So the gang at 37signals have launched an affiliate program for Backpack, and, of course, I’ve signed up. You will note the link graphic in the side bar, under the “Support” heading.
37signals is doing something a bit differently with the Backpack affiliate program: you don’t actually receive cash, but rather credit toward your own Backpack account. Theoretically, your own Backpack usage could be completely free if enough people sign up for a paid plan through your referral link.
You can use this link to sign up for and use the Backpack web service. The default plan is free, so it doesn’t cost you a thing to try the service out. Backpack affiliates don’t make a dime unless you upgrade from the free plan to one of the paid plans, which start at a mere five dollars a month. (This is the plan I am currently on.) Continued use of Backpack is one more reason I will likely not renew my .Mac subscription next year.
I just wish the affiliate program had been up and running last month, when I upgraded. Then Tom, who got me hooked on Backpack to begin with, could have earned some coin.
Backpack won’t be for everyone, just as with any other tool, but as with any other tool, you won’t know if you’ll like it unless you try it.
Tag: tech
Now that Yahoo! has absorbed another social-software site, maybe del.icio.us’s import feature will get fixed. I’m hesitant to really dive in to the service, or Furl, until one of them can import all of the bookmarks I have loaded in my browser.
While testing a new product for review, you set your iPod on shuffle, and hear Hootie & the Blowfish, dc Talk, King James (old Christian metal group), Petra (the Aerosmith of Christian rock), and then VeggieTales. Just kind of throws that whole rhythm off to have Junior pop in to the middle of the mix with “Come over to my house and play!”
It kind of amazes me what shortcomings the people who buy Windows computers are willing to live with. It used to be the case that Macs were more expensive than other kinds of computers, pound for pound. This is no longer true, of course, and hasn’t been for some time, but even if it were, it seems like it would be only proper. It seems like people who buy Windows computers have to spend a lot of time finding and downloading (or buying) programs to make their computers do stuff my computer does all by itself.
Relax, mouth-foamers, we’re talking about software. I like Michael’s system, sequestering apps for a specific amount of time to see if they’re truly needed or not. I need to do something along these lines, though I’ve already pared down to 110 items in the Applications folder from a clearinghouse earlier this year.
Today’s “Too Much Time On Their Hands” episode is brought to by TUAW:
Stick the guts of a modern optical mouse in to a classic Apple ADB mouse.
And thus Apple’s plans at world domination were dashed.
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Regarding HTML in e-mail: what Tom said. I’m not even an admin like Tom that has to deal with this crap on a day-to-day basis. E-mail is for text. The Web is for graphics. No co-mingling of the two. I realize I’m in a rapidly dwindling minority on this issue, Jeff, but that’s my area of Ludditism, I guess.
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The Tetran doesn’t look too terribly comfortable to be sliding in to one’s front pants pocket. [Via Lee.]
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I’ve noticed the severe lack of updates to Apple’s iCal Library section, too. Now I just get whatever I want from iCalShare.
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Google continues to intrigue me. Really.
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I pronounce it like the peanut butter, with a hard J. [Via John.]
Yeah, it’s been up a few days, but I’m just getting to it, okay? John Gruber has come around, much as I have recently, to the notion of PowerBook-as-main/only-system, a concept Lee has been a proponent of for some time. John also has an in-depth review of the latest 15-inch PowerBook, outfitted just as I would like, with his usual attention to detail.
It’s Monday evening, and I’m still sore from the neighborhood tree planting from Saturday morning. Eleven ten-gallon trees to go in the neighborhood’s greenbelt area. Seventy homes, with an average of two adults per home. Seven people showed up, including myself. Yeah.
An interesting tip I picked up from No Plot? No Problem! shows an innovative use for all that spam that gets collected for me. This one writer keeps a list of names that show up in the From field of spam e-mails, so she always has a pool of character names to pull from. I really like this, since usually when I’m working on fiction, I can come up with two or three good character names, then I start really pulling stuff out of bodily orifices. A simple text document in BBEdit now has 305 names, one per line, and the built-in Kill Duplicates filter ensures I don’t have the same name twice.
It’s nice to know the school district my son will enter in about three years is fairly hip to current technology. The district’s superintendent, Dr. Jerry Roy, has a blog, and in another attempt to get information out to parents, the district has a podcast.
In The Messenger, a small local rag, Roy says:
I’ve had a few folks talk to me and tell me they are happy that we are utilizing the technology. I wouldn’t say we are cutting-edge, but we are trying to find the best ways to communicate with the public. We are used to hard copy, but that is expensive. We are always looking for inexpensive ways to communicate our message, especially in these times when we are hard-pressed for funding. This gives us access to a lot of folks.
Dr. Roy and his staff need to be commended for their fiscal responsibility in leveraging these Internet technologies. Dr. Roy is using the free Blogspot service from Blogger for his weblog, and it is incredibly cheap to produce a podcast, which is one reason why the medium’s popularity is exploding.
Property taxes in Texas are much higher than they are in Louisiana, where we moved from seven years ago. One reason for that is, with no state income tax, school districts need to get their funding from somewhere. I’m not sure what the actual percentage is, but a very high percentage of the segment of property taxes earmarked for education goes in to your local school district, rather than disappearing in to some budgetary black hole at the state level. I see these efforts on the part of LISD to be a responsible use of my tax dollars when it comes to communicating with parents.
While my child is still years away from entering the school system, Dr. Roy and LISD have made it easier for parents like us to keep track of what is going on, and for that, I thank them.