MailChimp: Send Better Email

I tried this service today for one of my communities: MailChimp

Text-only newsletters are a thing of the past. MailChimp provides you with the necessary tools to create your own customized and professional looking newsletters in no time. It completely manages your subscribers lists, automatically eliminates invalid addresses and so much more. You even have a dashboard to actually know how your newsletters performed. It really does a great job. Creating and managing a newsletter campaign has never been so easy.

If you have less than 2000 people in your subscribers lists, MailChimp is completely free. Impressive.

Thanks to MailChimp, I’m never going to send out a cheap text-only newsletter again. We’re no longer in 1999 right?

Back on Ubuntu

I thought I could wait until April 17th, the day they’ll release Ubuntu 14.04, before switching back to Ubuntu, but the call of open source was too strong.

I decided to reload my system with Ubuntu Gnome 13.10, a Gnome flavoured Ubuntu right away. Although I never used it very much since it was first introduced, I’ve never been a big fan of Unity. It feels modern and sweet until you try Gnome 3. Everything Unity does, Gnome 3 does it even better. More accessible, faster, looks and feels better. It delivers for sure. That’s why I’m not using vanilla Ubuntu this time.

Oh and… no Wine please!

How to contribute to Flatpress?

If you enjoy Flatpress and want to suggest new features, report bugs, or discuss about the product, make sure you visit the official Flatpress Forum.

If you are a developer and want to contribute to Flatpress, you can do so on GitHub: GitHub|Flatpress

Disable interface animations in Office 2013

Don’t like all those animations in Office? Excel’s moving focus box, Outlook’s fade-in / fade-out effects? Here’s a little registry tweak that will allow you to get rid of most of this visual uselessness.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Graphics]
"DisableAnimations"=dword:00000001

Copy that in a .reg file and run it for an easy fix.

You can also do it yourself, manually by doing the following: Navigate to HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\Common\Graphics using the registry editor, then create a new DWORD value you’ll name DisableAnimations and set its value to 1. If the Graphics key isn’t there, you’ll have to create it, then create the DWORD value inside the key.

Outlook PST Backup Script with 7-Zip

Office 2013 has been around for a little while now. If you happen to deal with people using PST files to store their emails, you probably noticed that good ol’ PFBackup from Microsoft is no longer working with this new updated Outlook.

After trying several applications and scripts, I concluded that I had to come up with a script of my own. I decided it was going to be simple, versatile and that it would compress the PST files with 7-Zip as an extra.

All you have to do is copy the code below inside a .BAT file and modify the destination paths on line 2 and 5 as you see fit. Install the resulting file on the user’s desktop and ask them to run it a few times a week in order to backup their emails. Outlook must be closed before running the script, obviously.

ECHO OFF
Del U:\BACKUP\MAIL\OutlookBackup.7z
C:
cd %USERPROFILE%
for /f "delims=" %%a in ('dir /a-d /s /b *.pst') do ("%PROGRAMFILES%\7-Zip\7z.exe" u -mmt=on U:\BACKUP\MAIL\OutlookBackup.7z "%%a")
PAUSE

This script will scan your entire profile folder looking for *.PST files and have 7-Zip compress them inside one single archive.

Obviously, 7-Zip must be installed. Make sure there are no PST files with the same file name on the workstation, as it would result in an overwrite inside the archive. Just run the script once and look at the output.

Works with any version of Outlook, but won’t work with Exchange OST files.