Photo from sxc.hu user bo_1963

So I decided to come up with a wacky title for this week’s links. Nothing to do with dancing, but it rhymed and Monday is Columbus Day. In 5th grade, I drove my social studies teacher crazy by repeating two lines of a Columbus poem. (In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. In 1493, he sailed the deep blue sea.) I’m amazed she didn’t send me to the principal’s office now that I have kids who have done the same to me.

We’ve all done things to drive our teachers, parents and other adults nuts. What about you?

Brain food …

• 3 Tips for Professional E-Book Covers. Yes, we do judge books by the cover — ebooks included.
• How to Read More: A Lover’s Guide. Even book lovers like me fall into a reading slump. You get busy or choose to relax while watching TV. (It’s essentially reading for me because I read captions!)
• 10 Key Points Freelancers Must Know About LinkedIn. Good reminders. LinkedIn has so much going on. This cuts to the chase.
• Mobile Framework Comparison Chart. For my designer buds. Compare all the frameworks and choose the one that best fits your needs. [Link: Deborah Edwards-Onoro]
• Exquisite Tweets. Paste the URL from a single tweet in a conversation to get a one-page thread to share or save. [Link: Dana Chisnell]

And for fun because we’re allowed …

• 10 Coolest Lunch Bags. If you work in office with public fridge, first lunch bag and one other (ick) will stop theft. I like the lunch bag art bags.
• the difference 10 years makes. Cartoon covering TV, mapping, cell phones and more.
• 12 Hilarious Graffitis on Signs. Spoiler alert! Skip the first one if you haven’t seen Marley & Me …
• Size Comparison Of Famous Sci-fi Spaceships. Putting the end to “My ship is bigger” debate.
• Social Media Icons. I rarely follow the egg. Maybe twice out of the 8,000 I follow.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Meryl Evans

The Problem: Google missed the mark (or rather the company has technical limitations that we don’t know about) on one feature in its mobile Gmail app: You can’t view your Drafts on your mobile device. Yet, if I access Gmail through my mobile’s Internet browser, I can view Drafts. But using the browser to check Gmail on a mobile phone takes more work and time.

I use Drafts as a way to take notes and keep revising or adding on to them. It can be for an article, brainstorming, grocery list, anything goes. While I could email these notes to myself in Gmail and access them on my mobile device, I can’t add on to sent emails unless I reply and that makes a mess.

By the way, I do synchronize “memos” between the Palm Desktop organizer and Gmail. Accessing these memos requires going through Gmail Contacts app, which sometimes hangs when I click “Contacts” in Gmail. That’s because Gmail collects every address and duplicates them. I could turn off this feature, but it has its advantages. Anyway, the Drafts route is more manageable than the Memos route.

Now. I could go find another app for note taking, but haven’t found one that integrates seamlessly with Gmail and Gmail for mobile. Not crazy about the idea of finding and adding another separate app to use everywhere. Maybe you use one. If so, please share the app and your experience. Maybe I’d be willing to try it!

I’ve figured out a way to work with this. It’s not pretty or as efficient as it could be if Gmail for mobile would make Gmail Drafts accessible. But it works.

The Ugly Workaround. Create a Mobile label (aka folder). When I have a draft that I’d like to access on my mobile phone, I copy and paste it into a new email and send it to myself to file it under Mobile. Anytime I need to access the info, I just jump to the Mobile label from my phone. No searching or scanning through hundreds of messages. I keep this label organized with Mobile critical info.

Next time the Draft receives enough updates, I delete the old email in the Mobile folder and replace it with the updated draft.

Like I said, involved — but takes much less work than accessing Gmail through my mobile browser. I bet one of y’all has a better way.

What tips do you have for staying organized between mobile and desktop?

Make yummy chocolates during Valentine’s Day with Chocolatier on mobile! Verizon customers Text CHOCO to GAME (4263) to play Chocolatier anytime, anywhere on your cell phone.

Text CHOCO to 4263.

Man, it’s a shame I don’t have Verizon mobile. I’d love to see how this looks and plays on the small screen. If you know — please share.

Alawar Entertainment, publisher of casual games like Snowy the Bear series, Magic Shop, and Magic Ball to name a few, announces the creation of Alawar NewEdge Mobile. This company specializes in publishing games for smartphones and mobile devices. The new company will launch over 1000 games for mobile devices including Magic Ball 2, Treasures of Montezuma, Snowy, and more.

NewEdge will continue and focus on developing games while Alawar does the publishing and distribution. With more companies producing games and applications for handheld devices, we won’t have to wait till we get home or to the office to get things done or have fun. Just do it while you fly, ride (not drive, of course), or wait in a doctor’s office.

The target market for this phone is kids ages 8 to 12, although I recommend it more for the younger half of the group. 6 and 7-year-olds might be able to use it depending on the child.

We know how kids are reckless about making and receiving too many phone calls. Firefly lets parents control who they call. The phone comes with a PIN so parents can program the phone and kids can’t change it unless they figure out the PIN. The female button is typically the button for calling mom. The other one for calling dad. I programmed it so the female calls home and male calls Dad’s cell phone.

The address book only shows phone numbers for the people that the parents entered into the phone. The child also can’t view his phone number, so it’s possible to make it a one-way phone (calling out). I am comfortable with technology and I couldn’t figure out how to program it without reading the instructions and this is a rarity for me.

But it’s easy to do once you get it figured out… a little tedious as there are no numbers on the phone. But that keeps it very lightweight. Besides, once you’ve entered the acceptable phone numbers — you won’t need to deal with entering phone numbers again except to add someone new.

It might be a good phone for my 6.5-year-old because it would let him get in touch with us should anything happen. For my 11-year-old, I far prefer her sidekick since she can type to me (I’m hearing impaired) and besides — it’s better letting her get calls from friends on her own phone so she doesn’t take up our phone line.

This comes in multiple colors. I read some kid reviews who said it was an ugly phone. I think the male / female icons should be something else. But it’s a simple phone — how can it be ugly? When I was in the paging business, jellybean pagers (similar to the Firefly phone — oval, different colors) were a hit with kids. So I can’t imagine the issues with the looks.

It also has a useless, but cute and fun feature where you push a button and it does fireworks — the phone lights up, makes music, and shows a cartoon in the screen. It will probably get old fast even though there are about five different choices. You can also program the keys to have different colors in the screen. Kids like that stuff.

All in all… it’s a good starter for the younger set. Nothing fancy. Give it about 3 to 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Price: USD$99.00

Colors: USD$12.99 except white glow-in-the-dark is $9.99 (bubblegum pink green limeade clear x-ray white glow-in-the-dark skin)

If you run a weblog using Movable Type, then you can easily make it available for PDA readers. It takes under 30 minutes to set it up.

Select the weblog to convert to PDA format. Click on LIST & EDIT TEMPLATES > CREATE NEW INDEX TEMPLATE (just above the gray boxed area that lists your existing templates) .

In the NAME box, enter a name for the weblog. Mine says, “Portable meryl’s notes.”

In the OUTPUT FILE box, enter a name for the file with a .html extension. Here I enter, “pdanotes.html.”

Copy and paste the following and change the <TITLE> and the <DIV> right after the <BODY> tag.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=iso-8859-1" />
<TITLE>meryl's notes on the go!</TITLE>
<style type="text/css">
<!--
body {
	color:#333;
	background-color:white;
	margin:20px;
	padding:0px;
	font:11px verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
	leftMargin=0
}
h1 {
	font:bold 12px/12px verdana, arial, helvetica,
                       sans-serif;
	margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;
	padding:0px;
}
p {
	font:11px verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
	color:#333333;
	margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;
	padding:0px;
}
.Content>p {margin:0px;}
.Content>p+p {text-indent:0px;}
.tinyfont { font:8px verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; }
.smallfont { font:9px verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; }
.titlefont { font:14px verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif; }
a {
	color:#000000;
	font-family:verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
	text-decoration:none;
}
A:link { color: #09c; TEXT-DECORATION: none }
A:visited { color: #07a; TEXT-DECORATION: none }
A:active { TEXT-DECORATION: none }
A:hover {
	FONT-WEIGHT: normal; FONT-STYLE: normal
	BACKGROUND: #eee;
}
#Header {
	margin:50px 0px 10px 0px;
	padding:17px 0px 0px 20px;
	/* For IE5/Win's benefit height = [correct height] +
[top padding] + [top and bottom border widths] */
	height:33px; /* 14px + 17px + 2px = 33px */
	border-style:solid;
	border-color:black;
	border-width:1px 0px; /* top and bottom borders: 1px;
left and right borders: 0px */
	line-height:11px;
	background-color:#eee;
/* Here is the ugly brilliant hack that protects IE5/Win
from its own stupidity. Thanks to Tantek Celik for the
hack and to Eric Costello for publicizing it. IE5/Win
incorrectly parses the ""}"" value, prematurely
closing the style declaration. The incorrect IE5/Win
value is above, while  the correct value is below. See
http://glish.com/css/hacks.asp for details. */
	voice-family: ""}"";
	voice-family:inherit;
	height:14px; /* the correct height */
}
/* I've heard this called the "be nice to Opera 5" rule.
Basically, it feeds correct length values to user agents
that exhibit the parsing error exploited above yet get
the CSS box model right and understand the CSS2
parent-child selector. ALWAYS include a "be nice to
Opera 5" rule every time you use the Tantek Celik
hack (above). */
body>#Header {height:14px;}
.Content {
	margin:5px 5px 5px 5px;
	padding:2px;
}
.dateheader {
	position:relative;
	width:auto;
	min-width:120px;
	margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;
	padding:5px;
	z-index:3;
}
-->
</style>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<DIV id=Header>... meryl's notes on the go!</DIV>
<div align="left">
<MTEntries lastn="15">
<MTDateHeader>
<div class="dateheader"><H1><$MTEntryDate format="%A, %B %e,
%Y"$></H1></DIV>
</MTDateHeader>
<br>
<DIV class="content">
<span class="titlefont"><i><$MTEntryTitle$></i>
(<$MTEntryDate format="%I:%M%p"$>)<br /></span>
<$MTEntryBody$>
<MTEntryIfExtended>
<p><$MTEntryMore$></p>
</MTEntryIfExtended>
<MTEntryIfAllowComments>
<p>:: Comments left behind ::</p>
<MTComments>
<$MTCommentBody$>
<span class="smallfont">:: <$MTCommentAuthorLink$>
<$MTCommentDate$></span><br /><br />
</MTComments>
</MTEntryIfAllowComments>
</div>
</MTEntries>
</div>
<HR width="75%">
<P CLASS="tinyfont" align="center">
<a href="http://www.movabletype.org">Powered by
MovableType</a></P>
</body>
</html>

Hit SAVE and do a REBUILD.

That’s it for the Movable Type portion. Next step is to go to AvantGo and log in.

Click on MY ACCOUNT (upper right side of the screen) > CREATE CUSTOM CHANNEL WIZARD > in CHANNEL LOCATION, enter the URL to your new .html file that you just created. For this, it is: http://www.meryl.net/blog/pdanotes.html.

Click on VIEW to make sure it takes you to the .html page you created to verify it is the correct URL. Once confirmed, close the window and you’re back at AvantGo.

Proceed through the Channel Wizard. It has instructions for each screen so you can determine what you’d like to do. Remember, PDAs holds various amounts of data depending on the user’s PDA. Some are as small as 2 MB and others have 32 MB.

Click NEXT > Enter a CHANNEL TITLE (meryl.net articles) > Enter the CHANNEL MAX SIZE based on reading the instructions > NEXT > Select YES or NO for FOLLOW OFFSITE LINKS based on instructions > NEXT > Determine CHANNEL LINK DEPTH upon reading instructions > NEXT > Select YES OR NO for INCLUDING IMAGES (I recommend NO) > NEXT > FINISH (or go BACK if you need to revise something).

You’ll return to the MY CHANNELS screen. Select EXPORT CHANNELS. COPY the new channel you just have created by highlighting the entire URL and pressing CTRL-C. PASTE it in an email or word processor by pressing CTRL-V. This is the URL you give to others or put in your Web site for others to access your pages through the PDA.

Consider yourself portablized!