Hosted Exchange is a viable option for those individuals and freelancers that want to harness the power of an Exchange server but don’t want to pay for a full server license, buy the appropriate hardware and deal with the maintenance. Much like the web hosting industry where a company bundles many customers on a single web server, Hosted Exchange is a cost-effective option for individuals. The Exchange service provider bundles many customer mailboxes on a single Exchange server for a monthly or yearly fee.

A hosted Exchange plan typically costs between $10 and 20 USD per month. That cost typically includes a centralized e-mail server that stores email, contacts, appointments, notes, and tasks all in one place. You can have this information synchronized (via Direct Push synchronization) with multiple mobile devices, as well as your Outlook client or directly through an Outlook-esque web interface. When traveling as a freelancer, this is an especially nice feature and the increase in mobile productivity may be worth the price all by itself.

When working with on projects with external clients, you might also benefit from Sharepoint capabilities that are often bundled with hosted exchange. SharePoint combines a centralized document repository with collaboration, project tracking, and content management tools. Using SharePoint, you can easily and efficiently manage projects and enhance the flow of communication in your business.

Improve the “Linkability” of your Content
Having “static” web pages, e.g. brochure-style or storefront pages, are definitely useful for product information. But to optimize a site for social media, we need to increase the frequency and linkability of the content. My favorite method is to add a more-personal blog that shows your personality and thoughtfulness about a particular topic area. Other types of content, like white papers or aggregated selected links to related articles, are also quite useful for potential readers. Remember, the idea is to create something valuable beyond your core product offering to keep potential customers coming back.

Enable Easier Bookmarking and Sharing
Once a reader thinks your content is worth sharing, make the process as easy as possible for them! Adding website features like ReTweet and ShareThis buttons are a great way to allow your users to spread your content via their preferred channels. I also like to make sure each page has concise meta tag data (Title, Description, etc), because it will be easier for places like Facebook to import and show pertinent information about your link. As mentioned before, make sure your content is valuable and interesting because buttons-alone cannot get people to share your work.

Encourage Inbound Links
Inbound links from other blogs and websites are crucial to enhancing your search optimization and overall rankings. Listing trackbacks with each article or post will entice users to link to your site in the hopes that you will reciprocate a link. However, be aware of trackbacks from unrelated, spammy blogs or sites that are merely republishing your content without permission. For these reasons, I like to approve trackbacks manually before allowing them to enter the comments.

Help Your Content Travel
Building multiple channels of distribution for content can be a very effective way to gain exposure and attract links. Use Email newsletters, RSS subscribers, Facebook status updates, Twitter updates, content syndication, video syndication with YouTube, etc can all improve your social reach. With the number of possible channels on the web increasing, you need to make sure to stay current with popular services in the industry

Encourage Video Sharing
Online video is a growing medium, and in my opinion a rich and effective channel for entertaining, informing, or just getting a message across. If you have the resources to create compelling video content, please give it a shot. Since distribution is VERY inexpensive, especially with YouTube and embedding capabilities, you can potential receive a high return on your efforts. Encourage and embrace others who republish your videos.

Participate in Conversations
Let’s say you have a decent social presence – your Facebook page has fans, your blog is receiving comments, people are contacting you through your site. Take the time to connect one-to-one with these active readers, they’re often your best customers! Foster dialog in whatever public forums you have, but also think about dropping a quick email or note in private to create a more personalized relationship. Show your true passion for the topic at hand. You just might be connecting with a top influencer or champion of your service.

Get to Know Your Audience
As long as you understand your subject matter and that community’s interests, you’ll be able to set yourself for successful social media connections. Don’t stray too far from your niche, leverage the latest tools and industry trends, and try to stay focused on content that will drive interest in your expertise.

Thanks for taking a look at our thoughts! What tips for social media marketing and optimization would you add?

This second part will cover building a modal window and coding its behavior. If you don’t know what I already explained, please go back to the first article here and come back once you finish that one. However, if XHTML, CSS and jQuery are your friends, you may pick things up as we go, so just go ahead and read this part of the tutorial.

Let me remind you the concept we described in the previous article. We have a horizontal menu with a few categories. Each category has multiple subcategories and each such subcategory may contain a random number of products. For easier and faster movement of users thorough the site, we won’t reload the page once a subcategory is clicked. Instead, we will display all products in a modal window.

Here’s a screenshot of the menu and one simple modal window.

How does the modal work?

Once someone clicks a subcategory link, the modal window will be displayed and the products will show up. The modal will close when products are clicked, and the browser is targeted to a new page, when the user clicks the close button or when the overlay is clicked. It isn’t that hard is it?

The main issue is that we need different content in the modal window. Each subcategory will have its own products and we need to find out which products to display. We will do this with the help of jQuery as you’ll find out in just a few minutes.

But first, lets get to coding the structure and design of the modal window. First of all, we have the overlay mask, which will be an empty div. We need to make sure the overlay mask will be on top of all site content but beneath the modal window, so we will use z-index:1100 for modal content and z-index:1000 for the overlay. The overlay won’t be displayed unless a subcategory is clicked, so display:none is also mandatory. You should also choose your favorite color for the overlay, and set it absolutely to top left 0 pixels.

<div id="overlay-mask"> &nbsp; </div>

#overlay-mask {
	display:none;
	z-index:1000;
	background-color:#333;
	position:absolute;
	top:0;
	left:0;
	}

The modal window will be something like this. An outer div to hold everything in place, another inner div to hold the products, and a link that will server as a close modal window button. Because we want the button to span all the way, we had to use an outer div for the content of the modal, so that’s why there’s 2 divs and not just one.

<div id="overlay-content" class="all-rounded">
 
	<div>
		<a href="http://www.ultimatewasher.com" target="_new" class="thumb"><img src="images/wash1.jpg" width="102" height="102" alt="Wash1" /><span>First thumb</span></a>
 
		<a href="http://www.city-rentals.ca" target="_new" class="thumb"><img src="images/wash2.jpg" width="102" height="102" alt="Wash2" /><span>Second</span></a>
 
		<a href="http://www.tonsoftools.com" target="_new" class="thumb"><img src="images/wash3.jpg" width="102" height="102" alt="Wash3" /><span>Third</span></a>
 
		<a href="http://www.carriergenerators.com" target="_new" class="thumb last"><img src="images/wash4.jpg" width="102" height="102" alt="Wash4" /><span>Fourth</span></a>
 
	</div>
 
	<a class="close bottom-rounded">Click to close</a>
 
</div>

As you see, each product is in fact a link containing a product thumbnail and some text. Lets see how we style them. the purpose of the tutorial is creating the modal window, not styling it, so the style is really basic, especially if you take out the rounded corners.

#overlay-content {
	width:500px;
	}
 
#overlay-content div {
	width:450px;
	padding:25px;
	padding-bottom:10px;
	}
 
#overlay-content a.close {
	display:block;
	padding:0px;
	border-top:1px solid #333;
	font-size:15px;
	line-height:25px;
	height:25px;
	text-align:center;
	}
 
#overlay-content a.thumb {
	display:block;
	width:102px;
	height:122px;
	padding:0px;
	margin:0px 14px 0px 0px;
	float:left;
	text-decoration:none;
	}
 
#overlay-content a.thumb img {
	display:block;
	width:102px;
	height:102px;
	padding:0px;
	border:0px;
	}
 
#overlay-content a.thumb span {
	display:block;
	width:102px;
	height:20px;
	padding:0px;
	text-align:center;
	color:#999;
	}
 
#overlay-content a.last {
	margin-right:0px;
	}
 
#overlay-content div {
	overflow:auto;
	}

The first two lines are just setting the dimensions of the modal window, for the purpose of a modal window that contains four products, all on the same line. The anchor tag with the “close” class is in fact the button that will be displayed in the bottom of the modal that will be used to close to modal window if needed.

The thumb classed anchor will contain the image and the text description contained in a span tag. As all thumbnails have a small right margin, we need the additional last class to remove the right margin from the last product in the modal. The overflow is used to cancel the collapsing of the inner div that contains only floating elements.

We finished with structure and styling, so lets move on to jQuery coding. Take a look at the code in its entirety and try to understand it. The explanations will follow it just below.

var opacity = '0.8'; // can be up to 1
 
$('a[name=modal]').removeAttr('href'); 	//javascript on, no need to redirect to a link here
$('a[name=modal]').click(function ()
	{
	var maskHeight = $(document).height();
	var maskWidth = $(document).width();
	var windowHeight = $(window).height();
	var windowWidth = $(window).width();
	bvar contentWidth = $('#overlay-content').width(); // width
	bvar contentHeight = $('#overlay-content').height(); // and height of content area
 
	//Set height and width to mask to fill up the whole screen
	$('#overlay-mask').css({'width':maskWidth,'height':maskHeight});
	b$('#overlay-mask').css('opacity',opacity);
	$('#overlay-mask').css('display','block');</p> <p>
 
	// put the overlay content area in the center of the window
	$('#overlay-content').css('display','block');
	$('#overlay-content').css('left',(windowWidth-contentWidth)/2);
	b$('#overlay-content').css('top',(windowHeight-contentHeight)/2);
	});
 
	// move overlay content to center of the window
$(window).resize(function ()
	{
	var maskHeight = $(document).height();
	var maskWidth = $(window).width();
	var windowHeight = $(window).height();
	var windowWidth = $(window).width();
	var contentWidth = $('#overlay-content').width(); // width
	var contentHeight = $('#overlay-content').height(); // and height of content area
 
	//Set height and width to mask to fill up the whole screen
	$('#overlay-mask').css({'width':maskWidth,'height':maskHeight});
	$('#overlay-content').css({'left':(windowWidth-contentWidth)/2});
	$('#overlay-content').css({'top':(windowHeight-contentHeight)/2});
	});
 
var $scrollingDiv = $("#overlay-content");
$(window).scroll(function()
	{
	$scrollingDiv.stop().animate({"marginTop": ($(window).scrollTop()) + "px"}, "fast" );
	});
 
$('#overlay-mask').click(function ()
	{
	$('#overlay-mask').css('display','none');
	$('#overlay-content').css('display','none');
	});
 
$('.close').click(function ()
	{
	$('#overlay-mask').css('display','none');
	$('#overlay-content').css('display','none');
	});

The opacity variable will set the overlays opacity. It would look really odd with a non transparent overlay, so perhaps anything below .8 will do just fine. Except if you have it completely transparent when there isn’t going to be any overlay.

We find all anchor tags that has “modal” as name, and remove their href attribute, as we don’t want to move to another page before seeing the overlay, don’t we?

Then we have the on click behavior. As soon as an anchor link that has an attached modal window is clicked, we get the sizes of the document as well as those of the window. We also check out the width and height of the content inside the modal window.

Next, we set the width and height of the overlay mask using css attributes. We want the overlay to span across the entire page, right? We then set its opacity and make it appear in the page by changing its display property from none (set in the css) to block. We do the same with the content div, and also put it in the center of the browser window.

We also have a resize behavior, which will be triggered if you resize the browser after the page has loaded. If that happens, we check out the dimensions of the document and browser as well, and reset the content window in the center of the page. In the same time, we modify the width and height of the overlay so that it matches the changes triggered by resizing the browser.

If the page has a scrollbar and we scroll either up or down, we use the scroll jQuery trigger to animate the modal back to the center of the page. The stop function there before the animation will make sure that older animations will be stopped if the scroll is used continuously or with small pauses.

Finally, once the overlay mask or close button is clicked, we need to close the modal window, and the last two lines of code do just that.

One small, but real problem!

We haven’t taken in consideration the most important aspect. Each time we load the modal window the content needs to be different. The above code only works for the same content in the modal window such as a contact form, and we need to fix this issue.

First of all, we remove content from the overlay-content inner div and leave it empty. This div will auto-populate with proper content when a subcategory is clicked. Next, we add rel attributes to modal anchor links (those that were named “modal”). We will use unique rel attributes to identify the content we need to load.

We will also add divs that have classes corresponding to each rel attribute, which will contain the content we will load on click. We have to make this divs hidden so they don’t pop up god know where inside your site’s layout. Simple right? But how do we do this via jQuery? Even simpler, using only three lines of code.

Once a modal anchor is clicked we identify its rel attribute, get the html contents of the div that has the same class name as the rel attribute, then populate the inner div in the overlay content with the html content we found. Cool! Here’s the code for that, which we add just below the .click function.

var rel = $(this).attr('rel');
var modal_content = $('.'+rel).html();
$('#overlay-content div').html(modal_content);

And we’re done. You can check out the demo over here, or perhaps you’d like the source code? If so, you can download the source codes for the first part, which is just the sliding menu from here, or if you want the real deal you can get full source codes for modal window too from here.

Seems like everyone is a blogger these days, publishing articles on personal or freelance business blogs, updating statuses on twitter – even commenting on previously written articles. Face it, we’re blogging. But how can we stand out in a sea of keyboard happy drones? Repent from these sins and maybe the blog Gods will forgive you.

1. Pride
You can’t do it on your own, or maybe you can; don’t get me wrong, self belief is a good thing. But when you are starting a blog, one of the fastest ways to increase traffic is to partner up with other bloggers. Link exchange, link backs, shared links, they all work; find one that’s compatible with your niche then blog happy.

2. Envy
All blogs are not created equal, there is never going to be another gossip blog like Perez Hilton’s. Many have tried, but it’s still not the same. The faster you realize that you can’t imitate other successful blogs, the sooner your blog will become successful. So go out there and do your own thing, in fact look at what everyone is doing and do the exact opposite; you’ll be surprised with the results.

3. Gluttony
You can’t have all the followers, the twitter traffic machine , spamming, following everybody with the hopes they follow you back, all these are no no’s. These aren’t genuine connections, they are really not interested in what you have to say.

4. Lust
The lust for success and money from blogging. Honestly, there is no money in blogging; you can have a successful blog but I don’t see it bringing you any riches. If there is someone out there making millions from blogging please contact me!! I know there are blogs out there bringing in more than what my condo costs in day, but they just got simply lucky. 1 out of every 10,000 blogs get lucky and the other 9,999?? Well half of them fade to obscurity, and the other half are the true bloggers; still producing great content and informing and entertaining their readers all over the world..from the bedroom to the cubicle.

5. Anger
Don’t start a blog for a sake of hate, a blog solely created to lash out at someone or a group of people will eventually die. It becomes annoying because it’s the same thing over and over again. Protesting is different.

6. Greed
Take everything a step at a time. Have you ever been to those blogs with a sidebar filled with ‘Advertise Here’. Walk before you run, get the traffic before you start putting ad space up on your site. And go easy on the google ads, you don’t want your blog looking like the classifieds.

7. Sloth
Unnecessary widgets and apps on your blog makes it look unattractive and over crowded, if you don’t want any visitors to your site leave it there or put them up.

Remember always keep it short and sweet, don’t be the drunkard at the bar that won’t stop talking.

While compiling a proposal for internet marketing consulting, I knew I had a couple excel reports from a previous job that could be repurposed for this project. Unfortunately, I hadn’t opened the documents in a couple years and couldn’t remember or find the password. Obviously, contacting my previous company for the key was not an option.

Maybe Microsoft can offer an online service to securely store user passwords for documents? I’d love the ability to submit a “forgot password” request and receive a new one via email, much like every online login service in the industry. Oh well, until then we have to use utilities and cracks to access our forgotten files.

I ended up finding a good solution with step-by-step details and a free download for excel password recovery at Petri IT Knowledgebase. Their guide simply shows you how to use the utility’s two available options for recovery, and didn’t take more than a few minutes to complete. Give it a try if you ever find yourself in a similar (embarrassing) predicament as mine.

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