PowerUp!

Google is currently rolling out an update to Gmail to enable IMAP support on hosted accounts. IMAP is short for Internet Message Access Protocol and allows you to access your Gmail emails from other clients, like Outlook or Thunderbird.

The benefit of IMAP is that you’re able to check your mail directly on your mail server through a desktop mail client or mobile mail client, as opposed to downloading the messages to your computer.

To check and see whether IMAP’s been enabled on your account, go to http://www.google.com/a/ and enter your domain name. Then log into your email account. Once logged in, click Settings (up top right) and see if you have a tab named Forwarding and POP/IMAP. If you don’t have it yet, don’t worry… you’ll see the feature on your account in the coming days.

For more information on IMAP and Gmail, Google explains it in greater detail in this help entry.

Let’s face it - some businesses do just fine without a website. But, not having a website means missing out on providing potential customers with information that could be helpful to them (and make them more likely to visit/spend money with you!)

Enter Google AdWords and their new Hosted Business Pages feature. When you setup an Adwords Starter Edition account, you get this ability.  It’s a basic information page where you can tell people more about your business when they click on an ad. Read more about Hosted Business Pages here.

Check this out: GeoGreetings. See, I told you so

Hot on the heels of Microsoft’s release of Internet Explorer 7, the Mozilla Foundation has released Firefox 2.0, a significant upgrade to the up-and-coming browser. You can snag Firefox 2.0 from Mozilla.com. Firefox has long been the browser of choice for a number of folks on staff. Version 2.0 adds phishing detection, enhanced tab browsing, spell checking, session saving, etc….

I bit the bullet and loaded IE7 on my laptop this morning. I figure that I have avoided it long enough. I’m not certain that I will load it on my production machine here at the office… but I have a feeling that I will be making that change sooner rather than later. If you’re interested in picking it up, head on over to Microsoft’s IE page to update your computer

What’s IE7 mean for us? Hopefully not much… IE7 won’t be pushed out via Automatic Update until November 1st. Between now and then, we’ll be checking sites out in the new browser and make sure nothing breaks. Already this morning we’ve been through dozens of client sites making sure that nothing goofy happens to the layouts, that scripting still works, etc. And, as luck would have it, nothings been broken (yet).

What’s IE7 mean for our customers? A better more consistent internet browsing experience. The technology built into IE6 was buggy and problematic. Sites rendered properly, but didn’t adhere to standards that well. This meant extra work for our developers in trying to create a site that worked in multiple browsers because code that worked well in most browsers didn’t render well in IE. IE7 should solve this…

IE7 will also bring RSS feeds to the masses. What’s an RSS feed? It stands for Really Simple Syndication. Think of all the time you spend visiting your favorite websites checking for updates. If those sites offered an RSS feed (like our blog does!) you wouldn’t have to visit the site to know if new content was added. Using an RSS reader (like the one built into IE7) you’ll get notified when sites you frequent are updated. It’s not a new technology… but it’ll be new to a lot of people who’ve never even heard of them before.

IE7 also has a number of security improvements, including a Phishing Filter. The Phishing Filter checks sites to see if they match fraudelent websites. Ever get an email that looks like it was from eBay, PayPal, or a Bank asking you login to their site and update your personal information? Chances are that email was a scammer trying to get your personal information - social security number, credit card number(s), bank account info, etc. IE7 will (hopefully) protect you from these malicious activities by warning you when you visit a site that is not to be trusted.

I could go on, but I’ll save you the trouble. If you’d like to learn more about the browser, and download a copy for yourself, head on over to the Windows Internet Explorer 7 website for more info.

Is it just me, or is Basecamp (and all of 37Signals’ websites) down now? None of their sites is resolving for me now. I know they just moved their servers recently…and perhaps this is related to that move somehow.

A TraceRoute is showing that one of their servers is unreachable…

69.36.39.150 ASN=18462[Destination Unreachable] burnham.37signals.com.

I’m sure similar tests on other URLs would yield similar results.

This outage concerns me because we use the Premium level Basecamp plan to manage all of our projects. When Basecamp is offline, it effects our ability to work efficiently (especially given our dependancy on this app now…) It begs the question now … what will 37Signals do to compensate users effected by their outage? And is a hosted offsite solution really the best thing for our business? I’m not sure, but ActiveCollab is looking pretty good right now…