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Transfer 7gig-10gig files online Free

I have been testing options for how to transfer large video files from one computer to another.

This is a simple option that needs no download or setup but the files time out after a few days: https://www.sendtransfer.com/

more options:

  • Google Drive is the winner – it offers 15GB of free space: But that 15GB limit includes not only your Google Drive, but also your Gmail account (includes all messages and attachments), Google Photos and more
  • Box.com – 10GB of free storage – the free version is a bit buried but you can sign up at:  https://www.box.com/personal
  • Dropbox only offers 2GB free. But it has a robust way of syncing between machines – it can push and not just pull files. It also allows sharing via an instantly-generated URL, you don’t have to share using their system but you can do that also.
  • OneDrive (by Microsoft) includes a free tier that offers 5GB of file storage
  • iCloud Files: 5GB free. add users to a file via their email, phone, etc. You can’t copy a URL and send like Dropbox (I usually prefer that method since you have easier control over revoking access by just moving the file around)
  • Firefox Send: up to 2.5gig free with end-to-end encryption and a link that automatically expires
  • SFTP is very cost-effective but requires some extra steps to set up.
  • NAS – also alot more setup but great flexibility and lots of storage for heavy users. (Synology DiskStation, QNAP TS-251B, Drobo, Etc.)

Other notes: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-send-large-files-for-free/

I like this detailed how-to on using Google Drive or OneDrive or Dropbox: https://m.wikihow.com/Send-Large-Files-to-Another-Computer-Using-the-Internet

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Braintree cancels $50,000 “Ignition” promotion

Braintree is no longer offering their fee-free $50,000 promotion. They called it “Ignition” and it let any new account process the first $50,000 without any fees — no 2.9%+$.30 standard transaction fees. Braintree is a full-stack payments platform that makes it easy to accept payments in your app or website.

Their blog post announcing the offer is still up and is very confusing. Their FAQ doesn’t mention the change.

I even see ads still being run by 3rd party vendors:

Here is the announcement mentioned the end of this offer to waive processing fees from Braintree via twitter:

and their original blog post from 2014 introducing this offer: https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/ignition-first-50k-on-us/

Today we’re launching our Ignition program, waiving the fees on the first $50,000 in processing for any U.S.-based startup … you don’t have to sign any contracts or make any commitments.

Braintree offers a good product that is easy to integrate with Gravity Forms, WooCommerce and many other payment systems. But their communication on this issue is lacking.

Update: from the support team:

The stoppage of the promotion was not an issue / error. Braintree stopped offering the Ignition Promotion on November 2016 and the blog post you mentioned is from 2014….Braintree needs to cover costs associated with the service we provide – for this reason, we no longer offer the Ignition Promotion or any kind of free processing limit or free processing period….
Merchants that were onboarded on the Ignition promotion and haven’t reached the full promotional usage amount will still be credited back for the processing fees until they reach the promotional limit they were onboarded with.

Our standard pricing is 2.90% + $0.30 per transaction. For verified charitable 501(c)(3) organizations, pricing is 2.20% + $0.30 per transaction for Visa, Mastercard, Discover, JCB and Diners Clubs cards, as well as Venmo and digital wallets, and 3.25% + $0.30 per transaction for American Express cards.

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How to set up free domain redirect using HTTPS

Nowadays it’s common practice to add SSL to even the simplest site. Google.com and many browsers are prominently featuring “not secure” messages and hint that they will make these message more prominent over time.

It’s easy to redirect one domain to another but the tricky part is if you already are using HTTPS and you just want to stop using your domain and forward it to another domain — you can’t use the basic “domain redirect” services from common domain registrars like GoDaddy or Namecheap.

The domain forward will work for HTTP but not for HTTPS. You will either get an error message saying the site is not secure or your HTTPS domain won’t load at all.

The solution is to set up full hosting and add an SSL certificate and then set up the redirect. Got other solutions in mind? please leave a comment below.

Common Redirects:

  • 301, “Moved Permanently”—recommended for SEO
  • 302, “Found” or “Moved Temporarily”
  • Meta Refresh
redirect via Namecheap

redirect via GoDaddy
Privacy error

Posted in Web Design | 1 Response

Web designers toolkit: server monitoring

MONITOR SERVER UPTIME/DOWNTIME

Downtime Monitoring by Jetpack
free, every five minutes

http://site24x7.com
I have been using this service for many years. Can pay for just a limited number of sms messages on an otherwise free account. Or pay for a full suite of other monitoring tools for apps. Their interface gets a bit confusing since they have added so many options over the years.

http://aremysitesup.com
They have an iPhone app with push notification that can alert you to your site’s status.

http://www.SiteUpAlert.com
Allows for searching for a particular string of text on a page. great for looking for updates.

http://www.VisiStat.com
server uptime is only one small feature of their analytics package.

http://UptimeRobot.com
good free option, 50 monitors, log for 2 months, 5 minute monitoring intervals

 

updated for 2018

Posted in Web Design | 1 Response

How to screenshot on Mac and iOS 11 – no software needed

How to take a MacOS screenshot
Two options:  capture entire screen or just a portion of it.

Where will the screenshot be?

Usually the screenshot is automatically saved to your desktop but if you installed Dropbox you may have a “Screenshots” folder in your Dropbox that files will appear in. Also, your screenshots may appear in your downloads folder.

How to take a screenshot of your entire screen

screenshot 3 full screen.JPG

  • Press Shift-Command (⌘) 3

How to take a screenshot of a selected portion of your screen

screenshot 4 all.JPG

  • Press Shift-Command-4. The pointer changes to a crosshair.
  • Move the crosshair to where you want to start the screenshot, then drag to select an area. (tip:  hold Option. Shift or Space to modify the way the selection moves.)
  • When you’ve selected the area you want, release your mouse or trackpad button. To cancel, press the Esc (Escape) key before you release the button.

crosshair: corsshairs.jpg

How to take a screenshot of a window

Press Shift-Command (⌘) 4 and note that your pointer changes to a crosshair. Press the Space bar and pointer changes to a camera. Move the cursoe over a window to highlight it. Click your mouse button to finish.

iOS 11 and screenshots

October 2017: taking a screenshot is just a bit different than in previous versions of iOS. Users initiate by pressing two buttons — they will still see the screen flash, but beyond that, you have many new editing options.

There is a new Screenshots album, and Screenshots floating interface.

Additionally, when you take a new screenshot (or series of screenshots in a short period of time), the snap minimizes itself in the bottom left corner of the screen. From here, you have four options:

  • swipe it off-screen to save it to your Photos
  • Leave it alone, and the thumbnail will simply be in Photos library after a few seconds
  • long-press on the thumbnail to send it as-is via the “Share Sheet”
  • tap on the thumbnail to enter Markup mode (edit mode)   — without saving it to your Photos library. (this is the most useful feature of the floating interface)

This video shows how to markup a screenshot:

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WordPress Popover options and ways to make them less annoying

I have many clients who find that their email list is their most important marketing tool. If someone allows you to message then in their email inbox you have a great opportunity to communicate your ongoing brand messages.

The most sophisticated solution requires a member log-in system so the website can know who has signed up already. That’s what NYTimes has, for example. Without a login, the system can’t check the Mailchimp (or whatever) list and see who subscribed because WordPress doesn’t know the email address of the person who is currently visiting the site.

WHO CLICKED A LINK IN NEWSLETTER?
A partial solution is to add a special link in your email newsletter so when someone clicks a link from the newsletter they don’t get the “email wall”.

The Dreaded Email Wall and How to Make it Less Annoying

Another popular solution is to set up a “wall” where users have to give their email to read your content. Sometimes this “wall” can be “leaky” in the sense that you are not strictly requiring signup so users can just “close” the request to sign up. The strongest from of a “wall” is a “popover” where the browser screen dims and a message and signup form appear in the middle of the screen. This completely interrupts the users flow of reading your content and many users hate that interruption. But it can be effective. The name differentiates it from a “popup” which refers to how a ling can open a whole separate browser window/tab.

There are many ways to improve the way an email wall gets the users attention. Of course you want the wall to remember the user’s action from page to page so they don’t get asked over and over again. But another option is simple to have the popover appear at the bottom of the page – not when the page  first loads. Here’s a setting option for the free (but outdated) ITRO Popup Plugin that shows a pixel offset – a user has to scroll that far down a page to see the popover:

itro-Screen Shot 2015-04-28 at 5.30.41 PM

I also suggest if you use this option you set display mode to be once per 30 days   or something like that – so if someone “closes” it the popover won’t come back.

I recommend GetSiteControl: it offers many options for when to trigger the display of a popover :

  1. Based on rules and behavior triggers (location, language, scroll depth, time on page, exit intent, and other parameters.)
  2. Upon click on a page button, link, or image (on selected page elements.)
  3. Upon click on the popup button (based on the way visitors interact with your other popups)

I have also used this more sophisticated plugin: PIPPITY

To try it out is not free – it is @$50 (or google around for coupons) – but it offers some nice features. They do offer a demo mode on their site so you can test it to some degree before buying.


Not sure if you can make the text look like anything or just work within their templates.

pippity

Some features

  • popup trigger only at the end of an article, once the reader has read some content
  • popup appears after a certain number of pageviews
  • Have popup appear only on article pages (posts)
  • Create multiple popup profiles – view and manage them from an easy to use dashboard.
  • includes analytics for each popover
  • Settings require a few clicks in a kind of ‘wizard’ and would be simpler laid out in one form but overall I like this tool

See these hovers for an explanation of what it can do:

pippity-hovers

 

 

 

SCROLL TRIGGERED BOXES

There are other kinds of notifications – ones that appear at the end of a page and may slide in from the side. These are less intrusive than a “popover”. Also called “toasters” since they can pop up from the bottom of the screen.

this looks like a nice simple option: https://wordpress.org/plugins/scroll-triggered-boxes/screenshots/
UPDATE: Scroll Triggered Boxes is now Boxzilla

DEMO:
(their site is no longer working at http://wecandothatforyou.com/scroll/)

See more:

 

ANNOUNCEMENT BARS

Another way to be less intrusive is to use an announcement bar at the top of the page instead of a popover.

All-IN-ONE TOOLS

Popup_Popover,-Embedded,-Top-Bar,-Scroll-Box-mailchimp-options

  1. MailMunch offers all 4 types of signup forms (Popup/Popover, Embedded, Top Bar, Scroll Box) and includes free and paid version (plugin links). Free version available.
  2. Launch Effect is a WordPress landing page theme with built in MailChimp integration.
  3. AddThis (free) or GetSiteControl  (free trial or starts at $7/mo): I mention them above but it’s worth repeating since they really have a fully-featured set of tools.

OTHER PAYMENT-BASED OPTIONS

  1. There are some other interesting options at this link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/paywall
  2. But most of them are related to people paying $ for articles – not for requiring email signup. Like this one:
    https://wordpress.org/plugins/leaky-paywall-article-countdown-nag/
    A “leaky” pay wall is basically what NTtimes does.
  3. This gives other options for the paywall – https://wordpress.org/plugins/bitwall/
    1. Pay to access content.
    2. Tweet to unlock access.
    3. Opt in to view an ad before consuming content.
  4. This is similar: https://premium.wpmudev.org/project/pay-with-a-like/
  5. Another fully featured payment system: https://zeen101.com
  6. And another non-free, fully featured landing page and “LeadBox” creation tool: leadpages.net
Posted in Web Design, WordPress | Leave a comment

Gravity forms – Notification Issues

Having email Notification issues with Gravity Forms?

It can be hard to find a root cause since many issues can be behind notifications not being sent or received, and perhaps you are experiencing an issue that is less common and will require the support of your server administrator to solve.

One possible solution: there is a issue related with notifications being received when using an email in the domain of Yahoo or AOL in the from address. This isn’t due to an issue with Gravity Forms or your server, it is due to how these providers have configured their domains DMARC records.

  new-yahoo-logo

The problem here is related to a new DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance) “reject” policy advertised by Yahoo to third-party email servers.

With the new policy, when a Yahoo user sends an email to a mailing list, the list’s server distributes that message to all subscribers, changing the headers and breaking DMARC validation. List subscribers with email accounts on servers that perform DMARC checks, such as Gmail, Hotmail (Outlook.com), Comcast or Yahoo itself, will reject the original message and respond back to the list with automated DMARC error messages.

So users of Gmail, Hotmail and other DMARC-enabled providers will not only fail to receive messages sent to the mailing list by Yahoo users, but will flood the list with bounce messages, risking to be bounced off the list themselves.

Laura Tessmer Atkins is a client of mine and  co-founder of email anti-spam consultancy firm Word to the Wise based in Palo Alto, California, also confirmed and documented the issue in a blog post. She believes that Yahoo began advertising a “reject” policy because of a recent attack against Yahoo users that involved attackers compromising yahoo.com email accounts and sending unauthorized emails to their contacts.

aol_logo1

AOL imposed a stricter email-validation process aimed at stamping down a “spoofing” attack that plagued users a couple years ago. The policy change makes it easy for mailbox providers to determine which emails are fakes, but the situation is not always so obvious for email users.

Following a similar move by Yahoo, AOL changed its DMARC policy to “reject,” meaning that a line of text has been added to its DNS record instructing mailbox providers to reject any email allegedly associated with an AOL domain that didn’t originate from an AOL server. Although the header of a spoofed email has been specially crafted to make it appear the message originated from a specific AOL email address, it in fact never crosses AOL’s servers.

The change to the email authentication system came after days of users complaining of emails that appear to originate from AOL users that contain links to sites with often nefarious intentions such as spreading malware or peddling diet pills.

  • For more information on the Yahoo domain issue click here.
  • For more info on the AOL domain issue click here.
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Best third party Gravity Forms plugins

First make sure to review the mostly free plugins in the WordPress directory:

Start with the list of free add-ons by the people who make GF (with a dev license of GF): gravityforms.com/add-ons

…and their directory of 3rd party plugins: gravityhelp.com/other-resources

Gravity Perks
wide variety of add-ons including “Pay Per Word”; “Unique ID”; “Conditional Logic Dates”; “eCommerce Fields for Tax, Discounts, and Subtotal fields.”
http://gravitywiz.com

Gravity+
GravityPlus started with a stripe plugin (but now that is free from GF with a GF dev license). But they have added other useful plugins like “Gravity Forms Utility” (that one is free) and a new Salesforce integration tool. Also a “Gravity Forms User Registration Enhanced” plugin that allows users to both edit as well as add their accounts – so they don’t have to go into the WordPress admin area.
https://gravityplus.pro

GravityView
This tool lets you show and sort entries on the front end of your website.
https://gravityview.co
Lots of great demos like an Issue Tracker 

Gravity Forms Import Entries
Like the tile says – this fills in the one missing feature of the default Gravity forms import/export page (you can already import and export forms but by default only export entries).
https://gravityview.co/extensions/gravity-forms-entry-importer

GravityPDF
Automatically generate, email and download PDF documents: free with the option to pay for custom integrations like having Gravity Forms ifll in a preexisting PDF that you alredy have – like a Gift Certificate for example.
https://gravitypdf.com

GFchart
Chart and count information captured via Gravity Forms.
https://gfchart.com

GravityFlow
Feedback Loops & Process Branching; workflow steps turn forms into business processes.
https://gravityflow.io

Gravity Forms Image Choices: images as choices for Radio Buttons or Checkboxes (good for products too, both for product variations and for showing single images for products on order forms).
https://jetsloth.com/gravity-forms-image-choices

Posted in Product Reviews, WordPress | 2 Responses

How to use WordPress visual mode and text mode to write HTML

The WordPress visual mode and text mode can be a great shortcut for producing basic HTML.

This can be useful for adding links and other formatting to plain text widgets, announcement bars, excerpts or other places in WordPress that don’t support rich text formatting.

Steps:

  • Start a new post (or page)
  • Make sure you are in “Visual” mode
  • Add bold, italic, links or any other formatting
  • Switch to “text” mode to view the HTML – you can then copy and paste this code elsewhere
  • Once you are done remember to delete that post – otherwise you will end up with many messy “drafts”

 

Here’s a video with a brief demo:

Posted in WordPress | 1 Response

How to remove / deactivate buy button on WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the best eCommerce plugin for WordPress. All workflows are processed smoothly from backend to frontend. My team and I are able to adapt it to match the customized needs of my clients. Users generally find it easy to use.

But sometimes stores want to disable the purchase process (remove the cart and the buy button from the product page) — for a variety of scenarios:

  • I was migrating a site from one server to another and wanted to make sure no orders were “trapped” on the old server once I edited the DNS records to point to the new server.
  • For other kinds of test environments or site copies that might be seen in limited scenarios or edge cases.
  • Some stores  just want to display their products, as a display catalog and not for purchasing.  

You can use this code to remove the buy button from the product page:

remove_action( 'woocommerce_after_shop_loop_item', 'woocommerce_template_loop_add_to_cart' );
remove_action( 'woocommerce_single_product_summary', 'woocommerce_template_single_add_to_cart', 30 );

Place the code above in functions.php of your active theme.

Here’s a screenshot:

Before:

After:

This may not work with every theme and every setup. Learn more and see more complex code options at wordpress.stackexchange.com 

Posted in WordPress, WordPress WooCommerce | Leave a comment
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