The Mystic Bird

The great GMail machine had a hiccup the other day and was down for a period of time. Many users were without their “FREE, BETA VERSION” of GMail until Google got the problem worked out.

Thing is the FREE BETA VERSION part of this issue hasn’t dawned on them.

Hey! It’s a free service folks! Quit whining about defecting to Yahoo or Hotmail for crying out loud. Anyway, once Microsoft gets their hands on Yahoo, it might be facing the same or similar problems so there ya go. Not a pretty alternative after all, is it?

I wonder about people sometimes that will complain loud and long over something they get free. I mean, if you want something that’s free then ya gotta understand that sometimes….SOMETIMES, it’s gonna have some issues. So lambasting Google over it is kinda bordering on the doofus side a bit. At least they got it worked out pretty darn quick which goes to say a lot about their reputation.

Now, if you’re paying for some service and it goes down the crapper for a period of time, I would agree that it would be time to contact the provider to register a complaint. But, to advocate others to escape to Yahoo or Hotmail over a free email service provided by Google just because of a hiccup? Come on, man!

Oh! You didn’t really have your business’s email account(s) on a free beta service did you? Uh-oh.

Seems all of a sudden that Twitter and BlogCatalog have been real slow loading which in turn was keeping the site from loading as it should. I removed them both for the time being and things have returned to normal as far as loading times are concerned.

Anyone else having issues with Twitter or BlogCatalog in their blogs sidebars?

I gotta hand it to the folks at Wordpress. This is one sweet upgrade they rolled out. 2.5 Rocks guys!

The one-click upgrade for my plugins is sweet! Before, I had to download the upgrade, extract it, then upload it and re-activate it. PITA sometimes….especially if there seems to be plenty of upgrades going around.

The new layout is awesome too. It’s light and airy instead of the dark blue we were all accustomed to. Things have definitely been re-arranged too so be sure to look carefully before thinking you’ve lost a function somewhere.

There’s selections for media, audio, video and the usual image. Audio huh? Hmm, maybe a little voice to go with the post soon. Heh, now that’d be scary!

They’ve seemingly tried to think of the user when they created this new version. It’s become even more user friendly than before. This is what blogging is all about folks. A user-friendly platform that has the author in mind when it comes to writing a post or page. This is just awesome.

For more information on what 2.5 can do for your blog’s backend, visit Wordpress.org’s blog and see for yourself!

Photoshop has come out with a new web-based way to upload and edit your images plus show them off to the world. Cost? Absolutely free! That’s right. For the cost of a little time needed to learn the ropes of how to upload, create an album, add images to the album, edit them, etc., you have a flash-based gallery to show off to your friends.

They call it Photoshop Express and it’s still in beta so there may still be some bugs that Adobe will need to work out but there’s a feedback link so that you can help them out with this.

All one has to do is to join the service (free) and wait on the verification email. Once this arrives, click the link and you’re taken to your new account to begin creating galleries. The limit at this time is 2 gigs but that may go up in time. (more…)