My high school’s college fair — gathering of representatives from different colleges — looks pitiful compared to this week’s in Plano (a skip north of Dallas). Plano holds two nights of college nights at two of its three senior high schools in mid-September. Over 200 colleges come. We also went one last spring in Irving that was bigger. These give kids a great opportunity to meet many colleges and narrow their lists.

It’s best to start attending them in 10th grade because by the senior year, you should know where you want to apply because the application process mainly occurs in the fall of the senior year. Thank goodness we went to two of them last year. Now, we’ll be sure to go to at least two during our sons’ junior years. Maybe sneak one in 10th grade. It depends on many factors.

For example, our daughter wants to go to a school in the Northeast. Because of the Irving college fair, she found out about two schools that offer scholarships she can get based on her scores and grades that would bring down the costs. No, she’s not one of those who has a 4.0 GPA or super high SAT scores.

My older son wants to go to Texas A&M or TCU. But he’s 12. Of course, he could change his mind. When I was growing up, I wanted to go to A&M like my big brother did. I got accepted there, but ended up going to TCU for a year and finishing at American U in Washington, DC. What changed my mind was partly personal and partly the realization I needed a smaller school and a better chance of getting smaller classes.

Some kids know exactly where they want to go. In this case, the college fair is an opportunity to learn more about the schools and check out other options.

What was your experience in preparing for life after high school?

Brain food…

• If Things Aren’t Going Right, Try the Left! While focused on art, the advice can work for a lot of areas of our lives.
• 100+ Free HTML Email Templates. Wow. These are beautiful. They’ve also been tested in many of the most popular email apps.
• You’re Reading Too Fast. Better to read fast and get through more books, or to savor and absorb everything? I think it depends on book.
• Codecademy. If coding was this fun back when I took Javascript, Java, PHP, etc. classes, I might’ve been a coder today. Nahhh… like my writin’ biz.
• From Writer to Writer. Emily Suess asked writers — me included — to share their advice for handling rejection.

And for fun because we’re allowed…

• To Boldly Go Where No Cookie Has Gone Before… Nom nom.
• You’re Mocking Me Aren’t You? Many faces of Buzz Lightyear.
• 10 Neatest Monopoly Boards. Three Monopoly games is enough. We have the original, kids’ version and the fancy one from Franklin Mint that we ordered years ago.
• Old Timey Star Wars. I love old timey pics.
• The Future According to Sci Fi Films. Better watch out… according to 2012 and I Am Legend, we’re facing the end of the world and zombies taking over next year.
• 100 Years of Fashion. 100 years, 100 seconds, catchy music and rockin’ dancin’.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Meryl Evans

“Mom, I had fun,” said my youngest. That alone made last week’s family night out to the Texas Tornado hockey game worth it. Oh, they lost to Topeka Roadrunners, but being there provided a memorable experience for my husband and our two sons. Our teen daughter had no interest in going.

And all that in spite of my older son refusing to eat the BBQ buffet meal and my husband standing in line for an entire period. One of my clients invited us to the hockey game as part of its partner appreciation. We didn’t sit in the normal seats in the crowd. We went to a reserved area on the ground level behind one of the goals. It had tables and chairs and a buffet along the back wall. Popcorn, baseball hats, signed hockey sticks, pennants and programs decorated the black and gold tables.

I had an it’s a small world encounter when I entered the area. It was one of the tennis coaches who taught several of my classes a few years ago. Her husband also works with the client.

NHL vs. NAHL Experience

I’ve attended a Dallas Stars hockey game. The NHL Stars have nothing on the NAHL Tornadoes. If you’ve been to a major league and minor league baseball game, you can tell the difference. It’s the same way with the NAHL hockey game. Smaller arena, more entertainment, closer to the action. Although I grew up a big sports gal, hockey didn’t make my top list of sports. The Dallas Stars didn’t come to Texas until I was a teen and hockey wasn’t popular in Texas.

Watching the game on the ground level is a whole different experience than watching it way high up in the stands like I did with at the Stars game. At one point, I jerked in response to the loud crashing of players into the window near me.

Intermission

During the intermission, the boys got into a Porsche and rode in it around the ice. That may not sound exciting to you, but my boys — especially the older one — LOVES sports cars. It was the first time he rode in a Porsche. The girl on the other side of the cheerleader in the photo is the client’s daughter.

After that, the fans threw hockey pucks to try to get them in a small bucket in the middle of the ice. It was wild watching hundreds of flying pucks and only two landing in the bucket.

And another small world thing happened during intermission when kids from an elementary school choir sang. That elementary school was my kids’! What are the chances of that? First, the arena is in Frisco. The school is in Plano. Second, the Tornadoes played 34 games at that point. About half of that would be home games. So out of roughly 17 games, they sang at the one we attended.

I also met Ike, the team’s mascot. I’ve got a thing (no, not a fetish) for Mascots since seeing the San Diego Chicken when I was a kid. The chicken came to a Texas Rangers game and I had a blast watching his antics.

Freelancer Feels Like a Part of the Team

As a freelancer, I don’t have opportunities to attend corporate events like I did when I worked in the corporate world. One event took place at the old Texas Stadium in Irving (pre-Super Bowl 45 stadium) and one at Las Colinas Studios where TV shows film. Imagine how it makes a freelancer feel when she’s invited to a client’s event. One thing’s for sure — it makes you want to work harder (I already do, but it gives you renewed energy) for the client knowing they appreciate you.

It’s a Teeny, Tiny World

Though a local company (my only local client — Hint: Look on the window of the Porsche), I met Frank online. He created Fib or Not and hired me to do the copy for the game. Later, we discovered we lived within a mile of each other. When we first met, the little guy and girl in the Porsche were babies. Fast forward a few years, they are one year apart in grade at the same elementary school and we run into each other at school events.

Brain food…

• Phlixie: It’s tedious to find captioned instant download movies on Netflix. Phlixie is doing what Netflix should’ve done. They hope to expand it to other services. Yeah!
• Reading Judiciously: When I read — especially nonfiction — I try to look at the author’s writing and learn from it. Tough to do because you want to absorb the material, too. Kind of like multi-tasking brain. [Link: Elizabeth S Craig]
• The Query Letter That Won Me an Agent and a Four Book Deal (And Why It Was So Successful): That says it all.
• HTML5 Cheat Sheet: I still rely on my old yet in great shape VisiBone HTML card. It has high quality lamination.
• Claim Your Oscar: Worried about giving away too many trade secrets? Need not to worry.

And for fun because we’re allowed…

• Parents Shouldn’t Text: That should be “SOME parents shouldn’t text.” I think I’m a decent texter. Training my son on texting etiquette. [Link: Bitrebels]
• Light Show: Sensational!
• 13 things worth knowing about Super Mario: I had the mini Donkey Kong arcade toy. Memories…
• A cartogram done in real 3D: The material used? Legos. My mom has an beautiful book of map art. This will need to be in the next edition.

Email newsletters could fail the “test”
by Meryl K. Evans

The buzz word “standards” may cause an eyeball-rolling response, but without standards, we would have to buy specific media to work with our DVD, VCR and music player. Remember the software buying days, when you had to look for compatibility in terms of Mac versus Windows? Imagine having to do that with Web pages. This Web page is for Macs only … this one is for Windows. Thanks to W3.org, a body that sets recommendations for HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and other markup languages, we don’t have that issue.

Some sites, however, do look better in Internet Explorer than in Mozilla or Firefox. That’s because such sites use an Internet Explorer-specific markup language that is not standard. Let me explain. Let’s say the dreaded <blink> element is proprietary to Internet Explorer only (it’s not, but this is just an example). If an HTML page has it, and you try to view it in a browser other than Internet Explorer, nothing blinks on the page (not that we would want it to). This is a very simple example of what happens when a browser maker creates proprietary elements that works only with its browser.

Playing well with others

Creating proprietary markup code is much like DVD makers producing hardware that works only with a specific brand of DVDs. On one hand, it may encourage people to buy their DVD products. On the other hand, customers refuse to buy something that has such limits. Which would you rather have? A customer buying your product because it works with everything, not just item A, or a customer not buying your product at all because it works only with item A, which is also your product?

That’s the kind of thing we’re seeing with those popular single-cup brewers. I have a Home Café, which I received so I could review the product. The instructions explicitly say to use only Folgers or Millstone pods with the machine because using other brands will damage it. Yet, if you look at pods from Coolbeans.com or Starbucks, companies that don’t produce a machine, they are compatible with Home Café and other brewers such as the Senseo and Melitta.

I don’t like Folgers, period. So would Black and Decker rather me not buy its product because I dislike its partners’ pod brands, or buy it because I can use it with other standard pods? That’s why standards play an important role. They benefit all companies.

Does this mean a company can’t get creative? Not at all. Home Café, Melitta and Senseo look different. Two only brew one cup at a time while one can do two cups. The set up and usage are also different. The look and feel are distinctive. I’ve heard comments from people who prefer one brewer over another. If all single pod brewers work with any pod brand, then we have a choice based on which best meets our needs, just like with the standard coffee machines. Some love their Bunn. Some love their Braun. Some love their Krups.

Cars are the same way. The distinctive features, look and style separate one car from the others. But most of them run on unleaded gasoline. Imagine if we still produced cars using leaded fuel.

Standards for newsletters

So what about newsletters? Before sending this newsletter to you, we test it. Not in terms of beating it up and throwing it around like in the gorilla and suitcase commercials. Or running it into the wall with crash test dummies to test its safety.

Instead, we check for spammability as well as readability. How clean (or not) is the newsletter? Will it pass through the filters? Such a check looks at the fonts used, words and the markup code you don’t see unless you do a “view source.”

Once while doing a test on a newsletter, we received a warning that it had “shouting markup.” Wow. Not only do we have people who shout by capitalizing their text in email messages or instant messages, but we also have markup that yells. And apparently, it’s a bad thing in terms of filters.

When I write about Web design, I encourage using XHTML markup standards with CSS for layout. XHTML requires all markup uses lower case, as in <a>, <h1> and <p>, as opposed to <A>, <H1> and <P>. HTML doesn’t care if both are used.

But we’re talking about a newsletter’s ability to make it pass the filter, not about clean markup code. A newsletter checker shouldn’t care about the markup language. It should focus on the content. Yet, we get a warning that shouting markup, the use of upper case in the tags, is a bad thing and sends the email to the junk bin.

Words that do not pass go

Who decides the standards for declaring content as junk or legit? The bad guys keep changing their content to make it pass through the filters while the good guys fail. This article could send the newsletter to the junk folder because I use the word “spam.” Guess what? The real spammers wouldn’t use that word because they aren’t going to admit their content is spam.

Another “bad” word is “free.” It’s understandable. But it’s also legit. For instance, in the blog, we give a “complimentary” report to those who buy the report. Many businesses do this. Buy this and get this for free. Yet, I use the word “complimentary” or the phrase “no cost” to avoid using “fr33″ (that’s another one) and ending up in your garbage bin.

I get tired of seeing legitimate newsletters that I’ve requested using “fr.ee” or “spaham” to duck the filters. I want such newsletters to feel they can use normal words without getting creative. Yet I know spammers have gotten smart and now use periods and spaces in a word to sneak pass the filters, forcing the good guys to do the same.

What’s the solution?

If I had the solution to this problem, I’d be a millionaire. Phishers (bad guys who send you email leading you to believe it’s from a Web site with which you have an account) are getting smarter in tricking recipients into believing their email comes from a respected company, like eBay or PayPal, to get your personal information.

My email address has been blacklisted at Spamcop, a popular email filter, several times. Spammers find ways to use email addresses of people like you and me. Furthermore, they change their email and Web URLs as frequently as we change our clothes. My email server host provider offers the option of using a spam service like Spamcop, but I don’t use it. Too often, the newsletters I want have ended up in Never, Never Land.

Plus, on occasion, we forget we subscribed to so-n-so’s newsletter when we entered a contest or requested a free white paper. Some recipients report such newsletters to Spamcop, and a good guy gets jailed over a reader’s mistake.

Helpful applications, useless response systems

By using software on my computer, I put email management under my control. I’ve trained the program to recognize senders on my list. This product has done a good job and rarely sends a legitimate email to the junk folder. I always scan the junk folder before I empty it — this takes less than a minute.

Some people use the “response system.” You’ve seen these. You send an email to a friend and immediately get an email saying to click on this link and enter the code to prove you’re a real person. There’s a flaw with the system. Newsletters are managed electronically and will not catch these responses.

When I managed a list of over 100,000 readers, I watched for those response requests. However, it was easy to miss a request in the middle of all the “bad address” or “email box is full” messages. Some idiotic response systems require you to confirm you’re a human EVERY time you send a message to the individual. I gave up on several readers who had this in place.

I think the solution is to manage our emails at the host provider and local computer level. At least you have some control here. A good host provider gives you an option of using filtering services. If you do, it should store email messages in a junk folder you can access and review before they’re gone forever. If you don’t want to review them, simply empty the junk folder.

RSS enters the picture

Some online marketing experts are proclaiming the newsletter dead and all content should come through RSS feed readers (see RSS article for explanation on what it is). I’ve been using an RSS feed to make my content available for such readers before it hits the mainstream. I like this alternative, but I still like email newsletters coming to me.

Are you thinking I am promoting newsletters because I am in the newsletter biz? I wouldn’t do that. I believe in offering as many options as possible. My blogs and newsletters are available in RSS. Some people won’t read newsletters unless there is an RSS feed for them. Others don’t want to use RSS as they prefer content to “come to them” rather than having to open an RSS reader like FeedDemon or go to an online RSS reader like Bloglines.

I use both. The email newsletters I want to read regularly come to my email box. For those that aren’t as important, or that I want to access when I need information, I rely on their feeds and open my reader when I want to read them.

What about RSS readers that send content to your email box? NewsGator is one such application, and it’s excellent. I have so many feeds that when I run NewsGator, I get a ton of content in my email box in a folder set aside for feeds. The only way to get rid of the content is to delete the entries myself. That is the only pain.

RSS is not a replacement for email newsletters. It complements them. It provides readers with another option. Essentially, you’re getting the same coffee from the content, just using a different machine to get it. Some readers prefer one brand while others choose a different brand.

Applications that check your newsletter’s content for spam are useful. However, they should focus only on the content and make recommendations for changes to decrease a newsletter’s chances of being filtered. Reviewing markup should not fall to such applications. There are other validators that do that job.

So what ARE the rules? There are no set rules with email newsletters. However, we have published “our” rules in this newsletter and in the book. Every newsletter we produce follows this book. The rules are subjective, but they’re available to everyone who wishes to read them.

Everyone has a strong opinion on spam, but few experts explain what it is or how it is measured. We’re just as confused. Our experience has taught us that a publisher with a solid opt-in list is at risk from an overzealous “spam fighting” industry. The lack of instructions and support from companies who offer tools, especially the free ones as many use them, cause more problems for the good guys who don’t spam their lists.

The shouting markup. We obtained a lower score by changing the upper case HTML mark up to lower case. However, trying to find this rule and an explanation is fruitless. All the guidelines indicate are the message and the evaluation. The evaluation is meaningless as the one we received stated, “BODY: HTML has very strong ‘shouting’ markup.” Nothing more.

Someone pointed me to the source code of the spam checker, which hints that shouting markup refers to refers to B, I, U, STRONG, EM, BIG, CENTER and H1-H6 tags. How is the typical newsletter publisher going to know this? Most of them are not HTML experts and would not be able to read spam checker’s source code.

Where are the standards? Where is there a manual that accompanies this popular spam checker and the implemented rules? It’s not a standard found in any RFC (request for comments), but an organization’s arbitrary ruling. We need guidelines and basic standards.

Meryl K. Evans is the Content Maven behind meryl.net, helping companies get better results through simple words that make a big impact. Contact her to discuss how your business can boost its profits.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Meryl Evans