Okay so I’m sure you have heard of SPF in your sun lotion but what does that have to do with email? 

SPF is an acronym for Sender Policy Framework. SPF is used to help prevent spammers from forging emails. A forged email is when someone tries to send an email as you but from their own machine or server.

What happens is a spammer end up sending out 1000′s and 1000′s of emails using your email address (usually they use a email harvester to get your email address from the web). Of those 1000′s of emails a large percentage of them fail and send back a postmaster return error usually saying that email does not exist. Those emails don’t get sent to the person forging the emails but to the real email address. Please note that the spammer has not hacked your email and email password but is using a script to send out the forged emails using your email address obtained from a harvester.

SPF is not an anti-spam solution but is a tool we can use to help prevent spammers from sending out fake emails. All of our servers work with SPF and you can create your own SPF by using the SPF Setup Wizard. Once you have created your SPF open a ticket and have one of our support staff install it for you.

Most Internet savvy users will tell you that Digg.com can be one of the greatest sources of traffic if you can get one of your stories “dugg” and onto the front page. You can receive so much traffic, in fact, that it may crash your server will all those people visiting (but thankfully, if your blog is hosted on BlueFur, you should be able to “survive a Digg” without too much trouble). But have you ever wondered how some WordPress blogs can have a little “Digg” button for each and every post, making it incredibly easy for readers to submit their articles?

I’ve tried other plug-ins — like Digg This — but I could never get them to work properly. One of the coolest things that I want to have on my blog is the ability to show, in real time, how many Diggs a particular post has received. After digging around the web (no pun intended), I came across the Digg Integrator WordPress plug-in. It comes with a fair bit of customization, and the way that I have it set up on my blog, the Digg count doesn’t show up until the story has actually been dugg.

All you have to do is insert a short line of code in your single.php and/or your index.php files and the plug-in will take care of the rest. Well, you have to write great content and get people to Digg it… the plug-in can’t do that for you.

One of the giveaways that we would like to create is a custom car decal. The decal will be one that will be small enough to place on the back window of a vehicle (see example of a window decal to the right). We will be giving these away to some customers, friends and family who want to show off their BlueFur pride.

The contest is easy. Post a link to your mock ups of the car decal of what you would put on your vehicle in the comments of this post or email it to me at gjones at bluefur dot com. We will pick a winner from the entries and award them not only a Free Decal but a $200 cash prize.

I know our first design contest had lots of great entries so we look forward to seeing your ideas.

I was reading in the local newspaper yesterday that the average working Canadian spends approximately 240 hours each year commuting to and from the office. By and large, this time is wasted each day as we fight our way through rush hour traffic or find ourselves squished inside a public transit vehicle. After all, by taking half an hour to travel each way, twiddling our thumbs or listening to some music, we’re not exactly being all that productive.

The study conducted urges people to make better use of that time and they encourage employers to help ease that process by providing employees with more flexibility, much like how I mentioned last week, except now we’re talking about working professionals rather than entry-level youth workers. They suggest that companies allow employees to work four 10-hour days, for example, instead of a standard five day week. Taking this concept further, telecommuting or working-from-home can also drastically increase productivity, because workers would no longer need to actually travel to the office to get any work done. Speaking from my own experience as a freelance writer, I know that working from home has been a fantastic arrangement for me, because I don’t need to physically travel to any office, other than having to walk down the stairs from my bedroom.

The study in the paper also suggests strategies like providing employees with laptops and the like, so that they can get some work done while commuting. This might be a possibly suitable solution for people who take the subway or the bus (assuming that they get a seat and not just a standing spot), but I’d highly recommend against firing up Microsoft Word or Excel while heading down the highway in your car.

What’s your take on maximizing productivity? Is commuting time completely wasted or does it provide a much-needed respite for overworked employees?

I have been reading the copyblogger blog for awhile to understand how to improve our site. The blog talks about ‘Landing Pages‘ and how to improve them. In my mind for some reason a landing page was something you used as a trick if you had affiliate inbound links or if you had Google AdWords.

Until copyblogger finally put up an example I started to rethink what a landing page is. Any page on your site where your making a sale is a landing page. So our Unix Hosting page is a landing page to purchase hosting. The conversion of this page is much lower then I want it to be.

Then I went through a few other hosting sites and noticed they all had the same style of Unix hosting pages. Some lined up different but all in all it was the same. Nothing on our page or any of the other sites pages actually talked to me. They just displayed the raw data in tables and no sale is made.

Then I read this great landing page for another host written by copyblogger. After reading it even I was amazed and ready to sign-up. Okay not really because I know that host is not really that good.

So if our pages were less feature based and spoke more about why you should purchase from us do you think the conversion rate would go up?

Granted, I’m a little biased towards Dell, because my girlfriend has a 700m and I have the Inspiron 640m and Inspiron 1501. Even at the entry-level end of things, I’ve been quite impressed with their build quality and reliability, and I particularly appreciate the fact that you can customize just about any platform to suit your needs. Need a faster processor? No problem. Want a bigger hard drive or integrated Bluetooth? They’re only a click away.

One of the newest Dell notebook computers to be announced is the ultra-portable XPS M1330. Featuring a 13.3-inch widescreen display, the XPS M1330 is available in three different colors. If you’re going to be using this laptop under a business context, my suggestion would be to stick to the Tuxedo Black or maybe the Pearl White, but if you’re a little bolder and what some flare to go with your computer, then you can also nab the M1330 with a Crimson Red casing as shown above. There is no difference in price between the different colors.

The current base configuration — which goes for $1,399 Canadian — comes with an Intel T7100 (1.8GHz) Core 2 Duo processor, Vista Home Premium, integrated 2.0 megapixel webcam, 120GB SATA hard drive, 1GB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM, 8x CD/DVD burner, and Intel integrated graphics (GMA 3100). Each of these bits (and more) can be upgraded for a price. For example, you can get a backlit LED display for an extra $150 (but the webcam gets downgraded to VGA).

I can’t say for certain, but I’d expect a few specials to come up next month to gear up for the “back to school” season, so even if you’re buying for business, you might want to wait until then. After all, Dell is known to have some pretty good deals from time to time.