work and only the news and articles remain on

Final update on email scams in 2014

I have decided today to close off the special report on email scams in 2014. It has been going for nearly 6 months and most of the scam emails I receive have already been captured on that page. It is time to now switch on my anti-spam software and junk mail filter at the mail server so that I won’t get so many in my mailbox. I created the report to catalogue the different ways that scammers try to catch you out either to click a link to a dodgy

Using cell reference names and named ranges in Microsoft Excel

Everyone who uses Excel and that has written a formula (you might think that must be everyone but there are some people who just use Excel for sorting rows of data) will have used the row and column reference at some point (i.e. A1 or R1C1) or a cell range (A1:C2 or R1C1:R3C2). Anyone that has gone back to their workbook after a long time to make modifications or anyone that has to modify or decipher someone else’s workbook will curse those row and column references. So what can you

Update on the new top level domains released for general availability

Six new top level domains were released to buy now under general availability today (August 6); .actor, .fail, .financial, .limited, .rocks and .wtf. In all, 31 domains have gone live (and are therefore available to buy now) since my last update just over a month ago. Excluding those released today the newly available domains are; .associates, .bar, .blackfriday, .capital, .christmas, .co.com, .consulting, .engineering, .exchange, .fish, .gripe, .kaufen, .lease, .media, .moda, .pictures, .pub, .reisen, .report, .rest, .services, .town, .toys, .university and .vision. In addition, there were 28 new domain name extensions

Dealing with hard drive failure, data recovery and disposal

It is far better to protect your data against loss than it is to rely on others to be able to recover your data for you and not only because of the cost implication. If you have to send your drive away then it might go missing in transit, it might not be recoverable or it might fall into the wrong hands. You cannot know when your disk drive will fail and each disk drive will usually only have a lifespan of 3 to 5 years. If you back up

Simple steps for replacing your Windows 8.1 system disk with a bigger drive

I thought I would upgrade the hard drive of my son’s Windows 8.1 PC. A simple task on Windows 7 but not so on Windows 8.1. I did a quick search on the internet but most things pointed to purchasing some software or referred to Windows 7 articles. I thought to myself that surely Microsoft wouldn’t have dumped the backup and restore feature that made this task so simple. After a bit of hunting around in the Control Panel, it looks as if they have just changed the names of

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