http://forums.ernieball.com/blogs/chewie/ Ernie Ball, manufacturer of premium guitar and bass strings. Also home of MusicMan, high quality electric guitars and bass guitars. en Fri, 25 May 2012 11:45:48 GMT vBulletin 60 http://forums.ernieball.com/images/misc/rss.jpg http://forums.ernieball.com/blogs/chewie/ http://forums.ernieball.com/blogs/chewie/17-visual-voicemail-blackberries.html Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:43:42 GMT Last night I discovered a service called YouMail
http://www.youmail.com

I don't know if the new Bold's or Storm's have visual voicemail or not, so this might not apply to those. Those of you with iPhones have definitely been privileged.

In conjuction with a third party app you can manage your YouMail vmail without the need of the browser on a blackberry.

The app is called VyMail.
It will show who the voicemail is from, how long, play it, and delete it without having to call in.
VyMail can be download from:
http://www.joekrill.com/vymail/

There is an OTA install for that available too. Point your phones browser too http://www.joekrill.com/vymail/ota/

I just followed the instructions on YouMail to set up my Blackberry Pearl 8100. Basically all it does is change the phone number missed calls get forwarded to and changes the number your cell phone dials when you use your phones voicemail button. This means you're voicemail is now own the YouMail system and not as in my case AT&T's system.

Even if you don't install VyMail you can still manage your voicemail from your blackberry by pointing the browser to http://m.youmail.com

You can even have custom voicemail greeting messages for callers.
You do need to upload a copy of your phone's contacts to YouMail if you want to be able to do this. Right now my phone recognizes my callers by first name and tells them I'm unavailable.

You could though add a custom message to crazy ex-girlfriends. There are tons of pre-recorded greeting messages. Many make it so the persson calling you thinks there is a problem with their phone. You can even have it hang up after it plays the message.

Or you can just mess with your friends using this service too.

Update: 03/12/09

http://googlevoiceblog.blogspot.com/...gle-voice.html

Looks like Grand Central is now Google Voice and has all the old Grand Central features I've grown to love and now has the YouMail features like custom answers and visual voicemail

Enjoy

Update: 03/24/09

I just checked back at youmail.com and saw they have an app now for blackberries. Now visual voicemail on blackberry is almost identical in function as visual voicemail on an iphone.

go to http://m.youmail.com/ota on your blackberry to install it. ]]> Chewie http://forums.ernieball.com/blogs/chewie/17-visual-voicemail-blackberries.html http://forums.ernieball.com/blogs/chewie/13-how-use-rss-feedburner-promote-your-wordpress-blog.html Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:16:22 GMT phatduckk turned me on to feedburner, so he deserves some of the credit here.

Anyway if you don't know what RSS is stands for Really Simple Sindication. What does that mean? I don't think I'm the one to try to translate that in to layman terms. It is really cool and handy.

Feedburner takes an RSS feed and helps promote it to a wider audience, basically giving some free exposure. One of the nicer features of the Feedburner feed in addition to using their bandwidth to syndicate your feed is that you can now track people who are subscribed to your feed.

So lets start with a couple screenshots of the entire process.

1. Head to the main page of your wordpress blog. In this case well feedburn Sterling's blog on the mm site as an example. Notice the RSS symbol in the Firefox Toolbar circled in red below.



2. Click on the RSS symbol and the following page will show up. Notice the address in the Address Bar. Copy that to the clipboard.



3. Now head on over to the Feedburner homepage and enter in the url you copied from the previous step and hit the next button as illustrated below.



4. Feedburner will automatically fill in the next page itself, but you'll have to log in or create a new account when you get to this step. I'm not going to explain how to do that as it is fairly self explanatory.





5. Once you have clicked on Activate you can skip any optional steps feedburner prompts for and complete the process. Take note of your newly created feedburner RSS feed address and keep it handy for later. Once completed the screen should look something like the following:



6. At this point you need to download the Feedsmith plugin for Wordpress. At time of this posting the latest version can be found at http://www.feedburner.com/fb/product...plugin_2.3.zip. Once downloaded, extract the zip file and upload the file plugin file to the wp-content/plugin directory on your webserver. I'm on Solaris so I used gFTP, but on windows, Filezilla should do the trick. Mac i think you should be able use Fetch. Anyway it should look something similar to below.



7. Login to your wordpress admin and click on the Plugins tab. Click on Activate for the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin.



8. Once done it should look like the following:



9. Now click on Settings and enter in your newly created Feedburner RSS feed and hit save.



10. At this point your done. Verify by returning to the main page of your blog and click on the RSS feed again. It should now list the feedburner RSS feed and not your original wordpress RSS feed.



That's about it. I'm sure I forgot something but I think this should be enough to get you going.

Here's an example of some usage of RSS feeds. I'm a big fan of iGoogle. My Firefox homepage is set to iGoogle and it has the RSS feeds from several sites I follow for easy reading. There are several other ways to take advantage of RSS feeds. My other favorite ones are Google Reader and Thunderbird. Here is an example screenshot of iGoogle with a subscription to Sterling's Blog shown.

]]> Chewie http://forums.ernieball.com/blogs/chewie/13-how-use-rss-feedburner-promote-your-wordpress-blog.html http://forums.ernieball.com/blogs/chewie/11-firebug-yslow-yslow-vbulletin-plug-faster-forums.html Tue, 03 Jun 2008 19:31:50 GMT I recently discovered a addon for vbulletin that should speed things up a bit. YSLOW 1.0.3 (Make Your Forum Faster) - vBulletin.org Forum (http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=178286) To see what the plug-in does exactly one needs two firefox extensions. Firebug... I recently discovered a addon for vbulletin that should speed things up a bit.
YSLOW 1.0.3 (Make Your Forum Faster) - vBulletin.org Forum

To see what the plug-in does exactly one needs two firefox extensions.

Firebug has been a handy Firefox extension for web developers for some time now.

Just discovered YSlow which is addon for the Firebug extension.

YSlow lists performance issues that can plague a website and pages and gives advice on how to correct them.

The YSlow addon for vbulletin just makes it easier for you to address those issues on a vbulletin forum.

It's not really limited to vbulletin. It can actually be used on any Apache/PHP based server. ]]> Chewie http://forums.ernieball.com/blogs/chewie/11-firebug-yslow-yslow-vbulletin-plug-faster-forums.html