Sam’s random musings

How to Construct the Perfect Email Subject Line · The Cranking Widgets Blog

How many times have you received an email with a subject line that said something like “Question” or “FYI”? Or, worse yet, had no subject at all? For all the millions of email messages that traverse the Internet every day, the ability to effectively formulate an indicative subject message seems to be fairly unimportant to most people. A quick skim of the last 100 or so email messages you’ve received will likely support my claims.

The minimum: * Use keywords like Question, Response, FYI or he says ’spam’ why the heck would I send spam? and why would I read your email if you tell me it’s spam, I’m not some kind of Spam junkie, my sister in law is… * Briefly describe the subject * Never leave the subject blank

Now these are good, worth linking to in your .sig but really, why do people need to be told this, it is maddening, why do people not at least describe in the subject.

how do I know it bugs me… I wrote about it before http://blog.samdevore.com/archives/2007/09/16/email-subjects-welcome-to-my-pet-peeve/

(Via Sandy’s Blog.)

Short History of WordPress MultiUser:

A Short History of WordPress MultiUser (WPMU).

Nice read, I am planning on working on shifting all my teachesme hotlyn code into this in the next few months… time to depart the Frontier…

(Via Photo Matt.)

Non-Errors in English Usage:

“Those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English.” (Via Coudal, which is weird, given that they’re a bunch of illiterates.)

Lightly interesting…

(Via Daring Fireball Linked List.)

News: First PowerSchool, now Chancery: Pearson on SIS spree:

Pearson Education is on a Student Information System (SIS) acquisition spree — the company has acquired Chancery Software, a week after announcing it had acquired Apple’s PowerSchool.

So another competitor goes down the throat of the Pearson/SASI juggernaut. My guess is that it is time for a group of districts to get together and investigate and layout some serious support for some of the open source efforts out there. Soon there will be on commercial option and believe me it SUCKS

(Via MacCentral.)

Lab Setup Whitepaper:

A very extensive guide to how to setup up a student computing lab on OS X 10.3.Emil Lundberg of Uppsala University has done an incredible job of documenting what he’s down in his environment. Grab his case study in the downloads section.

Good information if you are planning on setting up a lab in an education setting. I think it is STUPID not to think about what one is doing when setting up a lab in a school setting. If all you are doing is setting up the machines in a default setting with two users or more users like Student and Admin, you are setting yourself up for more work and lots of headaches, this is a NEW OS don’t make the same decisions you did with os 9 or windows. THINK DIFFERENT!

(Via AFP548 Full Feed.)

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p>U.S. Newspapers and RSS:

I’d been looking for a list like this for quite a while…here are over 150 local, state and national U.S. newspapers with RSS feeds. And that doesn’t include international papers. I just think that’s pretty amazing, and there is no doubt that number is going to grow.

Right now, every student in my school could have a free subscription to the New York Times, Washington Post, Dallas Morning News and a whole bunch of other really respected, well-written newspapers.

(Via weblogged News.)

SF New Mexican::

Ins and outs of the “No Child Left Behind” rating system.

More evidence that unfunded mandates are crappy ideas

(Via Dangerousmeta.)